ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that infrastructure-practice relations are more than material: they are shaped by the ambitions and actions of states, companies, citizens and consumers. It shows different visions and versions of 'normal' always coexist: there is no single template to follow and no one model of consumption. The book provides important insights into the manner in which successive versions of 'normal' are constituted through sequences of disruption and readjustment and across multiple sites and scales. It offers a conceptual toolkit with examples and lessons from the industrial West that remind that, too, arrangements have been flexible and have taken a variety of different forms. The book shows there are ways of making sense of the complex relations and politics at stake and ways of learning from conjunctions of infrastructures and practices, and from those that exist elsewhere.