Trying to Connect: Examining Social and Infrastructural Inequalities. Part I

Achieving an equitable and inclusive distribution of urban infrastructure and services poses various challenges for local authorities in cities around the world due to recent or lasting trends of political instability and/or financial shortcuts. The non-accessibility of urban infrastructure and services in many cities – particularly in the Global South, but also in the North – exacerbates existing social inequalities, as marginalized social groups suffer from poor access to its provision. With a rising critique of the networked infrastructure ideal, increasing (academic) attention is paid to different practices of co-production which complement or substitute shortcomings of public infrastructure and service provision. There is a growing concern with hybrid and heterogeneous constellations, including both, formal and informal elements of infrastructure and service production. These include processes of auto-construction, the side-by-side of formal and informal or the formalisation of prior informal services. To investigate these different arrangements, a relational understanding of their provision examining both, their social and material forms of production, has gained relevance in the last years. This also happens in the context of different practices of richer and poorer households to substitute for lack of state provision. While it seems obvious that infrastructural inequality is related to social inequality, this session seeks to bring together contributions that examine the particular socio-material relations as well as spatial and temporal constellations of these inequalities. Comparative approaches that analyse the intersections of social and infrastructural inequalities and of the conflicts and tensions that accompany them are particularly welcome.