The Promise of Infrastructure

“Everyday infrastructures are very good to think with. They are materially, socially, and symbolically dense; they are often banal, everyday, and taken for granted; yet they are the bearers of modernity, promising progress, development, democracy, an easier life, safety, security, and much else. The Promise of Infrastructure makes all of this brilliantly clear and vivid, at once capacious in its reach and theoretically innovative in its disposition. This book shows powerfully how infrastructures are not simply rich ethnographic objects but apparatuses of neoliberal rule. A must-read." - Michael Watts, Class of ’63 Professor, University of California, Berkeley

"The Promise of Infrastructure offers a provocative reflection on the current academic, social, and political moment that we find ourselves in. . . . While The Promise of Infrastructure as a whole offers a surprisingly comprehensive condemnation of the 'radically human-centered thinking' that has produced the Anthropocene challenge that we now face, it also suggests the tools we will need to map out possible futures. Appropriately, these are not prescriptions promising a better future. Rather they are openings for possibility, for action, and for wonder." - Tim Oakes, Technology and Culture

"The volume offers a highly valuable contribution to the study of human/non-human relations. Taking up Brian Larkin’s call against a premature separation of the material from the discursive, the editors argue that infrastructural matter becomes political only in relation to human ideologies, aesthetics or histories." - Laura Kemmer, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

"Infrastructure holds promise for those sociologists, and social scientists, interested in the making and reproduction of inequality, power and difference, both contemporarily and historically. . . . This volume advances such a research agenda, challenging prevalent notions of temporality, political change, identity formation and the making of the future." - Julio Alejandro De Coss Corzo, British Journal of Sociology

"The Promise of Infrastructure is a timely and compelling account of the myriad ways in which infrastructures can be theorized and the limits and potentials of the same." - Siddharth Menon, AAG Review of Books

"The Promise of Infrastructure is a stellar collection of essays by anthropologists and social scientists who explore roads, buildings, bridges, water meters, pipelines, power stations, and other structures which we encounter on a daily basis but whose contribution to the production of difference we frequently overlook."  - Natalia Kovalyova, Anthropology Book Forum

"This book presents a combination of insightful theorisations and an engaging ethnography." - Sudha Vasan, Economic & Political Weekly

"The Promise of Infrastructure is essential reading for scholars and students who wish to more fully understand the ethical and social role of the 'Ideal Infrastructure,' its history, its criticisms and its (uncertain) future destiny." - Marco Spada, Environment and History

“The collection covers much ground in its nine chapters and does more than merely ‘gesture to all the work still to be done’ on the topic [of infrastructure]; it also propels readers to ask new questions about infrastructure and equips them well for the task.”

“In relation to the field of urban studies, the book offers a sophisticated framework for deeper consideration of a number of critical foci, such as the urban ‘governance of matter’ but also ‘the matter of governance’, a rhetorical conceit that emphasizes the political aspirations inherent within technical-material systems, as well as how matter embeds and enacts political rationalities and sociospatial dynamics of inequality…. It offers much to urban scholars working to conceptualise the mutually reinforcing relations between socioecological dynamics, sociotechnical change and processes of urbanisation through the lens of infrastructure, and how these relations shape and are shaped by urban governance and the multiple modalities of infrastructural politics.” - Cynthia Browne, Urban Studies

“The edited collection by Anand, Gupta, and Appel highlights infrastructures as a promising site for ethnographic research.... [It] reveal[s] the potential of infrastructural ethnography to make visible power inequalities and exclusionary practices and expose infrastructures as powerful sites for redefining governance and belonging.” - Daivi Rodima-Taylor, American Anthropologist

“The Promise of Infrastructure teaches the reader how large state-run infrastructures can possibly induce and solidify regimes in pursuing their political promises. . . . Insights stemming out of The Promise of Infrastructure—especially the concept of ‘ruination’—enable researchers to acquire a ‘fuller’ account of the lifecycle of an infrastructure.” - Alex Christian, Journal of Cultural Economy