Cultural Infrastructure: Select Annotated Bibliography - Prepared by Dr Phillip Mar

About the Cultural Infrastructure Research Program The Cultural Infrastructure Research Program (co-led by Professor Deborah Stevenson and Dr Zelmarie Cantillon) conducts cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research into the cultural institutions and practices that shape the expression and experience of everyday lives and cultures and contribute to the social, cultural, and economic vitality of cities. [...] Mindful of the complexity and unevenness of cultural infrastructure, the program probes its contours at different levels of operation and governance, and in contexts ranging from the local to the global. [...] Swelling and splintering of theories of infrastructure The expansion of infrastructure as a theoretical category is illustrated in the call for ‘expanding and renegotiating the roles of infrastructure not only as a technical, but also as a political, economic, social, and even aesthetic matter of concern for all’ (Ruby and Ruby 2017). [...] Analysis of the modelling and monitoring of critical infrastructure systems and their interdependencies has itself become a field of study (Ouyang 2014), a kind of mirroring of the analyses of some of the larger- scale infrastructure theorising mentioned above. [...] Drawing on a case study of land occupations and informal settlements in the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, where the staples of life such as water, electricity, shelter and sanitation are co-constructed by the poor, the paper argues that infrastructures—visible and invisible—are deeply implicated in not only the making and unmaking of individual lives, but also in the experience of community, s.