Commoning roads: maintenance and the labour of infrastructure

This chapter discusses the analytical purchase of the concept of commoning for understanding infrastructure maintenance beyond the more common state- and market-centred approaches. It explores this concept through the case of Swedish civic road associations. These associations own and maintain their own road systems, which are open and free for the general public to use. Road associations reproduce themselves, as a community, by maintaining their roads as a common resource and striving towards self-reliance and sufficiency. Commoning is subsequently unfolding in opposition to external pressures. Road associations are subject to the pressures from municipal governments and their road standards and from corporations attempting to offload work tasks onto the commons. Commoning is, at least in the case studied, dynamically balancing off these pressures while cultivating communal labour among its members. The chapter concludes by proposing that social studies on infrastructure have much to gain from using commoning as an analytical concept.