Introduction: take your time

We live in infrastructural times. Of course, we always have. Socio-technical systems supplying energy, water, transportation, information, and waste removal have been essential to the development of urban life in its myriad forms, and they continue to be foundational for the remaking of urban and regional worlds. Yet in the first decades of the twenty-first century, infrastructure is having a profound moment in the spotlight. For one, research on urban and regional infrastructure has continued to develop in exciting ways since Susan Leigh Star (1999: 377) implored us to ‘study boring things’ and unravel the inherent dramas underlying infrastructure's ‘singularly unexciting … lists of numbers and technical specifications’. Indeed, it is difficult to perceive infrastructure as boring or banal as governments around the world embrace massive investments in infrastructure in pursuit of their economic and territorial ambitions at a multitude of scales (Addie, Glass, and Nelles, 2020; Schindler and Kanai, 2021; Shatkin, 2022). At the same time, a global ‘infrastructure turn’ is compelling scholars in the social and policy sciences (notably in urban studies) to grapple with infrastructures’ significance as ‘political intermediaries’ (Amin, 2014). They have responded by expanding their conceptual and methodological toolkits to interrogate the intersections of infrastructure, urbanization, and urban life in novel and generative ways (Larkin, 2013; Graham and McFarlane, 2015, Wiig et al, 2023). From political-economic critiques of mega-projects that are (re)shaping cities’ global competitiveness and intensifying capitalism's crisis tendencies (Jonas et al, 2019; Wiig and Silver, 2019; Schindler and DiCarlo, 2022) to ethnographic explorations of the incremental and improvised ways that infrastructural systems are (re)produced through everyday practice (Lawhon et al, 2018; McFarlane, 2021; Ramakrishnan et al, 2021), the study of infrastructure provides a powerful lens to understand how cities and regions worldwide are being built, governed, and contested.

Contemporary infrastructure scholarship is finely attuned to the geographic imprints of such urban infrastructuring. Roads and rails, cables and containers, pipelines and ports exist in place as specific spatial products, while as networked operating systems they foster all manner of flows across an increasingly urbanized planet. A rich spatial lexicon exists to help us conceptualize infrastructures’ central role in connecting, integrating, splintering, and bypassing the material and social geographies of cities, regions, countries, and even continents (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Young and Keil, 2010; Easterling, 2014).