The Tower. A Concrete Utopia

The Tower. A Concrete Utopia Traditionally, urban planning and architecture carry a form of utopian optimism for a livable city with them. Yet, all too often infrastructural dreams turn into nightmares and the skyward ideals of a towered cityscape turns into the symbolism of degraded holes. In a narrative that takes off from an architectural apprentice and the cast-in-concrete spirits that he called, photographer Sammy Baloji and anthropologist Filip de Boeck weave photos and text into a construction of hopes, failures, and social complexities nested into the material existence of postcolonial Kinshasa.This article is part of the dossier 'Infrastructure' of the Technosphere Magazine published by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Infrastructure could be understood as a crystallization continually forming the technosphere. It functions both as the glue to the different parts of this man-made sphere, but also mandates the way certain systems are controlled or made possible. Human techniques and behaviors are only as viable as the infrastructure within which they are set. This point is particularly salient as increasingly more devices and apparatuses are tied together. A complex of logistic networks and protocols, synthetic materials and organisms, algorithms and architectonics interlink these parts in fragile chains of relation and interaction, bluntly imposing new landscapes of accreting and eroding geo-artefacts. Thus infrastructure is both the epistemic and physical skeleton upon which the technosphere grows and proliferates. It provides the reasons behind how things are organized and makes such an organization possible in some sort of fixed capacity. It constitutes the swaths of sites around the world extracting and producing energy, treating and procuring water all while managing waste and subsequently generating an immense tangle of dumps, grids, treatment plants, reservoirs, and sewers. Bridges, roads, harbors, airports, and railroad yards that bring goods and people from place to place, servers, telecommunications wiring, satellites, and antennae that send and receive signals: infrastructuralization is the becoming systemic of the granular. And what is systemic becomes a matter for earthly politics.status: publishe