Fronstaging the Urban Backstage? ���The Politics of Infrastructure Disruptions

Stephen Graham Newcastle University

1. Leigh-Star (1999)

•  For Susan Leigh-Star (1999) nine characteristics. •  embedded (i.e. “sunk into other structures); •  transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented each

time or assembled for each task”); •  offers temporal or spatial reach or scope; •  is learned by its users; •  is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of

electricity use); •  embodies standards; •  is built on an installed base of sunk capital; •  is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once or

globally; •  Finally, infrastructure “tends to become visible upon

breakdown”

Conventional Narratives

•  When infrastructure networks "work best, they are noticed least of all" (David Perry, 1995).

•  Modernist urbanism associated with progressive veiling of infrastructure, physically and discursively, beneath the urban scene, as part of emergence of “Wired-Piped-Tracked” Metropolis

•  Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) "the networks became buried underground, invisible, banalised, and relegated to an apparently marginal, subterranean urban world".

‘Unblackboxing’ •  Technosocial ‘blackboxes” are

momentarily undone

•  Cultures of normalised and taken-for-granted infrastructure use sustain widespread assumptions that urban ‘infrastructure’ is somehow a material and utterly fixed assemblage of hard technologies embedded stably in place which is characterised by perfect order, completeness, immanence and internal homogeneity rather than leaky, partial and heterogeneous entities.

Myth of Fixed and Stable Emplacement

•  Infrastructures regarded as "symbols of the complexity, ubiquity and the embodied power of modern technology" (Summerton 1994).

•  “We sometimes seem to view mature Large Technical Systems as invulnerable, embodying more and more power over time and developing along a path whose basic direction is as foreseeable as it is impossible to detour [But] systems are more vulnerable, less stable and less predictable in their various phases than most of us tend to think (Summerton, 1994)

‘Frontstaging’ Urban ‘Backstage’

•  Irving Goffman’s (1959) terms, the built environment’s “backstage’ becomes momentarily “frontstaged”

•  The sudden absence of infrastructural flow creates visibility just as the continued, normalised use of infrastructures creates a deep taken-for-grantedness and invisibility.

Reification?���Too Categorical, ���

Static, Crude

•  Often simply not the case!

•  Varies enormously by site/place/sector/subjectivity •  Complex politics/poetics/mediations/remediations of

produced visibilities and invisibilities

•  Contested and woven through with profoundly unequal power geometries across topologies of time/space

•  Need a much more nuanced, detailed exploration of precisely how disruptions are discursively and materially constructed and experienced in different sites/’sectors’/places/ cases/subjectivities to reveal complex politics of visibility and invisibility

1. Often Simply Not the Case: Discourse of the Powerful? ���For a billion urbanites or more, infrastructural failure, exclusion and precarity is

perpetually and profoundly visible & imprivisation is constant���

Infrastructures have “always been foregrounded in the lives of more precarious social groups — i.e. those with reduced access or without access or who have been disconnected, as a result either of socio-spatial differentiation strategies or

infrastructure crises or collapse.” ���Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008) ���

•  Cultures and economies of infrastructural repair and improvisation almost invisible within urban studies

2. Complex Topologies of Disruption and (Re)Mediations��� of Produced (In)Visibility in Time-Space ���

Cascading disruptions in space and time within multiple, tightly-coupled, skeins of infrastructure networks (Richard Little)���

“We are all hostages to electricity” Leslie (1999)���

Socio-technical ���‘Normal Accidents’ (Charles

Perrow): Blackout

Exposed Myths of Dematerialisation/ Sectoral

Isolation/ ‘Cleanness’:���The Electromateriality of

‘cyberspace’ •  “When servers are down,

panic sets in. Electronic power failures, internal surges, the glitches that corrupt and destroy memory, mirror our relation with power itself ” (Grossman, 2003, 23).

•  A single Google server farm consumes as much electrical power as a city the size of Honolulu.

“On July 19, 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper, wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have

reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make the boxcars glow. A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks. By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid along the railroad right-of-way, disrupting telecommunications traffic on a critical New York-Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail.

The New York–based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability to update its web pages. Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report

problems. Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact

with Washington.” Kazys Varnelis

Exposed Topologies���Disruption and Digitality ���

Exposed Myths of Neoliberal Re-Regulation

•  Electricity deregulation in the USA had actually ignored the economic and geographical fundamentals of an industry that

necessitates reliable, material connectivities between generation and use; that is prone to cascading and spiralling

failure as transcontinental and transnational markets in supply are established within “complex interactive networks,” with dramatic unintended consequences ; and where the hard

infrastructures are ageing and organised with a baroque level of complexity and local fragmentation.

But post-mortems for such events become messy!

