Infrastructure

The Infrastructural Ideal and the Modern Networked Home

To begin, the modern infrastructural ideal should be understood in the context of Fordism and Keynesianism. Fordism, named for the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, refers to a system of mass production, distribution, and consumption that is reliant on the centralized provision of infrastructure networks for the reproduction both of capital and labor power. In the United States, Fordist economies of scale were nurtured by the Keynesian state (named for economist John Maynard Keynes), which implemented the redistributions and cross-subsidies that the “ideal” required. Between 1920 and 1960, massive federal investment in infrastructure transformed water, sanitation, transport, gas, and energy grids into the standardized and ubiquitous underpinnings of advanced industrial society. It was also during this era that the comprehensively networked home emerged as a crucial node within Keynesian systems of privatized consumption and social reproduction. As household access to road, water, energy, and communication networks became indispensable, residents became more tightly enmeshed within the capitalist system of dispersed consumption. Through the provision of elaborate physical and social service networks, the Keynesian state thus created the socio-physical preconditions for capital accumulation and social reproduction under conditions of Fordism.

Keynesianism reached its structural limits in the 1970s and was subsequently replaced by a neoliberal mode of governance and a post-Fordist system of production. The rise of neoliberalism signaled, inter alia, an abrupt “rescaling” of infrastructure development, usefully conceptualized as the dual “uploading” (to supranational levels) and “downloading” (to subnational levels) of infrastructural authority. On one hand, the political economy of infrastructure was uploaded through processes of privatization and financialization. Although, at present, some local water systems, transport assets, and power grids are fully owned by transnational corporations, the process of financialization influences all infrastructure sectors. Indeed, even when cities do not directly privatize public works, they often must engage capital markets to finance their efforts, as the development of public works now unfolds largely within the global infrastructure market. This entails private sector regulators, such as bond-rating agencies, which impose a different disciplinary logic than did their public sector predecessors. While localities once received much of their infrastructure funding through intergovernment transfers based on sociodemographic criteria, they are now compelled to keep expenditures low and revenues high in order to maintain positive bond ratings.

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