Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Box
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Theorising Infrastructure: a Politics of Spaces and Edges
- 2 The Cultural Politics of infrastructure: the case of Louis Botha Avenue in Johannesburg, South Africa
- 3 Spatial Dimensions of the Marginalisation of Cycling – Marginalisation Through Rationalisation?
- 4 Mental Barriers in Planning for Cycling
- 5 Safety, Risk and Road Traffic Danger: Towards a Transformational Approach to the Dominant Ideology
- 6 What constructs a cycle city? A comparison of policy narratives in Newcastle and Bremen
- 7 Hard Work in Paradise. The Contested Making of Amsterdam as a Cycling City
- 8 Conflictual Politics of Sustainability: Cycling Organisations and the Øresund Crossing
- 9 Vélomobility in Copenhagen – a Perfect World?
- 10 Navigating Cycling Infrastructure in Sofia, Bulgaria
- 11 Cycling Advocacy in São Paulo: Influence and Effects in Politics
- Conclusion
- Index
1 - Theorising Infrastructure: a Politics of Spaces and Edges
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Box
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Theorising Infrastructure: a Politics of Spaces and Edges
- 2 The Cultural Politics of infrastructure: the case of Louis Botha Avenue in Johannesburg, South Africa
- 3 Spatial Dimensions of the Marginalisation of Cycling – Marginalisation Through Rationalisation?
- 4 Mental Barriers in Planning for Cycling
- 5 Safety, Risk and Road Traffic Danger: Towards a Transformational Approach to the Dominant Ideology
- 6 What constructs a cycle city? A comparison of policy narratives in Newcastle and Bremen
- 7 Hard Work in Paradise. The Contested Making of Amsterdam as a Cycling City
- 8 Conflictual Politics of Sustainability: Cycling Organisations and the Øresund Crossing
- 9 Vélomobility in Copenhagen – a Perfect World?
- 10 Navigating Cycling Infrastructure in Sofia, Bulgaria
- 11 Cycling Advocacy in São Paulo: Influence and Effects in Politics
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Introduction
As an increasing number of authors demonstrate, ‘infrastructure is never neutral and always inherently political’ (compare McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008; Young and Keil, 2014; Nolte, 2016: 441). Moreover, as Sheller (2018: 97) argues, ‘The politics of infrastructure concerns the politics of mobility’. Infrastructures of all types, whether hard (as in material structures) or soft (as in skills and knowledge), are those systems that support action. Infrastructures for cycling are not limited to dedicated or designated cycleways but are inseparable from wider mobility infrastructures. Building cycling infrastructures is not just a matter of providing physical spaces, but also of building the skills, competencies and confidences required for moving in public spaces.
If infrastructure is inherently political, then the ways in which different infrastructures permit some courses of action and deny others, how they route and re-route mobile practices, and how and what any given infrastructure makes possible, are matters of justice and injustice (Sheller, 2018). This chapter seeks to engage with a selected range of current theorisations of the politics of infrastructure, and to apply them to specific cases of cycle-specific infrastructures. It subsequently relates the ideas of social and spatial justice arising from these perspectives to bell hooks’ (1990) consideration of marginalisation, to consider how the patterns of marginalisation and mainstreaming revealed in the contributions to this volume might be understood through a lens of a critical and radical politics.
What does infrastructure do?
Infrastructures both provide the potential for social actions and processes and are produced by social actions and processes. In creating potential, however, infrastructures inevitably also order and govern the actions they make possible (Koglin, 2017). Infrastructures organise and shape potentials, providing for some courses of action and not for others. As infrastructure opens up some paths of action, it also closes down other possibilities. This increase and decrease of possibilities affects people differentially, which is why it must be considered in terms of justice.
The mechanism of ordering and governing action is one of facilitation: infrastructural provision being the provision of material facilities (hard) or the facilitation of actions through social development (soft). While certain actions are facilitated by both kinds of infrastructure (hard and soft), actions and practices that fall outside of its desired outcomes are simultaneously rendered unruly, ungoverned; perhaps even ungovernable and deviant.
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- Information
- The Politics of Cycling InfrastructureSpaces and (In)Equality, pp. 15 - 34Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020