A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Foregrounds the built systems or networks that coordinate the circulation of things, people, money, and data into integrated wholes. Provides an analytical framework for critically interrogating the relation between built networks and their spatial mobilities, including attention to their institutional dimensions, political economies, and forms of life that interact with and reshape their geographies.
Lines are willfully ignorant of volume. Precisely because of this, lines are forced to confront volume at every turn. As they strive to abstract themselves down to one dimension, lines must negotiate endlessly with all three stubbornly material dimensions. Their linearity is never more than a bargain of convenience, a tolerable approximation of an abstract ideal. Abstraction is not itself an abstract process.
This video feature accompanies the article “The social production of container space”. Although a sizable body of popular and academic literature explores how shipping containers have reconstituted the spaces through which they travel, the space within containers themselves remains largely unexamined.
The increasingly common conjunction of contemporary art and logistics (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015) might be cause for incredulity in some quarters—not least those of logistics specialists or art historians. However crucial to the working of contemporary economic life—so much so that theorists have taken to speak of a shift to supply chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009)—the visible manifestations of this material theory and practice of the circulation and assembly of commodities appear stamped by an inexorable banality, especially in that modular metonym for global capital as a whole, the container.
The New Silk Road presents the perspective of a world without barriers, where logistics is not a means but an end. A world in which connectivity is productive in itself. This vision, repeated over and over again by the participants of the Forum, is not just a vacuous slogan for a complex project yet to be defined.
I draw on the idea of infrastructuring to approach ethnographically the human and material components of infrastructure "in the making." While much of the literature on humanitarianism, human rights, and development has attended to politics, law, and ethics, an attention to infrastructuring moves past idealist concerns to the technicalities through which ideals become enacted on the ground.
Putting research on the socio-political effects of Kenya’s new Standard Gauge Railway in conversation with geographically and anthropologically grounded scholarship on infrastructure, the article analyses how megaprojects, in spite of state spectacles of infrastructure-qua-development, are embroiled in multiple modalities of ruination.
Infrastructures, as the humanistic and social scientific literature comprising an 'infrasturctural turn' show, are systems that move water, raw materials, goods, electricity, trash, and people while shaping social identities and notions of citizenship, creating forms of exclusion and belonging, and producing environmental meanings and practices.
This article argues that biopolitical infrastructures have been central features of Turkey’s ongoing colonization of Kurdish territories and populations and that the Green Revolution, despite its promise of progress and abundance, needs to be understood as part of this history of racialized state-making.
Perhaps the most famous image of Palestinian life under the British (1917–1948) is that of the “iron cage.” This article holds on to the notion of the iron cage, but proposes to stretch its meanings in two directions.
Why do infrastructures remain in place if they do not perform the functions which compelled their design? If soft infrastructures such as diplomatic trips do not increase bilateral trade volumes, why do they stay on the agenda?