This document summarizes Stephen Graham's paper on the politics of infrastructure disruptions. It discusses how disruptions can "frontstage" infrastructure that is usually invisible. It notes that infrastructure is often seen as fixed, but is actually vulnerable. Disruptions reveal complex politics and power geometries. They can challenge naturalized views of technology and systems, exposing myths of their stability and regulation. Responses to disruptions also reveal inequalities and securitization of flows.

1. Fronstaging the Urban Backstage?
The Politics of Infrastructure Disruptions
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. 1. Leigh-Star (1999)
• For Susan Leigh-Star (1999) nine characteristics.
• embedded (i.e.“sunk into other structures);
• transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented each
time or assembled for each task”);
• offers temporal or spatial reach or scope;
• is learned by its users;
• is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of
electricity use);
• embodies standards;
• is built on an installed base of sunk capital;
• is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once or
globally;
• Finally, infrastructure “tends to become visible upon
breakdown”

3. Conventional Narratives
• When infrastructure networks work
best, they are noticed least of all (David
Perry, 1995).
• Modernist urbanism associated with
progressive veiling of infrastructure,
physically and discursively, beneath the
urban scene, as part of emergence of
“Wired-Piped-Tracked” Metropolis
• Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) the
networks became buried underground,
invisible, banalised, and relegated to an
apparently marginal, subterranean urban
world.

4. ‘Unblackboxing’
• Technosocial ‘blackboxes” are
momentarily undone
• Cultures of normalised and taken-for-
granted infrastructure use sustain
widespread assumptions that urban
‘infrastructure’ is somehow a material
and utterly fixed assemblage of hard
technologies embedded stably in place
which is characterised by perfect
order, completeness, immanence and
internal homogeneity rather than leaky,
partial and heterogeneous entities.

5. Myth of Fixed and Stable
Emplacement
• Infrastructures regarded as symbols of the
complexity, ubiquity and the embodied power of
modern technology (Summerton 1994).
• “We sometimes seem to view mature LargeTechnical
Systems as invulnerable, embodying more and more
power over time and developing along a path whose
basic direction is as foreseeable as it is impossible to
detour [But] systems are more vulnerable, less stable
and less predictable in their various phases than most
of us tend to think (Summerton, 1994)

6. ‘Frontstaging’ Urban ‘Backstage’
• Irving Goffman’s (1959)
terms, the built
environment’s “backstage’
becomes momentarily
“frontstaged”
• The sudden absence of
infrastructural flow creates
visibility just as the
continued, normalised use
of infrastructures creates a
deep taken-for-grantedness
and invisibility.

7. Reification?
Too Categorical,
Static, Crude
• Often simply not the case!
• Varies enormously by site/place/sector/subjectivity
• Complex politics/poetics/mediations/remediations of
produced visibilities and invisibilities
• Contested and woven through with profoundly unequal
power geometries across topologies of time/space
• Need a much more nuanced, detailed exploration of
precisely how disruptions are discursively and materially
constructed and experienced in different sites/’sectors’/
places/ cases/subjectivities to reveal complex politics of
visibility and invisibility

8. 1. Often Simply Not the Case: Discourse of the Powerful?
For a billion urbanites or more, infrastructural failure, exclusion and precarity is
perpetually and profoundly visible imprivisation is constant
Infrastructures have “always been foregrounded in the lives of more precarious
social groups — i.e. those with reduced access or without access or who have
been disconnected, as a result either of socio-spatial differentiation strategies or
infrastructure crises or collapse.”
Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008)

9. • Cultures and economies of infrastructural repair
and improvisation almost invisible within urban
studies

10. 2. ComplexTopologies of Disruption and (Re)Mediations
of Produced (In)Visibility inTime-Space
Cascading disruptions in space and time within multiple, tightly-
coupled, skeins of infrastructure networks (Richard Little)

11. “We are all hostages to
electricity” Leslie (1999)
Socio-technical
‘Normal Accidents’ (Charles
Perrow): Blackout

12. Exposed Myths of
Dematerialisation/ Sectoral
Isolation/ ‘Cleanness’:
The Electromateriality of
‘cyberspace’
• “When servers are down,
panic sets in. Electronic
power failures, internal
surges, the glitches that
corrupt and destroy memory,
mirror our relation with
power itself” (Grossman,
2003, 23).
• A single Google server farm
consumes as much electrical
power as a city the size of
Honolulu.

