INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, research on the role of infrastructure in societal transformation has blossomed, labelled as the “infrastructural turn” in social sciences (Amin 2014). Increasingly, the focus is not limited to large technical systems that facilitate resource and energy flows such as (rail) roads, ports and power lines, but also encompasses cultural institutions such as public libraries and museums. Libraries are long-acknowledged places for information provision and knowledge transmission, but they increasingly also function as important socio-cultural infrastructure that contributes to the everyday life of cities (Klinenberg 2018; Latham & Layton 2019). Arguably, this transition of libraries from information to socio-cultural infrastructure is generative to society, but it is also what is necessary for libraries as a public institution to avoid extinction (Van Melik & Merry 2021). Shrinking subsidies, changing demographics, decreasing membership and the rise of digital technologies force libraries to reinvent themselves: as community centres, innovation labs and makerspaces.

This transition has changed the “hardware” of libraries, which now offer fewer physical books and more mobile usages of library space. A library's furniture needs to be flexible to allow for rapid spatial reorganization to accommodate a wide range of non-book-based services, including art classes, homework, social service assistance, language instruction, crafts and yoga classes. But more fundamentally, this transition also requires a change in libraries’ “software”, reframing the librarian's role from “information experts to community advocates, teachers, and as match-makers for people to meet one another and new ideas” (Barniskis 2016: 114). Community librarian courses are organized to equip staff for these new duties, like arranging lunch meetings for elderly patrons. Turning the library into socio-cultural infrastructure not only requires staff to increasingly perform “emotional labour” (Julien & Genuis 2009), but also to demonstrate and legitimize the library's social values beyond its role as information provider (Van Melik & Merry 2021).

To understand the practices behind these transformations, this chapter focuses on how the library as socio-cultural infrastructure comes into being through (in)formal practices.

INTRODUCTION

With the transformation towards knowledge and innovation societies, the share of solo-and micro-entrepreneurship, freelance work, gig work or digital entrepreneurship of the total workforce has increased. Likewise, the share of income-related employment organized in atypical forms of work (outside tenured full-time employment) has increased in Western industrialized countries supporting project-based work outside of a fixed workplace and various combinations of part-time employment. Knowledge, creative and/or digital workers often work from home, make use of third places (e.g., cafes, libraries, community centres), or use collaborative workspaces (e.g., co working spaces or makerspaces). Over the past 15 years, co working spaces have emerged as a new urban cultural infrastructure. Globally, Deskmag (2019) estimates that the number of co working spaces has increased from 8,900 in 2015 (with 545,000 members) up to 26,300 in 2020 (with 2.7 million members). In addition to collaborative workspaces, mixed-used shared spaces for creative practices (e.g., hackerspaces, fab labs, open workshops) have also been established. Taken together, these two more general trends exemplify how digital affordances, technological development and economic as well as labour-market transformation processes have inspired the development of new material production settings that support collaboration, co-design, co-production, co-creation or sharing.

Platforms such as Deskmag or the Fab Lab Association, suggest that social-material infrastructure for sharing work environments, tools for creative projects and experiences are no longer novel and experimental in cities. Instead, such places have become established and expected material urban artefacts. Collaborative workspaces can be understood as “hard” cultural infrastructure that facilitate the production of culture in cities by promoting creative and digital entrepreneurship and practices (Bryson 2007). Likewise, they can also be considered “soft” cultural infrastructure because they provide access and contribute to diffusing information, generating knowledge, organizing learning experiences and fostering networks. This latter characteristic underscores that they are not just neutral platforms for social activities, but instead are “fundamentally relational concepts” (Star & Ruhleder 1996: 113).

INTRODUCTION

Infrastructure is definitive of cities, intimately embedded in their constant change – their expansion and densification, their sprawl and contraction, their construction and decline (Melosi 2020). In addition to reconfiguring energy, water, sewage, solid waste, transportation and communication systems to persistently address complex societal issues (e.g., climate crisis, environmental pollution, deepening inequalities and exclusions, economic decline and privatization) and reshaping urban futures, infrastructure is also cultural. Over a decade of interdisciplinary scholarship has investigated the centrality of urban infrastructure to the transformation of cities demonstrating how “direct user involvement” in its malleable networks (Furlong 2010: 47) actively shape the extent to which residents can participate in urban life (Baumann & Yacobi 2022). Despite offering technology-and actor-focused explanations of infrastructural capacities and entanglements (Rutherford 2020; Rutherford & Coutard 2014; Silver 2014b), such research has largely neglected the cultural sector. Even as more recent scholarship attends to the palimpsest of socio-technical layers that rhythmically persist across time and space within systems (Monstadt 2022) – the “heterogenous configurations” of “different coverage, technologies, operations, logics and ownerships” (Lawhon et al. 2018: 723) that reinforce the longue durée of infrastructure choices (Moss 2020) – culture remains underexamined.

