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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2024

Shifting Regimes of Historicity and the Control of Urban Futures through Infrastructures: Continuities, Ambivalences, and Tensions in the Anthropocene

Résumé

The chapter is concerned about how infrastructures mediate relations between past, present, and future. It begins by bringing three temporal registers into dialogue: the evolutionary life cycles of infrastructure; the experiential dimensions of infrastructure time; and the relations between past, present, and future that shift as infrastructures materialize social temporalities via processes of ‘infrastructure- based futuring’. This heuristic captures the multidimensional nature of infrastructure time (as perceived, conceived, and lived) and the dialectical tensions within which these temporal registers are ambivalently suspended. The chapter articulates how this temporal ambivalence captures fundamental tensions between two modern ‘regimes of historicity’: a contemporary presentism through which short- termism comes to dominate social time and a modern futurism that continues to restate the promise of infrastructure to deliver political, economic, or environmental objectives. The maturation of the Anthropocene disrupts the logics of both modern temporal regimes. The realities of an existential climate crisis challenge how we envision infrastructural presents and futures – and possible ways to transition between the two. The chapter argues our current infrastructural compact prioritizes forms of adaptation to environmental change rather than radical transformation. The time frames under consideration may vary, but temporality is primarily understood as linear, with the vested interests of ‘the present’ constraining necessarily radical socio-technical shifts. Yet the ruptures and inequities arising within the Anthropocene also create possibilities for pluralizing time and thus open alternative futures and potentialities for infrastructural change. The chapter closes with methodological suggestions for researchers interested in operationalizing the study of infrastructure-based futuring, notably advocating for the exploration of experimental elsewhens beyond the networked city. (From the book's general introduction, p. 9-10)
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halshs-04469490, version 1 (20-02-2024)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-04469490 , version 1

Citer

Olivier Coutard. Shifting Regimes of Historicity and the Control of Urban Futures through Infrastructures: Continuities, Ambivalences, and Tensions in the Anthropocene. Bristol University Press. INFRASTRUCTURAL TIMES. Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds (Jean-Paul D. Addie, Michael R. Glass and Jenn Nelles, eds), pp.72-94, In press, 978-1-5292-2971-4. ⟨halshs-04469490⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 27/04/2024
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