Infrastructural citizenship and geosolidarity

Abstract

In northeast Houston, a community organization is experimenting with building green infrastructure, beginning with rain gardens. In doing so, the project's participants are engaging in what might be called “infrastructural citizenship.” This form of citizenship uses “civil power” to defy white-supremacist legacies of technopolitical flood control, which have made northeast Houston one of the most heavily flooded parts of the city. Yet infrastructural citizenship also expresses commitments beyond stormwater management, taking aim at inherited infrastructural logics and traditions associated with other norms of US petroculture (e.g., spatialized and racialized environmental toxicity, translocal supply chains). In contrast to the default petrosolidarity that ensnares the Global North (and much of the Global South), initiatives like the rain garden project evince a growing geosolidarity with the land and its capacities. Such a politics can challenge both a racist petrostate and the conditions of ecological emergency that it perpetrates.