Walking the (Infrastructural) Line: Mobile and Embodied Explorations of Infrastructures and Their Impact on the Urban Landscape

Abstract

Drawing on a series of Infrastructural Exploration ‘walkshops’ hosted at the Centre for Urban and Community Research (Goldsmiths), this article reflects on the possibilities offered by walking infrastructural lines to critically engage with urban infrastructure. In these walkshops, we invite participants – academic researchers, students, activists, members of the public – to join in moving through the city and to consider their embodied and emotional contact with the infrastructure we encounter. Traversing different spaces and opening our sociological imaginations to the city, we place an emphasis on collective experiences, happenstance conversations and different forms of knowing. We aim to foster a corporeal, mobile and multisensory attention to infrastructure and its impacts on the urban landscape. In this article, we propose that these embodied and affective encounters with infrastructure can attune us to questions of infrastructure’s social life, the politics of its siting, urban power dynamics, distributional (in)justice and forms of (infra)structural violence. Inspired by Shannon Mattern’s work, the article ends by offering a provocation. We ask readers, as we ask walkshop participants: then what? What are the socio-political potentials in these collective, peripatetic and visceral engagements with infrastructure?