The Broken Promise of Infrastructure
The Broken Promise of Infrastructure tackles the divisive cultural politics that have been used to deflect attention away from Britain's failing infrastructure, from Brexit through to the "levelling up" agenda and beyond. Building on more than a decade of research, Davies shows that infrastructures are always far more than concrete and steel: they reinforce nationalist narratives, undermine regional identities, and impose real limits on our politics. Exposing the geographies of race, class, and gender that still govern the way infrastructure is imagined, Davies invites us to break open these limits and ask what – or rather who – really makes Britain work.
The promise of "levelling up" has been broken. Ranging from Stoke-on-Trent to South Africa and Silicon Valley, Davies shows that this broken promise runs back through much longer histories of industry and empire. As racial capitalism maintains its iron grip on Britain and the climate crisis becomes daily more apparent, this book argues there has never been a more urgent time to challenge dominant ways of thinking about infrastructure, and to reclaim its world-shaping force for ourselves.
Endorsements
Offering an exhilarating journey through time and space, Davies is an expert guide through the ruins of a once imperial power to the hollow fantasy of what passes today as ‘levelling up’. This exciting book explains why the performative politics of planning and architecture are far too important to be left to the professionals.
– Vron Ware, author of Return of a Native: Learning from the Land
A crucial intervention into the ‘culture & society’ tradition, this superb study connects the decline of Britain and its social fabric to wider currents in global and post-imperial history. Davies has done something few British literary critics have had the means or courage to do in recent years: write a monograph of social purpose and importance.
– Alex Niven, author of The North Will Rise Again
Davies exposes how today’s nationalist structures of feeling remain a woeful substitute for the public life that modernist dreams once promised. A brilliantly bracing indictment of the political classes that have re-energised nationalist melancholia in lieu of a Britain that works.
– Sivamohan Valluvan, author of The Clamour of Nationalism
Sewage, housing, transport, oil: all are key to what Davies terms the ‘broken promise of infrastructure’. Tracing the colonial and classed legacies of today’s ‘infrastructures of feeling’ with inventiveness, precision, and care, this remarkable and timely book throws down the gauntlet for change, challenging us to reimagine and rebuild our collective infrastructure together.
– Jo Littler, editor of Left Feminisms
Contents
Introduction.
Beginning its story in the West Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent, the book uses the phrase ‘infrastructures of feeling’ to show how certain stories, affects, and experiences – what Raymond Williams referred to as structures of feeling – are connected to the hard materials that we encounter and rely on in our everyday lives, from railways and roads to sewers and housing.
Promise
The book’s first chapter explores the narratives of nationalist promise and exponential growth that have been built into infrastructure since the Second World War, reviewing their afterlives in Brexit and the 2019 general election campaign, and calling for a promise of infrastructure development that holds in tension the embodied experience of people’s day-to-day lives and the horizon of future alternatives.
Origins
The second chapter considers the cultural narratives that credit ‘genius’ individuals with infrastructure’s origins, mapping the global histories that are erased by such nationalist monuments and tracing this infrastructure of feeling as it has evolved from John Locke’s philosophies of property through the Victorian writer Samuel Smiles to the language of levelling up and the rise of Amazon capitalism.
Spectacle
The third chapter reaches beyond Britain to its Empire in southern Africa to show how infrastructure not only evokes powerful feelings when it fails, but also when it operates as a spectacle of power. The chapter tracks the building of railways across southern Africa before exploring how attempts to decolonise infrastructure have also made use of spectacle to reimagine a new social settlement.
Autonomy
The fourth chapter returns to the proliferation of roads and car parks in cities such as Stoke to show how privatised mobility infrastructures have been used to roll out deeply individualised and limited understandings of autonomy. Against these, the chapter argues that it is in everyday examples of collective organising that we might glimpse a future where infrastructure is not something done to us, but something we make collectively for ourselves.
Belonging
The fifth and final chapter explores how sanitation and housing infrastructures have underpinned imaginaries of cleanliness and dirt, and how these in turn have defined categories of belonging. It tracks a long history of racialised stigmatisation and failing infrastructure that culminates in the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, while also highlighting a range of place-making practices that have articulated different forms of belonging.
Epilogue
This book pushes back against deep-seated cultural imaginaries to create space for different ideas of infrastructures as place-making and life-giving materials. In its epilogue, it points to possible and potential futures of infrastructure in Britain.