To oblivion and beyond: Imagining infrastructure after collapse

Introduction

Los Angeles’ Belmont Tunnel emerges from the ground roughly a mile from the city’s downtown. Completed in 1925, the tunnel was planned to be—and for nearly 30 years was—a key segment of the city’s transportation infrastructure, helping passengers circumvent downtown traffic as they moved between the growing suburbs and business and shopping opportunities in the city. At the tunnel’s terminus in West Lake, an open railyard shuttled passengers onto lines bound for Burbank, Hollywood, Santa Monica, and the San Fernando Valley.

Thirty years later, in 1955, the last train emerged from the Belmont Tunnel, a banner draped across its front reading, “To Oblivion.” Los Angeles’ transition from home of the largest electric railway system in the world to a city dominated by personal vehicles and freeways was driven by either the power of motor vehicle manufacturers like General Motors and the oil industry (see Snell, 1974; a narrative also picked up by the film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) or competition between geographic regions (Adler, 1991). As freeway construction commenced in the 1950s, most rail lines were replaced by buses, and the tunnel and Toluca railyard were abandoned, leaving “a hole in the ground which apparently could be used for nothing” (Pacific Electric Subway Terminal, n.d.).

The tunnel and railyard remained abandoned for the next 50 years, periodically used by the city to store impounded cars or cold war rations (Harvey, 2009). It regularly functioned for community members as a site for graffiti (Patel, 2007), raves (Khawaja, 2015), and weekend games of tarasca, an indigenous Mexican sport (Hernandez, 2004). For a time, the Belmont Tunnel was the only known tarasca ball court in the US (Knight, 2005). With these latter uses, the space was decidedly public, an argument residents made when protesting the construction of the Belmont Station apartments, completed in 2008 (Hernandez, 2004). The new owners painted over the graffiti and turned the yard in front of the now-blocked tunnel entrance into a dog park behind a locked gate.

The manager of the apartments told the Los Angeles Times that there had been between 100 and 200 coats of artists’ paint sandblasted away during construction. “I took a little chip myself,” he told the Times. “This is a part of history” (Harvey, 2009).

It is not difficult to imagine a study of southern California’s transportation infrastructure following the pattern established by Hughes’ (1983) influential Networks of Power. Tracing back from the private apartment complex through the hours spent by residents on congested freeways, the smog-filled air and the growth of the suburbs in Orange County, a sociotechnical story can be brought out with impacts on land and bodies linked to technical constraints, societal structures and personal decisions. The tunnel’s use, too, as appropriated public space hints at perspectives on infrastructure more focused on unintended use, workarounds and the ongoing task of aligning systems with users (e.g. Amin, 2014; Graham, 2001; Larkin, 2008).

Yet, despite this clear history, we feel increasingly pulled to think about the future of infrastructures like the Belmont Tunnel and the network of tracks that spider across southern California. Considering such futures means taking seriously the prospect that infrastructures will not be maintained, that railyards will not only be converted into apartments but that they will also fall into disrepair and disuse in the wake of natural and societal disasters.

While it is difficult to imagine infrastructures’ future lives, it is harder still to imagine the disappearance from the landscape of the large-scale concrete and steel structures that define much of the 20th-century. Maintenance and repair (Jackson, 2013) are central to the continued functioning of infrastructure; these social processes can easily become untenable for municipalities and states. As a 2017 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers finds, America’s infrastructures are already in various states of disrepair (America’s Infrastructure Grade, 2017). And, even while the world changes and deterioration continues, the scale and durability of infrastructures constructed in the 20th-century ensure that, like Roman aqueducts, these objects will persist despite disaster, disrepair and disuse.

Strikingly, we are now in a situation in which infrastructures themselves are crucially implicated in large-scale societal and environmental changes that will likely lead to the failure of maintenance processes required to perpetuate their functioning. As Boyer (2016) argues, infrastructures possess a temporal persistence that “points deathward” (p. 174). Oil refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast, for example, take part in a system of resource extraction that hastens climate change; at the same time, climate change threatens the continued functioning of these refineries, and oil companies have requested federal funds to protect their facilities from the destructive environmental phenomena that they have a hand in creating (Associated Press, 2018). As Appel et al. (2018) note, “Infrastructural breakdown saturates a particular politics of the present” (p. 3).

