The temporal incompleteness of infrastructure and the urban

This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also socio-material practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism.