The Broken Promise of Infrastructure

Offering an exhilarating journey through time and space, Davies is an expert guide through the ruins of a once imperial power to the hollow fantasy of what passes today as ‘levelling up’. This exciting book explains why the performative politics of planning and architecture are far too important to be left to the professionals. – Vron Ware, author of Return of a Native: Learning from the Land; A crucial intervention into the ‘culture & society’ tradition, this superb study connects the decline of Britain and its social fabric to wider currents in global and post-imperial history. Davies has done something few British literary critics have had the means or courage to do in recent years: write a monograph of social purpose and importance. – Alex Niven, author of The North Will Rise Again; Davies exposes how today’s nationalist structures of feeling remain a woeful substitute for the public life that modernist dreams once promised. A brilliantly bracing indictment of the political classes that have re-energised nationalist melancholia in lieu of a Britain that works. – Sivamohan Valluvan, author of The Clamour of Nationalism; Sewage, housing, transport, oil: all are key to what Davies terms the ‘broken promise of infrastructure’. Tracing the colonial and classed legacies of today’s ‘infrastructures of feeling’ with inventiveness, precision, and care, this remarkable and timely book throws down the gauntlet for change, challenging us to reimagine and rebuild our collective infrastructure together. – Jo Littler, Professor of Cultural, Media and Social Analysis, Goldsmiths

Drawing on examples from Rhodes's railways to the tragedy of Grenfell, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure takes readers on a journey through a cultural history of infrastructure development across Britain and its Empire.The Broken Promise of Infrastructure tackles the divisive cultural politics that have been used to deflect attention away from Britain's failing infrastructure, from Brexit through to the 'levelling up' agenda and beyond. Building on more than a decade of research, Davies argues that infrastructure projects are always far more than concrete and steel: they can reinforce nationalist narratives, undermine regional identities, and place real limits on our politics. By exposing the geographies of race, class, and gender that still govern the way infrastructure is imagined, Davies invites us to break open these limits and ask what – or rather who – really makes Britain work. The promise of 'levelling up' has been broken. With case studies that range from Stoke-on-Trent and South Africa to Silicon Valley, Davies shows that this broken promise runs back through broader histories of industry and empire. As racial capitalism maintains its iron grip on Britain and the climate crisis becomes daily more apparent, this book argues that there has never been a more urgent time to challenge dominant ways of thinking about infrastructure, and to reclaim its world-shaping force for ourselves.