Urban Political Ecology of Infrastructure Systems

Urban political ecology of infrastructure systems examines how power relations, economic interests and ecological processes intersect in the production, maintenance and contestation of urban infrastructures. It frames pipelines, networks and platforms not as neutral artefacts but as socio-technical assemblages that mediate flows of water, energy, information and labour. This approach foregrounds uneven access and environmental injustices by revealing how infrastructural design, governance and everyday practices co-produce spatial inequalities. It emphasises the emergent and often incomplete nature of infrastructures, the labour that sustains them and the embodied ways in which bodies themselves become infrastructural through gendered or precarious work. By spanning diverse contexts—from global North smart cities to resource-scarce settlements in the global South—this field illuminates the political stakes of infrastructural interventions and offers pathways for more equitable and sustainable urban futures.

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Urban Political Ecology of Infrastructure Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in urban political ecology of infrastructure systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Socio-technical assemblage: An integrated system of material components, human actors and institutional practices that together produce and maintain infrastructure.

Infrastructural incompleteness: The notion that urban infrastructures are perpetually emergent, heterogeneous and contextually adapted rather than uniformly “complete” or standardised.

Infrastructural violence: The cumulative harm and exclusion caused by unequal design, distribution or invisibility of infrastructure, often experienced as slow and gendered effects.

Platform infrastructuring: The process by which digital platforms consolidate and govern urban resources, spaces and labour flows, transforming them into critical infrastructural elements.

References

1. Thinking food delivery platforms infrastructurally: The practices and politics of Baemin's infrastructuralisation in Seoul. New Technology Work and Employment (2024).
2. Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition: Scenarios from the mobile age in Nairobi. Social Studies of Science (2020).
3. Bodies as urban infrastructure: Gender, intimate infrastructures and slow infrastructural violence. Political Geography (2022).