Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail

Stephen GrahamNewcastle University

Starting Points: Infrastructure and Urbanization

• 2007 50% of world’s population live in urban area. These 3.3 billion people concentrated on 2.4% of earth’s surface

• Rely on spectrum of mobilities and connections, obvious and hidden

• Once infrastructure networks are successfully built, "unconnected localities" can be linked through what Latour calls "provisionally commensurable connections" (Latour, 1997; 2).

• Urbanites "are particularly at risk when their complex and sophisticated infrastructure systems are destroyed and rendered inoperable, or when they become isolated from external contacts" (Barakat, 1998)

• Usually no alternatives; increasingly tightly-coupled and multi-scale interdependencies: cascade effects

1. Starting Points 2. Understanding

Infrastructure Disruptions

3. Infrastructure Disruptions, Social and Political Mobilisation & Political Violence

4. Conclusions

Cyborg Urbanization

• Blending of social into technical (and vice versa) ; technological into natural/organic ; and social into natural/organic

• Complexes of ‘infrastructure’ involve all three processes of blurring: socio-technical (cyborg bodies); socio-natural (urban water systems; resource commodity chains); techno-natural (urban metabolism & ecology)

• "The city", writes Erik Swyngedouw, "cannot survive without capturing, transforming and transporting nature's water. The 'metabolism of the city' depends of the incessant flow of water through its veins" (1995, 390).

Constituting the ‘Anthropocene’: Technosocial & Technonatural

Assemblages and Metabolisms

“The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its

provision of water, warmth, light and other essential needs. The home can be conceived as ‘prosthesis and prophylactic’ in which modernist

distinctions between nature and culture, and between the organic and the inorganic, become

blurred” Matthew Gandy 2004

Bill Joy: When Turning Off Becomes Suicide

• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, caused a furore amongst, suggested that the

mediation of human societies by astonishingly complex

computerised infrastructure systems will soon reach the

stage when "people won't be able to just turn the machines

off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning

them off would amount to suicide" (2000, 239).

How are certain technosocial complexes ‘black boxed’ as the ‘engineer’s stuff’ of

‘infrastructure’?• For Susan Leigh-Star (1999) nine

characteristics.• embedded (i.e. “sunk into other

structures);• transparent (“it does not need to be

reinvented each time or assembled for each task”);

• offers temporal or spatial reach or scope;

• is learned by its users;• is linked to conventions of practice

(e.g. routines of electricity use); • embodies standards; • is built on an installed base of sunk

capital;• is fixed in modular increments, not

built all at once or globally;

Paradoxically, often only noticed when they fail

• Finally, infrastructure “tends to become visible upon breakdown”

• When infrastructure networks "work best, they are noticed least of all" (David Perry, 1995).

• In richer cities at least, modernist urbanism associated with progressive veiling of infrastructure, physically and discursively, beneath the urban scene, as part of emergence of “Wired-Piped-Tracked” Metropolis

• Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) "the networks became buried underground, invisible, banalised, and relegated to an apparently marginal, subterranean urban world".

Disruptions and Collapses Work to ‘Frontstage’ the Urban

‘Backstage’• Irving Goffman’s

(1959) terms, the built environment’s “backstage’ becomes momentarily “frontstaged”

• The sudden absence of infrastructural flow creates visibility just as the continued, normalised use of infrastructures creates a deep taken-for-grantedness and invisibility.

‘Unblackboxing’

• Technosocial ‘blackboxes” are momentarily undone

• Cultures of normalised and taken-for-granted infrastructure use sustain widespread assumptions that urban ‘infrastructure’ is somehow a material and utterly fixed assemblage of hard technologies embedded stably in place which is characterised by perfect order, completeness, immanence and internal homogeneity rather than leaky, partial and heterogeneous entities.

Of course for a billion urbanites or more, infrastructural failure, exclusion and precarity is perpetually and

profoundly visible & imprivisation is constant

Infrastructures have “always been foregrounded in the lives of more precarious social groups — i.e. those with reduced access or without access or who have been disconnected,

as a result either of socio-spatial differentiation strategies or infrastructure crises or collapse.”

Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008)

• Cultures and economies of infrastructural repair and improvisation almost invisible within urban studies

2. Understanding Infrastructure Disruptions

“Cyborgs, like us, are endlessly fascinated by machinic breakdowns, which would cause disruptions in, or denials

of access to, their megatechnical sources of being.” Tim Luke (2004)(above NYC blackout, 2003)

•

Socio-technical ‘Normal Accidents’ (Charles Perrow):

Blackout

“We are all hostages to electricity” Leslie

(1999)

Cascading disruptions in space and time (Richard Little) (e.g. California Blackouts, 2001)

The Electromateriality of ‘cyberspace’

• “When servers are down, panic sets in. Electronic power failures, internal surges, the glitches that corrupt and destroy memory, mirror our relation with power itself” (Grossman, 2003)

• A single Google server farm consumes as much electrical power as a city the size of Honolulu.

Blackouts and Neoliberal Dogma

• Electricity deregulation in the USA had actually ignored the economic and geographical

fundamentals of an industry that necessitates reliable, material connectivities between

generation and use; that is prone to cascading and spiralling failure as transcontinental and

transnational markets in supply are established within “complex interactive networks,” with

dramatic unintended consequences ; and where the hard infrastructures are ageing and

organised with a baroque level of complexity and local fragmentation.

But post-mortems for such events become messy!

“A distributive notion of agency does interfere with the project of blaming. But it does not

thereby abandon the project of identifying [ ] the sources of harmful effects. To the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to

look for sources. ” Must look at the “selfish intentions and energy

policy that provides lucrative opportunities for energy trading while generating a tragedy of the commons”; at “the stubborn directionality of a high-consumption social infrastructure”; and at “the unstable power of electron flows, wildfires, ex-urban housing pressures, and the

assemblages they form” Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett, (2005) “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3): 445–65. Pp. 463.

Blackouts and the ‘Global’ City

• “We are talking about Mumbai as the

next Shanghai”, a general manager for

a major Mumbai advertising firm, faced with losing

30% of its revenues due to daily 4 hour

power cuts, reported in 2005. “And here we are faced with the possibilities of blackouts” (SAND,

2005).

• Also unerringly reveal the often concealed politics of cyborganised cities

• e.g. Katrina in 2005 not a ‘natural disaster’ or ‘Act of God.’ Rather, the inevitable result of:

• Climate change accentuating hurricane

• Hitting a city denuded of natural protection and

• Very poorly covered by a levee network that was systematically racially biased over centuries of constructed socio-nature in context of a

• A Neoconservative and racist Federal Government that had systematically skewed Emergency Planning towards terrorism for political ends

Fleeting Moments of Visibility: eg Trawler Severing Oceanic Optic Fibre Off Egypt, December 2008

“On July 19, 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper, wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make

the boxcars glow. A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks. By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid along the railroad

right-of-way, disrupting telecommunications traffic on a critical New York-Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail. The New York–based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability to update its web pages.

Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report problems. Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and

Los Angeles, and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact with Washington.” Kazys

Varnelis

Disruption, Digitality & Internet Geopolitics

Malign Mobilities: SARS (Roger Keil and S. Harris Ali)

Securitising Networked Flows

Malign Immobilities: Sewer Fat (Simon Marvin and Will Medd)

Supply Disruptions: Oil Shock

Disruption Geopolitics

Alan Feldman: ‘Normality’ and ‘Event’ -- Infrastructure and ‘securocratic war’

“The interruption of the moral economy of safe circulation is characterized as a dystopic ‘risk event’,” Feldman suggests.

“Disruption of the imputed smooth functioning of the circulation apparatus in which nothing is meant to happen. ‘Normalcy’ is the

non-event, which in effect means the proper distribution of functions, the occupation of proper differential positions, and

social profiles.”

Critical Infrastructure protection, ‘resilience’

and virtual borders

* Centre on pre-emtively idnetifying and targeting malign

circulations – of bodies, data, pathogens, code

and finance -- whilst sustaining ‘normal’ and

risk-free ones

“The virtual border, whether it faces outward or inward to foreignness,

is no longer a barrier structure but a shifting net, a flexible spatial

pathogenesis that shifts round the globe and can move from the exteriority

of the transnational frontier into the core of the securocratic state.”

