1. Infrastructure Disruptions
as Extreme Events
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University
IHRR Seminar

2. Infrastructure and Urbanization
• 2007 50% of world’s population live in
urban areas
• These 3.3 billion people concentrated
on 2.4% of earth’s surface
• Rely on spectrum of mobilities and
connections
• Once infrastructure networks are
successfully built, "unconnected
localities" can be linked through what
Latour calls "provisionally
commensurable connections" (Latour,
1997; 2).
• In such a context, ‘Acts of God’ or
“environmental Hazards' mediated
profoundly by complexes of urban
infrastructure

3. Technosocial and Technonatural Assemblages
• Organise, and mediate, the
distribution of people, goods,
services, information, wastes,
capital, and energy between
multiple scales within and between
urban regions.
• The contemporary urban process
involves complex ‘cyborg’ liaisons
and multiple, distanciated
connections.
• Straddle many scales and link more
or less distant elsewheres.
• Crucial to “Anthropocene”

4. Cyborg Urbanization
• Blending of social into technical (and vice versa) ; technological into
natural/organic ; and social into natural/organic
• Complexes of ‘infrastructure’ involve all three processes of blurring:
socio-technical (cyborg bodies); socio-natural (urban water systems;
resource commodity chains); techno-natural (urban metabolism &
ecology)
• "The city", writes Erik Swyngedouw, "cannot survive without capturing,
transforming and transporting nature's water. The 'metabolism of the city'
depends of the incessant flow of water through its veins" (1995, 390).

5. • “The modern home, for example, has become a complex
exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth,
light and other essential needs. The home can be conceived as
‘prosthesis and prophylactic’ in which modernist distinctions
between nature and culture, and between the organic and the
inorganic, become blurred” Gandy 2004

6. Bill Joy: When Turning Off Becomes Suicide
• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems,
recently caused a furore amongst, suggested
that the mediation of human societies by
astonishingly complex computerised
infrastructure systems will soon reach the
stage when "people won't be able to just turn
the machines off, because they will be so
dependent on them that turning them off
would amount to suicide" (2000, 239).

7. How are Technosocial complexes ‘black boxed’ as
the ‘engineer’s stuff’ of ‘infrastructure
• For Susan Leigh-Star (1999) nine characteristics.
• embedded (i.e. “sunk into other structures);
• transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented
each time or assembled for each task”);
• offers temporal or spatial reach or scope;
• is learned by its users;
• is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of
electricity use);
• embodies standards;
• is built on an installed base of sunk capital;
• is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once
or globally;

8. And yet, paradoxically,
often only noticed when they fail
• Finally, infrastructure “tends to become visible
upon breakdown.”
• When infrastructure networks "work best, they
are noticed least of all" (David Perry, 1995).
• Modern urbanism associated with progressive
veiling of infrastructure, physically and
discursively, beneath the urban scene, as part
of emergence of “Wired-Piped-Tracked”
Metropolis
• Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) "the networks
became buried underground, invisible,
banalised, and relegated to an apparently
marginal, subterranean urban world".

9. The ‘Fronstaging’ of the Urban ‘Backstage’
• Irving Goffman’s (1959)
terms, the built
environment’s “backstage’
becomes momentarily
“frontstaged”
• The sudden absence of
infrastructural flow creates
visibility just as the
continued, normalised use of
infrastructures creates a
deep taken-for-grantedness
and invisibility.

10. ‘Unblackboxing’
• Technosocial ‘blackboxes” are
momentarily undone
• Cultures of normalised and taken-forgranted infrastructure use sustain
widespread assumptions that urban
‘infrastructure’ is somehow a material
and utterly fixed assemblage of hard
technologies embedded stably in place
which is characterised by perfect order,
completeness, immanence and internal
homogeneity rather than leaky, partial
and heterogeneous entities.

11. Myth of Fixed and Stable
Emplacement
• Infrastructures regarded as "symbols of the complexity,
ubiquity and the embodied power of modern
technology" (Summerton 1994).
• “we sometimes seem to view mature Large Technical
Systems as invulnerable, embodying more and more
power over time and developing along a path whose
basic direction is as foreseeable as it is impossible to
detour [But] systems are more vulnerable, less stable
and less predictable in their various phases than most of
us tend to think (Summerton, 1994)

12. • Cultures and economies of infrastructural repair and
improvisation almost invisible within urban studies

13. Socio-technical
‘Normal Accidents’: Blackout
• “cascading effects”
• “We are all hostages to
electricity” Leslie (1999)

14. The Electromateriality of
‘cyberspace’
• “When servers are
down, panic sets in.
Electronic power
failures, internal surges,
the glitches that corrupt
and destroy memory,
mirror our relation with
power itself” (Grossman,
2003, 23).
• a single server farm
consumes as much
electrical power as a city
the size of Honolulu.

