Splintering Urbanism @ 20: Reengaging Contradiction, Confinement, and Consumption

The goals laid out in Splintering Urbanism have largely been met. Infrastructure is no longer ignored in critical scholarship, technical determinism is broadly challenged, and infrastructure is widely studied in socio-technical and assemblage terms. Going forward, critical engagement with contradiction, confinement, and consumption are worth contemplating. Contradiction emphasizes how infrastructure is often both-and: social investment and capitalist extraction, unifying and divisive, flow and confinement. Confinement, unlike its analog, receives little attention in infrastructure studies. Infrastructures of control and concentration, however, have a long history and have been expanding in recent decades, enrolling and reconfiguring infrastructures of circulation (or flow) in turn. Last but not least, consumption usually comes into infrastructure studies through a concern with processes of exclusion and fragmentation. It is rarely analyzed in critical, socio-technical terms as an active and complex agent that structures and is structured by infrastructures of production. Through these three themes, we can continue to build on the gains of SI@20.