Allen Feldman

“The next Pearl Harbor will be both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's targets will not be the U.S. military or defense system but, instead, the U.S. public and its post-

industrial and highly informatized lifestyle. What is now a tool for comfort, an

object of leisure, or a necessary support for work

[..] will soon become the world's deadliest weapon”

(Debrix, 2001)

Postal Systems…

Water…

Streets…

3. Infrastructure Disruptions, Social and Political Mobilisation & Political

Violence

“Complex infrastructure often exhibits extreme levels of vulnerability to non-planned events. The reason for this is may be found in an area of complexity

research called highly optimized tolerance (HOT). HOT research has found that complex networks, like most global

infrastructure, exhibit behaviors explained by the design considerations

of its makers. The end-result of this planning is a network that is extremely

robust against certain types of anticipated failures/insults but conversely is hypersensitive to

unanticipated classes of uncertainty”. John Robb

Contemporary political mobilisation and political

violence increasingly deployed through embedded

urban infrastructures at multiple scales to distribute

cascade symbolic and logistical effects

“Grocer Terrorists”: Criminalisation of (Alleged) Infrastructural Targeting: “The

Coming Insurgency” and the “Tarnac Nine”

Mumbai’s ‘Water Wars’ (Colin McFarlane)

Infrastructure Disruptions and Political Protest -

Bangkok: People's Alliance for

Democracy (PAD), Dec 2008

Gate Gourmet Dispute, Heathrow, 2005

Criminalising Strikes,

Securitising Labour and the

Postpolitical ‘Logistics City’ (Deb Cowen)

Passage-Point Urbanism: Jittery Camps,

Archipelagoes of Enclaves & Dreamworlds of

Neoliberalism

“The new bunker is a passage from one point to another”

Virilio and Lotringer

Disruption by Design and the Liberal Way of War: State Infrastructural Warfare

"There is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon" (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999)

"If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you go after their infrastructure. " (Phil Agre, 2001)

“Strategic Paralysis”: Urban Infrastructure and US Air Power

John Warden’s “Enemy as a System”. Basis for US

doctrine : “Strategic Ring Theory”. Civilian

infrastructures =‘dual-use targets’

Ritzer "by declaring dual-use targets legitimate military

objectives, the Air Force can directly target civilian morale”

"If infrastructure links the subsystems of a society," he wrote, "might it be the most important target ?" (Felker,

1998).

First Order Effects Second Order Effects

Third Order Effects

No light after dark or in building interiors

Erosion of command and control capabilities

Greater logistics complexity

No refrigeration Increased requirement for power generating equipment

Decreased mobility

Some stoves/ovens non operable

Increased requirement for night vision devices

Decreased Situational Awareness

Inoperable hospital electronic equipment

Increased reliance on battery-powered items for news, broadcasts, etc.

Rising disease rates

No electronic access to bank accounts/money

Shortage of clean water for drinking, cleaning and preparing food

Rising rates of malnutrition

Disruption in some transportation and communications services

Hygiene problems Increased numbers of non-combatants requiring assistance

Disruption to water supply, treatment facilities, and sanitation

Inability to prepare and process some foods

Difficulty in communicating with non-combatants

“It should be lights out in Belgrade : every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be

targeted. We will set your country back by pulverizing

you. You want 1950 ? We can do 1950. You want 1389 ? We

can do that, too!”

Thomas Friedman, New York Times,

April 23rd, 1999

‘Bomb Now, Die Later’ : The ‘War on Public Health’ in Iraq -- 1991-2003

”I want to put every [Iraqi]

household in an autonomous

mode and make them feel they were isolated…

We wanted to play with their

psyche”

General Buster Glosson 1991

.

Towards State Computer Network Attack (CNA)

The aim of the US cyber-attack

programme is to “gain access to, and

control over, any and all networked

computers, anywhere on Earth.”

William J. Astore, Tom Dispatch, June 5th,

2008, at

Conclusion: Heuristic Devices

• Critical focus on the politics of infrastructure disruptions a powerful perspective for linking ‘mobilities turn’, political ecology and economy, critical urban geography, biopower and critical security & risk studies/IR

• Further disrupt notions of ‘natural disaster’, ‘technical’ failure etc.

• Infrastructure disruptions and their manufacture often remain hidden, their politics obfuscated, beneath continued modernist binaries: cities and nature; cities and ‘the environment’, ‘North-South’, ‘peace/war’, ‘inside’/’outside’ of nations etc.

• Reveal the traces and politics of cyborg urbanisation (and decyborganization)

• Exposure of disruptions of ‘normal’ circulations and mobilities serve to problematise and denaturalise ‘normal’ ones within broader context of neoliberal globalisation, urbanisation and securitisation