IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ijurrs/v47y2023i2p183-199.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

PREFIGURATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects

Author

Listed:
  • Amelia Thorpe

Abstract

This article examines the unsanctioned installation of infrastructure for walking and cycling as a site of possibility. In contrast to accounts of everyday urbanism that see in these kinds of interventions possibilities for a politics in which the state subsides, I find instead an effort to reclaim the state for more progressive purposes. I focus on groups calling themselves transformation agencies and departments of transformation to argue that DIY infrastructure is deployed on city streets not as an effort to subvert or supplant city authorities, but instead as prefigurative performances of city–citizen relationships ‘as if’ they were otherwise. Exploiting the plurality and contingency of the state and its legal forms, objects are installed to show how quickly things could be different, and sometimes they succeed in prompting significant shifts. Through guerrilla paint and pop‐up posts, transformation agencies work prefiguratively to imagine and enact forms of citizenship that are not centred on automobility.

Suggested Citation

  • Amelia Thorpe, 2023. "PREFIGURATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(2), pages 183-199, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:47:y:2023:i:2:p:183-199
    DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.13141
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13141
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1468-2427.13141?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Heyer, J.H. & Sethi, M. & Wall, S.P. & Ayoung-Chee, P. & Slaughter, D. & Jacko, S. & DiMaggio, C.J. & Frangos, S.G., 2015. "Drawing the curtain back on injured commercial bicyclists," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 105(10), pages 2131-2136.
    2. Margit Mayer, 2013. "First world urban activism," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(1), pages 5-19, February.
    3. Abdoumaliq Simone, 2005. "Urban Circulation and the Everyday Politics of African Urban Youth: The Case of Douala, Cameroon," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(3), pages 516-532, September.
    4. Mimi Sheller & John Urry, 2000. "The City and the Car," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(4), pages 737-757, December.
    5. Michel Callon, 2010. "Performativity, Misfires And Politics," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(2), pages 163-169, July.
    6. Jason Henderson, 2020. "EVs Are Not the Answer: A Mobility Justice Critique of Electric Vehicle Transitions," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 110(6), pages 1993-2010, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Amanda Tattersall & Kurt Iveson, 2024. "PREFIGURING PRAGMATICALLY? Prefigurative Politics and the Constellation of People Power Strategies for Winning Affordable Housing in Cape Town," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(3), pages 423-441, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Miner, Patrick & Smith, Barbara M. & Jani, Anant & McNeill, Geraldine & Gathorne-Hardy, Alfred, 2024. "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    2. Mark Thomas & Steven Tufts, 2016. "‘Enabling dissent’: Contesting austerity and right populism in Toronto, Canada," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 27(1), pages 29-45, March.
    3. Bear, Laura, 2020. "Speculations on infrastructure: from colonial public works to a postcolonial global asset class on the Indian Railways 1840-2017," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103445, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Edgar Pieterse, 2010. "Cityness and African Urban Development," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2010-042, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    5. Cameron White, 2016. "The conditions of practical action: Neoliberalism and sustainability in the Australian road construction industry," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 34(8), pages 1501-1515, December.
    6. Pera, Marina, 2020. "Potential benefits and challenges of the relationship between social movements and the commons in the city of Barcelona," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    7. Talia Margalit & Adriana Kemp, 2019. "The uneven geographies of post-political planning: Objections to urban regeneration projects in peripheral and central Israeli cities," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(4), pages 931-949, June.
    8. Junxi Qian, 2015. "No right to the street: Motorcycle taxis, discourse production and the regulation of unruly mobility," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(15), pages 2922-2947, November.
    9. Miwa Matsuo, 2020. "Carpooling and drivers without household vehicles: gender disparity in automobility among Hispanics and non-Hispanics in the U.S," Transportation, Springer, vol. 47(4), pages 1631-1663, August.
    10. Farber, Steven & Páez, Antonio, 2009. "My car, my friends, and me: a preliminary analysis of automobility and social activity participation," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 216-225.
    11. Ayona Datta, 2014. "Gendered Nature and Urban Culture: The Dialectics of Gated Developments in Izmir, Turkey," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(4), pages 1363-1383, July.
    12. Jonas Larsen, 2017. "The making of a pro-cycling city: Social practices and bicycle mobilities," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(4), pages 876-892, April.
    13. Luca Nitschke, 2020. "Reconstituting Automobility: The Influence of Non-Commercial Carsharing on the Meanings of Automobility and the Car," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(17), pages 1-20, August.
    14. Emre Tarim & Arie Gozluklu & Gulnur Muradoglu, 2023. "The American spirit: The performativity of folk economics in global financial markets," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(8), pages 1906-1927, November.
    15. Wilson, Adam & Mitra, Raktim, 2020. "Implementing cycling infrastructure in a politicized space: Lessons from Toronto, Canada," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    16. Hirschhorn, Fabio & Paulsson, Alexander & Sørensen, Claus H. & Veeneman, Wijnand, 2019. "Public transport regimes and mobility as a service: Governance approaches in Amsterdam, Birmingham, and Helsinki," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 178-191.
    17. Seung Jun Choi & Junfeng Jiao, 2024. "Uncovering electric vehicle ownership disparities using K-means clustering analysis: A case study of Austin, Texas," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 7(3), pages 2403-2456, December.
    18. Gordon Waitt & Theresa Harada, 2012. "Driving, Cities and Changing Climates," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 49(15), pages 3307-3325, November.
    19. Lake Sagaris, 2015. "Lessons from 40 years of planning for cycle‐inclusion: Reflections from Santiago, Chile," Natural Resources Forum, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(1), pages 64-81, February.
    20. Brand, C. & Marsden, G. & Anable, J.L. & Dixon, J. & Barrett, J., 2025. "Achieving deep transport energy demand reductions in the United Kingdom," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 207(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:47:y:2023:i:2:p:183-199. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0309-1317 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.