[Themaintainers] Talk: Maintenance & the Humanness of Infrastructure (Steven Vogel) Maintenance SIG Thursday 13th April (1800-1915 UTC+1)

[mark young]

Dear all,

Hope this email finds everyone well. We’d like to announce the next session
of the Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology SIG on Thursday 13th April
(1800-1915 UTC+1). In this session, we’re very excited to welcome Steven
Vogel who’ll be discussing the role of maintenance in sustaining the built
environment. If you'd like to receive a link for the talk, please send me
an email at mark at markthomasyoung.net


Best,

Mark

*Maintenance and the Humanness of Infrastructure*

Steven Vogel (Denison University)

Thursday 13th April (1800-1915 UTC+1)

Urban infrastructure is typically thought of as a set of objects, or
perhaps a set of processes, upon
which human beings in cities depend. Humans use infrastructure, on this
view, but generally do so
without even noticing it, and the complexity of the processes involved in
such use in particular is
generally invisible to urban inhabitants. Only at moments of failure ---
blackouts, natural disasters,
etc. – do those inhabitants become aware of the infrastructure their lives
require and presuppose.
Yet there is more to the human involvement in infrastructure than merely
use: humans build it, first
of all, and secondly (and just as importantly) they maintain it. If we
shift our focus from the use of
infrastructure to the practices of construction and maintenance that make
that use possible, we can
come to see that infrastructure is not so much a set of objects or
processes as a human doing, in which
building, maintenance, and use are intertwined, and where “failure” is not
so much an occasional
event with special powers to reveal the city’s dependence on an otherwise
hidden infrastructure as a
constant element (which means “failure’ may not be the right word). The
implications of this apply in
turn not merely to infrastructure in particular but rather to all elements
of the built environment,
which is to say to the city as such: it is not a thing but rather itself a
kind of ongoing practice.


(In order to avoid confusion regarding the timing of the talks - the
following table clarifies when the talks begin in different locations)

Amsterdam 7:00pm
London 6:00pm
Toronto (New York) 1:00pm
San Francisco 10:00am
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