“A distributive notion of agency does interfere with the project of blaming. But it does not thereby abandon the project of identifying [ ] the sources of harmful effects. To

the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to look for sources. ”

Must look at the “selfish intentions and energy policy that provides lucrative opportunities for energy trading while generating a tragedy of the commons”; at “the stubborn directionality of a high-consumption social infrastructure”; and at “the unstable power of electron flows, wildfires, ex-urban housing pressures, and the assemblages they form”

Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett, (2005) “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3): 445–65. Pp. 463.

Emergent, Malign Mobilities: SARS ���(Roger Keil and S. Harris Ali)

Securitising Networked Flows

Supply Disruptions: Oil Shock

3. Moments of Mass/Popular Technoscientific Cartography/Visualisation���e.g. Trawler Severing Oceanic Optic Fibre Off Egypt, December 2008

Classic Media Events/ Moral Panics

4. Can be Used to Disrupt Conventional Media/ Political Tropes and Provide Heuristic Devices for Critical Scholarship/Pedagogy and Engagement to

Challenge and Denaturalise These ���An ‘act of God’? A ‘technical failure’? ‘Accident’?���

A ‘natural disaster’? A social meltdown?

•  Reveal the Often Hidden Politics of Risk

•  Also unerringly reveal the often concealed politics of cyborganised cities

•  e.g. Katrina in 2005 not a ‘natural disaster’ or ‘Act of God.’ Rather, the inevitable result of:

•  Climate change accentuating hurricane •  Hitting a city denuded of natural

protection and •  Very poorly covered by a levee

network that was systematically racially biased over centuries of constructed socio-nature in context of a

•  A Neoconservative Federal Government that had systematically skewed Emergency Planning towards terrorism for political ends

5. Culture of Fascination

“Cyborgs, like us, are endlessly fascinated by machinic breakdowns, which would cause disruptions in, or denials of access to, their

megatechnical sources of being.” Tim Luke (2004)(above NYC blackout, 2003)

• 

•  Arcade Fire’s song, “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”; a visceral reflection of the experience, and hammers home the sense of modernity unraveled, lives threatened, and norms abandoned:

“Woke up with the power out, not really somethin to shout about. ice ���has covered up my parents hands, don't have any dreams don't have any ���

plans. i went out into the night, i went out to find some light. kids ���are swingin from the power lines, nobody's home so nobody minds ���

I woke up on the darkest night, neighbors all were shouting that they ���found the light - "we found the light." - shadows jumpin' all over my ���

walls, some of them big, some of them small. i went out into the night ���i went out to pick a fight with anyone. light a candle for the kids, ���

Jesus Christ don't keep it hid! ���

Ice has covered up my parents hands, don't have any dreams don't have any plans. growin' up in some strange storm, nobody's cold, nobody's ���

warm. i went out into the night, i went out to find some light. kids ���are dyin' out in the snow, look at them go - look at them go! ���

and the power's out in the heart of man, take it from your heart put ���it in your hand. what's the plan? what's the plan?

is it a dream? Is it a lie? i think I'll let you decide. just light a candle for the ���kids, Jesus Christ don't keep it hid! cause nothing's hid, from us ���

kids! you ain't foolin' nobody - with the lights out! and the power's ���out in the heart of man, take it from your heart put it in your hand. ���

and there's something wrong in the heart of man, you take it from your ���heart and put it in your hand! where'd you go?!”

6. Multiple, Contested, Disruption Discourses���Privileged Discourses of Disruption (and Invoked Securitisation) ���

Often Work to Obfuscate Less Privileged Ones, Sometimes Violently!���

E.g. Blackouts and the ‘Global’ City •  “We are talking about

Mumbai as the next Shanghai”, a general manager for a major

Mumbai advertising firm, faced with losing 30% of its

revenues due to daily 4 hour power cuts, reported in 2005. “And here we are faced with the possibilities

of blackouts” •  (SAND, 2005).

Infrastructure Disruptions, Security and Political Violence���Mumbai’s ‘Water wars’ (Colin McFarlane)

Securocratic ���War (Allen Feldman )

•  Permanent, open-ended and deterritorialised mobilisations or ‘wars’ (on drugs, crime, terror, illegal immigration, biological threats) organised around vague and all-encompassing notions of public safety rather than territorial conquest

•  Reproduce state sovereignty not through external war and internal policing but through raising the spectre of mobilities and flows which are deemed to contaminate societies and threaten the social order internally and externally simultaneously

•  Terrorism, demographic infiltration, ‘illegal’ immigration, and pathogens and disease (SARS, bird flu, Mad Cow….

•  Unknown and unknowable, these varied and dispersed threats are deemed to lurk within the interstices of urban and social life, blending invisibly with it.

• 

Virtual Borders Erupt Both Within and Without ���Territorial Limits of States

•  “The virtual border, whether it faces outward or inward to foreignness, is no longer a barrier structure but a shifting net, a flexible spatial pathogenesis that shifts round the globe and can move from the exteriority of the transnational frontier into the core of the securocratic state.” Allen Feldman

•  Central here is the distinction between an event and the normal, societal background. Thus, ‘security events’ emerge when “improper or transgressive circulations” from the range of putative threats become visible and are deemed to threaten the ‘normal’ worlds of transnational capitalism.

