Prof. Mariana Valverde
Centre for Criminology and Socio-legal Studies at the University of Toronto

In many social sciences, especially urban geography and urban studies, there has been a marked shift called ‘the infrastructural turn’. That ‘turn’ highlights the political importance of infrastructure planning and provision in recent years, and also the notorious failures that plague infrastructure in both the global North and the global South.

My own argument is that infrastructure is about the only public object that seems to be worthy of public support: hence the constant marrying of ‘investment’ with ‘infrastructure’, as if investing were not spending. Even social services (the tattered remnants of the welfare state, one might say) are currently justified as objects of public spending as “social infrastructure”.

There is an emerging literature about legal infrastructures, mostly in the context of big data and digital worlds, a literature fuelled by recent policy efforts to impose state or transnational law regulation on ‘big tech’. But I argue that all infrastructure including old-fashioned bridges and roads have legal infrastructures –with ‘legal’ being used in a broad sense, to include apparently technical standards. Law and technical norms together provide the legal infrastructure of infrastructure.

The talk will begin with a reflection on the popularity of ‘infrastructure investments’ in a neoliberal era, and then go on to explore different aspects of legal infrastructures including so-called ‘technical’ standards (governing buildings, underground pipes etc) that often have more than the force of law.