Document [original]

Self-organised/ing Infrastructures

Understanding everyday practices of spread and resistance

in processes of socio-spatial change on the periphery.

Multi-sited ethnographies in rural Portugal and Austria

vorgelegt von

Jamie-Scott Baxter

BArch., Dip. Arch, Prof. Dip. Arch, RIBA I, II, III

ORCID: 0000-0001-8016-140X

an der Fakultät VI - Planen Bauen Umwelt

der Technischen Universität Berlin

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften

- Dr.-Ing. –

genehmigte Dissertation

Promotionsausschuss

Vorsitzende: Prof. Dr. -Ing. Angela Million

Gutachterin: Prof. Dr. Gabriela Christmann

Gutachter: Prof. Jörg Stollmann

Gutachterin: Prof. Dr. Jean Hillier

Tag der wissenschaftlichen Aussprache: 20. September 2022

Berlin 2023

Self-organised/ing Infrastructures

Understanding everyday practices of spread and resistance in

processes of socio-spatial change on the periphery.

Multi-sited ethnographies in rural Portugal and Austria

Jamie-Scott Baxter

Berlin, 2023

Abstract

The following thesis is concerned with the problem as to how social innovation, understood

here as a specific form of situated social change connected to grassroots self-organisation,

unfolds on the periphery. More precisely it asks, in rural peripheries, what types of socio-

technological systems support the spread and emergence of new social practices, where

spread is known to be a significant factor in social change? Although diverse, rural

peripheries are generally understood to be disadvantaged in comparison to say, urban

centres and other rural or peri urban sites, not least because of their specific social,

material, and spatial conditions and the discourses that partially construct them. To date,

little is understood as to precisely how social practices spread in complex transformative

processes to overcome these conditions and configure new spatialities.

The research sets out to answer these questions through two multi-sited ethnographies,

the first and main study in Alentejo, Portugal. The second supporting study in Upper

Austria. The ethnographies follow two cases, one in each location. In Portugal, I follow the

case of EPAM, a network of young herb farmers new to the countryside and track how they

exchanged knowledge on farming practices and ways of living in the countryside. As the

story unfolds, EPAM is shown to be not only a social network, but moreover a complex

system of material and discursive connections. On this web of connections and flows,

which I call self-organised/ing infrastructure, material practices and knowledge was spread.

As the ethnographies depicted, circulations are not only propelled by intentional human

action. Instead, the study shows that combinations of human and non-human forces

propagate practices bundled in materials such as farming or radio equipment.

Furthermore, a main result of the study shows how in both cases, resistance was of equal

importance to understanding how practices spread, or rather how the spread of what were

perceived as undesirable practices and discourses were in ways resisted.

Engaging new materialist theory, the thesis conceptualises the findings and presents a

novel middle range theory of spread. It reflects on the consequence for processes of social

and spatial transformation in the fields of social innovation, spatial planning, and design.

Keywords

Space, social change, spread and resistance, peripheries, socio-spatial theory,

infrastructure/ing, more-than-humans, topologies.

Dedications

To Douglas, Christine, and Alice. With all my love and gratitude.

Declaration of Interest

I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is my

own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not been

submitted for any other degree or processional qualification except as specified. As a

cumulative dissertation, parts of this work have been published in the academic formats

clearly stated in the text and on information pages inserted.

Table of Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Dedications ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Declaration of Interest ..................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................................................................. 4

List of figures ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Preface ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................................................................ 9

Part 1 Framing paper ............................................................................................................................................................ 10

I Middle range theory building: a new materialist approach to space and change

in social innovation ................................................................................................................................................................ 11

1. Introducing the problematic ..................................................................................................................................................... 11

2. Research design, methodology and thesis structure ......................................................................................................... 16

3. Empirical context: EPAM, OTELO and self-organised rural development .................................................................... 20

4. Reframing the problematic empirically ................................................................................................................................ 28

5. Theoretical framework: A new materialist approach for the research on social and spatial change in social

innovation ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 28

6. Findings: A middle-range conceptual repertoire for researching processes of social change and spatial

transformation ................................................................................................................................................................................. 45

7. Consequences of a process-relational middle range theory of space and change on

spatial design and planning ......................................................................................................................................................... 49

8. References .................................................................................................................................................................................. 50

Insert Box 1. Multi-sited ethnography and the topological study of spread and infrastructure .................................. 61

Part 2 Research Papers ........................................................................................................................................................ 71

II Socially innovative infrastructures and practices of spread ................................................................................. 73

1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................. 73

2. Putting forward generative, more-than-human practices of spread .............................................................................. 74

3. Methodology ............................................................................................................................................................................... 76

4. Cases ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 76

5. Discussion .................................................................................................................................................................................... 78

6. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................................... 82

7. References .................................................................................................................................................................................. 83

III Modes of spread in social innovation: A social topology case in rural Portugal ............................................. 88

1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................. 88

2. Conceptual framework .............................................................................................................................................................. 91

3. Methodology: Social topology ................................................................................................................................................. 95

4. Findings ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 97

5. Discussion and conclusion: Modes of spread in social innovation, a process relational approach ...................... 103

6. References ................................................................................................................................................................................. 105

Insert Box 2. Revolução dos Cravos and Rural Co-operatives in Portugal ....................................................................... 110

IV Infrastructuring resistance at the periphery. Or, how material-discursive

infrastructures materialise and spread ......................................................................................................................... 114

1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................ 114

2. Theoretical Framework ........................................................................................................................................................... 117

3. Methodology .............................................................................................................................................................................. 120

4. A case of Infrastructuring resistance ................................................................................................................................... 121

5. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................................. 129

6. References ................................................................................................................................................................................. 131

V From Living Labs to Sites of Unity: Decolonizing knowledge in spatial design

and urban research using critical reflexivity ............................................................................................................... 136

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................... 136

2. Living Labs .................................................................................................................................................................................. 137

3. Rethinking Epistemologies of the North ............................................................................................................................. 142

4. Methodology: Critical Reflexivity ........................................................................................................................................... 143

5. The Case of Neighbourhoods Made Living Lab, Essex. .................................................................................................... 144

6. A Critical Reflection on Neighbourhoods Made ................................................................................................................. 147

7. Conclusion - Towards Sites of Unity ..................................................................................................................................... 150

8. References ................................................................................................................................................................................. 152

Part 3 Conclusion, Outlook, and Critical Reflections ................................................................................................. 155

1. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................................... 155

2. Outlook: Towards critical spatial design ............................................................................................................................. 160

3. Critical reflection ...................................................................................................................................................................... 163

4. References ................................................................................................................................................................................. 165

List of figures

Fig 1.1 Modes of spread diagram

Fig 1.2 Photo Alentejo Portugal

Fig 1.3 Photo Herb farm, Alentejo

Fig 1.4 Early map spread and resistance in Portugal

Fig 1.5 Early map development of EPAM infrastructure

Fig 1.6 Spread of Otelo spaces, Upper Austria. Still from moving map, 2013

Fig 1.7 Spread of Otelo spaces, Upper Austria. Still from moving map, 2018

Fig 1.8 Polypropylene fabric weed barrier, Portugal

Fig 1.9 Radio equipment and community broadcastings booth Austria

Fig 2.1 PAM herb packaging boxes

Fig 2.2 Otelo Neumarkt in Mühlkreis

Fig 5.1 Participatory model photograph

Fig 6.1 Modes of spread diagra

Preface

I am an architect. I have practiced and taught architecture and urban design for over 15

years. I consider myself a designer and, with many other architects of my generation, I’m

grateful to have been able to design and construct buildings, landscapes, urban and

regional plans and strategies, in short: I have been involved with the production of spaces

at multiple scales. But the pull of designing and making space as a professional architect

has tarnished. At least under the conditions of late capitalism and the specific relations it

forces on the environment, society, and oneself. For me, and those I studied with at the

Architectural Research Unit under the tutelage of Professors Florian Beigel and Philip

Christou during my master’s degree in Architecture, space held a particular meaning. It was

infused with a sense of public duty, designing space for society. Architectural space at

multiple scales was made first and foremost for the city, as a common good. This

interpretation of space and city was not without flaws. Common to spatial design generally,

the imagined ‘citizen’ was often rather generic as were the types of social action and

relations they were thought to engage in. Although relationality was important, in this

epistemology space was contained and designed by the (White, male) hand of the

architect. Contestable as this interpretation of space maybe on some levels, the

commitment to the production of social space as a public good, in my view, gives meaning

to practicing architecture. Unfortunately, it is an ethic difficult to maintain under the

commercial pressures of practicing as an architect. Space deemed ‘unproductive’ tends to

be the first to be cut during ‘value engineering’. Architecture produced under neo-liberal

capitalism must comply with market logics, in a bleak view, architectural space is capital,

an asset before anything else.