13. “On July 19, 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper,
wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey
derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have
reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make the
boxcars glow.A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks.
By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid
along the railroad right-of-way, disrupting telecommunications traffic on
a critical NewYork-Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail.
The NewYork–based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability
to update its web pages.Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report
problems. Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and Los
Angeles, and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact
with Washington.” KazysVarnelis
ExposedTopologies
Disruption and Digitality

14. Exposed Myths of Neoliberal Re-Regulation
• Electricity deregulation in the USA had actually ignored the
economic and geographical fundamentals of an industry that
necessitates reliable, material connectivities between
generation and use; that is prone to cascading and spiralling
failure as transcontinental and transnational markets in supply
are established within “complex interactive networks,” with
dramatic unintended consequences ; and where the hard
infrastructures are ageing and organised with a baroque level
of complexity and local fragmentation.

15. But post-mortems for such events become messy!
“A distributive notion of agency does interfere with the
project of blaming. But it does not thereby abandon the
project of identifying [ ] the sources of harmful effects.To
the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to
look for sources. ”
Must look at the “selfish intentions and energy policy that
provides lucrative opportunities for energy trading while
generating a tragedy of the commons”; at “the stubborn
directionality of a high-consumption social infrastructure”;
and at “the unstable power of electron flows, wildfires, ex-
urban housing pressures, and the assemblages they form”
Jane Bennett
Jane Bennett, (2005) “The Agency of Assemblages and
the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3): 445–65. Pp. 463.

16. Emergent, Malign Mobilities: SARS
(Roger Keil and S. Harris Ali)

17. Securitising Networked Flows

19. Supply Disruptions: Oil Shock

22. 3. Moments of Mass/PopularTechnoscientific Cartography/Visualisation
e.g.Trawler Severing Oceanic Optic Fibre Off Egypt, December 2008

24. Classic Media Events/ Moral Panics

25. 4. Can be Used to Disrupt Conventional Media/ PoliticalTropes and Provide
Heuristic Devices for Critical Scholarship/Pedagogy and Engagement to
Challenge and DenaturaliseThese
An ‘act of God’? A ‘technical failure’? ‘Accident’?
A ‘natural disaster’? A social meltdown?

26. • Reveal the Often Hidden Politics of
Risk
• Also unerringly reveal the often
concealed politics of cyborganised
cities
• e.g. Katrina in 2005 not a ‘natural
disaster’ or ‘Act of God.’ Rather, the
inevitable result of:
• Climate change accentuating hurricane
• Hitting a city denuded of natural
protection and
• Very poorly covered by a levee
network that was systematically racially
biased over centuries of constructed
socio-nature in context of a
• A Neoconservative Federal
Government that had systematically
skewed Emergency Planning towards
terrorism for political ends

29. 5. Culture of Fascination
“Cyborgs, like us, are endlessly fascinated by machinic breakdowns,
which would cause disruptions in, or denials of access to, their
megatechnical sources of being.”
Tim Luke (2004)(above NYC blackout, 2003)
•