By focusing on the cultural infrastructure that supports practices of producing, performing, consuming and collecting culture, this book affirms the centrality of culture to the imagination, mediation and constitution of cities in the present and into the future. It has illustrated how cultural infrastructure is multi-faceted and relationally embedded in different material and socio-economic structures and social practices that undergird cities and city-making around the world. As cultural institution and artefact, this infrastructure might appear inert and fixed within local geographies and histories, but it is in the often-uncomfortable tension between obduracy and change where artistic and prosaic cultural practices unfold, creating urban imaginaries of living otherwise. Following Escobar (1992), embodied practices and imaginaries of living otherwise produce alternate political practices leading to forms of cultural innovation that chart different infrastructural futures. Subaltern and countercultural politics and practices of difference emerge in cities everywhere whether from their spatial, economic, cultural or sexual margins.

INTRODUCTION

Cultural production is assumed to be led by professional artists and cultural workers residing in urban centres (Scott 2008). Conversely, urban peripheries across the globe – low-density suburbs, working-class neighbourhoods flooded with cookie-cutter public housing, self-built settlements – are often mischaracterized as uncreative and culturally dependent on centralized artistic niches (Bain 2013; Jones et al. 2019). Yet the often self-taught creative youth from these same peripheries have been recurrently inundating cities and digital platforms with their artistic creations (Mullings & Habib 2022; Sitas 2020), demonstrating how they also act as active producers of their cities’ cultural infrastructure.

Latin American youth are no exception. Over the past few decades, young artists born and raised in self-built urban peripheries across the region have propagated self-managed cultural spaces and practices in their neighbourhoods that differ significantly from what can be conventionally found in consolidated urban centres. Often raised amid long-lasting patterns of stigma and infrastructural violence (Baumann & Yacobi 2022; Lemanski 2018, 2020, 2022; Malmström 2022; Mosselson 2021), the youth in these peripheral neighbourhoods are performing city-making processes that satisfy their basic material needs while advancing self-defined cultural rights beyond established understandings of civic, political and social rights, which still manifest extremely unevenly within Latin American cities (Heil 2021).

Studying this widespread youth-led infrastructure-building process across urban peripheries in Latin America holds significant potential for further globalizing urban theory (Ren 2022; Robinson 2022). Building on the so-called infrastructural turn in urban theory – focused on the material and political consequences for underserved citizens of the (insufficient) infrastructural provision by the state and other development agents (see Baumann & Yacobi 2022; Kanai & Schindler 2022; Lemanski 2018, 2020) – this chapter evaluates the urban, cultural and political implications of peripheral cultural spaces and practices in Latin American cities when these are studied as a form of city-making. Departing from frameworks portraying peripheral citizens as infrastructure consumers or claimants (Lemanski 2022; Malmström 2022; Mosselson 2021), it analyses how the youth from the peripheries also proactively produce new infrastructure.

INTRODUCTION

Cities are works of art. They are imaginative objects. They have life forces of their own that bring into view colliding individual and collective needs and ambitions and “heterogeneous views of functions and requirements of administering, of instituting, and distributing resources” (Blum 2003: 5). As centres of commerce, transportation and government, where large numbers of people live and work, cities are dense gathering places, sites where cultures intersect and collide (Bain & Peake 2022). It is from the emblematic co-presence of strangers, social interactions and critical engagements that collective life is built through institutions, public spaces, workplaces and homes within neighbourhoods (Miles 2007). But that density also brings with it socio-political conflicts, inequality brought by struggles over resources and infrastructure, as well as the threat of terrorism and disease transmission (Anheier et al. 2021).

In recent years, the global Covid-19 pandemic has, within a short period of time, produced a counter to the historical role of cities as sites of population concentration and social interaction. It has spurred urban exoduses and the digitization of many urban education and medical institutions, workplaces and retail and entertainment environments. Through information communication technologies (ICTs), the domestication of urban social relations has intensified, potentially eroding and reconfiguring long-established public-private spatial binaries that inform the meanings of urban places and the social structures and morphologies of cities. While ICTs enable spatiotemporal transcendence, meaning that “fewer relationships or transactions require … copresence”, they also increase the capacity for centralized surveillance and social control from various corporate and state actors (Calhoun 1992: 221). A constrained urban public life is concomitantly the product of this dramatic and rapid reworking made possible by the continual malleability of the material and human cultural infrastructure of cities that are ever-open to such change.

