Culture in the City. Infrastructures and Concrete Utopias, in Six Steps

We live in a space deeply encoded by a sort of global infrastructure. We continually experience its effects on the ordinary scale of our daily lives, and indeed it is precisely that daily dimension in which the global infrastructure imposes itself in the format of the natural objectivity of things and the inexorable way with which they are in relation to each other. These infrastructures are inextricably tangible – railway or motorway networks, oil and gas pipelines, Internet backbones, extractive plants, containers and goods warehouses – and intangible – the Internet of Things, consumer profiling data, logistics models, standards that establish measures, formats, intensities. A multiplicity of infrastructures constantly at work, increasingly synchronised with each other and particularly pervasive in our forms of life. Socio-technical systems in which forms of extra-state power, much more agile and faster than the public actor, penetrate and significantly affect its ability to regulate. From the containers in which goods reach any place in the world to the software and online platforms through which, for example, we order those goods; from credit cards with a systematic thickness of 0.76 mm to be used in any ATM in the world to the security standards of buildings and homes: every aspect of our lives bears the signs of the presence of infrastructure effectively functional to the production and control of connectivity. In fact, connectivity and the social imaginary through which it takes shape are a historically determined and therefore changeable product. The peculiarity of our time consists precisely in the synchronisation between the imaginary of connectivity and the factory-world, that is, the international division of labour and the global value chains that this global infrastructure allows. In this sense, the pandemic, or rather, as pointed out a few weeks ago in an editorial by the authoritative Lancet, the “syndemic” (a situation in which viral dynamics combine with noncommunicable diseases and their social determinants, reproducing and further exacerbating inequalities), is dramatic counter evidence of this historical peculiarity: it is proving devastating (also) to the extent that it affects the very socio-material heart of life forms in the times of infrastructure capitalism, or in other words connectivity.