Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability

Introduction

This Special Issue is the outcome of the research workshop ‘Urban vulnerabilities: infrastructure, health, and stigma’ held at University College London in June 2018. It was Professor Vanessa Watson, long-time Professor of City Planning at the University of Cape Town and the Global South Editor of Urban Studies, who initially suggested the journal as an ideal outlet for a collection of articles on infrastructure and stigma, and supported us throughout the process. Sadly, and to the great loss of the urban studies community, she passed away while this Special Issue was in production. She was a valued teacher, colleague and friend who made deeply meaningful contributions to the field, and she will be deeply missed. We therefore dedicate this issue to her memory.

Following the workshop discussion, which took place long before the current pandemic, this Special Issue critically examines how the stigma of infrastructural disconnect perpetuates urban inequality and exclusion – an issue, we would argue, that is highly relevant to the current urban condition in which the pandemic is preying on pre-existing disparities in the Global South and North. More specifically, through a collection of articles examining different cases and theoretical trajectories, this Special Issue explores the links between the material aspects of infrastructural neglect – how it operates on the body, creates dependencies and vulnerabilities, transmits affective charges – and the political effects of social stigmatisation. In the most basic sense, infrastructures, as the means of spatially defining and structuring relations in the city, are both shaped by and shape power-relations. At the same time, stigma attached to spaces – especially those lacking certain public services – is often used to further legitimise and reproduce infrastructural exclusion by demarcating symbolic boundaries, imaginations of Otherness or lack of deservingness of certain populations. Thus, the nine articles in this Special Issue interrogate the interplay between the material networks of the city and the immaterial stigma that derives from them and at the same time exacerbates, perpetuates and justifies exclusion.

The Special Issue is situated at the intersection of two debates in urban studies. First, the growing body of work on infrastructures’ role in shaping urban politics and citizenship, with the materiality of networked services understood as an important determinant of urban exclusion and participation. Second, the literature on structures and spaces of urban stigma which has gained traction especially in sociologically-informed approaches. Despite their overlapping concerns, these ongoing conversations have rarely engaged with one another in depth. This Special Issue therefore synthesises new thinking on the relationship between urban infrastructure and stigma in order to develop a better understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the material and the symbolic structures of the city that shape urban exclusion and vulnerability. In doing so, it aims to bring together these still-disparate debates, with a broader ambition of disciplinary and theoretical decompartmentalisation.

This introduction to the Special Issue proceeds as follows: We begin by outlining the existing work on ways infrastructures participate in urban exclusion, arguing that symbolic aspects play a key role in these processes and are thus worthy of further investigation. In the second section, we sketch out key debates on urban stigma, which we find often lack discussions of the concrete spatial, material or embodied ways in which stigma operates and manifests. We therefore point to the need to think about these two debates – on the materiality of infrastructural neglect and the role of stigma in urban exclusion – together. In the third section, we note that particular notions of vulnerability and urban health are deeply affected by the intersection of infrastructural exclusion and stigma, as has become all too apparent in the current pandemic moment. The final section before the concluding remarks provides an overview of the papers in the Special Issue while tracing some of the cross-cutting themes that emerge from them.

Infrastructure and urban exclusion

Since Graham and Marvin’s (2001)Splintering Urbanism, which demonstrated how infrastructure not only connects but also disconnects, segregates and isolates different parts of the city, the literature on urban exclusion by way of infrastructure has proliferated. In the so-called ‘infrastructural turn’, the socio-technical assemblages of public service provision have been utilised as ‘windows into social worlds’, a heuristic for understanding the city and the social relationships within it (Angelo and Hentschel, 2015). However, infrastructures are not merely the products of human relations, outcomes of socio-political processes in the city or material manifestations of the political. Infrastructures, we suggest, actively shape the degree to which residents can take part in urban life. Put differently, infrastructures have the agentic power to structure social interactions in cities (Amin, 2014), often beyond their stated or intended technical function (e.g. Shamir, 2013).

While it is clear that infrastructures play a key role in processes of urban exclusion, urban studies literature examining how the physical structures of the city contribute to marginalisation rarely accounts for the non-material impacts of infrastructure. Rodgers and O’Neill’s (2012) notion of ‘infrastructural violence’ highlights the capacity of networked services to exclude by restricting access to vital resources, thus perpetuating urban inequality. In studies following in this vein, disconnection from the network is equated to Galtung’s (1969)‘structural violence’, where built-in, indirect and often silent violence ‘shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances’ (p. 171). Unsafe drinking water may expose urban dwellers to disease, inadequate street lighting may result in higher levels of crime, insufficient public transport may reduce employment opportunities. Oftentimes, residents must then make up for the gaps in public service provision by purchasing private solutions, resulting in financial strain and a further constraint of possibilities for acting in the city. In its causes, such infrastructural violence mirrors the ‘profoundly mundane’ and ‘boring’ (Star, 1999: 380) workings of public services, but its effects can be as devastating as the ‘slow violence’ (Davies, 2019; Nixon, 2011) of environmental disaster and toxicity.