Often treated as superficial in contrast with the frameworks of urban economies, material and human cultural infrastructure is what makes cities themselves archives and works of art. In their diversity and multiplicity, cities are also synonymous with the production and consumption of culture.

As a mode of cultural production, the performance of culture – whether high or low, formal or vernacular, material or digital – involves a series of embodied actions that unfold over time and at various scales in a range of purpose-built and adaptively reused spaces. It is by moving in different ways – physically, but also imaginatively, affectively, socially, culturally and politically – that bodies, individually and collectively, produce and perform culture and hence co-generate urban spaces. Performative actions may include instruments and props, be guided by scripts and scores, and culminate in distinct situations or events. On a spectrum from amateur to professional, performers are artists (e.g., actors, poets, musicians, dancers and Carnival krewes) who present their work publicly after it has been tested and refined through rehearsal.

Performances of urban culture, then, are supported by a distributed infrastructure of rehearsal spaces (as well as performance venues, the city streets and community and cultural centres) that are accessed across cities, often in a time-limited way through short-term rentals. Where they can still afford to operate in cities, rehearsal rooms and recording studios can be rented by the hour or day to individuals and small groups. Many larger cultural institutions like universities, colleges, theatres, museums, libraries, dance studios and music halls also offer rehearsal spaces through rentals and residency programmes, but these come at a cost and must be applied and budgeted for. Those performers with long-term institutional relationships and contracts usually have access to stable and affordable rehearsal facilities, but individuals and community groups often struggle to access such spaces and are forced to be more mobile. In a panoply of small rehearsal spaces in the backrooms of bars, suburban garages, strip-mall storefronts, abandoned warehouses and even on pavements, subway platforms and apartment balconies, the uncertainties and vulnerabilities underlying creativity and cultural experimentation play out. Yet, as Bingham-Hall and Kaasa (2018: 10) specify, “[i] f performers are mobile, use infrastructures for time-limited periods, and are less tied to specific locations”, their infrastructural needs are less likely to be articulated in a unified political voice that can be amplified through media coverage, and they are less likely to be implicated in the contentious “politics of place” that contributes to neighbourhood-based gentrification.

Cities themselves are living archives. Their built form and streetscapes are at once prosaic and visually spectacular, messy and ordered, permeable and bounded. As complex, incomplete and ever-changing entities, cities and their cultural infrastructure are the repositories of urban life (Rao 2009). Nevertheless, there are cultural institutions within cities that have explicit mandates to collect, store and exhibit memories, histories and knowledge that become the foundations of state-sanctioned culture. These range in practice from small personal collections to the activist reading rooms and archives of oppositional groups, to state-sanctioned municipal libraries, national archives and metropolitan museums. Within these collections are images, texts and material culture from the past through to the present that are catalogued, indexed and stored for selective display and reinterpretation. In cities, these repositories provide the cultural infrastructure through which to recuperate the past and reimagine urban futures.

The collection of culture – the possession and assembly of rare and valuable objects – “is consumption writ large” (Belk 1995: 1). Whether compiled for archival activism or to nostalgically represent the past by refashioning new spaces and subcultures, collections make new relationships between objects, spaces, communities and their histories (Sellie et al. 2015). Collecting invariably brings objects together and, in the case of hierarchical structures like libraries, museums and archives, gives them an order in relation to one another based on classification systems (Derrida 1996). As Elsner and Cardinal (1994: 2) assert: “[i]f the peoples and the things of the world are the collected, and if the social categories into which they are assigned confirm the precious knowledge of culture handed down through generations, then our rulers sit atop a hierarchy of collections.” Collecting is a process of social display that distinguishes between things. It aspires to be distinctive and sometimes disruptive of norms while also reinforcing what constitutes taste and culture.

This section focuses on the socially admissible collecting of museums, libraries and archives, attending to how this cultural infrastructure of collection serves the public good (Bain & Podmore 2020). More than just tangible institutional repositories of written, visual, sonic and material culture, they are also spaces of urban encounter across socio-cultural, ethnic and generational divides that are embedded in locales (Amin 2008).

