This chapter examines the concept of ‘rhythm’ as an analytic to illuminate and connect the multitude of times that permeate the city through infrastructure. The study of urban rhythms has a rich history and continues to develop in provocative ways (Edensor, 2010a; Smith and Hetherington, 2013; Crespi and Manghani, 2020; Abdullah et al, 2023). My argument therefore contributes to a growing body of scholarship exploring the city and its infrastructure through ‘rhythmanalysis’ (see Meyer, 2008; Walker, 2021; Engels, 2022; Monstadt, 2022; Plyushteva and Schwanen, 2022) and is primarily concerned with extending Henri Lefebvre's work on spatiotemporality via an open reading of Rhythmanalysis (published in English in 2004). Following Lefebvre, I understand rhythms as regularly occurring sequences of events or processes: not things, but open moving forces that cannot start and stop at any time (Meyer, 2008: 148; Blue, 2019: 937). I build on this idea to unpack three core rhythmic modalities through which infrastructure time unfolds: repetition, cycle, and period. These modalities are valuable because they enable us to dialectically connect the material and affective, organic and mechanical, absolute and relational, and continuous and discontinuous dimensions of urban infrastructure, as well as the quantitatively and qualitatively different time frames through which infrastructural systems and practices of everyday life co-evolve. My goal is to develop a generative framework to conceptualize urban space, politics, and social practice by incorporating a distinct rhythmic temporal analytic into the ongoing ‘infrastructure turn’.

Three-dimensional dialectics of space-time

I begin with the assertion that, in the face of time's complexities, neo-Marxist dialectics can help us conceptualize the multiple meanings of infrastructure's spatio-temporality in rigorous, systematic, and productive ways. As a first cut, we can deploy David Harvey's (2006) treatment of space and think about time as a Raymond Williams-esque ‘keyword’ for critical infrastructure studies. Harvey's famed tripartite division of absolute, relative, and relational space, after all, is founded on the spatial-temporal concerns of, in order, Newton, Einstein, and Leibniz (Harvey, 2006: 272– 5; 2009). For Harvey, space is neither absolute, nor relative, nor relational in and of itself, and the same is true for time: the nature of infrastructural space-time is only revealed and resolved through human practice.