The cultural infrastructure of cities By Alison L.Bain and Julie A.Podmore, Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne: Agenda Publishing. 2023. 304 pages. $52.00 (paperback). ISBN: 9781788214926

This collection has the unusual quality, for an edited volume, of both diversity and coherence. Its 14 substantive chapters—there are also significant introductory and concluding chapters—range widely geographically, encompassing Toronto (several chapters), Berlin, Leipzig, London, Munich, New Orleans, Medellin, Oaxaca, São Paulo, Singapore, Montreal, Dublin, Ahmedabad, and a small unnamed Dutch city. Topically as well, each chapter engages a separate example of cultural infrastructure. The list runs the gamut of artists and cultural districts, open creative labs, accessible studio space, theatre, a dance venue, Carnival, youth-led peripheral cultural events, hawker centres, hipster retailing, the fashion industry, arts festivals, museums, libraries, and archives. This diversity is impressive, though it runs the risk of becoming unwieldy in its inflated variation. Considerable coherence is nonetheless achieved, due to the skill of the editors in providing clear frameworks in their introduction and conclusion, and in dividing the book into four parts (producing culture, performing culture, consuming culture, collecting culture) with short forewords binding the contributions in each part. The authors have clearly bought into the infrastructure problematic, leading to the emergence of a cumulative conceptual argument through the chapters. In this short review I note three themes from the book and one observation on infrastructure as problematic. One of the book's great strengths is its emphasis on change. Gentrification and urban redevelopment provide a backcloth to several chapters evoking chronic spatial uncertainty for cultural land uses. More acute is temporal uncertainty, as many authors identify the dire effects of COVID-19 and its demolition of former taken-for-granted norms and expectations. Adaptation became the evolutionary route to survival, and successful cultural venues pivoted to virtual programming and digitalization, while sidestepping the normal requirement of indoor face-to-face presence with virtual or outdoor performances. A second and related theme is the vulnerability of the cultural sector. Some projects are temporary from the start (Carnival, festivals), others are ephemeral, weighed down by insecure funding, space availability, and, perhaps, insufficient management skill and persistence. Even established institutions like theatres or museums depend on the vagaries of government funding and donor commitment, and may be stressed by sudden political or economic change or a random shock like the pandemic. A third theme in some, though not all, chapters is the presentation of cultural events as sites of resistance. A pervasive character of the artistic worldview is revisioning conventional understanding, a position that leads to a lexicon of unsettling, overturning, and reversal. Since the Romantic movement (at least) revisioning has included a redemptive, political edge. In the developing world of Global South cities, chapters place cultural expressions against the contexts of poverty, social exclusion, and religious conflict, while in northern cities authors present resistance more often in conflicts around gender and sexuality. An outlier here is the chapter on community programming in a Dutch library and the role of the volunteer in welcoming and facilitating diverse users. Among the calls for disruption and subversion, cultural geography should not overlook such worlds of care and community-building. In my scholarly journey I missed the infrastructural turn noted by almost all authors in this volume. Consequently, I look at cultural infrastructure as something of an outsider, familiar enough with the substantive topics in this collection, but more quizzical of the conceptual problematic. The Introduction addresses this issue comprehensively, but misgivings remain. Most chapters emphasize that infrastructure includes materialities (hard infrastructure) and also social, or soft, infrastructure. But there is more. First, the editors identify infrastructure “as an everyday lived experience in and of itself,” so that we can think of “people as infrastructure” (p. 7); in a later chapter, the human body appears as “foundational infrastructure” (p. 120). So does structure also include agency? Second, impinging upon (or part of?) cultural infrastructure, chapters evoke such entities as the political infrastructure, the economic infrastructure, even the digital infrastructure. Is there a logjam of language here? On several occasions authors use “ecosystem” and even “assemblage,” famously commodious terms, as synonymous with “infrastructure.” The old question arises: in spreading its ambitions so widely, is this problematic losing its analytical power? This is more a question, less a criticism, and an opening to conversation. It should not be the last word concerning a collection of essays that is empirically interesting, artfully creative, cohesively satisfying, and well-edited throughout.

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