Infrastructures of Life

When we think of infrastructure many of us think about mega-projects. An epic bridge spanning a valley, a highway bored through a billion tonnes of rock or a hydro-powered dam securing water and power for 10,000 new homes. Underwriting each herculean feat of engineering there is usually an equally ambitious consultancy fee to deliver an apparently robust business case to outline the project’s unassailable cost-benefit value. Such walls of impeccable economic virtue, however, often disguise a nest of undeclared values and hidden assumptions. For what we choose to think of as valuable, or even necessary within our infrastructure planning has always been a deeply ideological matter.

Think highways. Few forms of infrastructure have more deeply etched their ideological values of privileged private movement and time efficiency, on to the face of our cities. The adage that ‘Time means money’ when applied to infrastructure inevitably leads to reduced journey time as transport’s first (if not only) priority - often at the expense of community, environment and public interest. This was demonstrated with explicit force when the Djab Wurrung ‘directions tree’ in Victoria, estimated to be 350 years old was bulldozed in October 2020 against protest from Djab Wurrung people and allies. The highway upgrades will reduce drive time for those in cars, by a few minutes while the Djab Wurrung people will be haunted by this loss for generations to come.

Values are also woven into our local investments in infrastructure, such as housing and education, as we continue to exile the most vulnerable of our community to those under-resourced local government areas least able to provide for their needs. Doing so, we entrench spatial inequality, while urban dwellers in high socio-economic areas benefit from higher quality and more frequently maintained parks, transport, telecommunications, sports, culture and health care.

What are we to do with this great agglomeration of infrastructure, generations in the making, that might not reflect a society from diverse cultural backgrounds or consider the current global environmental crisis?

How do we rethink these inherited systems that engrain disadvantage while at the same time failing the worlds environmental landscapes?

How, also, can we approach a new era of infrastructure where data is embedded into buildings, health care systems and even social interactions?

It is clear that these questions hold profound reflections on how we live and whose interests are served by the visible and invisible infrastructure around us.

The Living Cities Forum 2023–Infrastructures of Life, will explore a different dimension of infrastructure, one that is rethought as the cultural, technological and material frameworks around which a more equitable, sustainable and inclusive society is organised.

From this perspective, how we think of infrastructure reflects who we want to be, and how we want to live. Infrastructures of Life will be an opportunity to radically rethink the layers of assumptions that sit behind the conventional understanding of infrastructure. Infrastructure will be examined instead, as a reflection of the public interests and values of all living entities - people, cultures and ecosystems - not just the unspoken inequitable values and quietly coded private interests of a business case spreadsheet.

Join us on November 16 2023 for the sixth edition of the Living Cities Forum at The Edge, Fed Square.