# Infrastructures as urban solutions? Critical perspectives on transformative socio-technical change

Jochen Monstadt, Jonathan Rutherford, Olivier Coutard

► To cite this version:

Jochen Monstadt, Jonathan Rutherford, Olivier Coutard. Infrastructures as urban solutions? Critical perspectives on transformative socio-technical change. Urban Studies, 2025, 62 (9), pp.1709 - 1730. 10.1177/00420980251339430. hal-05263860

HAL Id: hal-05263860

https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-05263860v1

Submitted on 16 Sep 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# Infrastructures as urban solutions? Critical perspectives on transformative socio-technical change

**Jochen Monstadt**

Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

**Jonathan Rutherford**

ENPC-Institut Polytechnique de Paris, CNRS, Univ Gustave Eiffel, LATTS, France

**Olivier Coutard**

CNRS, ENPC-Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Univ Gustave Eiffel, LATTS, France

## Abstract

This introduction to the special issue critically explores the pervasive logic of solutionism in infrastructure-led urban development and planning – a logic marked not only by the strong belief in the transformative power of infrastructures but also by a tendency to reframe how urban problems are prioritised and governed. Although infrastructures are increasingly positioned as key tools for urban decarbonisation, circularity, resilience or smartness, this introduction critically questions dominant solutionist approaches to complex urban problems. Drawing on recent urban scholarship, it explores infrastructures as ongoing, relational, and contested sociotechnical processes, rethinking transformative urban change as a situated, incremental, and ambiguous process shaped by local politics, materiality, and everyday repair and patching. Contributions to this issue highlight how infrastructural initiatives, even when partial or unrealised, can challenge dominant interests and practices and open space for alternative urban futures. Rather than repudiating infrastructural solutions, therefore, we suggest that the special issue foregrounds infrastructures' contested potential to enable progressive, transformative change. We pull out four transversal themes from the papers, around rethinking governance, repoliticising infrastructure development, embracing incremental and context-sensitive approaches and expanding conceptions of justice. In

Urban Studies
2025, Vol. 62(9) 1709–1730
© Urban Studies Journal Limited 2025

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00420980251339430
journals.sagepub.com/home/usj

Sage
doing so, we call for approaches to infrastructural transformation that remain open to uncertainty, friction and possibility.

## Keywords

normativity, sociotechnical approaches, solutionism, transformative urban change, urban infrastructure

## 摘要

这篇特刊导言批判性地探讨了以基础设施为主导的城市开发和规划中普遍存在的解决方案主义逻辑。这种逻辑坚信基础设施具有变革性力量，而且还倾向于重构城市问题的优先排序和治理方式。尽管基础设施越来越多地被定位为实现城市脱碳、循环性、韧性或智慧性的关键工具，本篇导言对解决复杂城市问题的主流解决方案主义方法提出了批判性质疑。借鉴最近的城市学术研究，本文将基础设施作为持续的、相关的和有争议的社会技术进程进行了探讨，重新思考了变革性的城市变迁，将其视为由当地政治、物质性以及日常修复和修补所塑造的情境化的、具有渐进性和模糊性的进程。本期特刊中的文章强调，基础设施建设举措（即便只是局部性的或者尚未实现的）能够对占主导地位的利益格局和实践方式形成挑战，并为城市走向不同的未来开拓空间。因此，我们并非否定基础设施解决方案，而是认为本期特刊强调了基础设施在推动渐进式、变革性改变方面存在的充满争议的潜力。我们从这些论文中提炼出四个贯穿始终的主题：重新思考治理方式、基础设施开发的重新政治化、采用渐进式且因地制宜的方法，以及拓展对正义的理解。在此过程中，我们呼吁采取对不确定性、摩擦和可能性持开放态度的基础设施转型方法。

## 关键词

规范性、社会技术方法、解决方案主义、变革性城市变化、城市基础设施

Received April 2025; accepted April 2025

## Introduction

In recent years, sustainability discourses have increasingly shifted from perceiving cities and urban regions as sustainability challenges to highlighting their potential as key sites and drivers for addressing contemporary environmental crises (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020; Montero, 2020). Global frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda or the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, along with numerous national policy initiatives, position cities and urban regions as pivotal actors and catalysts for societal transformations towards more desirable, low-carbon, resilient and equitable futures. However, what remains mostly implicit in narratives of 'urban solutions' to global problems is their underlying

assumption that transformative urban change will primarily be driven by the re-engineering of infrastructures, with policies targeting the transformation of energy, water, waste, communication and transportation systems. Indeed, cities across the globe are increasingly (re-)turning to infrastructures as a panacea for their most pressing challenges.

As the history of technology has vividly demonstrated, collective infrastructure optimism, represented by promises of infrastructures as a driver of urban change for the better, is not a new phenomenon (Hård and Misa, 2008). Since at least the late 19th century, the rollout of sanitary, transport and energy networks has been seen as a solution to economic, social and public health challenges of modern cities, promising progress, modernity and economic growth (Hård
and Misa, 2008; Melosi, 2008; Tarr, 1984). However, today's urban challenges differ from those of the 19th and 20th centuries in that cities are not solely confronted with isolated or sequentially emerging problems but with multiple interconnected crises (Westman et al., 2022) – many of which are linked to the very infrastructures that once promised progress: resource scarcity, environmental degradation, persistent social inequalities, economic volatility, geopolitical upheaval and hybrid warfare. While the idea of infrastructure as a vehicle for transformative urban change has long-standing precedents, the conditions under which this idea is mobilised today are profoundly different and lead to new ambitions, logics, and institutional arrangements.

To a large extent, today’s ‘urban infra-
structural turn’ is fuelled by massive national
funding programmes. These include China’s
New Infrastructure Plan and its Belt and
Road Initiative, the Biden Administration’s
2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs
Act, the European Union’s Green Deal and
India’s National Infrastructure Pipeline.
Such programmes seek to modernise trans-
portation, energy systems and digital con-
nectivity, hoping for trickle-down effects.
Complementary to these ambitious initia-
tives, various urban actions at different
scales promote cities as laboratories for
innovative infrastructure solutions to con-
temporary crises.

This rebooted collective infrastructure
optimism is often based on a narrow framing
of problems and on instrumental thinking,
according to which infrastructures serve as
passive and politically neutral tools societies
use to solve problems and achieve goals
(Schatzberg, 2018). Yet, as the papers in this
special issue reveal, such instrumental think-
ing demands urgent critical scrutiny and a
more diversified understanding of the means
and ends of infrastructural solutions, fore-
grounding sometimes obscured deeper socio-

political tensions and structural inequalities. The special issue thus develops a critical approach to narratives of ‘infrastructures as urban solutions’, acknowledging that such narratives often ignore or downplay infrastructures’ historical and political-economic entanglements, people’s complexities of infrastructure governance and uneven access to infrastructure services (see also Monstadt and Coutard, 2019).

The cases examined in this issue expose
the gaps and contradictions of infrastruc-
tural solutions to urban problems: in Paris,
green energy policies struggle to translate
into meaningful emissions reductions due to
governance deficits (Coutard and Gallez,
2025), while in Chicago, sustainability
efforts sideline critical justice concerns
(Lamphere, 2025). Similarly, initiatives for
circularity infrastructures in Nantes and
Gothenburg reveal tensions between sustain-
ability rhetoric and the economic logics that
sustain resource extraction (Bahers and
Rutherford, 2025). In Nairobi, segmented
walking and cycling infrastructure remains
disjointed and contingent on future funding
allocation and policy prioritisation (Nyamai
and Schramm, 2025). In Bengaluru, trans-
portation infrastructure projects aimed at
reducing motorisation ultimately reinforce
congestion and class divides (Ramachandran
et al., 2025), while Mumbai’s digital mobility
platforms reinforce socio-spatial fragmenta-
tion and worker exploitation (Kuttler, 2025).
These examples illustrate that infrastructure-
led urban transformations, often celebrated
as (socio-)technical ‘fixes’, can fail to address
the root causes of urban environmental,
social or economic challenges. Moreover,
the governance approaches proposed to
enhance infrastructural solutions – for exam-
ple, cross-sectoral coordination between
water and energy policies in Los Angeles,
Maputo and Cape Town (Smith, 2025), the
reliance on urban governance innovations in
Amsterdam (Monstadt et al., 2025) or the
governance across multiple jurisdictions in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region (Glass and Addie, 2025) – can either underplay critical governance challenges or can be undermined by entrenched neoliberal politics (Traill and Cumbers, 2025) or dominant power relations (Dewoolkar et al., 2025).

