Infrastructural Frictions

Abstract

This chapter explores more-than-human infrastructures that are materially performed and reconfigured by the ‘smart city’. We first consider literature that critiques ‘smart’ as a universalising set of urban, technological, and economic configurations that work to smooth out (and displace) the messy inefficiencies of the unsustainable city, and which foreground the intensification of intimate, ecological, and public surveillance along with the uneven benefits and harms accrued through the extraction of more-than-human labour and data. We then consider what such critiques illuminate and what relations are hidden or shadowed? We offer a counterfactual mapping of infrastructural frictions in multispecies smart cities as a critical point of difference. Drawing on feminist thinking about care, shadows, and ruins in multispecies worlds, we seek to think about what catches on the glitchy and frictive edges of smart cities and how might these be mobilised and transfigured by different forms of interdependence.