FRAMING QUESTIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY Stephen Read1
1
TU Delft, Department of Urbanism, s.a.read@tudelft.nl Keywords: technoscience; sustainability; urban form. 0. Abstract
Sustainability sits at the top of the policy agendas of the EU and other governmental bodies. But sustainability is complex and not one thing, it relates to different sectors and multiple systems, and also to different zones, scales, ‘levels’ those systems occupy. Theoretically and practically we are involved with different questions depending on where the question is bounded and at what scope we want to look at or deal with it. Situation, in a relational sense, matters. Without understanding this contextual, relational and framing factor we can end with inadequate or misleading answers to important questions. Questions need to be framed and framing involves complex topologies of spatial insides and outsides and functional parts and wholes. This relational and framing aspect of sustainability has been radically underconsidered and this paper will propose a method to address this deficit. The approach is ‘materialist’ but also ‘constructivist’, not in the sense of ‘social construction’. Instead it is proposed we live in a reality historically and technically constructed and that the ‘social’, the ‘economic’, the ‘cultural’ and even the ‘environmental’ are what we thus construct. This converges with a so-called ‘technoscience’ perspective, one that has been addressed through ‘actor-network theory’. But there are issues with actor-network theory that the method proposed addresses.
1. Introduction
“It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” (Jevons, 1866)
We have naturalised contemporary modernity, understanding this remarkable phenomenon, seen from the perspective of the history of humans and their environment, as a normal background to everyday events. We live in a viewpoint focussed on the objects and incidents of everyday life and seldom have the motive it seems to step away from the close-up view and get a picture of the way our relations with the world and with nature have changed. One opportunity to do some of this stepping away – and to discover the enormity of the predicament we face – is in relation to current thinking on energy use and sustainability. And part of the problem we face in facing up to the sustainability and energy issues are their (apparently systemic) lack of visibility in our everyday lives. Energy comes to us in plug-in-and-use forms which provides for but also hides its ubiquity – as well as the identity of the original sources of that energy. There are two aspects to this invisibility: on an everyday level people are not aware of their use of energy. Some attempts are being made to provide better visibility in the form of apps and other forms of customer feedback. But there are systemic aspects to this as well: energy use should account for the energy used to produce energy, it should account for limits, and to do this we need the larger perspective – a perspective not often held up in discussions on energy and sustainability – to understand the significance of the numbers. We need to know what the targets are and it seems increasingly certain that most people in ‘developed’ countries are not aware of the viability of their situation or the nature and extent of changes required. Here criticisms of the commercialisation of the green agenda are pertinent.
The larger systemic aspects of the target and actual use problem relate to some crucial transitions in our relation to nature. These transitions relate to what we call ‘modernity’ which it seems already incorporates this problem of visibility in that it is as much about what we hide from everyday view as it is about the visible spectacle of modern cities and places. It is designed in: modern cities shift waste and poverty out of sight; they also make the sources of clean water and plentiful energy
invisible. While they hide from us the means and costs of their production they make these resources ubiquitous. It becomes difficult to see just what it is we are producing in modern cities – apart from an everyday round of transactions and interactions – and it seems this ‘visibility’ aspect is part of what modernity does; creating new realities, and new conditions of everyday life, for modern people who are caught up in a somewhat narrow and contrived perspective and movement of modernity.
This paper is mostly about this systemic aspect of societal and urban structure – the structure of modernity if you like and the way it creates hegemonic situations – the way it, by forming modern viewpoints, constructs reality for its inhabitants. The problem of visibility and perspective I mention above arises out of this. I will also look at the problem of the changes or transitions between these ‘systemic situations’ and what is involved in these changes. We talk today about transitions to sustainability: what is actually involved in a transition from one ‘systemic situation’ of modernity to another. I adopt a ‘complexity’ and ‘technoscience’ perspective, explaining along the way what these mean.