31. • Arcade Fire’s song,“Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”; a visceral reflection of the experience, and hammers home
the sense of modernity unraveled, lives threatened, and norms abandoned:
“Woke up with the power out, not really somethin to shout about. ice
has covered up my parents hands, don't have any dreams don't have any
plans. i went out into the night, i went out to find some light. kids
are swingin from the power lines, nobody's home so nobody minds
I woke up on the darkest night, neighbors all were shouting that they
found the light - we found the light. - shadows jumpin' all over my
walls, some of them big, some of them small. i went out into the night
i went out to pick a fight with anyone. light a candle for the kids,
Jesus Christ don't keep it hid!
Ice has covered up my parents hands, don't have any dreams don't have any plans. growin' up in some strange
storm, nobody's cold, nobody's
warm. i went out into the night, i went out to find some light. kids
are dyin' out in the snow, look at them go - look at them go!
and the power's out in the heart of man, take it from your heart put
it in your hand. what's the plan? what's the plan?
is it a dream? Is it a lie? i think I'll let you decide. just light a candle for the
kids, Jesus Christ don't keep it hid! cause nothing's hid, from us
kids! you ain't foolin' nobody - with the lights out! and the power's
out in the heart of man, take it from your heart put it in your hand.
and there's something wrong in the heart of man, you take it from your
heart and put it in your hand! where'd you go?!”

32. 6. Multiple, Contested, Disruption Discourses
Privileged Discourses of Disruption (and Invoked Securitisation)
Often Work to Obfuscate Less Privileged Ones, Sometimes
Violently!
E.g. Blackouts and the ‘Global’ City
• “We are talking about
Mumbai as the next
Shanghai”, a general
manager for a major
Mumbai advertising firm,
faced with losing 30% of its
revenues due to daily 4
hour power cuts, reported
in 2005.“And here we are
faced with the possibilities
of blackouts”
• (SAND, 2005).

34. Infrastructure Disruptions, Security and PoliticalViolence
Mumbai’s ‘Water wars’ (Colin McFarlane)

36. Securocratic
War (Allen Feldman )
• Permanent, open-ended and deterritorialised mobilisations
or ‘wars’ (on drugs, crime, terror, illegal immigration,
biological threats) organised around vague and all-
encompassing notions of public safety rather than territorial
conquest
• Reproduce state sovereignty not through external war and
internal policing but through raising the spectre of mobilities
and flows which are deemed to contaminate societies and
threaten the social order internally and externally
simultaneously
• Terrorism, demographic infiltration,‘illegal’ immigration, and
pathogens and disease (SARS, bird flu, Mad Cow….
• Unknown and unknowable, these varied and dispersed
threats are deemed to lurk within the interstices of urban
and social life, blending invisibly with it.
•

37. Virtual Borders Erupt Both Within and Without
Territorial Limits of States
• “The virtual border, whether it faces outward or inward
to foreignness, is no longer a barrier structure but a
shifting net, a flexible spatial pathogenesis that shifts
round the globe and can move from the exteriority of
the transnational frontier into the core of the
securocratic state.”Allen Feldman
• Central here is the distinction between an event and
the normal, societal background.Thus,‘security events’
emerge when “improper or transgressive circulations”
from the range of putative threats become visible and
are deemed to threaten the ‘normal’ worlds of
transnational capitalism.
• The figure of the ‘terrorist’ looms especially large here
because such figures are seen to simultaneously breed
improper circulations of bodies, money, and drugs

38. “The interruption of the moral economy of safe circulation is characterized as a dystopic ‘risk
event’,” Feldman suggests.“Disruption of the imputed smooth functioning of the circulation
apparatus in which nothing is meant to happen.‘Normalcy’ is the non-event, which in effect
means the proper distribution of functions, the occupation of proper differential positions, and
social profiles.”

39. Water…

40. Streets…

42. • the next Pearl Harbor will be
both everywhere and nowhere at
the same time. It's targets will not be
the U.S. military or defense system
but, instead, the U.S. public and its
post-industrial and highly
informatized lifestyle.What is now a
tool for comfort, an object of
leisure, or a necessary support for
work [..] will soon become the
world's deadliest weapon” (Debrix,
2001).