Infrastructure past, present and future

For historians of technology and theorists of infrastructure, “infrastructure” as a phenomenon is characterized as any sociotechnical system that offers “near-ubiquitous accessibility” to people (Edwards, 2004: 186). In their recent work on the development and methods of infrastructure studies, Plantin et al. (2018) argue that infrastructure studies follows two “intellectual lines” (p. 295), where the first line focuses on large technical systems such as transportation networks, the expansion of communication networks, or the rise of mobile broadband connectivity. This literature emphasizes the building, standardization, and maintenance of such large-scale technologies.

A second intellectual line of infrastructure studies focuses on the sociology of infrastructure and its role in societies, articulating the social aspects of infrastructure dependencies for example (Bowker and Star, 1999; Star, 1990). Scholarship from this track (heralded by Susan Leigh Star) emphasizes the human impacts of infrastructures such as their inclusion, exclusion with master narratives, or enrollment in organizational cultures such as knowledge work.

One aspect of infrastructure studies that can be seen in both intellectual lines is a shared approach to temporality. For example, Lemke incorporates the principle of heterochrony, or the changes of time within a system (Lemke, 2000). Analyzing the transmission, context, vulnerability, or resilience of infrastructures is not possible without a commitment to timescales. By studying the conditions of possibility for things to exist, at moments of creation and then over time, examining the historical ontology of infrastructure provides a means of analyzing epistemological transformations (Ribes and Polk, 2012), emerging categories of knowledge (Bowker, 2000), and techniques of inscription (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). Curiously, however, both strands of infrastructure studies—whether focused on the development and uptake of technologies of scale or revealing the sociological impacts of infrastructure on human subjects—tend to consider temporality without engaging in real and imagined futures.

While much work on infrastructure aligns with the perspectives identified above, it feels increasingly pertinent to also enquire into infrastructure’s futures. This is largely due to feelings of crisis and collapse that ride the coattails of recently developed understandings of topics such as the anthropocene, climate change and the failures of capitalism and neoliberal politics to address these looming threats. Infrastructures are both implicated in the perpetuation and acceleration of these threats just as they are affected by their consequences. As Edwards (2004) indicates, climate change reveals the futility of attempts to hold as entirely separate nature and technology when storms destroy infrastructures such as levees and bridges. Indeed, recent examples of infrastructures that will not persist, unchanged, into the future abound: from Detroit’s abandoned neighborhoods to Flint’s corroded water pipes to the breach of the levees during Hurricane Katrina. The increasing prevalence of natural disasters due to climate change is especially notable because highly visible damage to basic services such as transportation, water, and power systems draws attention to infrastructures that themselves contribute to the acceleration of climate change. And behind these hypervisible phenomena are more mundane examples of breakdown and decay, as the shift from Keynesian to neoliberal governance over the past 50 years has left the United States with poorly maintained and underdeveloped infrastructures that have fallen into disrepair (Appel et al., 2018).

Civil infrastructures such as roads and bridges are currently assumed to have service lives of 50–75 years, and, as Ellingwood and Lee (2016) note, the actual service lives for many infrastructures will likely be much longer, stretching their maintenance requirements beyond a single lifetime. However, the concept of service life assumes ongoing maintenance and repair, and we might also talk about the extended material life of infrastructures that cease to function or to be consistently maintained yet continue to exist. Indeed, a strange and notable feature of many contemporary infrastructures is that, at the same time that they are decaying and collapsing, their scale and material composition make them likely to persist, albeit in non-functioning form, far into the future. As with the stone and concrete aqueducts built by the Romans almost 2000 years ago, many of the infrastructures of the 20th-century are likely to remain as material features of the landscape far beyond the point at which they cease to be maintained.