2. Determination and agency as systemic situation.
It is not controversial to say modernity is a construction – but this aspect of hiddenness reveals some of the nature of the construction involved. Technoscience1 researchers insist we need to adapt our methods to understand this construction because the distinctions we take as categorical are what are in fact being constructed. The society-technology distinction is not ‘natural’ in other words, conditioning our idea of what modernity is, rather it is the distinction itself that is constructed in modernity. Madeleine Akrich points out that the ‘social construction’ of technologies can only be coherent if there is an a priori separation between society and technologies. At the same time the technological deterministic idea that new technologies shape societies requires the same a priori distinction. Both of these views may in fact be wrong. A character of technology as it appears in social settings is that it is composed of multiple and heterogeneous parts. These parts are nonetheless organised in relation to one another, and in relation to the social actors who use them (Akrich). Social complexity is an organisation of social, technological and other material intended to do something. But in these organisations social elements are mixed with technical ones with no clear idea yet just which are technical and which social. Technical choices “operate within the framework of some very diverse constraints. Further, many studies of innovation process show, on the one hand, that the success of many innovators is linked to their capacity to work in both dimensions simultaneously, to constantly shuffle back and forth between the technical and the social, and to operate translations between these two registers (Akrich).
We could say this is what ‘social complexity’ consists of: a heterogeneous collection of things which are not organised in terms of a priori categories but in direct relation to one another and to some social purpose. Complexity is not an impediment to order – it just isn’t order as we customarily conceive it. It is an order of things designed – or apparently designed – to achieve certain predicable (social, functional, logistical – in any event useful) effects. Agency (how things predictably and reliably happen) here is understood not from a naturalistic perspective – as if things happen because of ‘laws’ or ‘forces’ of nature. This agency is not about the physicist’s fields and particles, but involves a more human determination of things alongside and integral with technology, technology seen here from the perspective of and integral with human agency. This agency is always mediated in networks having the character of aligning diverse components that together facilitate the effects that predictably and reliably happen. The organisation has in fact the character of technology, of strategic alignment and connection to some purpose: there is no magic to it; it is about the right connections and the right sorts of connections in the right places (Hacking; Heelan’s experimental physics) – but at a step up in scale to where we normally locate technology and including the ‘social’ elements. Hughes spoke in terms of a ‘seamless web’ (); Bruno Latour, in terms of a ‘network’ (). It may be used to good or to bad, to 1
Technoscience is a term introduced by Latour and Woolgar in Laboratory Life to critique the claim for a clear boundary between these categories.
democratic or to totalitarian, ends. There is just one determinant – that we depend on the technics to access the agency involved.
It depends on what we mean by ‘determine’, and in particular what or who the agent of determination is. Raymond Williams proposed our common assumption of society is “as a system of constraints on a supposedly free pre-existing individual” (). Determination is of course also associated with the will of powerful people and powerful historical characters stand for example behind the modernisation of Paris (Harvey; Rabinow), or of New York (Berman; Caro). But Williams also insists that determination may be understood in the pressure of on-going processes that act on us without us being directly aware of them (Williams 219-220). Rosalind Williams2 suggests technological determinism is also a powerful idea that can be strategically put to effect. The idea of progress is itself a determination – a teleology that people can act upon, and there have been engineers and political leaders aplenty who have taken up the challenge of acting on it to shape society towards instrumental rationalities and modernities. Thomas Hughes traced the role of Thomas Edison in the development of the electrical network in the United States … The problem with these accounts of the ‘social construction’ of particular ‘sociotechnical systems’ is that they miss the big picture. They miss the way systems are components in larger systems and how they themselves weave the fabric of modern human history. Examples include the very origin of the idea of ‘society’ (and the birth of sociology) in the French nineteenth century (Rabinow 1989) – or Fordism and the affluent society in mid-twentieth century United States (Galbraith; Harvey 1989).
3. Urban modernity and systemic situation
Misa et al The Urban Machine Industrial modernity, water reticulation, etc etc. The logistics of the industrial city, the flows of people, goods and ideas, created a ‘hidden integration’ (Misa) that precedes political integration and maintains it over time, so that our futures as well as our pasts are embedded in social-technological networks (Misa and Schot 2005). The link of this to agency may now be made somewhat clearer. Agency is something that may be due to human will but it is also bent to the ends of ‘determination’ as a sort of socio-technical telos at another level.
