Call for papers: Redefining Critical Infrastructure

What counts as critical infrastructure now? Who should design, own, govern, maintain and care for it? And what is happening as so many are brought back into more tangible, vulnerable, personal relations with land and water, fire and flooding, and ambivalent beings and forces on which life depends? What is happening out there on the ground, or in the mud, if you will? 

The term infrastructure is very young. But infrastructure as the architecture of the beneath and in-between is as old as the hills: repeating practices and relations among houses, settlements, people, land, water and the beyond human, which thicken into, and or are thickened by, material form. Modern infrastructure, from canals to grids, roads, dams, mines and factories to data networks, storage and so on, emerged as the scaffolding of extractive and settler colonialism, industrialisation and urbanisation, militarisation and statecraft. Dominant infrastructure domesticates peoples, lands and waters into labour and resources for accumulation. Its enchantment and authority rest promises of mobility, security, comfort, convenience and abundance for some, yet these depend on keeping the dispossession, toxification, immobilisation, and exploitation of others at a distance. 

Over the past twenty years, state definitions and typologies of critical infrastructure, its recurrent material, spatial and institutional forms, have expanded to encompass infrastructure’s own infra: wetlands as flood protection; forests as carbon stores, water collectors and cleaners; ‘nature-based’ fire and erosion prevention; community practices regenerating land and water; and recently, Indigenous knowledge and ceremony. Yet a crisis of abstraction deepens. Designating relations bracketed as ‘Nature’ or ‘culture’ as infrastructure can recodify and reterritorialise them through metrics, valuations and risk calculations. But floods, droughts, heat, wars, refusals and protests exceed optimisation and securitisation. 

Dominant infrastructural regimes appear to be making riskier moves. We use the term archipelagos to allude to the divergent zones where authority, jurisdiction, ownership of land, water and infrastructure, and thus the ‘design’ of essential forms of relation are being devolved, redistributed, reclaimed or reasserted. Experimental, traditional or ‘nonmodern’ practices irreducible to modern economic, state or scientific rationalities are being brought into new blurry relationships with law, engineering, technology and finance, sometimes via extrastate federations allied around the protection of ways of life. Pluralistic modes of infrastructuring are nothing new: modernity multiplied such hybrids while it obscured them. The question, therefore, is not the existence of difference itself, but who gets to make these relationships and how: a question of politics and design par excellence. 

But an islanding of jurisdiction is decidedly double-edged. Capitalism has long pushed care, reproduction and ‘defence’ onto ‘volunteers’, enthusiastic or not: into kitchens and bedrooms; onto women and drafted sons, dispossessed communities, bacteria, birds, forests and rivers; those compelled to adapt to relentless production, whose care is unreciprocated and work unremunerated. Resituating responsibility may redistribute authority, or merely labour, exposure and risk. Are states giving space to forms of authority they cannot assimilate, or are these the emperor’s new clothes: abandonment and responsibilisation recast as autonomy and plural governance? 

Put concretely: who may burn, flood, irrigate, maintain, repair, harvest or refuse; which forms of life are protected, exposed, sacrificed or left to die; under whose law, knowledge and authority; and who gains or loses? Can vulnerability—exposure to and dependence on forces that cannot be fully mastered—become collectively negotiated without erasing unequal distributions of labour, authority, protection and risk? Might experimental zones of infrastructuring produce ontologically plural archipelagos, simultaneously modern and beyond, connected yet divergent, in which different forms of reason, practice, knowledge and architecture coexist without collapsing into one universal order? Or do such differences become techniques through which dominant infrastructure reproduces itself? 

Convened May 13–15, 2027, the symposium welcomes contributions from academics, researchers, designers and policy makers, activists, and community practitioners. Contributions sit in four porous categories: land, water, energy and data. Please submit title, 400-word abstract & biography of 150 words or less by December 16. Convened by Brendon Carlin and María Páez González, at RAUM, chair Prof. Wilfried Keuhn. Further details.