Socio-Ecological Transformations and the Hybridization of Infrastructure Delivery

The accelerating climate crisis is driving profound transformations of urban infrastructures, particularly in housing. Decarbonization, circular resource management, and adaptation to environmental change require not only technological innovation but also shifts in governance, everyday practices, and responsibilities. These processes increasingly produce hybridity in infrastructure delivery, in which established and emerging actors, technologies, and modes of provision become entangled.

Socio-ecological transformations challenge conventional infrastructure models based on centralized provision, economies of scale, and clear institutional responsibilities. Decentralized energy systems, circular water management, and community-based solutions are often layered onto existing networks rather than replacing them. As a result, hybrid configurations emerge through the coexistence and interaction of old and new infrastructures, public and private actors, formalised and informalised arrangements, and individual and collective practices.

At the same time, infrastructure transformations are also politically contested. Responsibilities for provision, maintenance, and adaptation are increasingly renegotiated among states, utility providers, private companies, communities, and households. These processes generate new opportunities for participation and innovation, while also producing tensions, conflicts, and uneven distributions of costs, risks, and benefits. Consequently, questions of social justice and inequality are central to understanding infrastructural transformation.

This session invites contributions that examine how socio-ecological transformations generate hybrid infrastructural configurations across diverse contexts. We are particularly interested in analyses of the coexistence, overlap, and mutual dependencies of diverse actors, materialities, and practices. Contributions may explore how hybrid infrastructures challenge established distinctions such as formal/informal, public/private, planned/unplanned, or networked/unnetworked, and what these developments reveal about the governance and politics of socio-ecological transformation.