“Imaginaries from a Blackout”: Editorial Welcome
By Lana Judeh and Mohammed Abualrob
June 2023
In looking into the day-to-day experiences with infrastructure, a space emerges to examine broader issues about our societies and their relations with their political, economic and environmental systems. Specifically, it is a space to question the meaning of citizenship in the twenty-first century. If active citizenship is a practice immersed in the daily and routine, then perhaps looking at a water bill in Beirut, a train ride in Jerusalem, a blackout in Khartoum, or a bridge in Cairo or Kuwait City, can help us understand how infrastructural realities and various forms of citizenship in the Arab region are intertwined.
The idea of this special issue emerged from enduring discussions on the role of infrastructure in shaping our daily politics of belonging, alienation and antagonism. Within a globalized economy that constantly and persistently penetrates borders of all forms, various realms of infrastructure intersect, with many having common experiences across geographies. It is no coincidence that we find, in the contributions to this issue, similarities between the realities and meanings produced by infrastructure despite taking place in different locations and contexts.
The question of “what happens after the collapse of the electricity grid?” may be a question of what follows the collapse of the political project; the nation state or other models that promised a better future. It could also be a question of when and how people are mobilized or choose to (re)gain control over the decision-making of their daily affairs, and reorganize their relationships and ultimately their rights and responsibilities. More importantly, how do they overcome narrow localism and tribalism that fuel disputes over resources and services, to restore a collective and grassroots organization that achieves local and global citizenship at the same time?
In answering these questions, a fundamental starting point for this special issue was to investigate the extent to which people master infrastructures. That is, how do people, based on their local knowledge and resources, navigate technical systems at different levels, manage and govern them, and organize social relations around them.
Several contributions to this special issue explore the roles of infrastructure in people’s connection with and alienation from space and place. Specifically, the role that infrastructure exerts on public or shared space and people’s desire and ability to exist in, withdraw from, or return to and occupy it, be it a street or a valley. Driven by the desire to preserve or shape a collective memory of spaces and places, be they urban or natural, contemporary or historical, at the center or at the margins, these essays examine how such actions pave the way to new forms of empowerment, organization, agency, steadfastness, resistance, and subversion.
The question of everyday experiences with infrastructures is fundamentally a question about our relationship with nature as well as with each other. Infrastructural work and operations exert a form of violence that simultaneously depletes nature and marginalizes vulnerable groups. This violence provokes us to rethink our relationship with nature. It necessitates considering natural ecosystems as inspiration for new understandings of social, political, and economic relationships, as well as technological configurations. It is also evidence of humanity's need to reposition daily life and infrastructures within cyclical and regenerative systems, away from extraction and depletion. This special issue picks up the discussion on human-nature dichotomy - the constructed duality created by modernity and colonialism - which places humans outside of nature, and invokes delusions of control over it.
Expanding the discussion to include social, economic, and environmental “citizenships'' and not only “political” citizenship, which is limited to the legal membership in the state, requires the reconsideration of the rights and responsibilities of individuals and societies, as well as the reconfiguration of the relationship with the world; nature and the built environment across multiple scales of space and time. What we aspired to do with this issue is to start from the infrastructure crises in the Arab region to explore two interrelated issues: infrastructure’s role in stripping people of citizenship, or non-citizenship, so to speak, either by depriving them of their rights while maintaining their responsibilities, or by taking away both! And exploring alternative citizenship practices stemming from the urgency created by crises. That is to say, individual and collective practices for effective daily governance that build multi-layered affiliations, reformulate our social relations and individual and collective roles, and push to search for and build knowledge to imagine a better future.
Our culminating quest is to understand what kind of knowledge is required to seek answers to all these questions. Many of those who study infrastructure use the triad of nature, humans, and technology, and look at infrastructure as heterogeneous, nested biophysical, technological, and cultural networks that operate simultaneously and at different levels and scales. This necessarily entails delving into an interdisciplinary knowledge that uses different lenses to investigate the ways infrastructure shapes and is shaped by our realities. We hope that this special issue contributes to this discourse.
The core functions of infrastructure are connectivity, transmission, and networking. As guest editors of this edition of the Arab Urbanism magazine, we found ourselves in the midst of a form of infrastructure; a network of contributors, reviewers, and editors with diverse expertise who are spread across the world, volunteering efforts and cooperating smoothly to produce critical work that varies between academic essays and creative works.
This is a humble step to contributing to the novel form of infrastructure of words, imaginations, ideas, and a call to action. While we had hoped to produce a fully bilingual volume, it was not possible at this time. However, we hope to mobilize efforts in the coming months to provide the content of the issue in Arabic. We believe this is a part of our responsibility as authors and editors to produce content capable of reaching our societies and contributing to understanding the past, present, and future of our built and natural environments. Language, after all, is an essential infrastructure to make sense of the diverse knowledge we are contending with in our daily lives.
Finally, we thank all the contributors to this issue for all their efforts in creating critical work based on their diverse relationships with a range of topics and contexts. We thank the review and editorial team for their efforts and support in providing the necessary critique, evaluation and revision, each according to their experience. We received 40 proposals and worked as a team for almost a year to present to you 16 contributions that vary between academic creative content.