The pervasive logic of solutionism in contemporary infrastructure-led urban development and planning is also marked by its tendency to reshape how urban challenges are framed, prioritised and governed (Lennon, 2024; Morozov, 2013; Sætra, 2023). The papers here ask how engineers, developers, consultancies, and policymakers (re)define highly complex and contentious urban issues as infrastructure problems that can be resolved through sociotechnical innovation (Sætra, 2023) or innovative approaches to infrastructure governance. Moreover, they analyse the implications of limiting the actors involved in infrastructural solutions – often overlooking local communities, users, and everyday repairers and patchers – and explore how this framing influences whose knowledge counts and how solutions are imagined and produced. Although recent infrastructure innovations hold potential, the papers in this issue argue that they often overlook unintended consequences – particularly those that are less visible, indirect or unfolding across different spatial and temporal scales. Infrastructural solutions thus often generate new systemic issues, necessitating continuous cycles of sociotechnical reconfiguration to address emerging and accumulating complexities (Edwards, 2003).

Building on the engagement with infrastructural solutionism, this introduction to the special issue critically examines the notion of transformative change – sometimes defined as ‘a system-wide change that requires the consideration of social and economic factors which, together with technology, can bring about rapid change at scale’ (IPCC, 2018: 559). The papers in this special issue open and

unpack this conceptualisation, pointing to a plurality of ways of seeing ‘transformative change’. Infrastructure solutions are often framed a priori as contributors to urban transformation, yet the critical question remains: what does transformative change entail? How can we critically analyse and advance our understanding of urban and infrastructural futures through ‘transformative approaches’ that address urban challenges?

We suggest that much of the existing literature either overstates the transformative power of infrastructures and the potential of radical shifts from old to new systems, or focuses on exposing the limitations of purported transformations – debunking smart, green and sustainable solutions as quick fixes. However, both approaches tend to overlook alternative pathways that may meaningfully contribute to desirable transformations. In addition to exposing the pitfalls of solutionism (addressed in the second section), we call for approaches to urban infrastructures that are not only politically engaged, context-sensitive and multi-scalar, but also informed by reconceptualisations of infrastructure developed in recent scholarship. This entails rethinking our understanding of transformative change (third section) and critically reflecting on what more desirable directions for change might be (fourth section).

## The problem with infrastructural solutionism

Infrastructural interventions are often framed as critical tools for resolving urban challenges. Underpinning many of these interventions are techno-optimistic frameworks that promote the idea that the impacts of infrastructures are necessarily and univocally positive (Königs, 2022). Langdon Winner (1980) offered an early and influential critique of such views, arguing that technologies are not neutral tools but embody political choices and social consequences.
Like Mumford (1934) before him, he warned that uncritical faith in technological progress can obscure underlying power structures, democratic deficits, and the exclusionary effects of technological design. However, as the contributions to this special issue show, utility and tech companies, consultants, governments and many citizens continue to embrace belief in infrastructure solutions. The promise of smart cities, net-zero urbanism, circular economies, sustainable mobility systems or universal access to critical infrastructure services is frequently leveraged to justify investments in large-scale infrastructure projects, and infrastructural solutionism remains pervasive in urban governance and planning. From the contributions to this special issue, we can distil four key elements of infrastructural solutionism that constitute a first step to critically deconstructing the dominant ways infrastructures are imagined as straightforward technomanagerial fixes for complex urban problems (see also Table 1).

First, solutionism frames urban challenges as problems that can only be resolved through technological solutions. Morozov (2013) famously defined technological solutionism as the tendency to frame problems in ways that make them amenable to technological intervention, often reducing multifaceted societal issues to technical challenges with singular, engineered resolutions. Accordingly, the assumption is that advanced technology can drive a cascade of disruptive changes that predominantly produce positive environmental, economic, social and cultural transformations. A pertinent example of this is found in Bengaluru's transport infrastructure, where congestion and pollution have been addressed primarily through technological advancements, assuming they can single-handedly resolve deeply entrenched mobility and equity issues (Ramachandran et al., 2025). Rather than alleviating congestion, in this case, the park-and-ride transit system and redesigned street

corridors served more as image-building exercises that failed to disincentivise car ownership or significantly improve mobility options for marginalised residents. Similarly, platforms like Uber were introduced in Mumbai's ride-hailing sector, assuming that digital technologies could provide efficient and sustainable urban mobility. Yet, the emphasis here on digital platform-based efficiency sidestepped structural issues such as precarious labour conditions, regulatory gaps and the unequal accessibility of transport services, ultimately reinforcing socioeconomic divides rather than bridging them (Kuttler, 2025). The promotion of circular economies in Nantes and Gothenburg has also been framed as an engineering and infrastructural fix, emphasising waste-to-energy plants, material recycling hubs and district heating networks (Bahers and Rutherford, 2025). Despite their sustainability claims, the authors argue that these technocentric circularity approaches frequently reproduce the same extractive logic they aim to overcome by sustaining economic growth rather than fundamentally restructuring urban metabolic flows.

Second, infrastructural solutionism depicts specialised infrastructural expertise or engineering skills as crucial – if not indispensable – for addressing urban challenges. This implies that such expert knowledge is universally applicable and politically neutral, obscuring its social, ethical and political dimensions. But as Callon's (1984) work on translation and other STS analyses have amply shown, engineers, consultants and other infrastructure experts who promote new technological solutions do not merely apply neutral expertise to solve predefined problems. Rather, they actively shape, redefine or even invent problems to align with their available technology, specific expertise and economic and political interests. This process of framing or (re-)inventing urban problems reinforces the authority of technical actors or bureaucrats
<table><caption>Table I. Comparative overview of urban infrastructure problems and solutions.</caption><thead><tr><th>Case study</th><th>Framed problem</th><th>Proposed infrastructure solution</th><th>Solutionist approaches</th><th>Limits to proposed infrastructural solutions</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Bengaluru Transport Infrastructure (Ramachandran et al., 2025)</td><td>Traffic congestion, pollution, car dominance, safety of pedestrians and cyclists</td><td>Improved metro systems, dedicated transport corridors, park-and-ride facilities</td><td>Almost exclusive reliance on engineered solutions</td><td>Infrastructure expansion does not address structural mobility inequalities</td></tr><tr><td>Mumbai Ride-hailing Platforms (Kurtler, 2025)</td><td>Limited accessibility to and fragmentation in public transport</td><td>Digital ride-hailing platforms like Uber to optimise mobility and reduce congestion</td><td>Technological platform seen as a universal solution</td><td>Benefits skewed towards middle/upper-class users, labour precarity persists</td></tr><tr><td>Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Transport Planning (Glass and Addie, 2025)</td><td>Need for coordinated transportation development in the region</td><td>Expert-led regional transport decision-making</td><td>Technocratic planning</td><td>Top-down approach limits public participation and alternative mobility solutions</td></tr><tr><td>Nairobi Walking and Cycling Infrastructure (Nyamai and Schramm, 2025)</td><td>Traffic congestion; lack of pedestrian and cycling infrastructure</td><td>Segments of cycling and walking lanes in central business district</td><td>Dominance of engineers and external development partners</td><td>Transient government interventions with limited spatial reach, yet potential for future upscaling</td></tr><tr><td>Germany and the UK's Urban Energy Transitions (Traill and Cumbers, 2025)</td><td>Challenges in local capacity and multi-scalar governance for energy transitions</td><td>Delegation of key responsibilities to municipalities</td><td>Transition through decentralised infrastructure governance</td><td>Decentralisation requires stronger considerations of equity and multi-scalar governance mechanisms</td></tr><tr><td>Amsterdam Heating Transition (Monstadt et al., 2025)</td><td>Dependence on natural gas, climate mitigation, geopolitical conflicts</td><td>Integrating district heating with other infrastructure systems</td><td>Governance innovation framed as catch-all solution</td><td>Unsolved governance problems, downplaying socio-political conflicts and risks of increased socio-spatial inequalities</td></tr><tr><td>Paris Low-carbon Transition (Coutard and Gallez, 2025)</td><td>High emissions, reliance on traditional energy sources</td><td>Urban energy efficiency programmes (housing, mobility) and integration of renewables</td><td>Low carbon strategies based on technological and infrastructural developments</td><td>Democratic depoliticisation and downplaying of justice issues</td></tr><tr><td>Chicago Green Infrastructure and Energy Justice (Lamphere, 2025)</td><td>Environmental injustice and energy inequality</td><td>Large-scale energy efficiency retrofits, green infrastructure</td><td>Infrastructural responses encouraged by market mechanisms</td><td>Disregard of inequalities, with a risk to increase rather than alleviate them</td></tr></tbody></table>