Despite acknowledging the significant impact of infrastructural violence, much of the literature on infrastructural inequality fails to examine in detail how it operates on the embodied or psychological levels, or where the ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) of infrastructure might lie. While Rodgers and O’Neill (2012) note that infrastructural violence consists of ‘more than the physical forms of suffering’ created by infrastructural exclusion, and that these physical effects facilitate emotional harm and wider forms of social exclusion (p. 407), they do not articulate how this relationship operates. Pointing in this direction, Larkin (2013) importantly observes that infrastructures act not only through their technical function but through symbolic and affective registers, with technological connectivity and large-scale works associated with a sense of modernity (see also Anand et al., 2018). While the modern city is one in which infrastructures run underground and metabolic processes function almost ‘miraculously’, spaces of pollution and disease have often been framed as the ‘dystopian underbelly of the city’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000: 136), places modernity has not reached. On the other hand, when infrastructural services are extended to such spaces, the stigma of urban exclusion can be lifted (e.g. Anand, 2017).

Reflecting their important role as symbolic boundary markers, infrastructures are increasingly recognised as important sites where the terms and limits of (urban) citizenship are negotiated (Anand, 2017; Fredericks, 2018; Lemanski, 2019; von Schnitzler, 2016). As large-scale, often public projects which are frequently accessed at the individual household level, infrastructures function as nodes connecting the state, planning authorities and institutions on the one hand and residents’ everyday experience of the city on the other (Graham and McFarlane, 2015; Nolte and Yacobi, 2015). Lemanski (2020: 592) therefore argues that ‘infrastructure functions as the embodiment of citizenship for both citizens and the state’, although there are frequently disjunctures in the way both parties understand the contract of infrastructural citizenship. If ‘public services’ are for the public, they distribute those resources a community holds in common and deems a basic right. Disconnection from those networks then also entails a symbolic exclusion from that public, a demarcation as external to the community of rightsholders. Thus, infrastructures also become tools to delineate the boundaries of belonging in the city, a means of excluding those not deemed full urban citizens.

Particularly the absence or malfunction of infrastructures ensuring public hygiene – water, sewage, solid waste, as well as electricity – holds symbolic power that can be wielded to advance or justify urban exclusion. Due to deeply ingrained notions about cleanliness and visceral reactions to dirt, the absence of sanitation infrastructures can serve to paint the excluded as outside modernity and the normal political order, thus operating as a key propagator of urban stigma. Dominant urban discourses have historically conflated filth or disease in marginalised areas with the moral defects of their inhabitants, thereby legitimising the existing social order (Campkin, 2007; Nightingale, 2012; Otter, 2004). The abjecting power of disgust elicited by waste as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 2002; Kristeva, 1982), or of sensations associated with contamination (Tan, 2013), can serve to draw intra-urban boundaries and constitute those living in unsanitary conditions as the city’s constitutive Other – either as deserving of further exclusion or as requiring forceful state intervention (Cresswell, 1996; Gray and Mooney, 2011; Sibley, 2002; Stallybrass and White, 1986). Given that infrastructural (dis)connections can denote much more than mere technical access, that they frequently serve to delineate the boundary of urban belonging, modernity, citizenship and even humanity, there is a significant potential for engaging embodied, symbolic and affective approaches in the study of infrastructures as socio-technical systems.

Spatial forms of stigma

In sociological approaches to urban exclusion, the issue of stigma has received renewed interest in recent years, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and austerity. Studies frequently revisit the seminal work of Goffman (1963), who defined stigma as a social relation rather than an attribute of the affected individual (although a physical characteristic such as a ‘deformity’ may appear to be the origin of the stigma). Current work on the sociology of stigma seeks to move beyond ‘Goffman’s decidedly apolitical account of stigma’ (Tyler, 2020: 23, see also Tyler and Slater, 2018) and places particular emphasis on the need to examine stigma’s structural and processual nature (Link and Phelan, 2014). Stigma here is understood as a ‘label’ affixed by others, which can have very tangible material effects – for instance when resulting in decreased health outcomes among stigmatised groups (Link and Phelan, 2001). Link and Phelan (2014) further emphasise the deployment of stigma within systems of power and oppression by coining the notion of ‘stigma power’ to denote that ‘stigma is a resource’ which allows stigmatisers ‘to obtain ends they desire’ (p. 24).

