IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ijurrs/v47y2023i2p183-199.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

PREFIGURATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects

Author

Listed:
  • Amelia Thorpe

Abstract

This article examines the unsanctioned installation of infrastructure for walking and cycling as a site of possibility. In contrast to accounts of everyday urbanism that see in these kinds of interventions possibilities for a politics in which the state subsides, I find instead an effort to reclaim the state for more progressive purposes. I focus on groups calling themselves transformation agencies and departments of transformation to argue that DIY infrastructure is deployed on city streets not as an effort to subvert or supplant city authorities, but instead as prefigurative performances of city–citizen relationships ‘as if’ they were otherwise. Exploiting the plurality and contingency of the state and its legal forms, objects are installed to show how quickly things could be different, and sometimes they succeed in prompting significant shifts. Through guerrilla paint and pop‐up posts, transformation agencies work prefiguratively to imagine and enact forms of citizenship that are not centred on automobility.

Suggested Citation

  • Amelia Thorpe, 2023. "PREFIGURATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: Mobility, Citizenship, and the Agency of Objects," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(2), pages 183-199, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:47:y:2023:i:2:p:183-199
    DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.13141
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13141
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1468-2427.13141?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mimi Sheller & John Urry, 2000. "The City and the Car," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(4), pages 737-757, December.
    2. Heyer, J.H. & Sethi, M. & Wall, S.P. & Ayoung-Chee, P. & Slaughter, D. & Jacko, S. & DiMaggio, C.J. & Frangos, S.G., 2015. "Drawing the curtain back on injured commercial bicyclists," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 105(10), pages 2131-2136.
    3. Abdoumaliq Simone, 2005. "Urban Circulation and the Everyday Politics of African Urban Youth: The Case of Douala, Cameroon," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(3), pages 516-532, September.
    4. Margit Mayer, 2013. "First world urban activism," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(1), pages 5-19, February.
    5. Jason Henderson, 2020. "EVs Are Not the Answer: A Mobility Justice Critique of Electric Vehicle Transitions," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 110(6), pages 1993-2010, November.
    6. Michel Callon, 2010. "Performativity, Misfires And Politics," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(2), pages 163-169, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Amanda Tattersall & Kurt Iveson, 2024. "PREFIGURING PRAGMATICALLY? Prefigurative Politics and the Constellation of People Power Strategies for Winning Affordable Housing in Cape Town," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(3), pages 423-441, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Miner, Patrick & Smith, Barbara M. & Jani, Anant & McNeill, Geraldine & Gathorne-Hardy, Alfred, 2024. "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    2. Mark Thomas & Steven Tufts, 2016. "‘Enabling dissent’: Contesting austerity and right populism in Toronto, Canada," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 27(1), pages 29-45, March.
    3. Busscher, Tim & Tillema, Taede & Arts, Jos, 2015. "In search of sustainable road infrastructure planning: How can we build on historical policy shifts?," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 42-51.
    4. Martens, Karel & Golub, Aaron & Robinson, Glenn, 2012. "A justice-theoretic approach to the distribution of transportation benefits: Implications for transportation planning practice in the United States," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 46(4), pages 684-695.
    5. Sam Hampton & Richard Blundel & Aqueel Wahga & Tina Fawcett & Christopher Shaw, 2022. "Transforming small and medium‐sized enterprises to address the climate emergency: The case for values‐based engagement," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(5), pages 1424-1439, September.
    6. Esin Özdemir & Ayda Eraydin, 2017. "Fragmentation in Urban Movements: The Role of Urban Planning Processes," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(5), pages 727-748, September.
    7. Ross Beveridge & Philippe Koch, 2021. "Contesting austerity, de-centring the state: Anti-politics and the political horizon of the urban," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 39(3), pages 451-468, May.
    8. Loconto, Allison & Rajão, Raoni, 2020. "Governing by models: Exploring the technopolitics of the (in)visilibities of land," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    9. Matthew Williams & Non Arkaraprasertkul, 2017. "Mobility in a global city: Making sense of Shanghai’s growing automobile-dominated transport culture," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(10), pages 2232-2248, August.
    10. Bear, Laura, 2020. "Speculations on infrastructure: from colonial public works to a postcolonial global asset class on the Indian Railways 1840-2017," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103445, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    11. Edgar Pieterse, 2010. "Cityness and African Urban Development," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2010-042, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    12. Cameron White, 2016. "The conditions of practical action: Neoliberalism and sustainability in the Australian road construction industry," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 34(8), pages 1501-1515, December.
    13. McFall, Liz, 2015. "Is digital disruption the end of health insurance? Some thoughts on the devising of risk," economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, vol. 17(1), pages 32-44.
    14. Vigar, Geoff & Shaw, Andrew & Swann, Richard, 2011. "Selling sustainable mobility: The reporting of the Manchester Transport Innovation Fund bid in UK media," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 468-479, March.
    15. Pera, Marina, 2020. "Potential benefits and challenges of the relationship between social movements and the commons in the city of Barcelona," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    16. Talia Margalit & Adriana Kemp, 2019. "The uneven geographies of post-political planning: Objections to urban regeneration projects in peripheral and central Israeli cities," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(4), pages 931-949, June.
    17. Nikitas, Alexandros & Cotet, Corneliu & Vitel, Alexandra-Elena & Nikitas, Nikolaos & Prato, Carlo, 2024. "Transport stakeholders’ perceptions of Mobility-as-a-Service: A Q-study of cultural shift proponents, policy advocates and technology supporters," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 181(C).
    18. Junxi Qian, 2015. "No right to the street: Motorcycle taxis, discourse production and the regulation of unruly mobility," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(15), pages 2922-2947, November.
    19. Miwa Matsuo, 2020. "Carpooling and drivers without household vehicles: gender disparity in automobility among Hispanics and non-Hispanics in the U.S," Transportation, Springer, vol. 47(4), pages 1631-1663, August.
    20. Paudyn, Bartholomew, 2013. "Credit rating agencies and the sovereign debt crisis: performing the politics of creditworthiness through risk and uncertainty," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 59626, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:47:y:2023:i:2:p:183-199. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0309-1317 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.