Afterword

Abstract

This book renders newly vivid those aspects of the urban social that have long been treated as background or setting. The hum of urban lives, as the editors Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies suggest, is often constituted by its infrastructural forms. The chapters in the book surface these forms with an acute sensitivity to the aftermaths of colonial violence, in particular. Histories of urban planning have long been intended to compartmentalize and often to segregate, thus rendering some modern and capacitated and others zoned and regulated. This book helps us to understand their impacts, how they inhabit and haunt infrastructural histories. Building on the work of Abdoumaliq Simone, Brian Larkin, Ash Amin and others, Planned Violence makes a strong claim that we should not interpret the study of infrastructures too narrowly, nor lose the multivalencies of what they are able to suggest about the constitution of the political, the past or corporeal life. The collection reveals how infrastructures of our places and our times are sites of violence, planned and unplanned, as well as modes of re-opening, repair and occupation. In all of these ways, they demand our urgent occasion for thinking.