Perspectives on the future of infrastructure are split between these two poles: first, risk analysis and modeling (e.g. the calculation of service life) that largely attempts to control or account for breakdown and, second, theories that assume the inevitability of infrastructural collapse and view it as an opportunity for structural change.

Berlant’s (2016) definition of infrastructure (encompassing, for example, roads and bridges as well as families and norms) is characteristic of the breadth the term has taken on in recent scholarly work. Across these diverse domains, a core concept in Berlant’s perspective is the unique historical moment represented by the early 21st-century. Events such as the 2008 recession, austerity policies, and the Occupy movement, seen from this view, index “the infrastructural breakdown of modernist practices of resource distribution, social relation, and affective continuity” (p. 394). These events reveal “glitches” in the fabric of society and, at best, call for the creation of “a form from within brokenness beyond the exigencies of the current crisis, and alternatively to it too” (p. 393).

Crucially, however, Berlant does not see breakdown or glitches as the absence of structure or infrastructure; instead, one of her main contributions is drawing attention to the ways that ruptures can be normalized or repaired in ways that either perpetuate inequities or merely return the conditions that encouraged crisis, “collaps[ing] what’s better into what feels better” (p. 399). Repair is a key term in this argument, a process that, as many theorists of infrastructure have noted, is constantly called for. Yet Berlant also stresses the often-hidden choice represented by repair: to either return to what came before or to grasp the opportunity to produce “nonreproductive” futures specifically enabled by brokenness.

Boyer (2018) is similarly concerned with how infrastructures can be converted into systems that do not perpetuate current trajectories. Like Berlant, he keys the need for reimagining infrastructure to the conditions of the present and specifically highlights the environmental catastrophes of the 20th and 21st centuries and the consequences of neoliberalism on both infrastructural development and infrastructural decay. Reminiscent of Berlant’s worry that the repair of infrastructure merely reinstates a comfortable yet crisis-producing past, Boyer situates current infrastructures in relation to the Keynesian period that, compared with the wealth inequalities and personal precarities brought on by neoliberalism, seems to offer a return to familiar comforts. The current deteriorating condition of large-scale infrastructures in the United States can be directly related to this transition, with the public works projects and investment in infrastructure of the mid-20th century fading in the late 1970s to be replaced by an emphasis on privatization. While returning to large-scale public investment in infrastructure projects might feel good and even slow undesirable developments, Boyer argues that this would also represent a return to the imperialism that ultimately brought about current conditions.

Beyond a concern over nostalgia for Keynesianism, however, Boyer’s perspective is notable for beginning to outline a theoretical framework that suggests in more specific ways how transitions to “revolutionary infrastructure” might progress. Specifically, he aligns the possibility of optimism with the development of a range of posthumanist (e.g. Haraway, 1984; Wolfe, 2010) and new materialist (e.g. DeLanda, 2006; Harman, 2010; Morton, 2013) philosophies that respond to catastrophe by challenging the centrality of humans and turn instead to a focus on companion animals and materials. Where Berlant’s conception of infrastructure is quite broad and concerned with social relations as with material systems like highways, Boyer exclusively considers infrastructure through large-scale projects and specifically those involved in manufacturing and distributing petroleum products. He sees these systems as more than material, stressing Larkin’s (2013) definition of infrastructure as “things and also the relations between things” (p. 329). Specifically, Boyer considers infrastructure as congealed labor and expertise, such that an electrical grid represents the entanglement and perpetuation of engineering expertise and also a history of materials science and manufacturing that make available substances such as steel, concrete, ceramic, and silicon. Infrastructure, Boyer argues, stores these elements as a kind of potential energy held in suspension.

