As the British government is getting ready to announce a commitment of £5bn of public funding to a massive investment plan in infrastructures over the next couple of days, I am wondering how infrastructures sometimes are respecified in the redistribution of collective resources. The British government has been cutting back on public sector expenditures in almost all areas, including many types of support that would, I think, be included in sociological notions of infrastructure (like subsidies in transport, communication, education etc.). Now the rationale appears to be that some of that spending has to be redirected in order to attract private investment in infrastructures – while most of the cuts of course have remain as they were (and one immediately suspects more cuts will be forthcoming in order to support the “infrastructure boost”).

This is obviously another demonstration of how the scope of what is deemed a collectively indispensable infrastructure is subject of political spin and generally, I suspect, in any case much narrower than an exploration of instructures in terms of hybrid assemblages (or more broadly in STS terms) would have it. In this case, roads and energy are apparently deemed more essential than the “soft” human infrastructures within the collective, even in a service econony like the UK. Still, there is some discretion taken by policy-makers apparent here in defining the scope of the collectively indispensable more or less broadly. It may be worthwhile in exploring states’ contribution to the maintenance of infrastructures to look specifically at the fringes or gray areas where infrastructure policies are regularly accommodated. Political respecifications are also visible in attempts by interested private actors (investors, entrepreneurs, lobbyists etc.) to accommodate this scope, e.g. in the areas of housing and water mentioned in recent postings, particularly in Kathryn’s Medellín reports.

Conversely, there is also the question of how infrastructures are respecified economically in creating something like an infrastructure sector (as mentioned in the article from the Guardian linked above), i.e. as a type of aggregate market.

What are we to make of such political or economic respecifications (or re-assemblings) of infrastructures? Is it a reasonable strategy of sociological exploration confronting such respecifications be to go for the broadest possible understanding of infrastructures in order to effectively re-frame these more specific remediations? At the moment I feel tempted to say yes – but such a strategy would really beg for at least some kind of respecification that is genuinely sociological – if that can (or should?) indeed be re-assembled.