The technological nature of modern societies and cities is I would suggest not really in dispute. What is disputed is our concept of technology. Technology here is thoroughly constructed; it is not an autonomous force for change as ‘technological determinist’ accounts would have it. Rather technologies and social forms are enrolled – more often adapted or invented in order to be enrolled – in productive and reproductive processes which are coordinated with energy, resource and human flows. The rationales for the processes, and their coordination, is related, perhaps obviously, with the intentions and interests of those acting for change. Williams reminds us that “systems can be designed to be highly responsive to human control – or not to be. Human powerlessness can be part of the design. Fate can be engineered. In that case, we should look at those who choose to invest in large, complex technologies, and consider that they may do so quite deliberately in order to create technological determinism” (Williams 225). Thomas Edison built the electrical reticulation system as a comprehensive technological system precisely because this was the intention that motivated him. Hughes study of this process reveals this was not a simple or a straightforward job. But the fact is this motivation guided action and was realised in the end.
The economic sponsors and political interests behind such projects – because that is what they are, projects with deeply embedded ideologies and motives – need to be interrogated for their ‘determining’ role. From positions of power actors may build technological determinism into technological systems that, in place, may “significantly reduce the range of subsequent human 2
Williams ‘ecofeminist’ perspective converges with other technoscience perspectives in the openness of the ‘ends’ of the technical and the interdependency – indeed the inseparability – of the human and the technical. The ‘ecofeminist’ view on the other hand emphasizes our continuing links to nature. Overlarge technical systems are prone to crisis and our safest bet is with smaller-scaled bio-technics in which risk is distributed.
choices” (Williams 226). Williams reminds us of Antonio Gramsci’s argument that it is not only that the range of choices is limited in historical situation, but also that that situation shapes the minds of those who choose. Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ “is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society" (Gramsci …). Hegemony places limits on our understandings of what is possible and what is not in historical situation (Williams 220). Williams also quotes Schumpeter who claims “situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do – not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose” (Schumpeter …). Fate can indeed be engineered.
One reason we pay these sorts of ‘societal logistics and technics’ less attention than they deserve is the very success of the engineers, and of the engineering, modernising mind-set. These have a huge eventual effect on the image of the modern city, because, apart from the human traffic flow, most of this logistics and technics happens out of sight. They establish hegemonic ‘situations’ that are by their very nature naturalised. We don’t for the most part look beyond our everyday existences, embedded in these situations. The hiddenness of the larger consequences of these situations is indeed systemic: we live in socio-technical constructions which themselves determine our ‘realities’. What is also true however is that these systemic realities, situational positions, are not singular. They are particular products of distinct conjunctures, regimes of society, economy and technology, in particular times and places. A socio-technical ‘construction of reality’.
4. Trajectories and transitions of modernity
A ‘systemic situation’, socio-technical regime’ and ‘socio-ecological regime’ (Fischer-Kowalski) oriented on agriculture, agricultural technologies, agricultural markets and a pre-industrial society, shifted with the coming of the industrial revolution. This shift involved first of all a massive increase in per capita energy and material footprints (from 40-70 GJ to 150-400 GJ and from 4-5 tonnes to 15-25 tonnes per annum) (Fischer-Kowalski – see Read et al 2014). It involved secondly the wholesale reconfiguration of economies and societies in new sociotechnical systems – the reinvention of the city as a organisational apparatus for production, social reproduction and consumption fitted to this new energy regime.
The forms of these were not simply distributions of factories and neighbourhoods and trams and busses and electricity and telephones; they were whole urban organisations in which these components were organisationally integrated. The urban logistics are at the same time ecological, technological, social and economic and they co-constitute each other. It is in these constitutive structures that we must understand ecologies, technologies, societies and economies – whose forms are defined in the whole.
