Urban Studies and Social Policy
Date: Wednesday 05 February 2025
Time: 15:30 - 17:00
Venue: Hetherington Room 118
Category: Conferences, Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Charlotte Lemanski

Abstract: It is widely acknowledged within the urban studies ‘infrastructural turn’ (Graham and Marvin 2022) that infrastructure is not just the technical service or product that is physically delivered via reticulated pipes, wires, sewers, and roads, but that infrastructure is fundamentally a socio-political and relational process of complex contestation and negotiation over power and resources (Graham and Marvin 2001; Larkin 2013; Amin 2014; Coutard and Rutherford 2015; Lemanski and Massey 2022). In other words, infrastructures are not an inert, taken-for-granted substrate upon which social life unfolds; rather, that material/technical forms only become infrastructure when they enable human life to function (Star, 1999). Adopting a relational understanding of infrastructure trains our lens on the ways in which infrastructure illuminates and mediates political life, captured through the concept of Infrastructural Citizenship (Lemanski 2019, 2020). This concept explores how citizenship perceptions, identities and practices are mediated through infrastructure (in material and political terms) for both citizens and the state. Charlotte will introduce and explain the concept of Infrastructural Citizenship through examples from her research in South Africa.

Bio: Charlotte Lemanski is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Cambridge. She has worked in South Africa for more than twenty years, exploring everyday forms of inequality through the lens of infrastructure, housing, urban governance, and citizenship. Most recently she has been questioning what the ‘Just Urban Transition’ means for diverse stakeholders and sectors in highly unequal African cities, building on prior research investigating the implications of Off-Grid infrastructure transitions in African cities.