This view extends to architectural education, which much like the rest of academia, is

subject to the same pressures. At least in my experience in the UK, teaching architects had

become a kind of vocational training, the main purpose being to prepare students for

commercial practice. This was reinforced through the professional accreditation of the

course and how it was regulated, which at some level has to do with competition between

universities and attracting students. Training architects for practice leads to the idea that

those instructing must themselves be practising architects, which I was. But arguably this

creates a loop in which the interests of commercial practice become the only important

consideration and reproduced in education. Under these conditions, graphic abilities and

basic technical knowledge required for practice often trumped the careful unfolding of a

subtle argument. These combinations, in my view, potentially stifled critical thinking, where

criticality and commercial interests tend not to make good bedfellows.

Alongside others, I believe architecture is in a crisis, a crisis of ideas. For example, even

though space can be said to be one of its main concerns, architecture is not where ground-

breaking ideas on space have tended to be generated. Over the last decades, since the

spatial turn, spatial theory has arguably been driven by geography or sociology. Similarly,

design, another core aspect of the discipline, is currently capturing the imagination of some

social sciences. Anthropology, geography, urban studies, sociology, STS are reconsidering

the projective mode in design as a way through the perceived impasse in these disciplines

ability to think and participate in future-making practices. With these reflections on space

and design new theoretical impulses are emerging.

Perhaps it is not a crisis after all, but rather the opening of a new horizon for architecture –

a sort of reconfiguration. In another twist to the story, there is a renewed interest amongst

social scientist, especially in Berlin, to work closely with (and even research on) architects.

For example, in the SFB 1265 ‘Re-figuration of spaces’, an eight-year research programme

at TU Berlin where I am an associated member. It is funded by the Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaftand brings together architects, planners, and sociologist with

other social scientists to develop a new general theory on space and society. This

contemporary renewed interest for architecture to participate in socio-spatial theory and

methodology building has prompted some to describe the discipline as taking a ‘social

turn’, or others to explain it as a ‘scientification’ of architecture. 

Either way, I see this as a crucial juncture for architecture. It presents the possibility to ask,

how, as a discipline with a long history but strongly shaped by Modernity, can it adjust to

contemporary social, ecological, and planetary needs? For example, how might we, as an

architectural body, begin to counteract and resist the social and environmental harm we

have been implicit in making. To do this, I suggest, requires deep critical self-reflection on

how we produce not only space

for

society, but knowledge

space and society. In this

way, my personal objective during the last four years was to develop theoretical and

methodological knowledge for researching and designing space by working closely with

colleagues in sociology and other social and spatial sciences. It is these concerns that

motivated me to undertake doctoral research in an attempt to contribute to the unfolding of

this new horizon, and which I present here as a frame to the following thesis.

Alongside these personal reflections, in the remained of this preface I would like to also

present the practical framework in which the research was carried out. It was part of an EU

Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska–Curie Actions doctoral training programme led by Leibniz

Institute for Research on Society and Space. Broadly, the project researched social

innovation and social entrepreneurship in rural contexts in Europe. Ten research fellows

were distributed across seven European case study regions, including Austria, Denmark,

Germany, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Portugal. Fellows were supervised by academics in their

host regions and gained field access through associated practice partners. The programme

ran between October 2017 and April 2021, during which time (until Covid) we travelled

between regions for workshops, seminars, and immersive field research.

I was hosted at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space and supervised by

Gabriela Christmann, head of department ‘Dynamics of Communication, Knowledge and

Spatial Development’ and coordinator and chair of the RurAction project. Professor

Christmann is a sociologist. Jörg Stollmann, chair of urban design and urbanisation at

Technical University Berlin was my co-supervisor. This special supervisory constellation –

sociology and urban design – contributed to the specific interests, research design, and

methodology of the study.

I chose to do the doctorate by cumulative thesis. The primary reason for this decision was

to start writing and publishing academic papers early in the research to acquire the

knowledge required for a future academic career during the programme, learning from

supervisors and colleagues. To this end the decision was good, all papers are published or

in publication, and over the course of the project I have become more proficient in

academic writing for journals. A consequence on the thesis is that there is a progression in

writing, analysis, and argumentation over the papers from early work to latter. The papers

are organised in the chronological order in which they were written reflecting both the

development of the argument and progression of research and analysis.