43. “GrocerTerrorists”: Criminalisation of (Alleged) Infrastructural
Targeting:“The Coming Insurgency”
and the “Tarnac Nine”

44. ‘Zone/Park’;Archipelagos of Enclaves,
Passage-Point Urbanism and the
Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism

45. Criminalising Strikes,
Securitising Labour
and the Postpolitical
‘Logistics City’
(Deb Cowen)

46. Disruptions and Political Protest
- Bangkok: People's Alliance for
Democracy (PAD),
Dec 2008

48. Gate Gourmet Dispute,
Heathrow, 2005

49. Cyborgian
Global City System and the
New Imperialism
• Neoliberalised global cities often have a parasitic relationship with
near and distant hinterlands
• Global neoliberal urbanisation has led to ‘devastating disparities
between the mobility of capital and labour that have produced new
forms of economic serfdom in the global South’ Matthew Gandy
• Resource (food, water, energy) grabs organised and finance through
the financial centres and technopoles of the North’s global finance
capitals
• Biopiracy and biofuels push (indigenous groups in Indonesia,
protesting, above)
• E.g. Daewoo (South Korean corporation) has just leased half of all
the arable land in Madagascar to feed South Korean cities in the
future

50. Constituting the ‘Anthropocene’:Technosocial
Technonatural Assemblages and Metabolisms

51. Bill Joy:WhenTurning Off Becomes Suicide
• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems,
caused a furore amongst, suggested that
the mediation of human societies by
astonishingly complex computerised
infrastructure systems will soon reach the
stage when people won't be able to just
turn the machines off, because they will be
so dependent on them that turning them
off would amount to suicide (2000).

52. War andTerrorism as ‘Decyborganisation’
• ‘Switching cities off’
• Deelectrification
• We need to study how to degrade and
destroy our adversaries' abilities to
transmit their military, political, and
economic goods, services and
information […]. Infrastructures, defining
both traditional and emerging lines of
communication, present increasingly
lucrative targets for airpower [The vision
of] airmen should focus on lines of
communications that will increasingly
define modern societies (Edward Felker,
‘US Air PowerTheorist’, 1998)
• US Air Force model of enemy societies
(right)

53. ‘Strategic Paralysis’:‘Bomb Now, Die Later’ :
The War on Public Health’, Bombing “Back to the Stone Age” etc.
• General Buster Glosson, Iraq, 1991 : ”I want to put every [Iraqi] household in an
autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated… We wanted to play
with their psyche
• We need to study how to degrade and destroy our adversaries' abilities to
transmit their military, political, and economic goods, services and information.
Infrastructures, defining both traditional and emerging lines of communication,
present increasingly lucrative targets for airpower [The vision of] airmen should
focus on lines of communications that will increasingly define modern
societies (Felker, 1998).

54. Disruption by Design and
the Liberal Way of War:
State Infrastructural Warfare
There is nothing in the
world today that cannot
become a
weapon (Liang and
Xiangsui, 1999)
If you want to destroy
someone nowadays, you
go after their
infrastructure. (Phil
Agre, 2001)

55. “It should be lights out in Belgrade :
every power grid, water pipe, bridge,
road and war-related factory has to be
targeted. We will set your country
back by pulverizing you. You want
1950 ? We can do 1950. You want
1389 ? We can do that, too!”
Thomas Friedman, New York Times,
April 23rd, 1999

56. First Order Effects
Second Order
Effects
Third Order Effects
No light after dark or in
building interiors
Erosion of command
and control capabilities
Greater logistics
complexity
No refrigeration
Increased requirement
for power generating
equipment
Decreased mobility
Some stoves/ovens non
operable
Increased requirement
for night vision devices
Decreased Situational
Awareness
Inoperable hospital
electronic equipment
Increased reliance on
battery-powered items
for news, broadcasts,
etc.
Rising disease rates
No electronic access to
bank accounts/money
Shortage of clean water
for drinking, cleaning
and preparing food
Rising rates of
malnutrition
Disruption in some
transportation and
communications
services
Hygiene problems
Increased numbers of
non-combatants
requiring assistance
Disruption to water
supply, treatment
facilities, and sanitation
Inability to prepare and
process some foods
Difficulty in
communicating with
non-combatants

57. Disruption Geopolitics

58. Towards State Computer Network Attack (CNA)