For Boyer, the point of noting infrastructure’s status as potential energy is to imagine infrastructure as revolutionary, capable of not only reproducing systems but also of “blow[ing] the very same arrangement ‘sky-high’” (p. 231). Similar to Berlant’s call to see infrastructural glitches as opportunities to construct nonreproductive futures, Boyer’s incitement to use the stored energy represented by infrastructure to challenge current systems is provocative. At the same time, both suggestions are fairly underspecified in that they indicate a broad way of thinking about infrastructure in the future without necessarily providing a way to discuss what might be relevant or meaningful about specific infrastructures. In analyzing moments in Robinson’s science fiction trilogy in which infrastructure plays a role in producing alternative social or political forms, we attempt to identify ways that infrastructure might matter in and beyond times of transition.

Reading infrastructure in science fiction

If infrastructure is largely invisible in our everyday lives, it is certainly not so in recent science fiction. Indeed, beyond the focus on transportation and provisioning that tends to be necessitated by the genre conventions of technology-oriented science fiction focused on interplanetary travel, we are especially drawn to works that take place on recognizable, near-future versions of the Earth. Many recent novels in this vein are rooted in anxiety over approaching collapse, often associated with climate change but also with the large-scale infrastructures that provision current societies while also hastening their ends. Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, for example, imagines the United States during a severe drought, with private corporations struggling to control and sell to the wealthy the few remaining sources of water. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins is similarly set in a dystopian southern California, where extreme drought causes the US Bureau of Conservation to ration soda to citizens and enforce mass evacuations in response to an expanding sea of sand dunes, and in Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, survivors of climate change live on a city floating in the Arctic but contend with resource and housing inequality that in many ways resemble our current conditions.

While we do suggest that reading science fiction is a provocative method for exploring new perspectives on infrastructure and their relationships to non-reproductive futures, we focus here on Robinson’s Three Californias Trilogy, novels that have a distinct relationship to history (the 1980s) and place (southern California). We also draw on interviews with Robinson and critical statements on his work, taking these, together with the fiction, as representing a cohesive, if implicit, theory that can guide thinking about the future.

The novels comprising the Three Californias Trilogy were published between 1984 and 1990. Each imagines a different future for southern California and is modeled on a different genre of science fiction. The novels move from a society that feels inescapably bound to the sociopolitical system of America in the 1980s (The Gold Coast, cyberpunk); through a fragmented society that appears poised between regressive military nationalism, pastoral communalism or something new and strange (The Wild Shore, post apocalyptic); and ends with a society that is largely a socialist eco-utopia (Pacific Edge, utopian). In each of these speculative futures, infrastructure from the past plays an important role in characters’ struggles to shape their societies and the landscapes they live in.

Robinson’s work is often associated with utopianism, which he has described as “one course of history, a progressive course in which things become more just and sustainable over the generations” (qtd. in Robinson et al., 2004: 185). Indeed, while not referencing infrastructure, his comments on utopia and science fiction align strongly with Berlant’s remarks on non-reproductive futures and the dangers of repair as a way of reproducing existing inequalities. Both the imperialism of Heinlein-esque science fiction and the dystopian focus on corporate control represented by cyberpunk, Robinson has argued, risk serving only as “mirrors of the present […] portray[ing] the current triumph of capitalism as inevitable, eternal, and unbeatable” (p. 186).

Instead, Robinson’s novels consistently experiment with the production of new societal forms and ways of living, from the early-career trilogy on which we focus here to his popular Mars trilogy—chronicling the multigenerational terraforming of Mars and exploring the societal possibilities that might attend it—and more recent novels such as New York 2140, which takes place in a New York City that has been flooded due to climate change. In many ways, Robinson’s career has sought to answer a question very similar the one we pose in this essay: if present conditions lead inexorably to collapse, how can that collapse be used as a resource from which to build more equitable ways of life? We find Robinson’s answer to this question provocative precisely due to his position as a utopianist who writes science fiction—as a writer who, in line with genre conventions, is especially interested in the possibilities and limitations of the material world but who also explicitly sets out to imagine the material world in ways that do more than repair the glitch of the present.

In the following sections, we consider moments from Robinson’s Three Californias Trilogy that feature infrastructures constructed in the late 20th century. In attending to how characters view and interact with these partially ruined systems and landscapes, we draw out perspectives that pull in two sociopolitical directions: back toward the inequality of the 20th century as well as in another direction entirely, toward new and creative ways of life.

