The Hybrid Nature of Infrastructures

Note: The volume is the result of shared reflections between Giacomo Bonan and Katia Occhi. Giacomo Bonan authored pages 1-5 and Katia Occhi pages 6-10. Giacomo Bonan's research has received funding, as part of "The Water Cultures of Italy, 1500-1900" Advanced Grant, from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 833834).

Translation: Gavin Taylor

Until a few decades ago, the study of infrastructures was confined to a few areas of engineering, economics, transport and urban planning. Today, however, it has become the focus of a vast multidisciplinary debate that also includes the humanities and in particular history. As often happens with such kind of keywords, while the concept gained in currency it accumulated a multiplicity of definitions, sometimes resulting in haziness. The term "infrastructure" was originally coined in the second half of the nineteenth century to describe the French railway system and it was translated into other languages over the following decades. After the end of the Second World War, it became more widely used thanks to its adoption in military terminology (particularly in NATO programs) and it subsequently became a commonly used term in many different sectors, to the point of identifying virtually any element enabling the operation of modern economies and societies1.

Dirk van Laak, one of the historians most committed in recent years to analyzing the significance and role of infrastructures, defines them as: "the stable or immobile elements that are necessary to enable fluidity, movement, and communication. They produce a networked and circularly organized society that generates trade and change, peace and prosperity"2. He identified their emergence in the eighteenth century, within the first developments of state modernization.

Given the central role that infrastructures played in shaping the 'built environment', it is no surprise that this concept enjoyed growing popularity within the sphere of environmental history, also in relation to two interconnected dynamics. Within the academia, the last decades have seen a convergence between environmental history on the one hand and the history of technology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) on the other3. In more general terms, since the start of the new millennium these themes have been profoundly shaped by debate on the concept of the Anthropocene, one of the characterizing aspects of which is the progressive overlapping of ecological and social dynamics, including those related to technological factors4. As a consequence of these developments, infrastructures have come to be considered principally as hybrid socio-ecological systems, or according to a definition proposed by Sara Pritchard, envirotechnical systems, that are "historically and culturally specific configurations of intertwined 'ecological' and 'technological' systems"5.

Among the many methodological and thematic perspectives through which environmental historians have analyzed infrastructures, it is worth mentioning at least three particularly relevant fields of research, which are closely interconnected with each other and widely discussed also in the essays that comprise the present volume. The first is urban environmental history, as is already clear in one of the texts considered seminal to this historiographic genre: William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. In this work, the large infrastructures realized over the course of the nineteenth century, like railways and navigable canals, are considered the linchpins around which dynamics emerged linking the urban development of Chicago to the transformation of a hinterland that extended from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains6. At the same time, the studies in urban metabolism that were taking shape in those years also identified the construction and operation of large infrastructures (aqueducts and sewage networks, transport and communication systems, etc.) as elements that oriented the materials and energy flows, both within the urban context and between the city and the surrounding territory7. A turning point in these processes was identified, at least for Europe and North America, in the nineteenth century, when the development of modern industrial-scale infrastructures provided new opportunities for urban growth through a series of improvements in sanitation, mobility, and energy transport and consumption. The result of these dynamics was the emergence of the so-called "networked city"8.

The concept of a networked city had been developed by environmental historians starting from that of "large technological system" proposed by the historian of technology Thomas P. Hughes, when referring to the construction of large electrical infrastructures9. This genealogy leads to our second field of study, in which the ecological aspects of infrastructures have been frequently studied over recent years: history of energy. This dynamic area of research developed around the concept of energy systems (or regimes), a term that does not refer simply to the sum of energy sources and the necessary converters, but instead includes the social, economic, technological, and environmental aspects associated with specific models of energy exploitation. In this perspective, the study of energy systems and their transitions becomes a way to examine, through the lens of energy, the most significant ecological, economic, and social transformations of a given historical phase10. For example, recent research has demonstrated how modern energy transport infrastructures (canals, oil pipelines, transmission lines, etc.) are not simply connections linking supply and demand, but through the logic of economies of scale and the dynamics of path-dependence, they first 'created' new energy demands and consequently determined particular energy consumption models11. These transformations also redefined relations both between social actors at local or national scale, and between areas of the globe connected by the energy infrastructures on a geopolitical scale12.

The third and final field of study, particularly well covered by environmental historians who have analyzed infrastructures, involves the management and control of water resources. A famous - and contested - reference in this respect is the theory of "Oriental despotism" elaborated by Karl Wittfogel, postulating that the transition from sustenance agriculture based on local irrigation systems, to a model based on large scale infrastructures for irrigation and flood control in Asia encouraged the emergence of "hydraulic societies", characterized by powerful bureaucracies and centralized, authoritarian state systems13. Wittfogel's thesis was adopted and adapted by one of the founders of environmental history, Donald Worster. In Rivers of Empire, Worster analyzed the political and social dynamics linked to the realization of large-scale irrigation infrastructures, not in relation to the development of "Oriental despotism", but instead of "Western capitalism". Worster focused on the infrastructures that transformed the arid lands of the American West into one of the richest agricultural regions on the planet. The process was fuelled with massive public support, both in terms of invested resources and technical-administrative expertise, with an equally important contribution from large scale agrarian capitalism. This created a new typology of "hydraulic society" based on an interweaving of state intervention and private interests14.

In recent decades one of the most effective ways to integrate water, energy, and urban issues has been the study of rivers. Regarding infrastructures in particular, research has shown that water courses should not be considered only in relation to the impact of large-scale infrastructures on water flow rates or the morphology of river basins. Instead, rivers should be understood as integral parts of more articulated infrastructures, in which technical elements interact with natural ones. This is an idea that already emerged in a text considered to be a turning point in the historical study of rivers, The Organic Machine by Richard White15. The author considered the Columbia River to be a sort of organic machine, in which human and natural labor were interwoven and influenced each other, transforming the surrounding territory through irrigation, energy generation, and the development of transport systems. White's methodological approach has been adopted frequently and further elaborated in subsequent decades, like for example by Sara Pritchard in her study of the Rodano River, with the aforementioned concept of envirotechnical systems16.

Water courses can thus be considered as nodes in more articulated and hybrid infrastructures that have played an essential part both in urban contexts and for providing...