People as Infrastructure

Harvard FAS

Infrastructures are commonly defined in physical terms or material forms (e.g. roads, buildings, power supplies) and are said to impose productivity on the city and positionality on its inhabitants. In this course, however, we will extend the notion of infrastructure directly to social networks and the evolving process of negotiation between state and nonstate urban actors with power differentials and competing interests. Taking inspiration from AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of “people as…