More on infrastructures. What are infrastructures? (Hanseth; Edwards; Starr; Read 2009). Edwards defines infrastructures as ‘the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society’, “how infrastructures function for us, both conceptually and practically, as environment, as social setting, and as the invisible, unremarked basis of modernity itself (Edwards 186). “all infrastructures (indeed, all "technologies") are in fact sociotechnical in nature. Not only hardware but organizations, socially communicated background knowledge, general acceptance and reliance, and near-ubiquitous accessibility (Edwards 188). Relations are normalised and ‘stabilised’ through infrastructures – we can effectively substitute ‘infrastructures’ for ‘relations’. Infrastructures as ‘socio-technical systems’ (Edwards). The construction of our modern worlds is a (political) negotiation (and struggle) over the installation of modern ST systems – Rosalind Williams also suggests this. Our societies are (socio)technocratic, construction = engineering and most of what the engineers did they did through infrastructures. A material-relational society.
And the complex form of the city (social, technological, economic, ‘way of life’, is an infrastructure – more later …
Transport and eventual reticulation of safe water and energy, distribution of food and the removal of waste became constitutive and defining urban processes along with the everyday movement of people from neighbourhood to factory. These constitutive processes of the industrial city were of quite another type and order to the processes of the pre-industrial town or village. It is in the transitions from agrarian to industrial, and from industrial to post-industrial structures that we must understand change. This section is intended to begin to open up just what the modernities of the last four centuries have been producing with respect to the sustainability we have only recently begun trying to understand.
First, there is nothing very modern about modernity. And modernities are particular conjunctures and therefore multiple. One hundred years ago we faced massive globalisation of the economy, global and rural-urban migrations larger than we see today, the most rapid technological change the world has ever known, and a growing polarisation between rich and poor. Then came political and fiscal crisis that would destabilise Europe and lead to two world wars, economic crisis, and eventually renewal with the rise of what was then called the New World of the Americas. There is an aspect of cycle and repetition in our modern histories such that the formation of the modern world we inhabit today did not happen in one movement. We did not move to become ‘modern’ from a common ground of ‘tradition’. Rather, the renewals, shifts and crises of different modernities can be traced back in phases through time, and we moved from one world economy and one modernity to the next, according to Peter Taylor, spaced in the ‘long centuries’ and ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ of Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi.
Urbanisation proceeds by way of ‘projects’ we can associate with moments of construction, crisis and reconstruction in history. Construction occurs in projects of modernisation and new capitalist forms. Crises are endemic to capitalism, and these provoke responses which open new opportunities for development and we can associate these cycles, according to world systems theorists, with phases of the development of capitalism. Capitalism is founded on a principle of growth and each succeeding phase incorporates more territory than the one before and Harvey has already suggested the need for each of these ‘rescalings’ was provoked by a crisis in capitalism and that we can characterise these projects as ‘spatial fixes’ (Harvey 2001). Peter Taylor draws a distinction between a first (mercantile), second (industrial) and third (consumer) mode of ‘modernity’ (Taylor 1991). The first was centred on Amsterdam, the second on London and the third on New York, though it may be truer to say on the London-New York axis. These modernities are founded on asymmetries in the net flows of resources and value. Their power is expressed as economic and ideological power and sustained by global terms of trade (Hornborg 2009).
Dutch cities and nation, the British nation and its Western colonies and eventually ‘the West’, as conventionally understood today, have localised the benefits of these arrangements and have delocalised many of the costs. A Dutch modernity and long seventeenth century expropriated and transported rare and luxury goods from east to west, and slaves from Africa to the Americas to produce still more luxury goods for the European market. It created a culture of luxury that for the first time incorporated classes below that of the aristocracy; the European artisan and middle classes. This was followed by a British modernity and long eighteenth to nineteenth century that colonised a global economy and empire to industrialise and enrich a nation. An American modernity and long twentieth century built on this economy and empire to create the Western-biased global world we are part of today. Each of these episodes involved the organisation of a world economy, an economic and societal centre (a city, nation or region of accumulation), and a systematic and purposeful shift of resources and their benefits and profits from periphery to centre.
