Obstruction: counter-pedestrianism and trajectories of an infrastructure public

Abstract

The paper advances ‘obstruction’ as a key to unlock urban infrastructures. Conceptualizing the modern city in terms of motion (of bodies, things and finances) has been our academic commonsense since the growth of research interest on urban settlements in the mid-nineteenth century. The motion narrative posits obstruction as its negation, which it eventually conquers, and keeps on deferring obstruction’s final advent—the deathly city. The paper is a critique of this urban autobiography. It shows how obstruction makes certain forms of collective living possible. It describes the possibility of such collective living as ‘infrastructure publics’—a rather new noun compound—that interrogates the taken for grantedness of both ‘public’ and ‘infrastructure’.