ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the notion of infrastructural citizenship as a conceptual lens through which to acknowledge the interconnected relationship between infrastructure and citizenship in spaces of urban living. It explores how public infrastructure connects with citizenship in contemporary South Africa. Citizenship has long been a central concept within work on political, cultural and historical geography, exploring the relationship between citizens and the state. The citizenship is rooted in legal practices, but demonstrated through public infrastructure as the physical representation of the state in citizens' everyday spaces of living. Within the contemporary focus on citizenship as incorporating both legal practices and socio-political acts, there is widespread recognition that citizenship plays a role in both marginalizing certain people as well as being a tool for marginalized groups to protest at multiple scales. Contemporary approaches to infrastructure as socio-technical highlight the ways in which infrastructure provides a physical representation of broader socio-political processes that implicitly include citizenship practices and acts.