These modernities, taken together represent the rise and so-called ‘divergence’ (Pomeranz) of ‘the West’ from the rest of the world. In ‘world systems’ language they represent the rise of the ‘core’ at the expense of the ‘periphery’. Each of these successive modernities saw resources, people and profit
shifted from the rest of the world to Europe, the United States and the European colonies.3 These shifts, and the technologies associated with them, created particular modern worlds of readily available goods and implements; worlds of luxury and abundance for some, and worlds of poverty and scarcity for others, dependant on where one stood in relation to the centre. Central regimes of plenty were created while the real costs were shifted away from the centre and to the periphery. Colonial and neo-colonial political and economic cultures made this redistribution of power invisible and allowed us to discount the costs of abundance in the centre. Modern social organisation, regulatory structures and technologies normalised and embedded this skewing of power in the world, institutionalising, legalising and perpetuating it.
5. Reconfiguring our relation with nature
But, this articulation of costs and benefits, on a model, or series of models, of global power relations, also amounts to a reconfiguration, or series of reconfigurations of our relations with nature. In each phase of modernity availabilities, abundances and scarcities of the earth’s resources were reordered to the logics of centre and periphery and the world economy. Additional costs have appeared however, in the centre as well as the periphery, as externalities produced by this global skewing of the accounting of resources. Already in the Dutch modernity, in the seventeenth century, modernisation of agricultural production lead to a radical depletion of biological diversity and soil fertility. Artificial refertilisation compounded the problem and poisoned the countryside. In the British and American modernities, the productivity of the soil was supplemented by ‘cheap’ energy produced on the basis of a control of supplies of European coal and then global oil. These polluted first cities, then the countryside, and eventually the atmosphere, the seas and the climate. Each new phase of modernity reworked the cost and benefit and energy equations and each produced more intense external effects so that costs – in terms of climate change and unsustainability – today are felt everywhere.
The major production of each of these regimes of modernity was of course a global power structure, a skewing of distributions of wealth and poverty and of international power relations. But secondary productions include pollution, increasing resource scarcity and an unsustainable demand for energy (energy as our marker for ‘nature’?). If we go back to the ‘organisational’ theme at the beginning of this paper, secondary productions are also the organisational structures of these regimes. To recollect: the organisational structure linked social, technical and economic components such that they acquired their categorical characteristics in the relations; I said also that we can substitute ‘infrastructures’ for ‘relations’. My proposal here is that these effects, and the whole ‘socio-technical construction of reality’, are produced in the infrastructures. What is produced is also a form, or series of forms, in which relations are articulated.
6. Reconfiguring our relation with nature
Technoscience basically reverses the order of priorities in relation to technology and science: instead of ‘pure’ science leading ‘applied’ technology, technology comes first and it is telescopes, microscopes and steam engines that trigger the development of the theoretical sciences (Ihde 1991). Patrick Heelan taught us years ago that if we want to know the ‘theory’ behind the production of results in experimental science, we need look no further than the apparatus (Heelan 1977). The issue is about where we locate meaning – in the mind, in language or in the world? Heelan’s phenomenological thinking locates it in the world and specifically in the way the world is equipped or prepared for our knowledge and action.
A ‘technoscience’ urban theory would understand the city as apparatus or technology, fixing relations, and producing its own ‘theory’. According to Peter Taylor: “Spaces are created by social practices. Thus they are not universal, they are always historically specific. Spaces become socially important when they are constituted by myriad social practices. In this form they define a material spatiality of 3
Dependency theory (Frank) is being revived today from anthropology. Alf Hornborg (2009) interprets this as a ‘zero-sum’ game of material (and wealth) flows from the periphery to the core.
life. All spatialities are products of social agents ...” (Taylor 1999). the structure of the industrial city is an historical product of the reconstruction of the Western European city in the 19th and early 20th centuries – a reorganisation and rescaling of the city in an urban expansion consisting of a ‘structuration’ of neighbourhoods and centres around a ‘grid’ of new transportation networks consisting of trams, metros and so on (Read forthcoming). City space and neighbourhood space. Not created so much by ‘social practices’ as by the equipment those social practices depend on. This structure represents investment in a production and social-reproduction ‘machine’ (Smith) which is part of a project of modernisation whose emblematic case was Louis Napoleon’s and Haussmann’s Paris.
