Splintering, Specificity, Unsettlement: A Commentary on Splintering Urbanism

This short commentary seeks to supplement the conceptualization of infrastructural splintering with the ways in which the agential functioning of infrastructure—infrastructure as a verb—not only articulates bodies, things, materials, and spaces in cascading relationality, but produces specificities incapable of definitive measure. Here, specific constellations of urban inhabitants refuse to be governed in terms of a calculus that seeks to make judgments about the efficacy of particular living spaces, and their relative sustainability or value. Such specificity is one component of the ways in which infrastructure engenders unsettlement, of both position and sensibility. Part of Splintering Urbanism’s enduring value is found in the multifaceted dimensions of detachment, materialized both in the production of urban operations that resist ready translation into the normative terms of efficacy and in the undermining of normative social relations.