Politics of infrastructure

Infrastructure generally refers to the basic human-built material systems that undergird the smooth operation of societies and on which modern daily life rests. As this definition shows, we tend to regard infrastructure merely as a neutral technical or technological means toward more substantive ends. Infrastructure is also a boring thing to think about for us, as sociologist Susan Leigh Star famously noted.

Unfortunately, such a way of viewing infrastructure may cause us to miss things that we really need to know. It also may hinder us from more critically appreciating recent events occurring around infrastructure, protests that a group of the Solidarity

Against Disability Discrimination has been staging at Seoul subway stations calling for enhancements to the accessibility of public transportation for wheelchair users. Political scientist Langdon Winner’s perspective on technological artifacts can help destabilize and reshape our conceptions of infrastructure.

More than four decades ago, Winner raised a question of whether technological artifacts have politics that he conceptualized as the ongoing struggle for and the distribution and arrangement of power in society. He recounted the stories of overpasses and mechanical tomato harvesters in the process of finding the answer.

Robert Moses, an influential American urban planner from a white upper-class background, input his racial and class biases into the design of bridges over parkways leading to beaches in New York in the 1930s. He deliberately devised overpasses too low to accommodate public buses.

Only cars could traverse the low-hanging bridges. Overpasses could make beaches serve as desirable leisure spaces exclusively for affluent whites of the upper and middle classes as car owners by averting visits by poor, black and working-class people who could not afford private cars and ride public buses.

Meanwhile, university researchers invented mechanical tomato harvesters in the 1940s to help increase crop picking productivity and reduce farming costs. The machines, despite the good intentions behind them, generated unexpected adverse consequences in the tomato industry in California.

Farmworkers engaged in handpicking tomatoes lost their job. Costly and large harvesters also impelled many small farmers to leave the industry because they had difficulty competing with owners of large farms who could afford the machines. Drawing on these accounts, Winner thus asserted that technological artifacts that appear apolitical and value-free have, in reality, political qualities, deliberately or inadvertently, in that they distribute power disproportionately.

The value of his idea lies in teaching us to comprehend the political dimensions of technological objects not only through their material structure but also through their relationship with and impacts on the users.

Seoul’s subway system is poorly designed for a group of users with specific physical disabilities, as the disabled advocacy group wails. Some subway stations are not yet equipped with elevators and have a wide gap between platforms and trains.

There are also cracked or uneven sidewalks on

routes to metro stations. These factors that most of us take for granted turn into grave obstacles to wheelchair-bound people, making subway infrastructure highly difficult or even impossible for them to use.

Exclusion from or very limited access to utilities that shape urban environments is a particular form of violence, which anthropologists call “infrastructural violence.” It is not simply excruciating but also dehumanizing to wheelchair users.

Transportation infrastructural violence restricts their autonomy and freedom of movement which are inextricably linked to every aspect of their lives, including opportunities for employment, community participation and learning, among others.

People in wheelchairs experience deprivation of their rights and privileges as independent citizens. Infrastructural violence ultimately leads to death. This is not a biological death resulting from physical violence, but a social death that precedes the former, arising from social exclusion and the destruction of social personhood and dignity.

It is perhaps unreasonable to say that like Moses’ bridges, the subways system is designed consciously to express and accomplish the political aim of limiting disabled people’s freedom and ability to move.

Instead, it is safe to presume that its unthoughtful design likely resulted from the planners’ failure to reflect on the varied abilities, needs and expectations of all potential users in the designing process.

No matter what the reason for the design may be, what matters is that subway infrastructure has produced unintended yet concrete political

consequences, severely damaging the accessibility of its less-powerful users and their civil rights.

It is good to remember here the common understanding of infrastructure as built networks that uphold modern societies, with which this piece of writing started. It poses a pivotal question to us.

If our modern society has failed to eliminate and rather sustained discrimination against physically challenged people and the conditions under which it plays out, isn’t it sensible to assume that some infrastructures, such as the subway network, have performed, at least partially, as an apparatus of oppression and inequality in the guise of neutral tools? The way we see the world shapes the way we interact with and change it, which in turn influences what we see. In this respect, it has significant moral and practical implications for us to learn to view infrastructure as having very real political attributes and effects.

Seeing the politics of infrastructure does not merely enable us to heed, rather than ignore, and empathize with the predicament of others in marginalized positions enduring infrastructural violence. We can also contribute to alleviating their suffering by pushing the government to fix material defects that engender infrastructural injustice.

Our struggle to improve the less inclusively designed built environment is a political act since infrastructure itself has politics. There is no doubt that it will benefit not just the disabled, but also those of us who often forget that we are all just temporarily able-bodied.