Tyler (2020) in particular highlights the importance of ‘stigma as a material force, a structural and structuring form of power’ (p. 9, our emphasis). She drives home this point by describing embodied imprints of violence –‘tattoos, brands and whip marks inscribed on the bodies of the enslaved’ (p. 13) – as the original stigmata, thus foregrounding the physical violence of stigma, which was long framed as ‘symbolic, diffuse, slow and indirect’ (p. 15). Stigma, it is clear, can have devastating, violent impacts on human lives. However, even in such material accounts of stigma, the directionality appears to only be one of ‘stigma power’ manifesting itself on bodies or in space, never one in which material circumstances culminate in stigma – a void that this Special Issue aims to address.

Discussions of spatialised, and specifically urban, forms of stigma have been dominated by Wacquant’s (2008) notion of ‘territorial stigmatization’, which has been widely taken up in urban studies literature (e.g. in this journal, Garbin and Millington, 2012; Huey and Kemple, 2007; Pinkster, 2014; van Eijk, 2012; for a wider overview, see Slater, 2017). The framework put forward in Urban Outcasts (2008), where Wacquant examines racial segregation both in the French working-class banlieue and the Black American ‘ghetto’, weds Goffmann’s notion of stigma with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, adding ‘territorial stigma’ to Goffmann’s earlier typology of stigma. However, despite Wacquant’s focus on spatial seclusion, Sisson (2020: 666) rightly notes that the territorial component of territorial stigma has received ‘scant attention’. In Wacquant’s notion of territorial stigmatisation, space appears to be a mere conceptual ‘anchor’ (Wacquant et al., 2014: 1272) for negative representations and stereotypes, as stigma need not necessarily be based on actual material circumstances:

Whether or not these areas are in fact dilapidated and dangerous […] matters little in the end […] [T]he prejudicial belief that they are suffices to set off socially noxious consequences. (Wacquant, 2008: 239)

The physical decay of stigmatised urban areas are mentioned but these conditions only ever appear to be results of stigma, not vice versa. Such places might be ‘“depressing” and “uninspiring”’ (Wacquant, 2008: 177) but the stigma attached to them appears to emanate from discourse alone, not the material circumstances of state abandonment. In Wacquant’s approach, symbolic power structures social space, and social relations are reified in physical space (Wacquant, 2014, 2016), meaning that the spatial is primarily viewed as an outcome of symbolic and socio-political processes. The work of urban studies scholars, however, has long been based on the understanding that the social and the spatial exist in a dialectical relationship (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1980): not only is space shaped by social relations, it also shapes them. Therefore, in addition to examining how stigma can affect cities, we deem it necessary to ask how the built environment, in turn, shapes stigma.

We suggest, therefore, that the materiality of the city is more than the projection surface for discursive stigma, but rather an actor which can also produce stigma. This is occasionally alluded to in Wacquantian approaches to urban stigma. Thus, Slater (2018) shows how stigma is discursively attached to certain types of public housing, thereby legitimising their defunding. (For an overview of a range of other studies that apply Wacquant’s framing to public housing estates, see Sisson, 2020: 664). In this way, the stigma linked to inadequate services perpetuates residents’ infrastructural exclusion. Here, the ability of stigma to alter material circumstances comes to the fore, as it is argued that delineating certain areas of the city as ‘outside the common norm’ paves the way for exceptional treatment of those areas (Wacquant, 2008: 240): spatial containment and material disadvantages are justified and even exacerbated through stigma. The manner in which the materiality of the city creates stigma independently, or exacerbates discursive stigma, however, is not fully accounted for. Indeed, since territorial stigmatisation focuses on mainly the discursive production of stigma, Pasquetti (2019: 852) notes that the ‘affective dimension of experiences of spatial stigma’ still ‘remains undertheorized’. We would add to this the material and embodied dimensions of urban stigma and set out to examine them in the assembled set of articles.

The fact that the ways in which material circumstances can coalesce into stigma have generally been ignored by these studies serves as our starting point for reading the work on infrastructural exclusion in conjunction with literature on urban stigma. We interpret Tyler and Slater’s (2018) call for examining stigma’s relationship with socio-political structures of power, and particularly the interest in the ‘stigma of place’ (Tyler and Slater, 2018: 738), as much from a spatially-grounded point of view focused on the built environment as from a ‘new materialist’ (Coole and Frost, 2010) perspective which is attentive to the agentic capacities of matter. This Special Issue therefore asks how stigma materialises into physical form, and, vice versa, how the built environment, through material and affective impacts on urban dwellers, translates into stigma.

