Article
ID: CBB505883336

Working with Infrastructural Communities: A Material Participation Approach to Urban Retrofit (March 2021)

unapi
Sustainability Cities and towns Science and technology studies (STS) Infrastructure Consumption (Economics) Participation Buildings--Retrofitting 21st century London (England)

Retrofit is a rising area of concern for Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars of infrastructure. This paper sits at the junction between applied and theoretical approaches by using STS to support interventions in urban infrastructure systems and expand STS critique of retrofit. It discusses findings from a multidisciplinary project piloting retrofit possibilities to positively impact the way water, energy, and food resources were consumed in a London housing estate. Through qualitative research, we found that residents were making social and material interventions in infrastructure systems to manage the way resources were consumed at home, driven by a commonly held motivation to avoid wastefulness. We then mapped the social and material factors that helped or hindered these individual ambitions and used them to inform our codesign process. We found it helpful to think of the residents as an infrastructural community; a group of residents that share a material connection that can help mobilize collective action on shared consumption. We suggest this concept is useful for interventions and critiques of infrastructure retrofit, particularly in cities in the Global North where retrofit programs aim to rescale national systems to neighborhood levels. The concept highlights the possibilities for participation that emerge from bottom-up retrofit.

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Authors & Contributors
Bugliarello, George
Gabrys, Jennifer
Kelty, Christopher M.
Michael, Mike
Morgan, Ruth A.
Vleuten, Erik van der
Journals
Science, Technology, and Human Values
The Bridge: Journal of the National Academy of Engineering
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Social Studies of Science
Icon: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology
Science as Culture
Publishers
University of Chicago Press
SUNY Press
Concepts
Science and technology studies (STS)
Cities and towns
Infrastructure
Sustainability
Participation
Urban planning
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
20th century, late
Places
London (England)
Europe
Africa
Great Britain
Asia
Netherlands
Institutions
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
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