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Encouraged by Bonnie Honig's notion of the reparative work of public things in democracies, this paper argues that infrastructure is inextricable from desire. Once seen from this perspective, the emergence of public infrastructures of uncertainty gain new salience for mapping latent desires for democracy in profoundly undemocratic situations. Here, public infrastructures of uncertainty refers to a miscellany of conduits and sites that heighten rather than reduce uncertainty. Fractional investing--where investors purchase partial shares in publicly traded companies--and the sprawling digital networks that makes it possible is one example of a public site for heightening uncertainty. Only in a few cases are such things owned by the public sector, though they are all subsidized by governments and subject to public regulation of one sort or another. Yet, their public-ness stems less from genres of control than from their potential to bind disparate subjects, species, and things into an ordered cosmos. Moving beyond an approach to infrastructure that emphasizes its capacity to provide for needs and calibrate expectations of risk, this paper focuses on the imbrication of desire and unimagined futures. Its analytical claims are buttressed by historical interpretations of urban design projects from interwar Belgium and Australia, as well as close readings of essays in art and political criticism by Octavio Paz.
Shiben Banerji is an urban designer and historian. For his first book, Lineages of the Global City, Shiben received a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, Urbanism, and Design, and a Graham Foundation Publication Grant. Recognized for bringing the humanities into conversation with public policy, Shiben was recently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Humanities at UIC, and Visiting Faculty at the Indian School of Public Policy. For his commitment to student success, Shiben was invited to deliver the faculty lecture at the 5th Annual Decolonization Dinner in 2019, and in 2020 received SAIC's Full-Time Faculty of the Year Award.
This event will be live captioned by CART. For additional access requests, including ASL interpretation or audio description, visit saic.edu/access
