Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms

The RSA Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms (NOIR) challenges regional studies to attend to infrastructural questions by critically unpacking how infrastructure shapes regional lives, governance, and developmental pathways. Our conceptual framing of ‘infrastructural regionalism’ focuses on those infrastructures that have relevance beyond the local. Analysing regions through infrastructure provides a novel perspective on the regional question as investment and disinvestment in infrastructure reveals vital discursive and material elements that produce, structure, and modify metropolitan regions worldwide. The development of infrastructural assets – ranging from transport and telecommunications to energy and sanitation – as part of regional policies raises conceptual and applied questions about how the funding, governance, and spatiality of such infrastructure can promote urban, economic, and ecological sustainability at the regional scale. By placing the region at the center of the ‘infrastructural turn’, NOIR brings infrastructure to the forefront of innovative, interdisciplinary, and multi-scalar research on metropolitan regions to determine how regions are constructed, territorialized, governed, and experienced. NOIR offers multiple forums to debate the terrains of regional infrastructure, develop collaborative research projects, and facilitate meaningful dialogue between academics and practitioners. During our second phase, we intend to extend and deepen the existing network, placing an emphasis on mobilizing infrastructural regionalism to assist scholars and practitioners in developing policy outcomes that facilitate equitable regional development. Key goals for Phase 2 include expanding network membership; engaging with the practitioner/policy community; and developing collaborative research around the theme of ‘infrastructures of regional connectivity’.