A risk associated with writing a cumulative thesis as opposed to a monograph at the end, is

a potential lack of coherence in the body of work. I believe strong research questions, aims

and objectives, and theoretical positioning established early on helped to mitigate this.

Another risk, specific to the theoretical objectives of my thesis, is the development of terms,

language, and the conceptual reasoning and delineation of empirical observations made as

research advanced. This means some of the conceptual terms do evolve over the

succession of papers, however, I believe the theoretical framework that I articulate in the

introduction is robust enough to guide the reader through and overcome any risk of

ambiguity in concepts and terms as they progress.

The thesis is structured in three parts, the first introduces the theoretical and empirical

commitments and interests of the research. It sets out the research gap and subsequent

questions and objectives that guided the study. The section presents the main theoretical

findings of the research in the form of a novel middle range conceptual framework. The

second part consists of four research papers which form the main body of work. Part three

concludes with a look back at the main results and forward to the avenues they open for

future research. Finally, I end the thesis with a personal and critical reflection in the

afterword. This format was chosen over individual reflexive texts after each paper to

advance a more coherent overall critique of the body of work.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to Gabriela Christmann for conceiving of and

developing the proposal, securing an EU grant, and steering and managing the research

project

RurAction.

Social Entrepreneurship in Structurally Weak Rural Regions: Analysing

Innovative Trouble-shooters in Action

. It is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative

Training Network (ITN) programme financed through the European Union’s Horizon 2020

research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 721999). During the

programme, I met and worked alongside ten excellent doctoral researchers with whom we

shared a special experience with much hard work and many laughs.

Connected to this, I am grateful for the institutional support provided by the Leibniz Institute

for Research on Space and Society in Erkner where I was employed during the project. I

extend special thanks to the RurAction project partners who hosted us in our field work

and visits across Europe. Especially, Clara and Filipe at ADCMoura and Wolfgang and

Martin at OTELO, and to all those struggling to transform and make a good life for

themselves and others on the periphery.

Likewise, I wish to acknowledge the DFG-funded collaborative research center “Re-

Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265) at Technical University Berlin where I have been an

associate member for the last two years. The intellectual community surrounding the SFB,

including the interdisciplinary working group, Hybrid Mapping, has been an ongoing source

of inspiration. Critical conversations with the group’s members from sociology, urban

design, and architecture have provoked and nurtured my thinking on socio-spatial research

over the last years.

Personally, I would like to extend special thanks to Jörg Stollmann and Gabriel Christmann

for their supervision and intellectual guidance throughout, and to Jean Hiller for her

inspirational work and advice. Additionally, to the editors and anonymous reviewers at

Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of European Planning, and Journal of Nordic Urban

Studies, for reviewing and providing effective feedback on the published papers.

Finally, to my friends and family, partner Julia, and children Wolf and Luna who have

supported me while writing-up this dissertation.

Part 1

Framing paper

This introductory paper forms the first of three parts into which the following thesis is

divided. Theoretically, it frames the thesis, sets out its main arguments, presents the

research questions, methodology, and gaps in knowledge that the study aims to fill. It

introduces the empirical cases and the rural contexts in which two multi-sited

ethnographies were carried out, the first and main study in Portugal and a second

supporting study in Austria. Finally, it lays out the main theoretical findings of the thesis

and their implications on space and social change in research and practice.

Middle range theory building: a new materialist

approach to space and change in social innovation

‘For me, the most striking event of the 20th century is the

desertion of the countryside. The city has killed rurality.’

Michel Serres, 2014

Introducing the problematic

Under the contemporary condition of planetary urbanisation, spaces erstwhile demarcated

as suburban, peri-urban, rural, and peripheral are increasingly embroiled in extensive

global urban networks. In these networks, meaning and materiality are reconfigured, and

new socio-natural relations emerge as the urban metabolises its hitherto constitutive

outside. (Brenner & Schmid, 2011; Heynen et al., 2006; Kaika, 2005; Kaika & Swyngedouw,

2012; Swyngedouw, 1996)

This contemporary discourse on urbanisation as a web of planetary metabolic flows has

advanced urban research’s understanding of the city. No longer a discrete territory, node or

agglomeration, the urban is understood as a complex set of relational processes. This

interpretation has brought to light the interconnectedness of cities to each other, to their

Taken from a lecture given by Michel Serres at the Biennial of Architecture, Urban planning and

Design in Bordeaux, 2014, reproduced in: (Lozano, 2014). The quotation is preceded by: ‘One day I

was asked by a journalist about what I thought was the most important event of the 20th century. In

1900 in France, 65-70% of the population lived from agriculture or related trades. In 2000, the figure

was 1%. For me, the most striking event of the 20th century is the desertion of the countryside…’

hinterlands, and of the multiple social, natural, human, and nonhuman relations that

constitute, what Erik Swyngedouw called, the ‘hybrid city’ (1996). More recently, however,

urban scholarship has begun to recognise the unintended consequences of this discourse

as it has become globalised. Coupled with a perceived lack of attention on non-city spaces

over the last decades, urban research is in danger of performatively contributing to the

homogenising processes which it set out to reveal (Brenner, 2021; Ernstson & Sörlin, 2019;

Slater, 2021).

The following thesis tells another side to this story, and in so doing aims to address urban

research’s blind spot. It will bring to light a small but increasingly perceptible flow of people,

capital, goods, and resources moving from the city

the countryside. A reversal of the

usual narrative where the city absorbs flows

from

its periphery. It will chart the movement

of young educated professional ex-urban dwellers in two European countries – Austria and

Portugal – in search of different ways of living and working outside neo-liberal regimes and

capitalist logics of the city. As the story unfolds, it will describe how new collectivist

practices and forms of knowledge emerged as

new rurals

– as these social groups became

known – circulated and settled into a life closer to what they cast as nature in the

countryside. They did not form eccentric back-to-the-land communes or cults but

sophisticated social and material networks of interconnected family farms (in Portugal) and

collective work and social spaces (in Austria) which aimed to overcome the specific

conditions associated with life on the periphery.

It will be a story about social and spatial change in the countryside. Reflecting the concerns

of contemporary urban scholarship above, it is a tale of circulations, not of urban metabolic

flows consuming rurality, but of the tensions and conflicts in circulatory processes between

centres and peripheries at different registers. I will argue this type of social change is

understood as social innovation. It is regarded as being driven by grassroots action,

concerned with microprocesses and mid-level social mechanisms. In this understanding,

social change is situated and historic, it is the product of the spread and resistance of

knowledge and practices enacted by communities over specific spaces and times. It is a

complex non-linear process, on which, as I will elucidate below, there is a lack of

knowledge, especially from the perspective of the periphery. Understood to be

disadvantaged due to their relative remoteness and isolation, low density and aging

populations, ongoing disinvestment, and lack of infrastructure on one hand, and the ways

in which peripheries are imagined and discursively constructed, on the other, raises the

general question as to how social innovation on the periphery can unfold? More precisely,

what types of socio-technological systems support the spread of new social practices and

knowledge, and how can we understand this combination of social processes, mobile

practices, and technologies as part of a wider process of spatial transformation on the

social, material, and symbolic periphery? These are the concerns which the following

cumulative thesis sets out to answer by examining the spread and resistance of ways of

doing, knowing, and being in Alentejo, Portugal and Mühlviertel, Austria and the self-

organised infrastructures that supported them.

This problematic creates three interdependent analytic and empiric levels of enquiry:

innovative social practices and forms of knowledge inscribed in material configurations

(practices), novel collectivist infrastructural arrangements supporting the circulation of

practice (infrastructure), and peripheral rural spaces (space). The first and main case

examines these interdependencies through the lens of new collective aromatic and herb

farming (PAM) practices in the case of

Empreender na fileira das Plantas Aromáticass e

Medicinais em Portugal

(EPAM) gravitating around Alentejo, Portugal, where EPAM refers

to the socio-technological network of herb farmers. The second, supporting study maps the

everyday practices associated with new forms of work, experimentation, and collective

learning in Mühlviertel and Upper Austria in the case of

offenes Technologielabor

(OTELO), a network of open technology labs, nodes, and spaces spanning Europe. Both

cases are spatially distributed and reliant on forms of technology in the struggle to

overcome material, social, and spatial structures associated with rural settings in

comparable ways. Actors involved are consciously engaged in attempts to transform rural

spaces and support and develop collectivist ways of living and working on the periphery of

capitalist relations and the city. I refer to these types of collectivist socio-technical and

spatial/ising arrangements as

self-organised/ing infrastructure.

