Introduction: take your time

We live in infrastructural times. Of course, we always have. Socio-technical systems supplying energy, water, transportation, information, and waste removal have been essential to the development of urban life in its myriad forms, and they continue to be foundational for the remaking of urban and regional worlds. Yet in the first decades of the twenty-first century, infrastructure is having a profound moment in the spotlight. For one, research on urban and regional infrastructure has continued to develop in exciting ways since Susan Leigh Star (1999: 377) implored us to ‘study boring things’ and unravel the inherent dramas underlying infrastructure's ‘singularly unexciting … lists of numbers and technical specifications’. Indeed, it is difficult to perceive infrastructure as boring or banal as governments around the world embrace massive investments in infrastructure in pursuit of their economic and territorial ambitions at a multitude of scales (Addie, Glass, and Nelles, 2020; Schindler and Kanai, 2021; Shatkin, 2022). At the same time, a global ‘infrastructure turn’ is compelling scholars in the social and policy sciences (notably in urban studies) to grapple with infrastructures’ significance as ‘political intermediaries’ (Amin, 2014). They have responded by expanding their conceptual and methodological toolkits to interrogate the intersections of infrastructure, urbanization, and urban life in novel and generative ways (Larkin, 2013; Graham and McFarlane, 2015, Wiig et al, 2023). From political-economic critiques of mega-projects that are (re)shaping cities’ global competitiveness and intensifying capitalism's crisis tendencies (Jonas et al, 2019; Wiig and Silver, 2019; Schindler and DiCarlo, 2022) to ethnographic explorations of the incremental and improvised ways that infrastructural systems are (re)produced through everyday practice (Lawhon et al, 2018; McFarlane, 2021; Ramakrishnan et al, 2021), the study of infrastructure provides a powerful lens to understand how cities and regions worldwide are being built, governed, and contested.

Contemporary infrastructure scholarship is finely attuned to the geographic imprints of such urban infrastructuring. Roads and rails, cables and containers, pipelines and ports exist in place as specific spatial products, while as networked operating systems they foster all manner of flows across an increasingly urbanized planet. A rich spatial lexicon exists to help us conceptualize infrastructures’ central role in connecting, integrating, splintering, and bypassing the material and social geographies of cities, regions, countries, and even continents (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Young and Keil, 2010; Easterling, 2014).

The central contribution of the book is making new space for time and temporality in the global ‘infrastructure turn’. Contemporary infrastructure scholarship is highlighting the significance of infrastructural systems to the production and reconstruction of urban and regional space, yet we and our contributors argue it is the combination of temporalities and infrastructures that infuses cities and regions with rhythm and meaning. The book's chapters demonstrate the complex and multifaceted ways that time pervades the city through infrastructure and shapes the infrastructures of cities themselves. We have encountered the evolving materiality of water pipes and pumps, of concrete and rails, of electrical microgrids and global pathogens, and the resultant speeds and time frames through which financial value unevenly flows across time and space. The chapters’ empirical investigations have revealed a wealth of formal and informal social infrastructures that enable, produce, and replicate socio-technical configurations, from unfurling forms of financialization and state de-risking to the regulatory regimes shaping our ability to access urban space. We have also seen how time can be put to work (pasts mobilized, futures engaged, the present contested and claimed) to understand our current infrastructural worlds and foster their potential alternatives. What we hope emerges from these temporal adventures in infrastructure is a renewed appreciation of ‘infrastructure time’ as a social construct whose plurality – that is, the co-presence of multiple temporalities – informs, and is informed by, diverse, overlapping, and sometimes paradoxical human experiences (Nowotny, 1994).

The challenge for future infrastructure studies is to create geographically contextual accounts of these pluralistic temporal modalities, considering empirical detail about both the microseconds involved in self-healing systems and the epochal transformations of the Anthropocene. As we have seen from the streets of San Francisco to the fields of Laos, infrastructural times are embodied as people navigate their temporal and spatial worlds and are tempered by their individual agency and social constraints. Studying infrastructure's temporalities thus hinges on incorporating multiple knowledge systems (academic and lived) and requires us to recognize multiple ways of knowing and doing infrastructure time.

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.