15. Blackouts and the ‘Global’ City
• “We are talking about
Mumbai as the next
Shanghai”, a general
manager for a major Mumbai
advertising firm, faced with
losing 30% of its revenues
due to daily 4 hour power
cuts, reported in 2005. “And
here we are faced with the
possibilities of
blackouts” (SAND, 2005).

16. Blackouts and Neoliberal Dogma
• Electricity deregulation in the USA had actually ignored the
economic and geographical fundamentals of an industry that
necessitates reliable, material connectivities between generation
and use; that is prone to cascading and spiralling failure as
transcontinental and transnational markets in supply are
established within “complex interactive networks,” with dramatic
unintended consequences ; and where the hard infrastructures are
ageing and organised with a baroque level of complexity and local
fragmentation.

17. ICTs and Cascading Effects
• On July 19, 2001, a train shipping hydrochloric acid, computer paper,
wood-pulp bales and other items from North Carolina to New Jersey
derails in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore. Later estimated to have
reached 1,500 degrees, the ensuing fire is hot enough to make the
boxcars glow. A toxic cloud forces the evacuation of several city blocks.
By its second day, the blaze melts a pipe containing fiber-optic lines laid
along the railroad right-of-way, disrupting telecommunications traffic on a
critical New York-Miami axis. Cell phones in suburban Maryland fail. The
New York–based Hearst Corporation loses its email and the ability to
update its web pages. Worldcom, PSINet, and Abovenet report problems.
Slowdowns are seen as far away as Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles,
and the American embassy in Lusaka, Zambia loses all contact with
Washington.
•
Kazys Varnelis

18. Political Ecological
Disruptions: Katrina
• Urban political
ecologies rendered
starkly visible
• Metabolized nature
disturbed; politically
constructed
vulnerabilities exposed

19. Malign Mobilities: SARS

20. Malign Immobilities: Sewer Fat

21. Supply Disruptions: Oil Shock

22. Forced Disconnection: Infrastructural Warfare
• "There is nothing in the
world today that cannot
become a weapon" (Liang
and Xiangsui, 1999)
• "If you want to destroy
someone nowadays, you
go after their infrastructure.
" (Phil Agre, 2001)

23. “Global Guerillas” and Infrastructural insurgencies
“Global economic networks, like today's oil
networks, are typically sparse (few nodes),
hierarchical (an inverted pyramid of
distribution), concentrated (big hubs), and
vulnerable (not built with security in mind).
Complex infrastructure often exhibits extreme
levels of vulnerability to non-planned events.
The reason for this is may be found in an area
of complexity research called highly optimized
tolerance (HOT). HOT research has found that
complex networks, like most global
infrastructure, exhibit behaviors explained by
the design considerations of its makers. The
end-result of this planning is a network that is
extremely robust against certain types of
anticipated failures/insults but conversely is
hypersensitive to unanticipated classes of
uncertainty”. John Robb

25. Water…

26. Streets…

27. •
"the next Pearl Harbor will be
both everywhere and nowhere at the
same time. It's targets will not be the
U.S. military or defense system but,
instead, the U.S. public and its postindustrial and highly informatized
lifestyle. What is now a tool for
comfort, an object of leisure, or a
necessary support for work [..] will soon
become the world's deadliest
weapon” (Debrix, 2001).

31. State-Backed Infrastructural War
• John Warden’s “Enemy as a
System”. Basis for US doctrine :
“Strategic Ring Theory”
• Legitimises civilian infrastructures
as ‘dual-use targets’
• Ritzer "by declaring dual-use
targets legitimate military
objectives, the Air Force can
directly target civilian morale".

32. •
Edward Felker’s (1998)
embellishment of Warden
•
Infrastructure, rather than a
separate 'ring' of the 'enemy as a
system', in fact pervades, and
connects, all the others to actually
"constitute the society as a
whole"
•
"If infrastructure links the
subsystems of a society," he
wrote, "might it be the most
important target ?" (1998).

33. First Order Effects
Second Order
Effects
Third Order Effects
No light after dark or in
building interiors
Erosion of command
and control capabilities
Greater logistics
complexity
No refrigeration
Increased requirement
for power generating
equipment
Decreased mobility
Some stoves/ovens non
operable
Increased requirement
for night vision devices
Decreased Situational
Awareness
Inoperable hospital
electronic equipment
Increased reliance on
battery-powered items
for news, broadcasts,
etc.
Rising disease rates
No electronic access to
bank accounts/money
Shortage of clean water
for drinking, cleaning
and preparing food
Rising rates of
malnutrition
Disruption in some
transportation and
communications
services
Hygiene problems
Increased numbers of
non-combatants
requiring assistance
Disruption to water
supply, treatment
facilities, and sanitation
Inability to prepare and
process some foods
Difficulty in
communicating with
non-combatants

35. ‘Bomb Now, Die Later’ :
The ‘War onGlosson 1991 : ”I want to put every--[Iraqi] household in an
1991-2003
• General Buster Public Health’ in Iraq
autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated… We wanted to play
with their psyche"

36. Towards State Computer Network Attack (CNA)