(continued)
<table><caption>Table I. Continued</caption><thead><tr><th>Case study</th><th>Framed problem</th><th>Proposed infrastructure solution</th><th>Solutionist approaches</th><th>Limits to proposed infrastructural solutions</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Circular Economy Solutions in Nantes and Gothenburg (Bahers and Rutherford, 2025)</td><td>Contradictions in circular economy initiatives in urban infrastructures</td><td>Reworking large-scale infrastructure with a focus on circularity</td><td>Technocratic and productivist approaches sustaining incumbent interests</td><td>Circularity infrastructures reinforce productivist logic rather than systemic change</td></tr><tr><td>Cape Town, Los Angeles and Maputo Water-Energy Nexus (Smith, 2025)</td><td>Fragmented governance of urban water and energy</td><td>Cross-sector coordination of water-energy infrastructure</td><td>Nexus-thinking reflecting an engineering rationale</td><td>Coordination efforts confined to specific projects/crises; they can even reinforce sectoral boundaries</td></tr><tr><td>Mumbai Struggle for Universal Water Access (Dewoolkar et al., 2025)</td><td>Water insecurity and infrastructural violence against marginalised communities</td><td>Implementing the right to water as a technical rather than a social justice issue</td><td>Technocratic framing of water provision emphasising licensed plumbers, administrative procedures and technical requirements</td><td>Administrative ambiguities and infrastructural violence (deliberately) hinder the implementation of water for all schemes</td></tr></tbody></table>

Source: Authors.

while masking the contingent and contested nature of infrastructural expertise. Dewoolkar et al. (2025), for example, offer a powerful critique of Mumbai's water provision system, wherein licensed plumbers are confronted with engineers and administrators, who act as gatekeepers and effectively (re-)define what is considered 'standard' infrastructure. Also, in the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission's regional transport planning, infrastructural transformation has been shaped by expert-led frameworks. The commission's decision-making processes prioritised regulatory compliance and efficiency, but this approach also sidelined local community voices and undermined more progressive approaches to infrastructure planning (Glass and Addie, 2025).

Third, policymakers and the general public are assured that private profits and public benefits can be harmonised through novel infrastructures. The assumption is that novel infrastructural solutions can be profitable – allowing businesses to ‘make the world a better place’ while generating revenue for shareholders (Obendiek and Seidl, 2023: 1312). Those economic benefits are used as a legitimising script and an opportunity to cast policy decisions on infrastructure renewal as win-win solutions. A case in point is Mumbai’s digital mobility platforms, where the introduction of ride-hailing services was justified as a means to alleviate traffic congestion and as a driver of economic growth (Kuttler, 2025). Similarly, implementing circular economies at the city scale has been framed as a ‘spatial fix’ for sustaining economic growth despite growing environmental challenges (Bahers and Rutherford, 2025). At the same time, Smith (2025) shows that nexus thinking and stronger cross-sectoral coordination have been promoted to solve environmental problems, promising win-win solutions for multiple infrastructure domains (see also Monstadt et al., 2025).

Fourth, effective governance solutions are proposed as a means to support
transformations towards more ‘sustainable’ infrastructures. As McGuirk et al. (2024) demonstrate, epistemic communities of experts, such as UN and OECD organisations, global philanthropies, consultancies, research institutes and NGOs, have driven the standardisation of governance innovations to streamline decision-making and accelerate urban and infrastructural renewal. Hereby, a range of best practice manuals, capacity-building programmes and showcase initiatives serve as instructional tools that define standardised approaches to infrastructure governance. The proposed ‘governance solutions’ and ‘best practices’ claim to foster new modes of governance thinking, operationalise innovation and phase out outdated or problematised practices (McGuirk et al., 2024). By doing so, they work to normalise specific infrastructural governance models and promote scalable and replicable best governance practices, legitimising technocratic and depoliticised approaches to solving complex urban challenges (McGuirk et al., 2024).

An example is the promotion of low-carbon heating solutions in Amsterdam, where local stakeholders follow national ‘best governance practices’ – that is, the invocation of local and regional transition visions, strategic plans, nexus thinking and experimentation – to radically change urban heating systems (Monstadt et al., 2025). Likewise, Glass and Addie’s (2025) study on regional infrastructural governance in the United States demonstrates how regional planning authorities operate within constrained political and financial environments. They underscore how infrastructural imaginaries at the regional scale are frequently entangled with economic and political interests that limit the scope of transformative change. Traill and Cumbers (2025) extend the critique of effective urban governance solutions to attempts to realise energy transitions, questioning the capacity of urban-level

actors to drive democratic and community-led energy transition policies in the face of entrenched multi-scalar governance constraints and dominant market logics. The authors warn against universalising models of local energy transition without attending to political economies, ownership structures and limitations to local governments’ financial and regulatory capacity.

These four dimensions illustrate how infrastructural solutionism simplifies complex urban challenges and privileges technical expertise and managerial logics, often at the expense of democratic decision-making, social equity and long-term sustainability. The case studies discussed in this special issue (see Table 1) reveal how these patterns play out across diverse urban contexts – highlighting the gaps between framed problems, promised solutions and the real-world limitations of infrastructure interventions. However, these examples invite us to move beyond merely critiquing solutionist narratives: as we ask in our following section, what kinds of change are actually taking place, and under what conditions can infrastructures contribute to transformative urban change?

## Rethinking transformative change through infrastructures

Many of the ‘problems’ discussed in this special issue seem at first glance rather mundane or routine, for example, the limited governance capacity of local actors (Monstadt et al., 2025; Traill and Cumbers, 2025), congestion and pollution (Nyamai and Schramm, 2025; Ramachandran et al., 2025) or increasing recycling and reuse of products and materials (Bahers and Rutherford, 2025). Most academic authors highlight that solutions offered and enacted largely fail to significantly move the dial and, indeed, even reproduce urban problems (or create new ones) while reinforcing dominant social interests. Exposing these often
disappointing results, the gap between
promise and achievement is indeed an
important part of the research. However,
the papers here do more in trying to under-
stand and analyse (and thereby foreground)
the wider significance of the various projects
and initiatives studied, exploring whether
and how these may bring about some form
of meaningful change. We suggest that in
seeing infrastructure as an ongoing socio-
technical process, in *contrast* to deterministic
and instrumental solutionism, the special
issue offers a different understanding of the
manifest or latent potential of infrastruc-
tures to contribute to transformative change.
In doing so, it engages with the highly com-
plex realities of contemporary urban infra-
structure (re)development – where what
counts as transformative sociotechnical
change must continuously evolve in response
to accruing and deepening crises.

We live in an age of proliferating and
interconnected crises – climate emergency,
environmental degradation, biodiversity
loss, geopolitical instability, rising inequal-
ities, expanding authoritarianism, resource
security layered over economic crises, tech-
nological vulnerabilities, etc. – leading to a
perception or state of permanent meta-crisis
or urgency, the new normal of living with
turbulence and emergency all the time (e.g.
Henig and Knight, 2023; Westman et al.,
2022). For us, this implies that the experi-
ence, governance and potential of infrastruc-
tures must be seen as inexorably different
from crises in the 19th and 20th centuries
(see e.g. Fan et al., 2023, on the pandemic;
Petrova and Prodromidou, 2019, on energy
access in austerity; Rutherford and Marvin,
2023, on responses to the permanent fragility
of electric grids). This is all the more so, as
disrupted, decaying or ruinated infrastruc-
tures both prefigure and result from this
evolving ‘polycrisis’. Progress and moder-
nity, the claimed benefits and achievements
of infrastructure development, are in

upheaval and turmoil (see, e.g. Coutard,
2024a). The extent to which urban infra-
structures can contribute to resolving multi-
plying, interlinked and ever-present issues
and problems is uncertain and unclear to say
the least (Appel et al., 2018). Can infrastruc-
tures ever provide an overarching ‘solution’,
or is it now just a way/tool of strategically
managing or coping with ongoing crises?
What kinds of infrastructural or wider urban
solutions emerge from the ‘rubble’ and
‘ruins’ of the modern urban infrastructures
that led us to this crisis in the first place?

