Infrastructure, Power and the Resilience of the State

The Nation State played a very prominent role in the formation, dissemination, and stabilization of the modern infrastructural ideal, especially from a material perspective.

Infact the amount of investment required, together with the geographic scale of intervention, made the state the essential point of reference for the realization of infrastructure, which was considered the concrete proof of material progress.

Since the ’70, this mode has been in crisis and the public role of the state has been questioned, even and especially concerning the governance of infrastructure.

The proposal aims to problematize this prophecy, Although it is certainly possible to read the changes that have taken place over the past fifty years in terms of a gradual decline in the role of the state in the creation and control of many infrastructures, the most recent challenges demand that to abandon the linear logic that the idea of decline seems to suggest. Not only because a still substantial part of access to infrastructure is based on the mechanism of citizenship, but also because the goal is rather to understand what are the new forms through which state, supra-state, and extra-state governance processes interact in the management and implementation of infrastructure.