Urban and infrastructural rhythms and the politics of temporal alignment

Abstract

To date, urban research has paid little attention to the role of urban infrastructures in shaping and ordering urban temporalities. I contend that the study of infrastructures offers a powerful lens for understanding the reciprocal relationship changing infrastructural and urban temporalities as well as the power-driven processes of temporal alignment and realignment. Approaching time through the empirical study of infrastructures, I argue, reveals how contemporary infrastructural change is entangled with—often conflicting—orientations to the past, present, and future. At the same time, it uncovers how temporal ordering and reordering processes by socio­-technical systems not merely reflect, but also enable, constrain, and preconfigure contemporary and future urbanism. Specifically, periods of infrastructural change, crisis, and failure reveal various temporalities, asynchronisms, and misalignments that are otherwise invisible or neglected but are crucial for the broader understanding of urban change and its governance.