In exploring these questions, the papers
are building on a primary lesson from the
accumulating richness of infrastructure scho-
larship in the last 25–30 years – that, as soon
as we analyse infrastructure as a *process*
rather than (or as well as) a more or less
definite and identifiable *thing* or outcome,
infrastructure projects and configurations
can be recognised as having generative lim-
itations or ‘pinch points’ (see e.g. Alderman
and Goodwin, 2022; Amin and Thrift, 2017;
Appel et al., 2018). In other words, they may
not be large-scale, permanent ‘solutions’ for
everybody (contra the illusion of the techno-
cratic literature noted above), but even the
most obdurate and embedded infrastructure
can serve variegated purposes in situ and be
repurposed or deviated for new or other uses
along the way. Urban scholars have amply
analysed the fragmented plurality of infra-
structure formations and their diverse and
uneven implications in different contexts (for
in-depth recent reviews, see Coutard and
Florentin, 2024, Wiig et al., 2022). ‘Making
progress’ with infrastructures is then no lon-
ger about leading to a given end state, and
even less so about a single system/solution,
but increasingly about maintaining flux,
ambiguity and uncertainty (and thus open-
ness of possibility; Mwaura and Lawhon,
2025). Recent urban infrastructure scholar-
ship is thus dominated by perspectives
emphasising the incremental, emergent,
makeshift nature of much infrastructure
development especially, but not exclusively,
in the South (see e.g. Baptista, 2019; Guma,
2020; Silver, 2023). In this work, infrastruc-
tures are full of potential and always see-
mingly open to being shaped otherwise – in
other words, they can always come to consti-
tute or contribute to a possible ‘solution’,
albeit partial, fragile and small-scale. For
Amankwaa and Gough (2022), for example,
informal modes of electricity access in
Ghana ‘should not be recognised as a failure
but as a sphere of opportunity, innovation
and transition’ (as claimed in their abstract;
see also Bobbins et al., 2024, on solar mini-
grids in South Africa or Monstadt and
Schramm, 2017, on water and wastewater in
Tanzania).

Constant repair and care of systems and
system components, and the diverse labour
that goes into this, has become a focus of
study. Whether in relation to the mainte-
nance of decaying established infrastructures
or fixing, mending and servicing new infra-
structures, the everyday, often hidden or
undervalued work of keeping variegated
infrastructures and components functioning
and available has reaffirmed the emergent,
shifting quality and effectivity of infrastruc-
tures (e.g. Denis and Florentin, 2024; Stokes
and de Coss-Corvo, 2023). Bryson et al.
(2023), for example, studied, ‘patching’ as
an individual or collective ‘bottom-up’
response to recurrent problems with public
infrastructure and how such co-productive
‘infrastructuring’ transforms not only urban
environments but relations between the local
state and citizens (see also Lemanski, 2020
on a different context). In this sense, trans-
formative change can be seen as emerging
from incremental shifts – building on
strands, fragments or experiments with
infrastructures that support ways of coping
with and living through crises – rather than
pursuing the often disempowering and

seemingly unattainable goal of large-scale
systemic infrastructure transformation.

Of course, this is not to say that urban
transformation through infrastructures is
now solely a matter of small-scale, incremen-
tal practices and developments. Indeed, some
scholars have taken issue with this immanent
perspective, wherein important structural
dynamics and constraints, including (espe-
cially) the inherent (fast or slow) violence of
infrastructures, are downplayed in favour of
‘affirmational depictions of infrastructures’
possibilities for world-making’ (Lesutis and
Kaika, 2024: 459). Clearly then, to under-
stand how infrastructures both enable and
constrain transformative change, we need to
pay continuing attention to the tensions they
inherently enrol and rework. This means
holding together a concurrent focus on the
past and future promises of infrastructures
and their already visible effects, whether in
terms of violated bodies and intimacies,
social inequalities, new forms of colonialism
(e.g. Curley, 2021; Davies, 2021) or uneven
and unsustainable material configurations.

What, then, does this collection of papers
contribute to this ongoing debate about the
role of infrastructures in transformative
change? Here, at least three overlapping
themes strike us as important.

Attending to the compromise of
infrastructure

A first point is that beyond the ‘promise’ of
infrastructure solutions lies the inherent
compromises through which infrastructures
come to be. The sociotechnical processes the
papers dig into and lay bare allow authors to
delimit, even demythologise, the work that
infrastructures can feasibly do or be made to
do. This may be obvious, but it remains a
powerful rejoinder to the self-fulfilling pro-
phecies and rhetoric of solutionism. The
papers accept and take seriously the limits,
constraints and restrictions of infrastruc-
tures, and even how they may undermine or
weaken options and opportunities in some
situations (Dewoolkar et al., 2025). In so
doing, they do not just offer a critique of dis-
appointing or obverse results and conse-
quences, they also recover a generative sense
of projects/initiatives as partial, open, always
contested possibilities. They usually require,
for example, alliances or coalitions or some
form of collective agency or coordination to
bring about change (Glass and Addie, 2025:
1789; Smith, 2025) or substantive socio-
environmental justice (Lamphere, 2025). It is
in the cracks, breaches and fissures that
other ways of seeing, doing or being emerge.
While enacted ‘solutions’ may seem to be
imperfect, limited and low-key to many pub-
lics, the papers find alternative pathways
and potentials in the interstices of these proj-
ects and strategies (see next section).

Here, Nyamai and Schramm (2025: 1796) usefully remind us that an infrastructure project is capable of serving a purpose even if it does not actually materialise. A promise of infrastructure can be a powerful indicator of political willingness to improve urban liveability and sustainability. It can be revealing of wider political projects, either explicitly or implicitly. In Nairobi, the potential of the mobility infrastructure ‘segments’ partially rolled out by the short-lived Nairobi Metropolitan Service agency remains, albeit with their transformative role bound up with future decisions about the distribution of responsibility and investment.

In the papers in this special issue, projects start, evolve, are delayed, and even abandoned, but irrespective of this, they show that infrastructures are always changing. There is, then, a shared concern amongst the authors for the shifting lives of infrastructures, the undulating and uncertain narratives and timelines of initiatives or plans or projects, none of which are likely to end as they began (cf. Appel et al., 2018: 18).

Again, part of the compromise of infrastruc-
ture is the limits to the capacities of the dif-
ferent actors – whether planners and
strategic actors or private or community/
third sector – to do and to get things done,
especially with often recalcitrant or unmalle-
able infrastructures.

Disconnecting ‘scale’ and ‘transformation’

Second, the papers show that even small
infrastructural projects can be generative.
This focus enables a wider view of potential
transformative change to emerge that is less
constrained by preconceived ideas of the
scale or degree of change. One of the main
effects of seeing from the small-scale or local
is, for example, to broaden the range of
actors (and types of social relations) that are
or could be involved in enacting change.
This means working from the ‘situatedness
of transitions’ (Traill and Cumbers, 2025:
1810), while avoiding the ‘local trap’
(Purcell, 2006) of seeing local interventions
as signifying local agency and control or as
inevitably democratic and progressive.

