HKU Division of Landscape Architecture
Spring 2023 Public Lecture Series
“ASSEMBLING FUTURES”
Infrastructure in a Minor Key
Lecture Abstract
Infrastructure is a pivotal concept in reading the assembly, function and politics of urban life. Whilst scholarship on infrastructure has exploded in the interpretative social sciences, much of this work remains resolutely humanist, tethered to notions of design, planning and assembly. What might looking at animal-infrastructure assemblages do for developing an ecology of infrastructure that does not take infrastructural form or constitution for granted? How might relations between macaques and infrastructure enable us to rethink the material politics of urban life? Drawing on fieldwork in Delhi, India, this talk first shows how arboreal geographies of macaques and itinerant practices of electricians purloining electricity give rise to infrastructural form in ways completely unanticipated in the electric grid’s inaugural assembly. The talk then turns to what I call infrapolitics – activities that subtend political life – and how claims to infrastructures are made by summoning various other-than-human agents, be they macaques or spectral beings. The talk then turns to how relations between people and macaques themselves become infrastructural, subtending economic practices at the margins of urban life. Together, these strands articulate what I call a minor ecology of infrastructure, which posits a different grammar for understanding infrastructural formations than more familiar idioms of informality, planning design and assembly.
About the Speaker
Maan Barua’s research is on the economies, ontologies and politics of the living and material world. His most recent work examines how cities are governed by regulating nonhuman life. Maan’s forthcoming book Lively Cities: reconfiguring urban ecology will be published by Minnesota University Press in May 2023. He is the PI on an ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant on Urban Ecologies and is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.
About “Assembling Futures”
The DLA Spring 2023 Lecture Series “Assembling Futures” brings together distinguished academics and professionals in the fields of landscape architecture and heritage conservation to discuss recent works concerning environmental futures. Although landscape and heritage practices have long engaged with the regeneration of existing environments for future use, the precise relationships between such works and the future remain underexamined. Lectures in this series explore landscape architecture and heritage conservation as future-making practices that condition how future environments are managed, valued and imagined. By attending to how different projects reassemble the relationships between human and non-human agents and evolving socio-material engagements across different scales, the series encourages critical reflections on the competing visions of building future worlds in the face of growing uncertainty and unfolding environment crises.
The lecture is open to the general public.
CPD Credit Hours and AIA CES Learning Unit Hours are offered to members of the HKILA.
CPD Credit Hours are offered to members of the HKICON.
Please visit “Assembling Futures” for further information on the Public Lecture Series.