Urban health and vulnerability

With the above discussion in mind, let us return to the current Covid context. We have seen over the past two years that the effect of the pandemic varies depending on the strength of existing urban infrastructures. There is already clear evidence that housing conditions, green and sanitation infrastructures play a crucial role in shaping the health of populations (Gibson et al., 2011). Yet these days we observe that insufficient infrastructural conditions not only affect the transmission of Covid, but also decrease the ability of stigmatised urban dwellers to cope with the disease. A current case from the US illustrates this argument clearly –Ahmad et al. (2020: 10) found that ‘[c]ounties with a higher percentage of households with poor housing had higher incidence of, and mortality associated with, COVID-19’.

Here our understanding of infrastructural stigma and urban health coincides with Horton’s recent statement that the current health crisis is not a pandemic but rather a syndemic, which indicates how urban and spatial elements – including infrastructure – influence the accumulation of various health conditions and how these are experienced in a given urban context. A syndemic approach ‘…provides a very different orientation to clinical medicine and public health by showing how an integrated approach to understanding and treating diseases can be far more successful than simply controlling epidemic disease or treating individual patients’ (Horton, 2020: 874). To put it differently, infrastructure and social stigma are the core of syndemic urbanism where ‘lockdown’, ‘physical distancing’, ‘hand washing’ or ‘working from home’ are not options in the many cities where a majority of inhabitants live in poorly serviced neighbourhoods and informal settlements. In such settings, recent studies show, the impact of lockdown on mental health – itself highly-stigmatised – is also higher (see case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh in Ahmed et al., 2020).

Indeed, we stress, our health and wellbeing are deeply embedded in socio-technical systems around us; infrastructures serve as a form of ‘exoskeleton’– they are extensions of our bodily selves on which our survival depends (Gandy, 2005). This ontological ‘dependency on infrastructure’ (Butler, 2016) makes human bodies, as well as urban systems, vulnerable and thus turns infrastructures into particularly salient sites for interrogating urban stigma from an embodied point of view. Stigma here is not only the outcome of spatial exclusion, but also the cause of urban configurations that exacerbate embodied vulnerability and exposure to harm.

The approach and articles in the special issue

The papers in this Special Issue examine this intersection of infrastructural exclusion, stigma and urban vulnerability through case studies from cities in the Americas, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East as well as Europe. The articles examine a range of infrastructures, including water, heating, waste, sanitation, security, health and sound. While the studies’ settings and specific infrastructures of focus often differ vastly, we outline here a range of cross-cutting themes that emerge.

Concluding remarks

As this set of articles shows, the stigma of infrastructural disconnect is often framed as self-inflicted or linked to an inherent attribute of a given community, thus blaming the victims of urban exclusion for their own situation. However, thinking with infrastructural stigma allows us to foreground the produced nature of stigma by underscoring that it is often an effect of disconnect. By focusing on the infrastructural origin of stigma, we draw attention to the structural causes of urban inequality – a reality which is often occluded by both stigma itself and by prevalent academic approaches to understanding it. At the same time, the articles draw attention to the way stigma coalesces into infrastructural configurations that increase urban vulnerabilities, and that – like all urban processes – they are constantly (re)produced and (re)negotiated.

Our hope is that this Special Issue will initiate an interdisciplinary conversation among urban scholars and experts, acknowledging the necessity to understand the infrastructure/stigma nexus as a determinant of urban justice. As planners, architects and urbanists, we should proactively identify patterns of systematic stigmatisation that undermine the well-being of individuals and communities in cities, especially in a (post-) pandemic world.

This selection of articles accentuates the need to consider the accelerated urbanisation process in recent decades and the fact that most of the world’s population lives in urban territories, thus requiring thought about the well-being of city residents not just during a health crisis. This is even more significant because social and economic gaps are widening within and between cities, and questions of environmental and social justice are shaping everyday life for urban dwellers. This is the time to think about infrastructural stigma in the context of urban inclusion and health as a proactive field, one which can contribute to the physical and mental wellbeing of urban populations. If social cohesion and collective responsibility form the basis for a new civil contract – one which prioritises social justice rather than social fragmentation, planning of public spaces and infrastructure as public goods rather than commodities, and healing our welfare services – we may be able to overcome the urban manifestations of the current crisis. More broadly, the notion of infrastructural stigma as we have proposed it not only adds a further dimension to our understanding of urban vulnerability and exclusion, but is essentially about creating awareness of questions of redistributive justice in the city.