Thinking Through Infrastructure Network

From decluttering bedroom drawers to detoxing from social media, minimalism has taken the global affluent class by storm. But what are the cultural politics of minimalist practices? Are they just an online trend or do they foster deeper desires that might be mobilised in the pursuit of a just world after capitalist growthism? And is It possible to speak of Marie Kondo as an organic intellectual of...

Where is Britain’s military infrastructure? Who builds it and how does it reshape rural landscapes? What happens to the communities who must learn to live in its vicinity? How are they persuaded to accept it? How do they resist? Whose labour makes military infrastructure work and how is it connected to conflicts around the world? In this episode, Dom spoke with Zsuzsanna Ihar, an anti-disciplinary...

This episode presents an audio recording of the Gentrification and African Presence in Peckham or GAPP walking tour, led by Dr Charmaine Brown. The tour highlights key spaces in Peckham occupied by the Caribbean community from the 1950s through to the 1990s and early 2000s. It also explores how Peckham has been reshaped by waves of gentrification in the years since. Photographs from along the rout...

What is wind? How do we transform wind into electricity? And how does a view of Britain from the vantage of wind energy change our narrative of its national history and its national geography as well? This episode of the TTiN podcasts presents a recording from a live event hosted in collaboration with SPARC, or Sound Practice and Research at City St George’s, as well as City’s Modern History Clust...

Concrete underpins modern construction and allows for building processes that are mostly taken for granted. But where does the cement that comprises concrete actually come from? What natural resources, state territories, power relations, and political ecologies does cement bring into view? And how are the stakes of these ecologies raised in the fraught space of Palestine, where cement mediates exh...

Logistics describes the just-in-time supply chains that make consumer capitalism possible in the twenty-first century. It has seeped into every corner of our imaginations and behaviours, transforming us into logistical subjects who must manage our lives through the systems and schedules of late modernity. But where does logistics come from? What are its pressure points and paradoxes? And how does...

What makes an American road novel? What are the material conditions that caused it to emerge in the mid-twentieth century? Why does it persist, what does it tell us about infrastructure, and why has it travelled so widely – but also unevenly – through literary cultures across the globe? In this episode, Dom sat down with Myka Tucker-Abramson to discuss her recent book, Cartographies of Empire: The...

How does rain impact how and when people get around, whether on foot, on public transport, or in private vehicles? How does it affect how we use outdoor and public spaces, from parks to streets and shopping centres? How does it influences our moods, and mental and physical health? How does it affects what people wear, how people socialise, what jokes they tell, and even what people eat? How does r...

In this short review episode of the Thinking Through Infrastructure podcast, network convenor Dom Davies looks back at some of TTiN's activities in 2025, including our event with Zack Polanski, our book launches with scholars from the Foundational Economy Collective, and our new podcast series of interviews with artists and academics about projects that address themselves to questions of infrastru...

How can city makers renew urban spaces in ways that benefit existing residents, rather than displacing them? And how have communities organised to resist their displacement? On 28 November, TTiN put these questions and more to a panel of academics and practitioners: Charmaine Brown, community activist in Peckham and Lecturer at the University of Greenwich; Anna Minton, journalist, author, and Read...

What would you say if you had 5 minutes to talk to Matt Damon about the “global water crisis”? On 18 October, TTiN hosted Filippo Menga for a conversation about this and other questions addressed in his book, Thirst: The Quest to Solve the Global Water Crisis (Verso 2025). With responses from Naho Mirumachi, Professor in Environmental Politics at King's College London, and Julie Froud, Professor o...

Professor Juliet Fall is a political and environmental geographer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Juliet’s work focuses on questions of border infrastructure, biosecurity, and the boundaries between humans and nature. In this podcast, we discussed her new book, Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography, which interleaves ethnographic comics with academic es...

How can art and storytelling help us to make sense of infrastructures as concrete and symbolic systems? How do we map the social, cultural, and imaginative aspects of infrastructure? Giada Peterle is a visual artist, comics author, and urban walker, and author of Comics as a Research Practice (2021). Her work explores how arts-based and narrative approaches can expand the ways we think through and...

Dr Nicola Kirkby is Centre Manager for DIVERSE CDT, the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Diversity in Data Visualization, at City St George’s, University of London, and a member of the steering group for the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network. In this podcast she discusses her new book, Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel: From Platform to Plot via the Railroad, which is out n...

Professor Alex Tickell is a historian and critic of global literatures in English. This panel event launched his book, City Fictions of the New India, published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. In the book and this recorded discussion, Alex discusses how fiction, literary journalism, the graphic novel, and television drama have reimagined the relationship between infrastructure and citizenship...

Infrastructure is comprised of systems or networks so complex that we can never see them in their physical totality. Yet they also shape the most immediate conditions of our lived experience, unevenly redistributing wealth, time, and life itself across society. What kind of stories do we need to apprehend infrastructure? How can we see it and bring it under our collective control? How do we contes...

It's hard to escape the feeling that in Britain today nothing works. Economic growth and higher wages are simply not enough. This is because the so-called "cost of living crisis" is only the face of a deeper crisis of foundational liveability. How can we address failing public services and decaying social infrastructure? What is the foundational economy and how do we rebuild it? What is the role o...