INTRODUCTION

Local shopping streets and neighbourhood retailing are universal urban forms of commerce that produce and maintain the lifeblood of the cultural infrastructure of cities as a marketplace of public cultures (Zukin et al. 2016). Forming the public face of local identity and sites where social identities emerge, the socio-spatial assemblage of brick-and-mortar stores and buildings, business owners, workers and shoppers comprise the consumption infrastructure of urban retailing. This infrastructure organizes encounters between different publics in cities, producing street-level sites of exchange and dignified livelihoods for marginalized actors and international newcomers (Hall 2012). Into the twenty-first century, however, local shopping streets – everyday sites of retail diversity – face extreme competition from online retail shopping (Zukin et al. 2016), while the concentration and internationalization of financial retail capital displaces and replaces low-capital independent shops with brand-name global chain stores (Mermet 2017). Moreover, the aestheticization of production and consumption represents an additional force of homogenization, blitzing the social, cultural and economic heterogeneity of neighbourhood retail shopping streets with new consumer cultural forms of lifestyle-centred, upscale market values of distinctiveness, individuality and authenticity (Ley 2003; Zukin 2010). This homogenization standardizes urban retail infrastructure into specialist bubbles of cultural commerce that maintain and validate the social networks and aesthetic preferences of the new urban middle class. It also signals the roll out of new local micro-retail actors who embody an emerging occupational type and consumption pattern that feeds the postmodern marketplace of post-industrial cities: hipster retailing.

Exploring the aestheticization of urban retail infrastructure, this chapter begins by tracing paradoxical class identity formation processes of “the hipster” within aestheticized spheres of consumption and production in the city, highlighting how in the twenty-first century the hipster embodies a distinct form of entrepreneurial retail. It then offers a case-study analysis of an independent ice cream boutique in downtown Toronto, Canada as a microcosm of the dynamics of hipster retailing. The chapter argues that hipster retail infrastructure is both physical and virtual, materializing from culinary and image processes of making and selling that are structured by an “aesthetic disposition” of the self-employed proprietor and amplified by digital self-branding imperatives of mobile social media users.

INTRODUCTION

All cultures enact rituals to mark or celebrate significant events. Some are rites of passage marking life stages, like initiations, weddings or funerals, while others follow an annual ritual calendar. Carnival in the Christian calendar is one of these: a period of revelry and overindulgence that culminates in Shrove Tuesday – Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”, a last day of fun and feasting before the fasting period of Lent, which begins the following day, Ash Wednesday, and continues until Easter Sunday, 47 days later. The earliest written records of Carnival festivities date to the twelfth century, and it is still celebrated in many places around the world.

What Carnivals share is a cultural infrastructure that allows certain kinds of things to happen: forms of sociability and exchange, performances of parody or pageantry and affectively charged sensory and aesthetic experiences of music, movement, spectacle, food and other stimulants. This chapter argues that Carnival as cultural infrastructure is a product of the encounter and negotiation between three other kinds of infrastructure: (1) an overall temporal and organizational infrastructure; (2) the embodied infrastructure of the people who create and enjoy Carnival; and (3) the regulatory infrastructure that permits, monitors, categorizes and accepts or rejects elements of Carnival. This argument is illustrated using a case study from New Orleans, Louisiana, the largest Carnival in North America. The rest of this introduction sketches out Carnival as a global phenomenon. The first section situates Carnival in New Orleans, tracing its history and the specific temporal and organizational infrastructure on which it currently depends. Second, Carnival is discussed as embodied infrastructure, bound up in the physical, sensory joys and pains of the people who make it happen. The body is central to Carnival, since costume, movement, exuberance and sensory excess are what demarcate the festivities from the everyday. The third section reflects on Carnival's encounter with the regulatory infrastructure of the city, specifically the processes for securing permits and policing. The discussion centres on a particular subset of Carnival practices, drawing on ethnographic research conducted since 2016 through participant observation in Carnival, semi-structured interviews with its practitioners, and analysis of social media, news media and municipal documentation.

Cultural production – its services, activities and networks – are embedded in, and transformative of, places. Within cities, residential, industrial and commercial neighbourhood sites that fall into disrepair are revalorized through creative activity (Rantisi & Leslie 2010). Contemporary urban planning and policy solutions have leveraged the culture-capital compromise wherein the “authenticity” of artistic labour and the appeal of creative lifestyles (Zukin 1982) are employed to breathe new life into decaying urban industrial infrastructure – store fronts, strip malls, schools, religious institutions, factories and warehouses (Zukin 2010).

