Desire and Denial: On Constructing and Contesting Infrastructures

Building on the foundational work of Brian Larkin and Donna Haraway, this interdisciplinary volume reevaluates infrastructures as both manifestations of cultural and political orders and instruments of concealment. 

Infrastructures are not just technical systems, but also cultural and political orders that stabilize and transform societal processes. Following Brian Larkin’s study The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, the writings collected in Desire and Denial conceive of infrastructures as material manifestations of symbolic and economic projects and efforts to build political power. They embody collective desires―for mobility, safety, control, or modernization, among other things―that not only structure planning processes, but also constitute normative ideas about the future. 

At the same time, infrastructures operate based on denial: by systemically concealing, say, environmental devastation, social inequality, political exclusion, and colonial continuities. As Donna Haraway already underscored in the late 1980s, techno-scientific orders are premised on stories of objectivity and innocence―narrative patterns that also inform the planning and legitimation of infrastructures and the visions of the future they imply. 

The contributions in this volume explore this complex set of tensions, reading infrastructures not just as part of the built environment but also as politically contested, culturally appropriated, and symbolically fraught scenes of social conflict.

Nathalie Bredella is a senior researcher at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Grayson Bailey is a researcher and coordinator at the TUM Institute for Advanced Study, where he supports international academic exchange and interdisciplinary research projects.