Infrastructures Collaborative pour une justice sociale

Social justice requires that communities at the margins are engaged in structures of power and decision-making; all too frequently, however, they are excluded. This paper argues that, to achieve inclusive city governance, it is essential to support and maintain an experientially sensitive infrastructure of community-focused organisations working in collaboration with local universities and local government. We stress the socio-political nature of infrastructure (Larkin, 2013; Amin, 2014): it is as much social as material. Whilst technologies of infrastructure are important, what matters, we urge, is the capacity of infrastructure to foster connectedness for social action rather than isolation and exclusion through technical management. Understood as such, infrastructure supports endurance, articulated by Berlant (2016: 395) as ‘ongoingness’. There is a tension in this ‘ongoingness’ between solidity and flow, responsiveness and endurance, which we explore both conceptually and in practical settings.
Collaborative infrastructure, we argue, is essential at the city-level in any attempt to tackle structural inequalities and disadvantage. The paper links the conceptual notion of collaborative infrastructure to practical initiatives involving community anchor organisations and community wealth-building approaches. Of particular importance to engaging communities at the margins are networks of organisations that can act as brokers, intermediaries and umbrella or ‘in-between’ entities that support and curate the work of smaller, more narrowly focused groups or enterprises. These intermediary organisations are community-led and controlled, multi-purpose and complex, and are responsive and committed to local community and context.
We pay particular attention to the role that universities should play as civic institutions to support and develop such infrastructures. Universities can produce knowledge by bringing academic scholarship and expertise into dialogue with practitioner and experiential expertise, generating new knowledges capable of developing and sustaining collaborative infrastructures that remain responsive to embodied experience, or ‘experientially sensitive’ (a term we elaborate on in the second section of the paper).
The paper has three sections, beginning with a discussion on the idea of ‘community anchors’, and ‘anchor institutions’. In the second, we explore understandings of infrastructure, showing how it is a crucial foundation of the collaborative structures and processes that can engage communities at the margins through new forms of governance. The final section contains two vignettes which illustrate the practical role that universities, working with communities and city governments, can play in the creation, maintenance and development of knowledge production to support collaborative infrastructures. The first vignette is about a Bristol-based project, Communities in Focus, that aims to make community-generated data more productive by enabling it to flow through infrastructures in ways that enliven city governance with the experiential expertise of communities. The second vignette concerns a Sydney-based initiative called Sydney Commons Lab that aims to support and link the actors, practices and values of a regenerative commons-based economy, with a particular focus on embedding participatory democracy within economic entities; a broader conception of wealth, especially resistance to the quantification of value within market exchange, particularly as represented in goals of profit maximisation; and commitments to reducing both wealth inequalities and ecological harms that flow from the market – especially fair working conditions and more equitable finance.