Urban Infrastructure and Its Relation to Modern Living

Urban infrastructure is the networks of systems in a city that aid the running of the city and the people in it. It is a very broad term that refers to the framework that provides operation and organisation which in turn makes economic development possible within the urban area. The term infrastructure was coined in the 1920s and is generally accepted now to refer to more than just physical manifestations of material, instead modern study now investigates the “multi-dimensional analysis of the horizontal and vertical composition of space”. Thus, studying the interrelationships between areas and services of the city and their integration to daily urban living.

In this essay I will attempt to convey the different types of infrastructure and the incorporation of them to modern life. Through the various readings and wider research, it has become apparent that infrastructure is more than just the material components of the cities structure. Infrastructure varies as hard and soft, visible, and invisible all of which stems from the intervention andor lack there of from the state. Furthermore, I will attempt to evaluate how these degrees of infrastructure impact on modern living in a technological age of surveillance and governmentality.

The first aspects of infrastructure I will examine are hard and soft infrastructure. Both categories which can be further subcategorised as explained by Dyer et al. Hard infrastructure is what is considered the best fit to the above 2004 definition. This is because hard infrastructure is that which is physical in the built environment of the city. It is the physical material, networks and systems which are spatially fixed. It may include but is not limited to roads pipes cables etc. Hard infrastructure is particularly taken for granted and is the systems that are often ignored but most depended upon since when breakdown occurs within these networks social order begins to unravel into chaos. Perhaps most easily seen during blackouts which give ‘light’ to looters and criminals.

Hard infrastructure can be further subcategorised into utilities, urban space, and buildings. These may not be the only three subdivisions but according to Dyer et al they are the 3 which form the foundation to the framework which is hard infrastructure. They are self-explanatory and much easier to give definition and explanation to. They are utilities, urban space, and buildings. Utilities are physical services, and mostly provide transportation in the city such as sewage transportation, water systems etc. Utilities do not only provide connection within the city. They can also provide interconnections on a national level but also on an international scale, consider the ~5% of the electricity, received from France, transferred to the UK in 2005. Secondly urban space, this is considered by Dyer to be the bounded space in the city from streets, playgrounds, parks etc. It is owned by state or privately and usually identified at the local neighbourhood scale. This form of infrastructure is what incorporates landscape and nature as described by Gandy, 2011 which brings in questions of “aesthetics and cultural representations” into the forefront of his research. Urban space thus is directly linked to use of space and by extension memory as he explains “urban space unsettles distinctions between ‘living’ and ‘non - living ‘…and binds the human body to the city”. Finally, the third subcategory is Buildings, this is of course the architecture within the city through single or grouped buildings which give the city its ‘shape’ often famously such as the London or New York Skyline. Buildings of course are largely contrasting between the global north and south and even within each sphere as one considers postmodernism.

Soft infrastructure on the other hand is much harder to dine and map onto spatial scales. However, it can loosely be defined at the ability to provide services. It incorporates the social and economic infrastructure not just the physical material. Burdette gives the example of the healthcare infrastructure which not only includes the hospital but the medical workers, the flow of capital to the hospital and the legal system that supports it. Dyer et al’s research defines three primary soft infrastructures as Institutional, communal, and personal. Institutional infrastructures are the private and public systems which provide services, they can have varying degrees of influence such as the aforementioned healthcare, councils, or government, but could also include art or community cultures, however they will all typically run in a top-down fashion withunder state support. However of course community organisations or cultures will also be a part of communal infrastructures, which are specifically the work of the groups within a neighbourhood. However, there could also be communal infrastructures at work online which are not spatially bound to an area but instead will involve people bounded together by a physical or nonphysical relation, the example Dyer gives are those who live along a river or those bounded by a faith. This gives rise to the inference that communal infrastructures can be forged through discourse as people who go have gone through hardships or othering find common ground through their experiences in or out of the city. This idea leads onto and is also interwoven with the final division which is personal infrastructure which refers to support systems a person will have, from another individual to friends and family. However, it is not limited to those who said person knows as this infrastructure is forged through the sense of belonging and social connections, for example that experienced by education and belonging to a school, college etc.

Furthermore, infrastructure is widely acknowledged to have elements which are both visible and invisible. One definition of infrastructure given by Star 1999, is transparency: She explains in her ethnography of infrastructure that infrastructure is transparent to use, as it does not have to be assembled for use each time, thus it becomes invisible as we no longer acknowledge it, until it breaks down as previously stated and it becomes visible. When breakdown occurs, the infrastructure is placed into the spotlight of society and the capabilities of the stategovernment or simply the respondents are scrutinised for use of backups and response times to restore the needs of society or the individual.

Lemanski, argues that not only is infrastructure visible and invisible but it is a way in which we see the state. She argues that “the physical presence of public infrastructure renders the state highly visible in urban dwellers' everyday lives”. We see the state as visible at the household and daily scale. She uses her research on public housing in Cape town to convey how the state is seen through lack of intervention and not responding to the changing use of land and housing and instead criticising the citizens as ungrateful and misusing the infrastructure in place. This idea is somewhat mirrored by Simone who criticises the state administrators in Johannesburg who lacked the “political and economic power” to intervene and address the evolving activities taking place in the city.

It could further be inferred that the state is visible through urban infrastructure through reading Edensor’s the gloomy city but in an opposite way. Instead of examining where that state has failed Edensor analyses the overuse of light and over intervention in urban areas by the state to create of city of surveillance. The author suggest that the state has overlooked the positive qualities of darkness in aim to “banish” darkness form the urban city to conform with the bourgeois ideals of conformity and regulating the night-time. This in turn with increased surveillance and security in the modern urban city could be seen to create a state-controlled city where the state controls the unique power to “gaze upon and scrutinise”, which consequentially created the idea that darkness must be overcome to “create a city of responsible, autonomous, rationally oriented, liberal citizens”.

In conclusion, urban infrastructure is crucial to both the people and the state. It is what allows for the everyday running of the city as an efficient “machine”. Its is both invisible and visible and works for and against the people however that common denominator in all research is the people. The people make the infrastructure and in return infrastructure makes people. From sewage workers who use and work on sewage systems to electricians that consume and installrestore electricity. People can manipulate the infrastructure as Gandy observed in Cape town or the can be manipulated by the infrastructure as Edensor illustrates through the possibilities achievable in darkness.