Infrastructures as urban solutions? Critical perspectives on transformative socio-technical change
本文批判了基础设施主导的城市发展中的“解决方案主义”逻辑，提出应将基础设施视为动态、关系性和有争议的社会技术过程，并强调渐进、情境化的变革路径。
This introduction to the special issue critically explores the pervasive logic of solutionism in infrastructure-led urban development and planning – a logic marked not only by the strong belief in the transformative power of infrastructures but also by a tendency to reframe how urban problems are prioritised and governed. Although infrastructures are increasingly positioned as key tools for urban decarbonisation, circularity, resilience or smartness, this introduction critically questions dominant solutionist approaches to complex urban problems. Drawing on recent urban scholarship, it explores infrastructures as ongoing, relational, and contested sociotechnical processes, rethinking transformative urban change as a situated, incremental, and ambiguous process shaped by local politics, materiality, and everyday repair and patching. Contributions to this issue highlight how infrastructural initiatives, even when partial or unrealised, can challenge dominant interests and practices and open space for alternative urban futures. Rather than repudiating infrastructural solutions, therefore, we suggest that the special issue foregrounds infrastructures’ contested potential to enable progressive, transformative change. We pull out four transversal themes from the papers, around rethinking governance, repoliticising infrastructure development, embracing incremental and context-sensitive approaches and expanding conceptions of justice. In doing so, we call for approaches to infrastructural transformation that remain open to uncertainty, friction and possibility.