In their study of multi-scalar governance
of energy transitions in the UK and
Germany, Traill and Cumbers (2025: 1822)
observe that: ‘Progress has been made in
small, localised ways, often illustrating the
art of the possible and reflecting the greater
possibilities of success in the context of de-
centralised agency’. There are ‘many varieties
of subnational agency’ that might be worked
into ‘opportunity spaces’ for progressive
transition (Traill and Cumbers, 2025: 1821f).
At the same time, Nyamai and Schramm
(2025) mobilise a concept of infrastructure
‘segments’ as a device to highlight at once
the incremental piecemeal focus of particular
projects and their integrative potential over
time, especially in a context of political fluc-
tuation and turnover: ‘The segments, while
often appearing disjointed and incomplete,
are infrastructures that are in a continuous
process of being reshaped especially within
temporary political regimes and short-term
governance that ideally lay the groundwork
for future integration into long-term plans'
(Nyamai and Schramm, 2025: 1799).

Glass and Addie (2025) make the distinction in their paper between a ‘reactive’ or incremental infrastructural solution and a more ‘proactive’ and potentially radical infrastructure as a solution but suggest that both are in constant interplay in many contexts, with the significance of the former not to be underestimated. Indeed, given the administrative and financial constraints of the planning commission they studied, they suggest that ‘incremental changes to infrastructure via small projects and experiments are often the best hope for responding to regional challenges of structural inequality and uneven access to resources’ (Glass and Addie, 2025: 1782). Bahers and Rutherford (2025) similarly discuss the merit of taking a more community-oriented ‘foundational’ approach to circular economy infrastructure, that also places local needs and requirements at the heart of infrastructure configurations. Given the challenges of altering entrenched, path-dependent systems, the authors argue that transformative change may be more achievable through community-oriented circularity infrastructure. While such initiatives may not significantly reshape large-scale resource flows, they can effectively address local needs and aspirations for greater access to a circular economy of waste prevention, re-used products and recycled materials (ibid.: 15).

Kuttler’s (2025) analytical privileging of
the tactics and practices of platform workers
over the technology-centric approach to the
platform economy is also an interesting
move to reframe the nature and agency of
transformative change and ground it in lived
experience and labour (rather than generic,
deterritorialised apps and algorithms). At

the same time, we need to be wary of fetishis-
ing the local and the bottom-up. While there
may well be greater progressive capacity and
agency to shape change at this level, signifi-
cant transformation still requires reinforced
national or transnational coordination, regu-
lation and action alongside local efforts
(Monstadt et al., 2025).

Centring matters of materiality

Third, some of the papers show that material-
ity matters in change processes, with material
infrastructure forms, flows and engagements
embodying the ways humans are reshaping
and engaging with their environments.
Monstadt et al.’s (2025) study of heating net-
works in Amsterdam, for example, fore-
grounds their necessary and complex
connections with other infrastructures and
material flows (data, electricity, waste and
water) and the challenges of managing and
governing these multiple systems in integrated
ways. Meanwhile, for Bahers and Rutherford
(2025), the contradiction in circular economy
strategies partially derives from the tension
between the relocalisation of material
resource use and the continued delocalisation
of resource networks, seen most clearly in the
vast quantities of waste imported from afar
to secure putative ‘local’ energy production.

There are also papers, in which a wider
set of materials or materialities shape urban
possibilities. Lamphere’s (2025) discussion
of restorative justice to ‘heal’ the past harms
of unequal market-oriented energy interven-
tions in Chicago invokes a substantive mate-
rial component in foregrounding the need
for ‘socio-environmental transformation’
that could involve alternative local socio-
technical configurations around power
plants and neighbourhood greenspace
(Lamphere, 2025: 1890). Equally,
Dewoolkar et al. (2025) discuss the material
basis of the work of activists and licensed
plumbers through their constant engagements with pipes and paperwork, in an attempt at circumventing the ‘administrative precarity’ of local populations without access to water in Mumbai. Ambiguity and bureaucracy have a very real material effect on marginalised groups (‘infrastructural violence’), leading to ‘de-ambiguation’ efforts centred on standpost water connection applications but that require inter alia detailed mapping of ‘non-notified’ slum areas and negotiating the expectations and requirements of senior engineers. As they argue: ‘In these situated bureaucratic accounts of professional action and activism towards a right to water, we demonstrate how infrastructures are actually being changed in practice’ (Dewoolkar et al., 2025: 1952).

## Reclaiming infrastructures beyond solutionism

Not all transformative change is equivalent or significant, meaning that we need to elaborate normatively on the conditions that may foster the emergence, development, and perennity of meaningful infrastructure initiatives. A *situated* reading of the papers forming this special issue thus opens new perspectives on the potential for transformative change associated with infrastructural developments. Foregrounding infrastructure as a *process* allows us to go beyond the technological determinism associated with dominant understandings of infrastructural solutionism. We have highlighted how this relational perspective offers a fresh angle on the processes of change. Indeed, beyond a reading of infrastructures as ends in themselves that often ‘fail to deliver’ (cf. the first section), the papers in this special issue show that infrastructures as processes are often crucial in multidimensional processes of change (cf. the second section).

This brings us to the final question we would like to examine in this introduction: In a context of polycrisis, how could a processual understanding of infrastructure be mobilised to foster more liveable, sustainable futures? In other words, to what extent do the contributions to the special issue suggest directions for, or forms of, desirable transformative change, and what are appropriate and effective ways to foster such change? This immediately prompts the question: how, by whom and for whom is change in a given direction deemed desirable? As our discussion above amply illustrates, research on transformative sociotechnical change inevitably rests on explicit or implicit normative assumptions about which end state and direction for change are desirable – or perhaps more accurately about what constitutes a more desirable alternative to the perpetuation of current trajectories.

As the papers in this issue show, infrastructure strategies all too often materialise as another phase of ‘business as usual’, contributing to increased inequalities in access to essential goods and services such as housing, water, food, energy, health or mobility (cf., e.g. Dewoolkar et al., 2025; Kuttler, 2025; Lamphere, 2025; Monstadt et al., 2025), increased needs for metabolised material resources and energy (cf., e.g. Bahers and Rutherford, 2025; Coutard and Gallez, 2025) or a combination of both. Contributors may differ on where – particularly at what governance level(s) – possible responses to these challenges should be situated. Still, there is broad agreement about the idea that genuine and desirable transformation requires a deviation from ongoing sociotechnical trends.

This shared conviction rests on broader considerations about the importance of large infrastructure systems in organising modern societies and, particularly, in shaping urban and societal futures (Coutard, 2024a, 2024b; Monstadt, 2022; Rutherford, 2020). Modern
infrastructure systems have largely pre-
empted collective futures during the last two
centuries and continue to shape them today
in several mutually reinforcing ways: materi-
ally, economically, socio-politically, narra-
tively, and by orientating social expectations,
values and imaginaries. Here, the pervasive
diffusion and influence of digital technolo-
gies and services have only made the future
closer, so to speak, inducing a form of ‘lock-
in into the present’ (Baschet, 2018).
However, over time, infrastructural develop-
ment as a general process has revealed unsus-
tainable or undesirable features.

The unwanted or unacceptable outcomes of contemporary infrastructural solutionism are easy to agree upon. Yet identifying a direction towards sustainable, progressive or otherwise ‘desirable’ shifts in the governance, provision and use of infrastructures is much more difficult. Indeed, while the (urban) politics of infrastructures and their role in perpetuating or even comforting dominant economic, social and political interests are now well studied, Karaliotas (2024: 272) notes that ‘less attention has been paid to the role that infrastructures might hold in articulating and circulating emancipatory politics’.

This is why we explicitly invited contribu-
tors to engage with *propositions* of alternative
pathways or ‘solutions’. The intention was to
lay out grounded, contextualised, actionable
propositions for thinking beyond their cases,
rather than (only) reasserting the obvious
need for interventions at other scales in
addressing underlying structural factors that
we all know prevent transformative change.
*Infrastructure* is well suited in this sense as a
‘critical zone’ of possible actions focused on
‘what lies beneath’, but that may incremen-
tally build up to forge more substantial social
and environmental change. The contribu-
tions to this special issue point to four over-
lapping directions, as outlined below.

Rethinking incumbent governance
arrangements in urban infrastructural
change

While there is a broad consensus in much of
the academic literature that business-as-
usual practices are proving insufficient to
enact transformative change, the question of
how change could be governed often
remains somewhat opaque. Several papers
in this special issue point to the importance
of the governance arrangements underpin-
ning transformative urban and infrastruc-
tural change.