An analogous structure is created in the modernisation project of the post-industrial city. This time the elements of development were distributed on and oriented towards inter-city commuter highways and railways. Here the emblematic case is the New Deal highway building of the United States. The highway, the motorcar and suburban living joined together in a different production and social-reproduction space and ‘machine’. My own studies on urban form have highlighted the fact that these two ‘projects of modernisation’ have structured the city and its development – its urbanisation in fact (Read forthcoming). Like infrastructures, these structures define social, technical, economic orders. At the same time they define ‘ways of life’ – and the boundaries between them. These structures are persistent, though their ‘contents’ may change. They may be adapted or simply appropriated to new logics of use – as worker’s neighbourhoods are appropriated by gentrifying populations attracted by the structural characteristics of the area they are buying into (Smith). My point is that the industrial city, defined by a nested duality of city and neighbourhood and a connective armature of a public transportation system is an infrastructure. Likewise the post-industrial city …
What drives the integration and coherence of these two inrastructures? Indeed they are not ‘splintered’ (Graham and Marvin); this is a detail that is not due to magic and needs to be explained. What is interesting is that in their original forms they represent what we now think of as normative entities – the neighbourhood, the city, the nation – that we know are also historical (and technological) constructs. What is at stake here is the very intelligibility and interpretability of our modern worlds. Modern world-views are neither in the mind nor in language; they are in the world. They are constructed in the world. What is embodied in these structures is firstly these ‘normative’ entities and their relations to one another, but in order to see this we must first of all understand the spaces in which they are inscribed.
Historical construction of the city; of the nation; of the neighbourhood.
The exemplary case of the modern industrial city is Second Empire Paris, which was made the hub and control point of a modern unified nation by the railways. A city-level network of boulevards defined a modern public face of a city whose transactions and exchanges with the nation were enacted through the railway stations and defined a new national economy and society. Intellectual constructions from Compte to Durkheim made a science of this new reality. Urban life was cosmopolitan and which stood in contrast to an intimate neighbourly realm, the border defined by the contrast between a boulevard network and another of quiet streets. In Amsterdam, a public transportation grid established the city level, and connected the metageographical ‘city’ with neighbourhoods. These metageographical levels are factors of economy, society and governance. They enable the economic and social levels important in the production machine that is the industrial city. They underpin distinct municipal and neighbourhood ‘community’, as well as governance and ‘way of life’ regimes characteristic of the industrial city.
The exemplary case of the post-industrial city is Los Angeles, where a metropolitan-level automobility network defined a new public face of the city in contrast to suburbs. In Amsterdam, automobility and rail transportation grids established the metro level, and connected this with older cities and new out-of-town places. These metageographical levels are again factors of economy, society and governance that enable the economic and social levels important in the production and consumption machines of
the post-industrial city. They underpin metro and urban ‘communities’, as well as governance and ‘way of life’ regimes characteristic of the industrial city.
We usually imagine these urban-geographical entities as ‘container’ spaces with clear borders. The different model proposed here has network spaces as ‘levels’, each with a ‘metageographic’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997) character, through which people order their knowledge of the world. Infrastructures of different scales and ‘levels’ may establish ‘city’ and ‘nation’ in the example above, but without the borders. Infrastructure as relations. The sort of networks Peter Taylor talks of have long been associated with technology, and Paul Edwards points out that technology is pervasive and quickly naturalised in modern lives but also makes the point that infrastructure is best defined negatively, as ‘those systems without which contemporary societies cannot function’ (ibid., p.187). Infrastructures incorporate and deliver social organisation consisting of ‘socially communicated background knowledge, general acceptance and reliance, and near-ubiquitous accessibility’ (ibid., p.188). They organise things into a distinct ‘modern world’, delivering capacities that have themselves become naturalised. According to Star and Ruhleder (1996), infrastructure has five properties: it is embedded in other structures; it is transparent; it has reach or scope; it is learned as part of membership of a ‘community of practice’; and it shapes and is shaped by the conventions of that ‘community’. Infrastructures are ‘material culture’, learned as part of membership in communities, while this knowledge is by extension a prerequisite to membership. Infrastructural knowledge is ‘a condition of contextuality in which understanding any part requires a grasp of the whole that comes only through experience’ (Edwards, 2003, p.190).
