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Desire and Denial
On Constructing and Contesting Infrastructures

Ambivalent Infrastructures

Infrastructures are not just technical systems but cultural and political orders that stabilize and transform societal processes. Following Brian Larkin’s study The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, the writings collected in Desire and Denial conceive of infrastructures as material manifestations of symbolic and economic projects and efforts to build political power. They embody collective desires—for mobility, safety, control, or modernization, among other things—that not only structure planning processes, but also constitute normative ideas about the future. 

Meanwhile, infrastructures operate on the basis of denial: by systemically concealing, say, environmental devastation, social inequality, political exclusion, and colonial continuities. As Donna Haraway already underscored in the late 1980s, techno-scientific orders are premised on stories of objectivity and innocence—narrative patterns that also inform the planning and legitimation of infrastructures and the visions of the future they imply. 

The contributions explore this complex set of tensions, reading infrastructures as not just part of the built environment, but also politically contested, culturally appropriated, and symbolically fraught scenes of social conflict.