Rather than essentialising the city scale as
inherently progressive, several authors cau-
tion against a ‘local trap’. While Traill and
Cumbers’ (2025) study of local energy tran-
sitions in Germany and the UK highlights
that transformative urban change often
stems from small-scale, localised initiatives,
they also underscore the enduring barriers
these efforts face. As a way forward, they
argue for increased coordination across
scales, places, and governance regimes.
Similarly, Monstadt et al. (2025) point to
the limitations of the Netherlands’ highly
decentralised governance approach to heat-
ing transitions, emphasising the need for
stronger engagement at the national and
European political levels. The authors argue
that the redistributive conflicts inherent in
transformative infrastructure governance
cannot be resolved through localised vision-
ing, experimentation or collaborative gov-
ernance alone but require ‘clear national and
European market rules, standards, tariff
models, etc.’ (Monstadt et al., 2025: 1845).
Glass and Addie (2025: 1789), too, argue
that locally bounded infrastructural visions
and strategies are ‘necessary yet insufficient’,
advocating instead for regionally anchored
governance that enables cross-jurisdictional
‘infrastructural alliances’ and long-term stra-
tegic planning towards more equitable
futures. Collectively, these contributions caution against confining the governance of transformative change to the urban scale, which risks underestimating the scalar politics that shape infrastructural change.

Other authors argue for moving beyond the uncritical adoption of governance innovations as universally applicable solutions. In his study, Smith (2025) proposes moving beyond reliance on depoliticised approaches to cross-sector coordination by emphasising the situated and political nature of coordination in urban water-energy governance. Instead of viewing increased cross-sector coordination as a desirable and rational goal per se – as commonly implied in nexus-thinking – he suggests focusing on how coordination is shaped by who gets to frame problems and solutions, whose knowledge is mobilised, and how local stakeholders are (or are not) equipped to act. In some cases, siloed sectoral strategies and institutional boundaries, he argues, might even be necessary to encourage desirable transitions (Smith, 2025: 1935). Similarly, Monstadt et al. (2025) show how nexus thinking and governance ‘best practices’ are often treated as modular ‘plug-ins’ that promise transformation but fail to address deeper redistributive conflicts or unclear governance mandates. The authors, therefore, call for more context-sensitive navigation of local political tensions, institutional constraints and resource limitations.

Furthermore, Nyamai and Schramm (2025) argue that we should be more attentive to the temporal dynamics and institutional instability of transformative processes. They show how transient governance arrangements, such as Nairobi Metropolitan Services, initiated impactful yet short-lived infrastructural change. Their concept of ‘infrastructural segments’ draws attention to the lasting imprints such arrangements can leave, but also to their vulnerability to institutional discontinuity.

To ensure these interventions contribute to long-term transformation, sustained political commitment and clear institutional pathways to develop temporary progress into broader infrastructural change, are thus needed.

## Fostering a democratic repoliticisation of transformative urban and societal change

Most contributions to the special issue emphasise that public authorities should aim at (urgently) repoliticising, in a democratic way, decisions about the ends, the dimensions and the means of transformative change. This democratic repoliticisation comes in various shapes and sizes: through support to grassroots initiatives; through the organisation of informed, public deliberation or through ad hoc changes in the multilevel governance or cross-sector coordination of infrastructural developments.

Some authors claim that the (re)empowerment of lay citizens or infrastructure stakeholders would help address key limitations in changes induced by/through infrastructural developments. Hence, Kuttler (2025: 1762–1764) strongly argues for promoting ‘worker-centric’, ‘bottom-up [ride-hailing] platformisation [...] that would benefit both platform workers and support sustainable and just urbanism’, even though he admits that bottom-up platformisation ‘may equally foster a “reproduction of Silicon Valley’s own [profit-oriented] vision of the good life”’ (van Doorn, 2017, in Kuttler, 2025: 1764). According to Kuttler, public authorities could, inter alia: support workers’ initiatives in ‘building digitally mediated, integrated public transportation systems’ (Kuttler, 2025: 1763); ‘foster local accountability and economic circuits’; attend to ‘platform workers’ requirement for adequate accommodation near the areas of operation [and for] access to centrally located public places’ and more generally consider ‘legal measures to
protect the interests and livelihoods of drivers' (Kuttler, 2025: 1762f.).

Concerned with transformative change pertaining to urban metabolism, Bahers and Rutherford (2025) note for their part that public authorities support ‘a myriad of activities and approaches across the two cities – re-use and repair workshops, second-hand shops, bulk grocery shops, resource centres and open and shared spaces for exchange and sharing’. These initiatives, they remark, are ‘not necessarily intended to materially transform the urban metabolism but [instead] to make visible possible alternatives, and to refocus attention on the small-scale local foundational infrastructure that communities require most’ (Bahers and Rutherford, 2025: 1910f). They then suggest that ‘perhaps transformative change is more likely to emerge through [such] community-orientated circularity infrastructure’ (Bahers and Rutherford, 2025: 1911).

Ramachandran et al. (2025) note that the ‘mobility interventions’ promoted in Bengaluru, often with the contribution of international consultancies or non-profits,

point towards a certain elite capture in planning, which stands in contrast to a more grassroots, participatory process whereby the challenges facing Bengaluru and the possible solutions to them may be discussed in the community and initiatives to implement such solutions may be built in a more ground-up fashion. (Ramachandran et al., 2025: 1743f.)

Reversing the paper’s argument suggests that such a bottom-up approach could help challenge the ‘valuational’, ‘expectational’ and ‘material logics’ (Ramachandran et al., 2025: 1741) underpinning dominant forms of infrastructure solutionism.

Other contributions emphasise the importance of bringing the implications of infrastructural solutions into the public spotlight and making them the explicit focus of public debate. For example, studying low-carbon

action in the Paris region, Coutard and Gallez (2025: 1867, emphasis in original) conclude that

variegated forms of depoliticisation [...] are at play in the delivery of low-carbon strategies, that is, combinations of circumstances and deliberate action resulting in the prevention of public debate, the avoidance of the public expression of conflicts, the promotion of policy measures that are not detrimental to powerful interests, and the disqualification of measures promoting less resource-intensive practices.

Reversing this perspective, they call for a ‘democratic repoliticisation of energy-climate action’ informed by public deliberation on desirable energy futures and the necessary associated trade-offs, and by variegated forms of ‘new social activism’ (Coutard and Gallez, 2025: 1868).

## Foregrounding variegated forms of justice

A third line of normative arguments developed in the papers concerns exploration of how to more effectively promote just transformative change, as well as the value of extending the forms of justice considered.

Glass and Addie (2025) argue that more just arrangements call for an upscaling of the governance of infrastructure development. They conclude their sophisticated discussion of the potentialities of ‘seeing like a region’ in transformative approaches to infrastructural change by underscoring the value of participatory regional infrastructure planning. Such regionalised approaches, they argue, can foster more equitable futures by enhancing both procedural and distributive justice – particularly through decision-making processes that more effectively acknowledge, negotiate and integrate the diverse perspectives, communities, knowledge and aspirations present within a regional planning context (Glass and Addie, 2025: 1789).
For their part, Coutard and Gallez (2025: 1854) argue that ‘depoliticisation is also detrimental to the consideration of justice issues’ and observe that possible resources for a democratic repoliticisation of the governance of transformative sociotechnical change ‘include civil society initiatives that challenge the unsustainability or the injustice associated with dominant policies and seek to offer concrete ways of resisting and experimenting with ways of transforming existing practices’ (Coutard and Gallez, 2025: 1868).

Among the contributions to this special issue, Lamphere (2025) offers the most systematic discussion of the various dimensions of justice involved in infrastructure-led transformative urban change. She argues for moving beyond conventional understandings of distributive and procedural justice to include other critical dimensions, notably recognitional, intergenerational, geographical and interspecies justice. Drawing on a case study of energy policy in Chicago, she illustrates ‘how failure to explicitly address dimensions of injustice risks reproducing, or worse strengthening, inequities’ (Lamphere, 2025: 1888). In her conclusion, Lamphere advocates for a ‘restorative justice’ approach to transformation – one grounded in five key tenets: accountability, direct participation, mutual learning, reparation and the prioritisation of ‘socio-environmental transformation or the long-term healing of both humans and ecosystems’ (Lamphere, 2025: 1890). She argues that such a restorative approach to infrastructure presents opportunities to not only ensure equitable access and benefits but also to minimise risk disparities and repair historical and systemic inequities (Lamphere, 2025).

