Between decay and repair: Embodied experiences of infrastructure's materiality

Abstract

This special issue bridges human geography, anthropology and political ecology to understand infrastructure in between conditions of decay and repair, and how embodied experiences of infrastructure intersect with processes of socio-spatial transformation.Our focus on decay and repair builds on literature that understands infrastructure as material processes articulated through social and affective dimensions, with implications for infrastructural access and broader political claims (Anand, 2015;Barnes, 2017;Chalfin, 2019;Fredericks, 2018;Lemanski, 2020;Schwenkel, 2015;von Schnitzler, 2013).We seek to further develop insight into and connect the multiple registers of discourse, materiality, labor and power geometries that determine when, and in what instances, infrastructures are unmade and remade.Decay and repair index the unpredictable socio-ecological relations that are created and animated by infrastructure, and how such relationships are further challenged and sustained by expectations of and capacities for maintenance.Though decay and repair are framed as a binary, we seek to capture the fluctuation between the two, and what happens in between.The collection contributes to recent scholarship on the everyday experiences of infrastructure among ordinary people (Anand et al.,