ABSTRACT
In much debate on cities in the Global South, infrastructure is synonymous with breakdown, failure, interruption, and improvisation. The categorization of poorer cities through a lens of developmentalism has often meant that they are constructed as “problem.”599 These are cities, as Anjaria has argued, discursively exemplifi ed by their crowds, their dilapidated buildings, and their “slums.”600 A sense of a burgeoning population has led to scholastic and public accounts of these cities as, in Seabrook’s phrasing, uncontainable and inadequate: “The terms in which the cities are discussed-urban ‘explosion’, ‘catastrophe’—tend to assimilate them to natural disasters; they are problems crying out fi rst for relief, and then for solutions.”602
