Afterword: Economies of infrastructure

urban life is... a matter of what can be made relatable at any point in time' (Simone 2011, 355).In their introduction to this special feature, Hillary Angelo and Christine Hentschel make a compelling case for the distinctive character of infrastructure as an object of analysis.Infrastructural forms, they suggest, are especially good to think with given the ways in which they mediate certain 'recurrent binaries' in critical thought -macro and micro, object and agent, human and non-human.This mediating quality has to do, perhaps, with the 'peculiar ontology' of infrastructure as both 'things and relations between things' (Larkin 2013, 329).My interest in this piece is to work at the intersection of some of these categories, in moving from the ethnographic and archival focus of the papers collected here to a conceptual concern with infrastructural economies.Such a move -between specific contexts of infrastructural interaction and more extended economies of infrastructure -is less about a shift up from the 'micro' to the 'macro' than it is about the changing scales at which, and the modes through which, infrastructures make things relatable.This movement from the ethnographic and archival to the economic is partly figurative and partly descriptive: such a critical space is opened up by Larkin's (2013, 328) account of infrastructure as an 'architecture of circulation'.In putting various things -materials, resources, capital, information, people -into circulation, in making them 'relatable', infrastructures involve diverse economies of investment, ownership, exchange and use.At the same time, they produce and reproduce distributional inequalities in material, and deeply spatial, ways.Thinking through economies of infrastructure lends itself to the kind of comparative or contrastive urbanism with which the special feature engages.These are architectures of circulation composed around various modes of design and delivery,