•  The figure of the ‘terrorist’ looms especially large here because such figures are seen to simultaneously breed improper circulations of bodies, money, and drugs

“The interruption of the moral economy of safe circulation is characterized as a dystopic ‘risk event’,” Feldman suggests. “Disruption of the imputed smooth functioning of the circulation apparatus in which nothing is meant to happen. ‘Normalcy’ is the non-event, which in effect

means the proper distribution of functions, the occupation of proper differential positions, and social profiles.”

Water…

Streets…

•  "the next Pearl Harbor will be both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's targets will not be the U.S. military or defense system but, instead, the U.S. public and its post-industrial and highly informatized lifestyle. What is now a tool for comfort, an object of leisure, or a necessary support for work [..] will soon become the world's deadliest weapon” (Debrix, 2001).

“Grocer Terrorists”: Criminalisation of (Alleged) Infrastructural Targeting: “The Coming Insurgency”���

and the “Tarnac Nine” ���

‘Zone/Park’; Archipelagos of Enclaves, ���Passage-Point Urbanism and the ���Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism

Criminalising Strikes, Securitising Labour and the Postpolitical

‘Logistics City’ ���(Deb Cowen)

Disruptions and Political Protest - Bangkok: People's Alliance for

Democracy (PAD), ���Dec 2008

Gate Gourmet Dispute, ���Heathrow, 2005

Cyborgian ���Global City System and the ���

New Imperialism

•  Neoliberalised global cities often have a parasitic relationship with near and distant hinterlands

•  Global neoliberal urbanisation has led to ‘devastating disparities between the mobility of capital and labour that have produced new forms of economic serfdom in the global South’ Matthew Gandy

•  Resource (food, water, energy) grabs organised and finance through the financial centres and technopoles of the North’s global finance capitals

•  Biopiracy and biofuels push (indigenous groups in Indonesia, protesting, above)

•  E.g. Daewoo (South Korean corporation) has just leased half of all the arable land in Madagascar to feed South Korean cities in the future

Constituting the ‘Anthropocene’: Technosocial & Technonatural Assemblages and Metabolisms

Bill Joy: When Turning Off Becomes Suicide

•  Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, caused a furore amongst, suggested that

the mediation of human societies by astonishingly complex computerised

infrastructure systems will soon reach the stage when "people won't be able to just

turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them

off would amount to suicide" (2000).

War and Terrorism as ‘Decyborganisation’

•  ‘Switching cities off ’ •  Deelectrification •  "We need to study how to degrade and

destroy our adversaries' abilities to transmit their military, political, and economic goods, services and information […]. Infrastructures, defining both traditional and emerging lines of communication, present increasingly lucrative targets for airpower [The vision of] airmen should focus on lines of communications that will increasingly define modern societies" (Edward Felker, ‘US Air Power Theorist’, 1998)

•  US Air Force model of enemy societies (right)

‘Strategic Paralysis’: ‘Bomb Now, Die Later’ : ���The War on Public Health’, Bombing “Back to the Stone Age” etc.���

•  General Buster Glosson, Iraq, 1991 : ”I want to put every [Iraqi] household in an autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated… We wanted to play

with their psyche" •  "We need to study how to degrade and destroy our adversaries' abilities to transmit their military, political, and economic goods, services and information. Infrastructures, defining both traditional and emerging lines of communication,

present increasingly lucrative targets for airpower [The vision of] airmen should focus on lines of communications that will increasingly define modern

societies" (Felker, 1998).

Disruption by Design and��� the Liberal Way of War: ���State Infrastructural Warfare

"There is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon" (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999)

"If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you go after their infrastructure. " (Phil Agre, 2001)

“It should be lights out in Belgrade : every power grid, water pipe, bridge,

road and war-related factory has to be targeted. We will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950 ? We can do 1950. You want

1389 ? We can do that, too!”

Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 23rd, 1999

First Order Effects Second Order Effects

Third Order Effects

No light after dark or in building interiors

Erosion of command and control capabilities

Greater logistics complexity

No refrigeration Increased requirement for power generating equipment

Decreased mobility

Some stoves/ovens non operable

Increased requirement for night vision devices

Decreased Situational Awareness

Inoperable hospital electronic equipment

Increased reliance on battery-powered items for news, broadcasts, etc.

Rising disease rates

No electronic access to bank accounts/money

Shortage of clean water for drinking, cleaning and preparing food

Rising rates of malnutrition

Disruption in some transportation and communications services

Hygiene problems Increased numbers of non-combatants requiring assistance

Disruption to water supply, treatment facilities, and sanitation

Inability to prepare and process some foods

Difficulty in communicating with non-combatants

Disruption Geopolitics

Towards State Computer Network Attack (CNA)