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Securing and scaling resilient futures: neoliberalization, infrastructure, and topologies of power
journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-09, 13:49 authored by Dan SageDan Sage, Pete Fussey, Andrew DaintyIn this paper we explore the scaling of resilience policy and practice not as an
effect upon infrastructure but as enacted through infrastructure. Drawing on Foucault’s
topological analyses of governmental power, especially his elaboration of its coeval
centripetal and centrifugal flows, we argue that understanding the scaling of resilience
policy and practice involves acknowledging its infrastructural composition. We examine
this infrastructural scaling through an empirical analysis of UK resilience policy and practice, as recounted by those working across multiple organizations involved in planning for, and coping with, aleatory events. This reveals how the neoliberal decentralizing refrain, expressed in resilience policy and its critique, is both sustained and displaced by interwoven circulatory mechanisms of obstruction, filtration, and acceleration. Together
these infrastructural flows amount to ‘fractionally coherent’ scalings that not only centralize governmental power but are constitutive of governmental centres. Our analyses of infrastructural scaling suggest that resiliency policy and practice is far less decentralized, or localized, than others have suggested, with both centripetal and centrifugal flows of power resulting from a composite of infrastructural circulatory mechanisms that can
variously scale political agency in relation to aleatory events.
Funding
This paper was based upon research conducted within the EPSRC-ESRC funded research project ‘Resilient Futures’ (EP/I005943/1).
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Environment and Planning D: Society and SpaceVolume
33Issue
3Pages
494 - 511 (18)Citation
SAGE, D., FUSSEY, P. and DAINTY, A., 2015. Securing and scaling resilient futures: neoliberalization, infrastructure, and topologies of power. Environment and Planning D - Society & Space, 33 (3), pp.494-511Publisher
© SAGE Publications Ltd.Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015-06-01Notes
This article was published in the journal, Environment and Planning D - Society & Space [© SAGE Publications]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d14154pISSN
0263-7758eISSN
1472-3433Publisher version
Language
- en