Angry optimism

Begin a new life. But how? It’s just the same old materials at hand … . How do you start a new life when everything else is the same? (Robinson, 1988: 377–378)

Robinson’s angry optimism is at times ambivalent toward and at others deeply concerned with the problems of the present. He brushes aside complete human extinction as improbable while at the same time arguing that we should be working to prevent other species from going extinct. His recommendations for action differ from the repairs associated with cruel optimism, however, in their rejection of current systems; more or better of the same will not save us, he suggests, and he instead advocates constructing “mongrel situations” to ameliorate damage or work toward what Berlant refers to as nonreproductive futures. As an example of mongrel infrastructure, Robinson points to his novel New York 2144, in which polar bears are transported to Antarctica in order to preserve the species. In this way, Robinson’s angry optimism involves, to some extent, setting aside history in order to survey the material possibilities that are available in the present and how they might be used creatively in the future. It is an ethos of finding value in the broken—a way of using the destruction of the present as a lever to free for new uses materials that might otherwise be constrained by convention or the momentum of social processes. In Boyer’s terms, Robinson seems to suggest that collapse and crisis make available the energy that has been stored in infrastructure and free it for more creative uses.

The relationship between angry optimism and infrastructure can be seen in the Three Californias Trilogy, as well as in many of Robinson’s subsequent novels. While his statements on angry optimism and mongrel assemblages are not specific to bridges, freeways or housing tracts, the central role that these objects play in imagining the future is still notable—and this pattern extends beyond Robinson’s work to many recent examples of science fiction. In part, this tendency is likely due to infrastructures’ material qualities and the probability that they will continue to dominate the landscape long after the relations that maintain them cease to exist. Engineers’ calculations of service life, after all, only forecast the duration of infrastructures’ functionality, and when they predict, for example, rates of deterioration for concrete, their analysis does not ask when the overpass or bridge will cease to be a noticeable part of the landscape or a resource for future action.

In all three of these novels it is clear that infrastructures shape lives, reproduce inequalities, hasten environmental disasters—and that they also survive such disasters, at least in a non-functioning form. The Gold Coast, for example, primarily represents the ways infrastructures structure and restrict lives, as the housing and transportation infrastructures of a pre-collapse Orange County instill in Jim a deep sense of hopelessness. The systems around him—and especially the relationship between weapons contractors and the state military and between real estate developers and those who are forced to live literally in the shadows of freeways—are too big for him to affect. One way that he attempts to negotiate his place in this world is by historicizing his surroundings and by remembering the relationships that have ceased to be (but that also led to the current society). When he digs through the layers of the past in the novel’s opening scene, the wooden beam he finds is seen in relation to its historical significance. Like the paint chip saved by the manager of the Belmont Station Apartments, it is seen as a historical reference more than a material object that has specific qualities and potentials.

However, two moments in The Gold Coast hint at the choice between crafting mongrel situations from material wreckage and failing to move beyond the significance of the present. Before conducting his futile attacks on military contracting facilities and real estate offices, Jim wrecks his apartment, tears apart his writing about Orange County, knocks his books off their shelves. Returning from his assault on the symbols of infrastructures he views as violent and unjust, he surveys the damage in his home, thinking that it is as if an earthquake has hit. He rearranges the fragments of his writing. He reshelves the books in a new order. Rather than centering on content and connotation, the scene is very much about the potential of material when seen as flotsam: not what is written on the paper so much as how it can be taped together into something new. Emphasizing a point that prefigures both Robinson’s later statements on angry optimism as well as Berlant’s discussion of non-reproductive futures, the narrator summarizes Jim’s actions: “He’s struggling to find a new pattern, working with the same old materials” (p. 376). Toward the conclusion of the novel, bookending the opening scene of excavation that seems to pose a question of what to do with the broken remains of the past, Jim dreams that he stands on a beach while above him, on a cliff, his friends and family tear apart a map of Orange County and drop the pieces down to where Jim is “trying to put together this big puzzle before the tide comes in” (p. 388).