Sites of cultural production – where the process of artistic creation and art-making result in the fabrication of objects or activities – are often mythologized in the public imagination, yet they have straightforward infrastructural requirements. Spaces of cultural production demand the permanent storage of, and access to, tools, equipment and materials which suggests the need for stable locations that do not necessarily require the co-presence of audiences (Bingham-Hall & Kaasa 2018). Art schools are one such key site of cultural production, that resemble laboratories or factories of research, experimentation and innovation. In art schools, emerging communities of artists work at the avant-garde edge of their disciplines, looking “to the past and tradition for inspiration” but their “main currency” is “hip coolness, progressive ideas and place in the contemporary art scene” (Becker 2009: 38). Within this world of culture-making, it is the makers themselves who are highly esteemed, and those cultural workers – those artists – who gain critical attention for their labour who are most admired, along with the spaces they inhabit (Becker 2009).

Beyond art schools, art studios have long been privileged as sites for undisturbed experimentation with materials, sound, light, movement and ideas that constitute the making of cultural work as well as the formation of professional identities (Bain 2004, 2005). The studio is celebrated as a “space for ongoing as well as finished projects, colour, paintings, scraps, scribbles, prototypes, ideas, chaos, order, language” (Sjöholm 2014: 505– 6). As a site to showcase oneself to curators and collectors, studios are not just places to make and store artwork. Rather, artists are collectors of objects and archivists of their own work and studios become places “where careers are stored and developed” and “where artists look both forward and backward in their practice” (Hawkins 2017: 91).

INTRODUCTION

Creative policy in world cities has often focused on the development of spaces where culture is showcased, exhibited or sold, such as flagship museums, galleries and performance spaces. Yet studio spaces are also a vital part of the cultural infrastructure of cities, providing the basis of the networks and spaces where art is produced and disseminated. In the visual arts, for example, without studio spaces there is no possibility of developing an arts scene based on the co-location and networking of creative workers, with the physical space of the studio being particularly important for providing opportunities for coworking and socially engaged arts practice (Zilberstein 2019). Yet in the super-gentrified cities of the global North – London, Paris, New York, San Francisco and Sydney, for example – the declining affordability of spaces for cultural production has proved a major challenge for urban policy predicated on the cultural economy as a driver of regeneration and renewal (Shaw 2014).

In such world cities, manufacturing decline in the 1980s frequently left swathes of abandoned industrial units that leant themselves to artistic production practices and were available at relatively affordable rates. The emergence of vibrant and profitable art scenes in specific inner-city districts was often the instigator of neighbourhood changes associated with residential improvement and economic growth, providing the basis of a seemingly sustainable model of arts-based urban regeneration that was trumpeted as part of the “creative city” agenda. Indeed, it has been repeatedly noted that creative industries generate significant amounts of economic, social and cultural capital for their host cities; for example, recent, pre-Covid, figures from the UK show creative industries were growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy (Creative Industries Council 2021), with the creative economy accounting for one in six jobs in London (Greater London Authority 2022a). Here, the sector contributes £52 billion a year, with the Greater London Authority (GLA) estimating that related supply chains generate an additional £40 billion a year for the city's economy (2019a).

INTRODUCTION

Hawker foods characterize urban Asia, with similarities and differences across cities that forge both cultural commonalities and distinctions. From the itinerant to the fixed location, from the temporary sites to the purpose-built, hawker foods are served in informal settings, with varying degrees of tradition and innovation, hygiene and squalidness, local authenticity and globalized influence. In the side-streets of Beijing where local delicacies such as scorpion are served, to the abundant food cart vendors on Bangkok streets, to the warung (small, typically family-owned eateries) in Surabaya, and the carefully planned and designed hawker centres in Singapore, hawker culture is a distinctive characteristic of Asian urban culture. This usually low-priced food option feeds a consumption culture that is casual, relaxed and pervasive.

The nature of this consumption culture is forged from multi-layers of infrastructure that enable the (re)production of hawker or street food culture. This infrastructure includes physical, social, economic and digital dimensions, with the relative interplay of the various dimensions resulting in distinctive characteristics of hawker culture in different urban contexts. This chapter refers to physical infrastructure as the sites and locations, architectures, physical structures and systems that enable the production and consumption of hawker foods. These could be purpose-built hawker centres or makeshift street-side stalls. The latter is intuitive, and indeed, embedded in the very meaning of “hawking”, but as this chapter will illustrate, itinerance need not be a requisite physical manifestation, and relative permanence and fixity can also characterize hawkers. Social infrastructure refers to the person of the hawker, the quintessential cook, micro-businessperson, purchaser, marketing and sales personnel, often all rolled in one. Economic infrastructure takes the form of economic policies and business models that enable hawker culture, and digital infrastructure refers to new models of transaction, including e-payments, online ordering and other practices enabled by digital technologies, which have empowered some hawkers while leaving others behind.