The Promise of Infrastructure 

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.

​Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

Reviews
"The Promise of Infrastructure is a stellar collection of essays by anthropologists and social scientists who explore roads, buildings, bridges, water meters, pipelines, power stations, and other structures which we encounter on a daily basis but whose contribution to the production of difference we frequently overlook." –Natalia Kovalyova, Anthropology Book Forum (12/02/2019)

"This book presents a combination of insightful theorisations and an engaging ethnography." –Sudha Vasan, Economic & Political Weekly (11/01/2019)

"The Promise of Infrastructure is essential reading for scholars and students who wish to more fully understand the ethical and social role of the 'Ideal Infrastructure, ' its history, its criticisms and its (uncertain) future destiny." –Marco Spada, Environment and History (01/01/2020)