The idea of collapse or ruin as a way of transforming infrastructure is picked up more literally in The Wild Shore, in which it is not a map of Orange County but the space itself that is torn apart and consequently made open to new possibilities. Striking components of infrastructure litter the landscape, pointing back to an unjust society and a violent state that closely resembles that of The Gold Coast. For the inhabitants of San Diego, putting the ruined map back together means reestablishing relationships with centers of state military power and restoring transportation and communication infrastructures to their former conditions. Because infrastructure relies so heavily on maintenance and repair, it plays a substantial role in shaping the rhythms of life, restoring infrastructure would also entail restoring a society. Notably, in relation to Berlant’s arguments regarding cruel optimism, the novel hints that the same cold war military state and geography to which the San Diegans seek to return played a role in prompting the nuclear attack that destroyed much of the country and its infrastructure. Cruel optimism, in this case, runs through infrastructure and the processes required to maintain it. Like the mayor’s house built on top of the freeway overpass, cruel optimism is very much about the relationships that once existed, and it is less concerned with the material properties of current ruins.

In contrast to the cruel optimism that seeks to return prior infrastructures and, consequently, prior societal relationships, other aspects of the novel hint at the kinds of mongrel situations that Robinson associates with angry optimism and the hope for nonreproductive futures. The most relevant examples of these mongrel situations involve the Scavengers’ appropriation of former infrastructures such as freeways and electric towers. Here, there is no attempt to put cars back on the roads or to use them as a conduit that allows people to live in one location but work in another. No one tries to make the electric tower function again or cares about its historical significance. Instead, inhabiting the tower spins the prior geography of Southern California in new directions. Following through with the metaphor of the torn map from The Gold Coast, if the San Diegans are trying to tape the map back together correctly, the Scavengers are rearranging the pieces and, consequently, experiencing the world in new ways.

The electric tower in The Wild Shore suggests more radical uses of infrastructure and more radical societal changes than do the descriptions of eco-utopias in Pacific Edge, partly due to the genre conventions of each novel. The post-apocalyptic novel is necessarily more open-ended than the novel that begins with a society that is, for the most part, already portrayed as a kind of utopia. Still, the excavation scene at the beginning of Pacific Edge is notable for highlighting how infrastructures can function as material repositories once they enter a state of ruin. The material comprising the intersection that the city’s inhabitants dig up—unlike the wooden beam excavated at the beginning of The Gold Coast—is seen not for its historical connotations but for its capacities as material. Transported to a refinery of unspecified type, the material is suggested to be processed into a form that can be used in subsequent construction projects. What is specific to infrastructure, here, is accumulation and standardization: the scale of infrastructure tends to bring together large quantities of material, and the need for standardization creates a situation in which ruined infrastructures can be seen as common stockpiles for future creativity and societal transformation. However, the transition to material repository is predicated on the breakdown of relationships and on the willingness to take a perspective that avoids reproducing them.

This ability of infrastructure to be converted into material repository can be seen both in the current world and in other works of science fiction. Jackson’s (2013) discussion of the work of shipbreakers—workers in Bangladesh who break down cargo ships, transforming them into metals and other materials that can be used again—for example, demonstrates how monumental components of the global shipping infrastructure serve as material repositories that reconfigure geographies. In this specific case, the movement of infrastructure redistributes materials and labor in ways that might prefigure the consequences of various collapse scenarios. Similarly, the perspective of angry optimism provides an opportunity to think about industrial waste in new ways, with electronic waste dumps perhaps seen as concentrations of certain materials or the nuclear waste storage facility of Onkalo seen as both a desperate act of prevention and also a stunning concentration of a rare material.

