Material and "providential" social infrastructures: a foundational economy perspective

Social infrastructure is grounded on the interlocking of social and material dimensions and, from the user perspective, every kind of infrastructure is an “interaction regime” where technical, spatial and social elements coalesce. Social infrastructure are key to the “foundational economy”: they are material (utilities and daily fundamentals), overlooked (pubs, cafés, and shops) and providential (welfare and social policies) goods and services that make the fabric of the daily-life of people-in-places. Social infrastructures are also meaning-making devices through which people shape places; moreover people are themselves infrastructure, a standpoint that is often associated with the role infrastructure plays in the Global South and/or in impoverished contexts. Social infrastructure, so conceived, is open to three distinctive modes of planning: place-based planning, social planning and ad hoc planning. A major consequence of this perspective on social infrastructure is that every kind of planning mode should explicitly address the interplay between the formal and the informal dimension which every infrastructure consists of.