Urban Infrastructure, Power and Inclusion: Star and Larkin Explained

Urban infrastructure is the set of networks that make a city work, water, sanitation, energy, transport, telecommunications, waste, and also the place where power materialises most discreetly. Deciding which neighbourhood gets sewers, where the metro runs or who has fibre optic is deciding who fully belongs to the city. Two authors have taught us to read infrastructure as social fact rather than mere technology: the sociologist Susan Leigh Star, with her ethnography of infrastructure, and the anthropologist Brian Larkin, who studied its politics and poetics. Their work founded what is now called the infrastructural turn in urban studies.

Susan Leigh Star: infrastructure is invisible until it breaks

Star, in The Ethnography of Infrastructure (1999), proposed a definition that has become classic: infrastructure is invisible while it works and becomes visible when it breaks. It is relational, because what is an object of work for the engineer is an unseen background for the user; it is embedded in other structures, learned as part of membership in a community, and it embodies standards that decide what is inside and what is out. Star insisted on studying the boring, lists, forms, pipes, because that is where decisions about who counts are hidden. Her example of the person with an allergy for whom a standard menu is an obstacle shows that every infrastructure has its excluded.

Brian Larkin: the politics and poetics of infrastructure

Larkin, in The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure (2013), added that infrastructures carry not only water or electricity but meanings. Dams, highways and power grids are built as promises of modernity and displayed as spectacles of state power, regardless of whether they work well. In his studies of Nigeria he showed how radio, cinema and intermittent electricity produce urban ways of life of their own, and how the fantasy of complete infrastructure coexists with everyday improvisation. Infrastructure is, in his reading, a way of governing and an aesthetic at once.

Splintering networks, Flint and infrastructural violence

From those foundations, research has documented how infrastructure distributes power and inclusion. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin described in Splintering Urbanism (2001) the shift from the universal networks of the twentieth century to unbundled networks that connect high-value enclaves and bypass the rest: toll highways, gated developments with their own services, fibre in the financial district. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where a cost-saving decision poisoned a poor, majority-Black city with lead from 2014, showed that infrastructural exclusion can be lethal. Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O'Neill called that harm inflicted by omission infrastructural violence.

Digital infrastructure and the smart city: new exclusions

The digital dimension has renewed the problem. The sensors, platforms and algorithms that manage traffic, lighting or surveillance are infrastructure in Star's sense, invisible while they work, and they decide whom the smart city serves: who appears in the data and who does not, who can pay for the service and who is left outside the app. Larkin helps us see the poetics of those networks, the promise of efficiency and modernity with which they are sold, and the politics they conceal: data ownership, surveillance and dependence on private providers.

The lesson for planning is twofold. First, make infrastructure visible before it fails: map who has and who lacks water, transport or connectivity, and treat those gaps as reversible political decisions. Second, plan infrastructure as a commons rather than an enclave, with universal networks, public maintenance and user participation in its design. Star and Larkin offer no recipes, but they offer a way of looking: behind every pipe and every cable there is a decision about who belongs to the city.