These infrastructural components redistribute materials, but they also redistribute capacities. In Robinson’s Red Mars, materials are transported from Mars back to earth using a space elevator consisting of 35,000 kilometers of carbon nanotubes attached to an orbiting asteroid. At the end of the novel, characters purposefully destroy the space elevator by crashing the asteroid into the planet’s surface, with the consequence that the elevator’s massive tether wraps around the planet like a belt. No longer functioning as infrastructure, the tether can now be seen as six billion tons of raw material. Like the tract houses that the Scavengers live in, burn and move on from, these examples of infrastructure as material aggregation are freed from the functions that their prior relations foregrounded. Standardized pine lumber, when integrated into the construction system, has relevant qualities (that align with the dimensions of walls, the length of nails and the load tolerances designed into residential structures). However, following a collapse of the relationships that make these qualities relevant, other capacities of the lumber—such as combustibility—can rise to the surface, transforming areas of (perhaps false) security and accumulation into spaces of migration and enabling new modes of consumptive use.

Seeing ruined infrastructures as repositories, however, does not only redistribute capacities related to material use. It also redistributes experiential possibilities, as Robinson’s novels demonstrate. Living inside an electric tower, for example, affords views into the distance and also new visual phenomena and ways of existing in relation to weather patterns. Freeways and overpasses afford speed and fleeting glimpses when associated with cars, but stripped of that relation they afford new experiences and possibilities such as an elevated vantage point that does not have to be sped through.

Boyer’s discussion of the distribution of oil and gas pipelines in the United States exemplifies the potential relevance of seeing infrastructure as the geographical aggregation of standardized material, as well as the ways that this perspective might extend or challenge current work on infrastructure. As Boyer notes, maps of oil and gas pipelines invert the usual emphasis on the country’s east and west coasts by illustrating the accumulation of oil and gas infrastructure along the Gulf Coast and through the middle of the country. For Boyer, these pipes represent congealed expertise and labor, but our reading of Robinson’s novels suggests that they are also material with potentials exceeding current use—that these infrastructures will persist and have unpredictable capacities once their conventional relations are broken down by catastrophe and time. The clustering of these capacities in the middle of the country, while not predictive, is certainly meaningful from this vantage point: not as a way of steering the future but perhaps as a resource for fueling speculative imaginings and for living within the changes to come.

Conclusion

A train emerging from a tunnel in Los Angeles bearing the banner “To Oblivion” both tells and hides the truth. Certainly, the public infrastructure represented by the Pacific Electric railway was heading for an end, to be replaced by the freeways that currently dominate southern California’s landscape. However, a great deal of history emerged in that oblivion, as the infrastructure went on to have a series of unpredictable afterlives, from public art space to arena for ancient sports and recreation. Infrastructure does not disappear into oblivion; it persists and sometimes mutates. What is beyond oblivion is far more interesting than simple disappearance.

While infrastructure scholars routinely discuss the pacing of infrastructure, its historical ontology and specific relation to modernity—that is, concepts roughly falling under the category of time—it is strange that few grapple seriously with the future. This is especially troubling because of the special relationship that infrastructure presently has to the future: at once implicated in oncoming collapse and also materially destined to persist after such an event. If goals such as Berlant’s non-reproductive futures and Boyer’s revolutionary infrastructure are to be pursued, it feels necessary to supplement understandings of infrastructures as objects that have sociotechnical histories and shape lives in the present with perspectives that suggest moments of future possibility.

In this project, collapse is an inevitability and also a conceptual tool. As Robinson’s novels suggest, disaster is a means to free material from pattern and use, allowing bridges, overpasses, housing tracts, power plants and water pipes to be seen as massive, uneven aggregations of material with unforeseen capacities. In this way, disaster might make way for the “squatting in” and “repurposing” of infrastructure that Boyer (2016) associates with revolutionary infrastructures and the formation of novel societies (p. 184). Approaching disaster attunes us to the materiality and geographical distribution of infrastructure as aspects of the present that will persist into strange and unpredictable futures. Looming collapse helps us to imagine, now, not necessarily what revolutionary infrastructures might look like but certainly the ways in which existing infrastructure might come to matter in their development. Grappling with infrastructures’ futures in this way is a hopeful method for current times.