Resilience and critical infrastructure: origins, theories and critiques

This chapter maps the intersection and imbrication of two objects – critical infrastructure (CI) – and then, resilience – over the last decade or so. In so doing, our purpose is to examine what making critical infrastructure resilient might variously mean, whether to governments, infrastructure operators, or diverse publics; and by the same token, how has accepting that resilience is infrastructural altered notions of resilience? Our discussions across this chapter are drawn from two closely related bodies of literature. The first critically examines the political framings of varied notions of resilience, while the second looks at how infrastructural materialities and circulations mediate certain conditions of life and their political imaginings. In bridging these literatures, we would also like to draw particular attention to how certain notions of resilience, notably those deemed ‘neoliberal’ are being exposed, challenged, and even multiplied, through their circulation within the materialities of critical infrastructure.