Inherent in the everyday term

spread

is the dynamic of movement furnishing it with a

processual character. Implicit is a relation between the “thing” that spreads and what it

appears to move over, in, across, or though. This normative understanding of spread, which

as I discuss in more detail below, continues to dominate discourses on diffusion in social

innovation, spatial planning, and cognate fields. I argue this use of the term serves to

(inadvertently) reproduce spaces as inert containers through which mobilised objects

travel. This corresponds to a way of thinking space that has long been contested and

overturned by relational approaches to space, topology, and mobilities, which, broadly

speaking claim spaces as a product of social relations and social processes.

The following work will deconstruct the normative understanding of spread. Then, through

empirical research on the cases, I will reinterpret and rebuild a set of analytical concepts

effective to grasp and yield new knowledge on spaces produced in complex relational

processes in which objects, subjects and spaces are not predetermined but, at least

temporarily, co-constituted together. Following Karen Barad (1996, 2003, 2007), this

ongoing spatial, material, and social process can be characterised as

re(con)figuration

. My

hypothesis is premised on the conviction that

theoretically

new mid-level concepts are

required to examine and understand re(con)figuration in its topological complexity, and

empirically

knowledge on processual space and transformation can overcome the

disempowering effects inherent in space rendered as a context over which only

professionals, experts, law makers or bureaucrats have the power to transform, or at least

Author’s translation: Entrepreneurship in the medicinal and aromatic plants sector in Portugal.

Author’s translation: Open Technology Laboratory Austria.

determine who participates.

Observing these processes and relationalities in the cases of EPAM in Alentejo and OTELO

in Upper Austria intends not only to bring into relief the intentional human will to spread

and innovate social practices and knowledge but moreover foregrounds specific

combinations of human and nonhuman forces which drive spatial, material, and social

transformation. I will refer to this as

modes of spread

, an heuristic I develop throughout the

thesis. Spread, then, takes on a more complex and non-linear character moving beyond the

normativity and human centricity underpinning notions such as ‘scaling-up’ and ‘best

practices’ used to describe aspects of diffusion. Instead, what the following analysis begins

to depict is a complex more-than-human process fraught with tensions that shape

innovation, transformation, and social change at multiple scales. To reveal these generative

conflicts, the framework requires another term to stand in contrast to spread. I deploy

resistance

to structure a non-hierarchical dialectic between projective vectors of spread and

the counterforces that resist, inhibit, arrest, interrupt, and disrupt material circulations. This

is an analytical move to observe the everyday practices, more-than-human forces, and

events that mobilise and distribute new ways of being, doing, and knowing on the

periphery. These new practices are antithetical to and aimed to counteract centralised

ideas, discourses, images, and ways of life and work deemed undesirable to the actors in

the Alentejo and Mühlviertel cases who sought to escape the fragmentation,

individualisation, and daily routines they associated with forms of urban capitalist relations.

It is this movement towards an imagined

outside

– economic and social – that I refer to as

periphery, while also evoking the geographical distinction of a remote rural region, lacking

infrastructure and with low population densities. In this sense the term holds material,

spatial, and imaginative meaning, and forces productive tensions between inside and

outside, city and rural, and centre and periphery, tensions I return to and develop in the

thesis.

I have indicated new socio-technical arrangements are required to support the spread of

antithetical material practices and knowledge which I refer to as both self-organis

and

self-organis

ing

infrastructures to emphasis different aspects

These are emergent systems

designed and maintained by civil society actors and initiatives in collective attempts to

reorganise space and social relations. They become especially relevant where public

infrastructure and cultural services are lacking, as in the cases. Two multi-sited

ethnographies (Karasti & Blomberg, 2018) will describe these infrastructural arrangements

and reveal them to go beyond large technological systems (Hughes, 1987), in state, private

or some sort of state-private hybrid ownership, but more pertinently for the civil society

actors involved, to consist of socio-technical processes, people, discursive practices, moral

orders, and events that yield self-organising

systems. This understanding of infrastructure-

in-the-making provides a final term relevant to study the interlinking of the three

interdependent levels of analysis outlined above (practices, infrastructure, space), I refer to

this as

infrastructuring

(Niewöhner, 2015).

