Intervening in the City: Co-designing Neighbourhood Infrastructure with Residents of a London Housing Estate

Abstract

Infrastructure is about norms, standards and social organisation. It helps construct categories of gender, family, citizenship (Star 1999). Infrastructure is about power and politics. It determines who has access to standards of living and the political ecology that results from differentiated access (Graham and Marvin 2001; Kaika 2004). Infrastructure is also about resources and sustainability. Centralised supplydriven systems have been critiqued for hard wiring the resource intensity of everyday life at unsustainable levels (Shove 2003). Infrastructure is rarely about co-design, although end users, even residents in their homes, are increasingly being seen as key to achieving system aims a..