Urban infrastructure patching: Citizen-led solutions to infrastructure ruptures

Abstract

This article explores how citizens respond to ruptures and problems in the places they inhabit by enacting adaptive improvised and incremental urban infrastructure patching. This might relate to citizens deciding to undertake small scale interventions in their communities to develop solutions to problems that are being overlooked by local government; or it might involve a community response to an ongoing systemic place-based problem that formal agencies involved in managing change are not addressing. This paper develops the concept of urban infrastructure patching with reference to conceptual debates and informed by research undertaken in Birmingham, UK. Drawing upon observations, interviews, and collective art projects, citizen-led urban patching is identified as an important urban intervention process that emerges in response to tensions between professional urban policymakers’ ostensive views of a place and the lived experiences of inhabitants. Cities are in a continual process of becoming and this includes the impacts of citizen end-user adaptive and incremental patching to maintain and enhance urban social-material environments. Two distinct contributions are made. First, citizen-end-user urban patching is based on residents’ experiences of perceived or actual ruptures in local urban infrastructure. Secondly, patching in response to ruptures is an individual and collective response. As a collective response, the power of numbers can bring about transformational change in places, but such participatory action is often viewed as challenging existing hegemonic power structures associated with representative democracy, whereas citizen-led responses can serve as a useful and parallel activity to urban government if it is legitimised.