Infrastructural knowledge is an internally related self-contextualising whole, a Wittgensteinian ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein, 1958), in which the different elements and practices in the network make sense by virtue of their mutual interrelationships in a sort of cultural or life ‘paradigm’. Here we understand the notion of paradigm in the relational sense used by Thomas Kuhn: as a set of practices (and associated material elements) that bind a ‘community of practice’ (Kuhn, 1962). In this sense, infrastructures integrate the practices and elements of a community or society and become environment to them. ‘To live within the multiple, interlocking infrastructures of modern societies is to know one’s place in gigantic systems that both enable and constrain us’ (Edwards, 2003, p.191). ‘Building infrastructures has been constitutive of the modern condition, in almost every conceivable sense. At the same time, ideologies and discourses of modernism have helped define the purposes, goals, and characteristics of those infrastructures. In other words, the co-construction of technology and modernity can be seen with exceptional clarity in the case of infrastructure’ (ibid.).
Figure 1. Amsterdam region, city and neighbourhoods Drawing: Jorge Gil
Figure 2a. Container space region, city and neighbourhood; b. Infrastructural space region, city and neighbourhood
These ‘levels’ are not abstract or metaphoric but perfectly real. They also realise the metageographic entities they enact as places. This reality is emphasised by the empirical facts of the infrastructural ‘grids’ involved which are readily distinguishable and mappable. The construction described here is clearly not a ‘nested hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national and global’ (Delaney and Leitner, 1997, p.93). It has been shown that our conventional understanding of the spatialisation of cities and neighbourhoods by a diagram of nested areas needs to be replaced by
another diagram of overlaid grids. Space is no longer defined in bounded entities at all, but in actual infrastructures supporting and enacting metageographic levels and places. Levels and scales are not abstract but inhere in the grids themselves, through the places enacted and known in them. Through these grids we can understand the structures of nested hierarchies of houses, neighbourhoods, cities, regions, nations, and the world - not as an abstraction but as an in-the-world human construction. All relations, including energy relations are mediated in these inside-outside structures – a topological set of spaces which frame all human reality – and the life patterns and socio-ecological processes through which metabolic processes work.
7. Towards a different environmental accounting
None of the entities (region, nation, city, neighbourhood) are abstract or natural: all are constructed in a series of space-time frames, themselves constructed, and of which they are the literal manifestation. These relations between space time frames are through infrastructures but also across boundaries that are both normative and real. Their normativity is a matter of the way we have historically divided our world to make it legible. The determination of the world is not in abstraction or in nature but in this constructed reality, so that without the lines on the map there is a great deal more definition in the world we just know than in in maps. What’s more the lines show their abstraction by often not even appearing in our everyday lives. We do not ‘see’ the world through maps (and our ‘mental maps’ are not cartographic) but through a topology of relations between normative entities (regions, nations, cities, neighbourhoods). This is not only the intelligibility structure of the modern world but also the logistical one – that through which asymmetries in the net flows of resources and value are established and maintained.
In order to know what is hidden from us by the normative and hegemonic nature of the worlds we have made, we need to map the transactions and exchanges through this other map. This has replaced the space of nature; it has in a sense become the space of nature. Descriptions and mappings in container space are compromised by borders and brackets that draw us to conclusions that are fatally partial. In becoming global (contra Smil) – in the past Nature was global – we are subject for the first time in human existence to real limits and these manifest at the global scale (Read et al 2014). Our environmental accounting has to account for the global and through the channels through which asymmetrical relations are enacted.
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