People as Infrastructure

AFRAMER 128X Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Infrastructures are commonly defined in physical terms or material forms (e.g. roads, buildings, power supplies) and are said to impose productivity on the city and positionality on its inhabitants. In this course, however, we will extend the notion of infrastructure directly to social networks and the evolving process of negotiation between state and nonstate urban actors with power differentials and competing interests. Taking inspiration from AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of “people as infrastructure,” this course will examine collective agency, alliances and transnational organizing among urban residents and groups who are economically marginalized and socially excluded from modernizing processes of urban planning and reform in Africa. We will interrogate African cities as networked spaces characterized by fluid and precarious interdependence between formal and informal actors in particular sectors. The course will bring together two central dimensions of infrastructure in urban Africa. First, infrastructural power: how infrastructure constitutes a privileged institutional channel for governance, regulation, and contestation in urban Africa. Second, infrastructural lives: the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures in Africa.