The current choice of tracks offers a wide range of themes relevant to the challenge of moving beyond growth as an organising principle in the governance of the economy, technology and in politics. Nevertheless what we feel is lacking is an opportunity to focus on how this plays out in specific geographies and the infrastructural technologies that make places liveable. There is already a strong and growing body of work on applying post and degrowth theories to the specific challenges of urban planning and authors are beginning to focus on specific infrastructural technologies. Yet, there is still within the literature, something of a dearth of mid-level theorising and policy analysis that engages with the often paradoxical nature of infrastructures. Infrastructure functions both as the underpinning to a quality of life all are entitled to whilst consuming energy and resources and oftentimes is explicitly oriented towards and designed to facilitate yet more economic growth. In order to further debate, research and practice we invite contributions from all of the disciplines involved in producing, managing and maintaining, governing, re-using and consuming urban infrastructures on questions such as, but not limited to;
STS has historically identified the way the prejudice of the initial designer is written into the form of physical infrastructures. Is it possible then to talk about ‘growth infrastructures’ and is it always the case that an orientation towards growth shapes urban infrastructure, if so can it be written out?
How do we develop policies and practices that engage with whilst not being bound by infrastructural legacies? How do we re-use, recycle or abandon infrastructures whose resource consumption can no longer be justified or whose functions are no longer appropriate and how do we decide which strategy to adopt?
- STS and LTS literature has generally presented alternative paths to the continuous growth of large technical systems or networked infrastructures as regressive and/or increasing inequalities. Can we find policies and practices that disrupt the growth paradigm whilst promoting social and interspecies justice and/or reducing inequalities?
- In a world where some places lack the basic infrastructure required for people living there to lead long and happy lives whilst others are arguably overdeveloped with infrastructural systems geared towards overconsumption, how do we achieve a more equitable distribution of infrastructure across the globe?
- With the financial costs and debts incurred a significant component of conventional infrastructures and megaprojects how do we broaden this debate to include sunk resource costs, incurred ecological and intergenerational debts and the development of the infrastructures necessary to make reparations for these.
- With many of the examples of potential solutions for a world beyond growth drawn from the local level and governed through face-to-face forms of democracy, how does both the scale of infrastructural networks and the planetary scale of urbanisation challenge us to identify post-growth infrastructures that work at different scales?
We aim to adopt a relatively traditional format although we will ask presenters to produce a short briefing paper prior to the session. We propose an open session however we will prioritise discussion between the authors using the presenter/discussant format in order to do this (each author will be given a paper and presentation to review and respond to). To enable as wider range of responses as possible we will produce a template for the briefing paper to open the sessions out to contributors who are less used to or simply lack the time (in the case of practitioners or activists) to produce a full written paper. The advantage of this format is it leads to a more targeted discussion with clear feedback for presenters and is of more value in scoping out further outputs from the sessions in the form of publications and future collaborations.