Course Description

Infrastructure is all around us. It is the room we sit in, the electrical wiring in the walls, the plumbing that brings water, the cables that connect us to networks beyond. It is our neighbourhoods, their layout, roads, drainage systems. It is our cities, their masterplans, the metro that moves millions, the centres of commerce that sustain economic life. It stretches far beyond, to the dams that secure water for agricultural and non-agricultural operations, mines and mining operations that power our grids, and highways that increase urban-rural connectivity and move commodities across vast distances. In a word, infrastructure is ubiquitous. It is that ubiquity, however, precisely why it remains hidden in plain sight. When infrastructure works, it recedes into the fabric of everyday life, becoming unremarkable and taken for granted. That ordinariness, however, holds only so long as infrastructure delivers on its promises and is thus reliable in nature. When it fails, and/or when its legal, social, environmental or architectural frictions emerge from the background, they expose the politics, inequalities and improprieties that its facilitation and functioning had previously obscured.

The course examines this duality inherent to infrastructure. Drawing on legal texts (legislation and delegated legislation) , judicial decisions, administrative documents and decisions (Ex: impact assessment reports, public hearing records), official reports, and ethnographic studies to understand how infrastructure is imagined, facilitated, contested, and ultimately experienced. Supplemented by secondary and/or theoretical literature that offers a baseline to analyze such documents on, the course broadly answers the following questions:

Why infrastructure, and the narratives around its promise and potential.?
What is the relationship between land, land relations and infrastructure development?
What does it mean to assess infrastructure?
How, and if the costs of infrastructure projects are internalized within administrative processes?
How do law and science constitute infrastructure?
How are resources allocated for infrastructure development?