## Mobilising research and researchers in ‘game-changing’

Finally, several papers insist on the role that research and researchers can play in

combating the growing denial of climate and other environmental changes and in advancing transformative change and more sustainable futures beyond the incapacitating alternatives of solutionism and collapsism.

It can be argued that all papers in the special issue play a part in the reopening of urban and planetary futures. Indeed, by revealing, documenting, measuring the hidden or not easily visible costs of business as usual, research(ers) can help inform and foster dynamics of transformative change. For example, Lamphere (2025) does so through the promotion of understandings/conceptions of justice that are better adapted to the contemporary context of polycrisis. Traill and Cumbers (2025) highlight the importance of emancipating collectively from imaginaries shaped by neoliberal ideology. Monstadt et al. (2025) point to ‘non-technical solutions’ that do not rest on narrowly designed technological solutions to narrowly defined problems adapted to these solutions, even though such ‘non-technical solutions’ come with limitations. Nyamai and Schramm (2025) identify conditions that facilitate medium- or long-term consistency in infrastructural development processes in contexts where transient forms of governance prevail. Ramachandran et al. (2025) expose the images of Bengaluru and its future that are actively promoted by self-serving interests seeking to generate (future) profits, thus suggesting a powerful political tool: challenging dominant imaginaries by challenging dominant images. In a similar vein, Bahers and Rutherford (2025: 1900) unveil the (at best) ambivalent role of infrastructure narratives, projects and developments in ‘the construction of imaginaries and enactments of sustainable futures of resource-efficient, circular or resilient cities’; by doing so, they provide actors with argumentative resources to challenge infrastructural solutionism ‘on the ground’.
The most explicit engagement with trans-
formative change through research is offered
by Dewoolkar et al. (2025). These authors
examine how ‘everyday ambiguation prac-
tices’ contribute to administrative precarity
and hinder equal access to water in Mumbai,
despite a 2014 High Court ruling. The
authors reflect on how researchers can sup-
port the labour of ‘de-ambiguation’, in their
case, through joint research-activism efforts.
Notably, two co-authors are involved in an
activist group in Mumbai campaigning for
water rights. They caution against urban
studies’ tendency towards abstraction –
which can itself perpetuate ambiguation –
and call for a return to the ‘action-oriented
origins of urban studies’ and its practical
commitments. Through their methodology –
choosing carefully how and with whom they
conduct research – they aim to ‘enable a
space for the working of the hyphen [...] in
Activist-Research’, fostering more ‘symme-
trical and possibly less extractive scholar-
ship’ (Dewoolkar et al., 2025: 1953).

Conclusion

This special issue highlights the contested
role of infrastructure in ‘solving’ contempo-
rary urban challenges. We have examined
how infrastructures mediate urban transfor-
mations in governance arrangements, econo-
mies, territoriality, labour and everyday
urban life. The papers collectively fore-
ground the uneven geographies of infrastruc-
tural development, the shifting institutional
landscapes through which infrastructures are
governed, and the urban imaginaries that
underpin infrastructural change. Rather
than treating infrastructures as fixed, univo-
cal technologies, the special issue approaches
them as dynamic and relational, embedded
in broader struggles over urban develop-
ment, environmental sustainability and
socio-spatial justice.

Yet, while this special issue has critically
engaged with infrastructural solutionism, the
contributions have mostly ignored its equally
deterministic but inverted counterpart: dis-
courses on *infrastructural catastrophism*.
These discourses centre on the idea that in
the context of the Anthropocene, the expan-
sion and increasing reach of the cumulative
infrastructure-induced transformations of
the Earth System has necessarily aggravated
urban vulnerabilities, amplified environmen-
tal degradation and entrenched systemic
inequalities. Rather than positioning infra-
structures as urban solutions, infrastructural
catastrophism casts them as existential driv-
ers of an ‘urbicidal Anthropocene’
(Wakefield, 2022).

Alongside infrastructural solutionism and
catastrophism, a third and increasingly sali-
ent discourse merits attention: *environmental
change denialism*. Within this discourse,
infrastructural innovation – for example,
‘smart’ infrastructures – continues to be
framed as a non-negotiable route to urban
competitiveness and well-being. However,
the environmental consequences of such
innovation – for example, the impact of per-
vasive digitalisation of urban processes on
energy use, resource extraction and waste
production – are actively sidelined, denied
or rendered invisible.

Understanding how these three imagin-
aries – solutionism, catastrophism and deni-
alism – shape infrastructural discourse and
practice is essential for urban scholars grap-
pling with the stakes of infrastructural
futures. Likewise, the root causes of these
overly simplistic imaginaries need to be
accounted for – if only in order to contribute
to the emergence of more relational, less
deterministic infrastructural imaginaries.

Another emerging research direction for
urban infrastructure studies is associated with
the development of more-than-human per-
spectives across social sciences and huma-
nities. Indeed, (urban) infrastructures are
embedded in the circulation of energy, matter and life across human and nonhuman worlds. In the context of the Anthropocene, where infrastructures are not only apprehended as solutions (as they were during the apex period of Western modernity) but also, and increasingly so, as agents of disruption, extraction, and ecological harm, it is worth asking how more-than-human perspectives can bring novel insights on urban and infrastructure change (see, e.g. Barua, 2021). Wakefield (2022), for example, sees urban theory in a wider frame in which questions of what the city is, and its role in planetary processes, have been utterly disrupted by the existential challenges and crises of the Anthropocene. Could a more ecologically attuned and materially grounded approach help reframe urban infrastructures in the making as mediators in dynamic and contested socio-ecological systems shaped by and shaping non-human agencies? Such a shift obviously challenges urban theory; it also raises new questions about the epistemologies, politics and ethics of infrastructural change.

## Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank all participants of the roundtable workshop ‘Infrastructures as urban solutions? Critical perspectives on transformative socio-technical change’, held in Limburg, Netherlands, in May 2022, where advanced versions of the papers contributing to this special issue and broader lessons were discussed. We are also very grateful for the thoughtful comments provided by Phil Hubbard on an earlier version of this introduction, as well as for the kind editorial support from both him and Ruth Harkin.

## Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

## Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the roundtable workshop that formed the basis of this special issue: Research Hub ‘Transforming Infrastructures for Sustainable Cities’, Pathways to Sustainability, Utrecht University.

## ORCID iDs

Jochen Monstadt https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9146-1571

Jonathan Rutherford https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5779-3185

Olivier Coutard https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3064-5526

## References

Alderman J and Goodwin G (2022) Introduction: Infrastructure as relational and experimental process. In: Alderman J and Goodwin G (eds) *The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures*. London: University of London Press, pp.1–26.

Amankwaa EF and Gough KV (2022) Everyday contours and politics of infrastructure: Informal governance of electricity access in urban Ghana. *Urban Studies* 59(12): 2468–2488.

Amin A and Thrift N (2017) *Seeing Like a City*. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Angelo H and Wachsmuth D (2020) Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? *Urban Studies* 57(11): 2201–2221.

Appel H, Anand N and Gupta A (2018) Introduction: Temporality, politics, and the promise of infrastructure. In: Anand N, Gupta A and Appel H (eds) *The Promise of Infrastructure*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp.1-38.

Bahers J-B and Rutherford J (2025) Urban infrastructures, metabolic resource flows and the contradictions of circular economy “solutions” in Nantes and Gothenburg. *Urban Studies* 62(9): 1897–1918.
Baptista I (2019) Electricity services always in the making: Informality and the work of infrastructure maintenance and repair in an African city. *Urban Studies* 56(3): 510–525.

Barua M (2021) Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology. *Progress in Human Geography* 45(6): 1467–1489.

Baschet J (2018) Interview by Jean Bastien, *Non-fiction*, 26 June. Available at: https://version-imprimable.nonfiction.fr/articlepdf-9443-entretien-avec-jeromebaschet-defaire-la-tyranie-du-present.htm (accessed 25 March 2025).

Bobbins K, Caprotti F, de Groot J, et al. (2024) Beyond the grid: The micropolitics of off-grid energy in Qandu-Qandu, South Africa. *Antipode* 56(1): 49–71.

