ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an examination of the modern infrastructure ideal, identified in the literature as a prescription of how infrastructure ought to appear and operate. Critical urban infrastructure scholarship has articulated and examined the travels of this ideal across the north and south. The chapter examines the relationship between work, virtue and the politics of distribution. Infrastructure studies are a particularly productive arena in which to investigate the normativity embedded in theory because an ideal, and its travels, has already been identified and investigated. One of the most central concerns for most of South Africa's colonial and apartheid economy was how to attract labour both from rural areas and other countries. The chapter deals with the idea that much of what scholars of southern cities are concerned about falls outside theory as conventionally articulated within the academy. More careful articulation of the process of urban theory making and its components may well help us navigate ongoing intellectual quandaries.
