Some anthropologists of infrastructure have critically reexamined Star’s claim that infrastructure becomes ‘visible upon…

“Some anthropologists of infrastructure have critically reexamined Star’s claim that infrastructure becomes ‘visible upon breakdown’. Their key observation is that infrastructure can take on different meanings and thus different visibilities for different people, at different times, and in different places. For example, a large-scale piece of infrastructure may be treated as a monument. Or the act of breaking ground for a new highway or launching a satellite may be defined as a national project. Meanwhile, a regional information hub can be the target of terrorism, and a waste-disposal facility can be seen as a nuisance to comfortable community life. To put it simply, infrastructure is not always infrastructure only in a material sense: it can have many other symbolic or imaginative capacities.”

– Shuhei Kimura, ‘When a Seawall Is Visible’, Science as Culture (2016)