30. The quietly radical importance of everyday infrastructures
By: Dan Hill
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Systems Thinking, Covid 19, Infrastructure, Design

This dynamic tends to dominate a project’s design and development lifespan. The core focus is on locating and removing value from place, by the real estate developers, infrastructure companies, consultancies, and increasingly tech companies, which are all usually located ‘elsewhere’. Just look at the compositions of the various teams involved in such projects; the balance of professions, their various background, their disciplinary mental models. They are simply not equipped to foreground local value, or address complex issues of environmental and social justice, such as those Wilkerson describes.

These approaches need recalibrating, and not solely for those elements traditionally captured by the word ‘infrastructure’, after Star’s definition. We also need a richer, more expansive sense of social infrastructure, such as that laid down by Eric Klinenberg and then developed by UCL’s Alan Latham and Jack Layton, in their article ‘Social infrastructure and the public life of cities: Studying urban sociality and public spaces’ for Geography Compass (Vol 13, Issue 7, June 2019.) (See also, for example, Shannon Mattern’s great 2014 essay on Libraries as Infrastructure.)

Latham and Layton unfurl the definition at the start of their article—“Libraries, laundrettes, and lidos. Pizzerias, plazas, and playgrounds. Sidewalks, swimming pools, and schools”—correctly suggesting that these elements shape the public life of a city as much as items like housing and railways. As well as public, cultural, and religious institutions, recreational and transit infrastructures, Latham and Layton include a discussion of “social infrastructures that operate commercially but nonetheless have a public character”, which extends into “markets, shops, laundrettes, cafes, bars, barbers, hair salons, nail bars, restaurants, hardware stores, street vendors.”

To me, this is profoundly useful. Public life is generated—or not—in these places. It is across this entire set of integrated architectures, activities and infrastructures that the seams of Wilkerson’s tapestry is stretched out. However, though Latham and Layton state that there is “an important role for planners here in ensuring a diverse range of stores and land use” for these social infrastructures, I can think of few planners who have true facility with the social and cultural minutiae of barbershops and nail bars, and what they are worth.

For instance, in my Arup team’s work for Gemeente Amsterdam, assessing the redevelopment of areas like ArenaPoort, the interviews and observations that Salomé Galjaard led quickly identified the importance of a local nail salon as a node in multiple overlapping networks, as part of our light-touch ethnographic research into this culturally complex neighbourhood. Yet it was a struggle to suggest that work to the client, to win that work, and deliver change from that work. They were simply not expecting that kind of intervention point.

Equally, of course, we looked at systems of energy, water, mobility, waste, and housing, the things typically associated with the word ‘infrastructure’. For me, these are all intrinsically connected, and the positive push and pull between these different types of infrastructure, when seen holistically—as part of the same systems—is not just revealing, but productive. It changes what we design, and how, as well as what happens. It means a much richer toolkit, and the ability to use hard and soft infrastructures together often means we can reduce the emphasis on the heavy, expensive, inert and mono-functional end of infrastructure spectrum. Unfortunately, that is precisely the end that planners and consultants tend to focus on exclusively.

As Donald Appleyard said long ago, “the planner sees his model of the projected city as a totality, from above; the inhabitant sees the present reality, from street level.” With some honourable exceptions, planning as a profession remains socially distant from the street.

We must bring these discussions together, and in the context of action rather than simply abstract discussion. The apparently rational and rather mundane world of transport planning, for example, has remained largely untouchable to social policy. Yet we can no longer allow the world of technology and infrastructure be seen as separate to that of society, politics, and culture, as if efficiency and convenience are necessary ‘agnostic’ goods which trump other, more meaningful challenges. (This is why computing might be better thought of as a social science; or rather, that a transdisciplinary approach to these everyday infrastructures would allow them to sing in their own voice whilst usefully colliding these unhelpful distinctions between computing, architecture, sociology, design, politics, and so on.)

“Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions that undergird the more visible delineations that we make among ourselves. In other words, caste is the bones, race is the skin, and class is the diction, the accent, the education, the clothing the things we can control as we present ourselves to the world … This is not to say that racism doesn’t exist. It’s saying that there’s something even more powerful underneath that we’re not seeing.”—Isabel Wilkerson, speaking on The New Yorker Radio Hour, WNYC Studios

Wilkerson’s poetic distinction of bones (caste) from skin (race) and class (diction, education etc) is intriguingly powerful. It’s almost akin to Frank Duffy’s ‘shearing/pace layers’ theory in architecture; as in, bones and skin are ‘slow layers’ that evolve steadily and carefully, whereas diction, education, and clothing are more fluid faster layers, exploratory and experimental, capable of holding and testing alternatives to norms.

Radical empathies

Wilkerson sees hope in ‘radical empathy’, which again has a natural affinity with a language of design.

“Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.”—Isabel Wilkerson, ‘Caste: The origins of our discontents’, (2020)

Design is often lazily assumed to be ‘good at empathy’ (although tellingly, you’ll often see it pop-up in design thinking frameworks as simply a stage in a process, which almost seems to deny the very idea of empathy.) Whilst there are elements of design practice, and related activities like ethnography, that could be broadly described as empathetic, we will have to dig a little deeper, particularly given Wilkerson’s prompt of ‘radical empathy’ being some kind of path forward.

The world-renowned developmental psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen describes how a form of “empathy erosion” stems from “people turning people into objects… in such a state we relate only to things, or to people as if they were just things”. This in turn enables violence, according to Baron-Cohen.

Whilst Baron-Cohen’s subjects were more often care workers rather than urban planners, this understanding surely sheds light onto certain forms of technocratic systems thinking and practice. That focus on “things”, with people just another kind of thing, unfortunately describes much of the culture of urban planning and much architecture, as well as governance more broadly. We now see that precisely that form of ‘empathy-eroding’ thinking and acting led directly to the racist planning now being exposed, just as it led to making infrastructure decisions based around automobiles (as vehicles or industrial products) rather than human and nonhuman life.