Infrastructure That Connects/Infrastructure That Divides

Abstract

We live in an age of infrastructure, we are told repeatedly (Dodson, 2017).Around the world and across the ideological spectrum, firms and governments are dedicating trillions of dollars per year to infrastructure.Conservatives and Liberals, in the Global North and South, and in authoritarian and democratic regimes are championing major infrastructure programs.Infrastructure policy and spending is increasingly becoming a key tool in local, national and global statecraft.While there is broad agreement across the ideological spectrum about the dire need to invest in infrastructure in order to achieve economic, environmental, and social objectives (as well as to make good on the damage done by past infrastructural policy), increasingly the term has become stretched to the point where we have seen the contesting of its meaning.The most traditional and narrow definition of infrastructure refers to fixed capital stretched across space in networked facilitiesroads, bridges, tunnels, railways, transit lines, water and sewage treatment facilities and pipes, power lines and associated generation plants and dams, energy pipelines, and telecommunication cables.These are what used to be known as public works, an underlying basis for a modern society.Trees and naturalized habitats are also being categorized as green infrastructure, since they serve the same function as the built grey infrastructure that stores water or retains hillsidesonly in many instances the green infrastructure is more successful.Ditto, blue infrastructure, such as canals and rivers, and their importance to urban metabolism.More recently, we have seen the definition widening to include "social infrastructure," such as care centers, hospitals, housing, libraries, and recreation centres.These are typically services provided in facilities on a single site, but are part of wider service networks.Because social infrastructure involves significant outlays for capital and maintenance and supports the social fabric of society, it is considered infrastructure.This includes new infrastructure but also repaired infrastructure.Now, in many countries, we are seeing the definition of infrastructure stretching ever further, with examples emerging of how activists and communities have sought to insert the notion of "care" into debates over working with existing infrastructural configurations.In the United States under the Biden infrastructure bill, for instance, we see the presentation of social services like childcare, health care, and elder care as the infrastructure of care.Indeed, as the definition of infrastructure expands (Carse, 2016), it is becoming a magical term.Unlike more conventional spending on goods and services that get tied up in parochial debates, infrastructure is presented as an investment that is far sighted, visionary, transformational and non-partisan, paying dividends for future generations.Who could possibly be against infrastructure investment?Of course, while infrastructure as a concept may have broad partisan and public support, particular infrastructure projects and political programs are most certainly contested, portrayed by opponents as wasteful, self-serving, politically motivated pork-barreling.For decades, there has been a visceral public and scholarly understanding of both the light and the dark sides of infrastructure.Infrastructure connects.However, infrastructure also divides.Infrastructure is not

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