This collection of papers offers a critical look at the social work that infrastructure does. We argue that small-scale interactions with infrastructure are, literally, foundations of larger scale social forms, including patterns of social integration and fragmentation, uneven geographical development and collective social imaginaries. The shared project of the papers, across very different places and times, is to use a ‘micro' unit of analysis to draw ‘macro' conclusions, by taking encounters between people and infrastructure as units of analysis and connecting them to illuminate how infrastructure shapes the social world.
The majority of the papers are products of an ongoing discussion about infrastructure and social organization that has taken place at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2012, led by Craig Calhoun and supported by the Einstein Foundation. The project builds on work by Calhoun (Citation1992) on ‘the infrastructure of modernity’, where he argues that the large-scale social relationships characteristic of the modern era are, in a large part, made possible by infrastructure. The others are by international scholars who have participated in seminars and conference sessions we have organized on this topic. Fran Tonkiss and AbdouMaliq Simone took on the task of responding to the papers and laying out potential directions for future research. Contributors’ shared motivating interest is in how material infrastructures influence social organization, and the shared empirical focus is on those that help constitute and sustain urban life.