ABSTRACT
On September 18, 2009, the blade of a giant wind turbine descended on the town hall square in Copenhagen. Using paint made available by the Environmental Office of the municipal administration, local kids were invited to literally “lend a hand” to the city’s green energy transition by imprinting their fingers onto this future-laden technology (Figure 8.1). Symbolically, this gesture would serve to publicly endorse a new municipal Climate Action Plan, in which 100 wind turbines were to be installed on the city’s territory, marking at once an infrastructural and eco-political ambition. As such, the event bore all the insignia of techno-political spectacle as a familiar format of modern power (Larkin 2013), carefully staged this time in front of the concrete architectural form of the urban collective, the town hall. Speeches of local politicians made clear that, from nowon, wind turbines were to be the res publica, the public thing, of Copenhagen life – a visible and celebrated marker of the city’s dedication to “the climate fight.” A little less than two years later, however, the fate of four 140-meter-tall
wind turbines, forming part of the action plan, came to a much less spectacular end. Projected by architects and engineers to be build off the tip of a 350-hectare peninsula undergoing urban renewal, known as Nordhavn (North Harbor), the national parliament decided to pass legislation that banned wind turbines from this otherwise ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ urban planning project. Acting on the direct initiative of the Ministry of Transport, the wind turbines were sacrificed as part of a wider national infrastructural settlement, meant to authorize the construction of a new container ship terminal on the site. Journalists and others were quick to note a backdrop of civic anti-wind turbine protest (see Blok and Meilvang 2015). Whatever the trigger, the resultant
show of legal sovereignty met with much dismay among Copenhagen planners and politicians, who saw little justification for such heavy-handed interference in what was, presumably, a shared ambition of infrastructural redesign in the face of global challenges. In this chapter I leverage the Copenhagen wind turbine story – part of
wider and ongoing fieldwork1 – in order to pose questions about the material politics of urban infrastructures, including the place of public contestation and civic attachments in its enactment. If, as anthropologist Alberto CorsínJiménez argues (2014: 342), “cities worldwide are witnessing today a transformation of their infrastructural and material landscapes,” such transformation is effected in no small part in the name of how planetary ecological threats become tangible and urgent in cities. Concern with climate change, in particular, animates a range of urban infrastructural interventions to achieve (socalled) low-carbon and resilient cities. As I will argue here, however, analyses of this urban situation have so far failed to take sufficiently note of the ways in which material infrastructural objects, like the Copenhagen wind turbines, come to be embroiled in public and democratic politics in the city. Conversely, the present chapter suggests that, understood as specific set-
tings of material politics, eco-urban planning interventions in the wake of climate change pose important analytical challenges to work on infrastructures in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, sociology, and beyond. In these fields, infrastructures have often been described as the
sunk, unnoticed, and indeed invisible backdrops to socio-cultural life, requiring for their study the figure-ground reversal that Geoffrey Bowker famously dubbed infrastructural inversion (e.g. Bowker 1994). In urban-ecological settings, however, infrastructures are inverted, so to speak, almost by default: here, multiple and conflicting actors engage in an explicit material politics of urban redesign, in which relations among urban life, technologies, and nature(s) are turned into contested matters of public concern. These settings, in short, enact a certain publicization of infrastructures (Rubio and Fogué 2013). Wind turbines are good candidates for inquiring into such dynamics – in
part because they are, in a banal sense, highly visible infrastructural objects (the theme of in/visibility, as we shall see, comes with more complications). More importantly, what the not-yet-stabilized energy infrastructural transition signaled by the Copenhagen wind turbines entails is a situation in which the social and the material is, as it were, held in mutual suspension (see Corsín-Jiménez 2014). Whereas technology may indeed be “society made durable,” in Bruno Latour’s (1991) famous phrase, the ethical-political ground on which new infrastructures are to stabilize is here as unsettled as the technologies. The work of socio-technical redesign thus becomes a site of forging and stabilizing – that is, of infrastructuring, or “infra-commoning” (Amin 2014) – a set of new urban habits and habitats. Rephrased in these terms, the question elicited by the Copenhagen wind
turbines is the following: under what conditions do socio-material urban worlds acquire qualities that we may call infrastructural, in the sense of ordering heterogeneous technical and ethical-political forces in converging, layered, and relatively stabilized ways? In what follows, I pursue this question by way of engaging certain intersections of STS and political theory, specifically of a pragmatist bent. In particular, I hope to show that Noortje Marres’ work on material publics (2007) in conjunction with the French neo-pragmatists Bruno Latour and Laurent Thévenot prove helpful in rethinking the politics of civic contestation and attachments to material ecologies at stake in the redesign of urban infrastructures. In complementary fashion, I argue, concepts from each of these analysts prove helpful in staying sensitive to the very shifts in meanings and material practices of infrastructural politics. The Copenhagen wind turbines provide a suitable test site for the argument.
