Toward post-growth infrastructure: Features, logics, strategies

Contemporary economic growth relies on infrastructure. However, post-growth scholarship has only recently begun to grapple with infrastructure as a specific object of analysis and often reduces it to little more than a set of barriers to be overcome or a means to essential service provision. This article challenges such limited perspectives by developing a holistic framework through which to understand post-growth infrastructure, how it works and how it can change. Building on the insights of infrastructural analysis conducted in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), geography and anthropology, we advance a relational understanding of post-growth infrastructure, which we define as those that foster social practices that satisfy situated needs, limit consumption and resist capitalist co-optation. Furthermore, we examine the logics that both explain the social dominance of infrastructure and represent pathways for its transformation; that is, as a phenomenon that simultaneously coerces and seduces individuals to adopt certain practices, yet remains suggestive of and open to other uses. We argue that, in order to explain post-growth transformations, post-growth studies must engage with these logics. Finally, we identify strategies for post-growth infrastructural transformation: appropriating growth infrastructure, reconstructing it in line with a post-growth agenda and ensuring its maintenance in the face of capitalist pressures. In this way, our framework represents an important step towards a larger body of research on post-growth infrastructure.