Landscape-Infrastructure: formal-informal Entanglements across political Ecologies of Resource Use

Perrotti, Daniela [UCL]

The essay looks back at the emergence of the landscape-infrastructure nexus across philosophy and landscape practice. The nexus is proposed as a vehicle for assembling institutionalised urban regimes and informal practices in the political space of the ecologies and economies of resource use in urban regions as well as in their discourse in urban studies. To illustrate my argument, first, I explore opportunities for circumventing dualistic ontologies through assemblage thinking and Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Then, I argue that, when studied through ANT, formal regimes and informal practices can be defined as quasi-objects that exist and acquire meaning in the landscape-infrastructure by virtue of their radical relationality and mutual dependence. Finally, urban political ecologies of water in Mexico City are discussed as a paradigmatic case for illustrating the entanglement of formal regimes and informal practices for resource use and management. I use the example of grassroot initiatives for decentralised water management at the household and community level to detect the insurgence of wicked problems in urban studies when the formal-informal distinction is addressed through definitive problem formulations. I conclude that the proposed actualised reading of the landscape-infrastructure nexus can help to look critically not only at the divide between informal practices and institutionalised resource-management regimes but also at the way urban studies are conducted.