Bryson JR, Billing C and Tewdwr-Jones M (2023) Urban infrastructure patching: Citizen-led solutions to infrastructure ruptures. *Urban Studies* 60(10): 1932–1948.

Callon M (1984) Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. *The Sociological Review* 32(1_Suppl): 196–233.

Coutard O (2024a) Shifting regimes of historicity and the control of urban futures through infrastructure: Continuities, ambivalences, and tensions in the Anthropocene. In Addie JP, Glass MR and Nelles J (eds) *Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds*. Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp.72–94.

Coutard O (2024b) Les grands réseaux dans et pour la transition socio-écologique: un nouvel âge des infrastructures? [Large networks in and for the socio-ecological transition: a new age of infrastructure?] *Transitions. Les nouvelles Annales des Ponts et Chaussées* 4: 30–33.

Coutard O and Florentin D (2024) Researching infrastructures and cities: Origins, debates, openings. In: Coutard O and Florentin D (eds) *Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities*. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp.1–49.

Coutard O and Gallez C (2025) Depoliticized environmental policies: Low-carbon action in the Paris urban region. *Urban Studies* 62(9): 1850–1875.

Curley A (2021) Infrastructures as colonial beachheads: The Central Arizona Project and the

taking of Navajo resources. *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 39(3): 387–404.

Davies A (2021) The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife. *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 39(4): 740–757.

Denis J and Florentin D (2024) Urban infrastructures’ maturity and the age (s) of maintenance. In: Coutard O and Florentin D (eds) *Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities*. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp.119–132.

Dewoolkar P, Iossifova D, Shelar S, et al. (2025) Everyday practices of administrative ambiguity and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggling for water infrastructure in Mumbai. *Urban Studies* 62(9): 1939–1956.

Edwards PN (2003) Infrastructure and modernity: Force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems. In: Misa TJ, Brey P and Feenberg A (eds) *Modernity and Technology*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.185–226.

Fan Y, Orford S and Hubbard P (2023) Urban public health emergencies and the COVID-19 pandemic. Part 2: Infrastructures, urban governance and civil society. *Urban Studies* 60(9): 1535–1547.

Glass MR and Addie J-PD (2025) Bridging ‘infrastructural solutions’ and ‘infrastructures as solution’: Regional promises and urban pragmatism. *Urban Studies* 62(9): 1771–1792.

Guma PK (2020) Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition: Scenarios from the mobile age in Nairobi. *Social Studies of Science* 50(5): 728–750.

Hård M and Misa TJ (eds) (2008) *Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Henig D and Knight DM (2023) Polycrisis: Prompts for an emerging worldview. *Anthropology Today* 39(2): 3–6.

IPCC (2018) *Global Warming of 1.5 °C*. Masson-Delmotte V, Zhai P, Pörtner H-O, et al (eds). An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate
change, sustainable development, and efforts
to eradicate poverty. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Karaliotas L (2024) Infrastructures of dissensus: Repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service. *Environ-ment and Planning C: Politics and Space* 42(2): 268–286.

Königs P (2022) What is techno-optimism? *Philosophy and Technology* 35(3): 63.

Kuttler T (2025) Urban mobilities in Mumbai: Towards worker-centric platformisation beyond ‘urban solutionism’. *Urban Studies* 62(9): 1750–1770.

Lamphere JA (2025) Justice, energy, and infra-
structure in the “Greenest City in America”.
*Urban Studies* 62(9): 1876–1896.

Lemanski C (2020) Infrastructural citizenship: The everyday citizenships of adapting and/or destroying public infrastructure in Cape Town, South Africa. *Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers* 45(3): 589–605.

Lennon M (2024) The problem with “solutions”: A political optimism in the sustainable energy industry. *Current Anthropology* 65(26): 130–154.

Lesutis G and Kaika M (2024) Infrastructured bodies: Between violence and fugitivity. *Prog-ress in Human Geography* 48(4): 458–474.

McGuirk P, Baker T, Dowling R, et al. (2024)
Enacting urban governance innovation:
Beyond strategic pathways to incremental
“muddling through”. *Urban Geography*. Epub
ahead of print 31 December 2024. DOI:
10.1080/02723638.2024.2441593.

Melosi MV (2008) *The Sanitary City: Environ-
mental Services in Urban America from Colo-
nial Times to the Present*. Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press.

Monstadt J (2022) Urban and infrastructural
rhythms and the politics of temporal alignment.
*Journal of Urban Technology* 29(1): 69–77.

Monstadt J and Coutard O (2019) Cities in an era of interfacing infrastructures: Politics and spatialities of the urban nexus. *Urban Studies* 56(11): 2191–2206.

Monstadt J and Schramm S (2017) Toward the
networked city? Translating technological

ideals and planning models in water and sanitation systems in Dar es Salaam. *International Journal of Urban and Regional Research* 41(1): 104–125.

Monstadt J, Pilo' F and van Gils B (2025)
Toward the next generation of urban heating
systems? Governing multi-infrastructural solu-
tions in Amsterdam. *Urban Studies* 62(9):
1826–1849.

Montero S (2020) Leveraging Bogotá: Sustainable development, global philanthropy and the rise of urban solutionism. *Urban Studies* 57(11): 2263–2281.

Morozov E (2013) *To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism*. New York, NY: Public Affairs.

Mumford L (1934) *Technics and Civilization*. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Mwaura M and Lawhon M (2025) Infrastructure in formation: The politics and practices of making progress with infrastructure. *Urban Geography* 46(3): 568–588.

Nyamai DN and Schramm S (2025) Infrastruc-
ture segments evolving through transient gov-
ernance: Nairobi metropolitan services and
active mobility infrastructures. *Urban Studies*
62(9): 1793–1807.

Obendiek AS and Seidl T (2023) The (false) prom-
is e of solutionism: Ideational business power
and the construction of epistemic authority in
digital security governance. *Journal of Eur-
opean Public Policy* 30(7): 1305–1329.

Petrova S and Prodromidou A (2019) Everyday politics of austerity: Infrastructure and vulnerability in times of crisis. *Environment and Planning C* 37(8): 1380–1399.

Purcell M (2006) Urban democracy and the local trap. *Urban Studies* 43(11): 1921–1941.

Ramachandran S, Rathod A, Baby J, et al. (2025)
Fixing motorisation: The logics of infrastruc-
ture solutionism in Bengaluru. *Urban Studies*
62(9): 1731–1749.

Rutherford J (2020) Redeploying Urban Infrastructure: The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rutherford J and Marvin S (2023) Urban smart microgrids: A political technology of emergency-normalcy. *Urban Geography* 44(8): 1794–1815.
Sætra HS (2023) *Technology and Sustainable Development: The Promise and Pitfalls of Techno-solutionism*. Milton Park and New York, NY: Routledge.

Schatzberg E (2018) *Technology: Critical History of a Concept*. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Silver J (2023) *The Infrastructural South: Techno-environments of the Third Wave of Urbanization*. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Smith S (2025) The urban water-energy nexus in Cape Town, Los Angeles and Maputo: The ambivalent role of cross-sector coordination for urban sustainability. *Urban Studies* 62(9): 1919–1938.

Stokes K and de Coss-Corzo A (2023) Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography. *Progress in Human Geography* 47(3): 427–446.

Tarr JA (1984) The evolution of the urban infrastructures in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries. In: Hanson R (ed.) *Perspectives on Urban Infrastructures*. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, pp.4-66.

Traill H and Cumbers A (2025) The limits to the urban within multi-scalar energy transitions: Agency, infrastructure and ownership in the UK and Germany. *Urban Studies* 62(9): 1808–1825.

Wakefield S (2022) Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene. *Urban Studies* 59(5): 917–936.

Westman L, Patterson J, Macrorie R, et al. (2022) Compound urban crises. *Ambio* 51(6): 1402–1415.

Wiig A, Karvonen A, McFarlane C, et al. (2022) From the guest editors splintering urbanism at 20: Mapping trajectories of research on urban infrastructures. *Journal of Urban Technology* 29(1): 1–11.

Winner L (1980) Do artifacts have politics? *Dae-dalus* 109(1): 121–136.