The final objective of my thesis is to reflect on the consequences of the conceptual

framework on spatial design and planning disciplines and advance a critical and processual

approach to spatial design and planning built on an imperative of

resistance

. I will argue

this signifies an epistemic shift from projecting ideologies on yet-to-be futures to a position

of opposition; opposition to social and environmental processes which are urgently

threatening the future of many forms of life on the planet. I argue that the inherent logic of

planning and design practices is geared towards organising and imagining future space.

Disciplinary practices and discourses are governed by and operate on historic ideologies

inscribed in contemporary political regimes. In this way, we continue to reproduce regimes

of the past by casting them into the future, structuring the spaces and ways we will live our

lives materialised in homes, buildings, infrastructure, cities, etc. I argue this limits the

professions’ ability to conceive alternative futures with emancipatory potential and forces a

reliance on the sublime creativity of individuals, with the blind hope that someone someday

will be gifted enough to think and imagine differently. Valorising the heroic figure of the

creative genius serves to undermine the creativity and emancipatory effects of collective

authorship and social subjectivity. I will argue that, in order to break out of this cycle, we

must question the logics that practices of design and planning are built upon and which we

take for granted. We must stop naively casting the past on to the future and instead reject

and defend against destructive contemporary practices – an idea I discuss and elaborate on

throughout.

Empirical ethnographic research was essential to grasp the complexities of the questions

elaborated above. At a theoretical level, I aim to contribute to new middle-range theorising

on relational processes in social and spatial transformation, effective for the cluster of

disciplines engaging in contemporary critical socio-spatial research, including spatial

planning, urban design, urban studies, human geography, and urban anthropology where

current research on social change and infrastructure tends to neglect spatial aspects. I

believe it also has resonance with an emerging discourse in sociology of space which is

working on processual and relational understandings of space and sociality, especially the

‘Re-figuration of spaces’ (Knoblauch and Löw, 2022). Both these relationships to other

spatial theory are discussed in the following section of this introduction. Finally, my sincere

hope is that the research and findings presented in the following thesis will lead to new

knowledge on and for communities engaged in struggles for self-determination to self-

organise ways of life and work on the social and spatial periphery.

In summary, the main aims of the thesis are:

• Concretely, to explicate the effects of self-organised/ing infrastructures on processes

of social innovation as a particular type of social and spatial change in social

innovation in the cases of Alentejo and Upper Austria, as examples of peripheral

rural spaces.

• Theoretically, to articulate an innovative middle-range conceptual repertoire along

three interlinked analytical levels: practices, infrastructures, and space and the

linking of these levels with concepts of spread, resistance, and infrastructuring.

• And finally, to reflect on the relevance of the findings and theoretical framework for

spatial design, planning and social innovation.

Research design, methodology and thesis structure

2.1. Research design and methodology

The research consists of two multi-sited ethnographies (Karasti & Blomberg, 2018; Marcus,

1995), the first and main study in Portugal centring around (but not restricted to) Alentejo

and the second, supporting study in Upper Austria. Multi-sited fieldwork was selected due

to its focus on ‘connections and circulations between multiple sites’ (Henriksen, 2002). This

mode of research works to define the object of research which cannot be accounted for in a

single site of investigation (Marcus, 1995), making it well-suited to study the spread of

practices between multiple sites. Additionally, Henriksen and Karasti and Blomberg

advance multi-sited ethnographies to study infrastructures as virtual sites and distributed

objects. This approach includes capturing and analysing the associated ongoing processes

of infrastructuring across multiple sites with both on an offline connectivity. Multi-sited

ethnography is geared towards the study of circulation, connectivity, and infrastructure, the

object of study in this thesis. For an extended review on constructing the field in multi-sited

research see insert box 1 on page 62.

In Portugal, the case of EPAM acts as an entry point to rural life in the peripheral region of

Alentejo. In upper Austria, OTELO provides a way into the peripheral region of Mühlviertel

and then into adjacent subregions in Upper Austria. Cases were selected because they

each consisted of a constellation of different sites. In 2017, EPAM connected approx. 40

herb farms spanning territorial and administrative boundaries. OTELO connected around 35

open labs across Austria. In this way, they both exhibited a strong characteristic of spatial

spread over a period of roughly the same time (approx.10 years). Although the emphasis

presented in the thesis is on Alentejo, cases were contrasted throughout analysis.

Ethnographic data were collected in field stays in each county (6 weeks Austria, 8 weeks

Portugal). Field work consisted of qualitative semi-structured interviews (20 in Austria, 16

in Portugal), observations (including participant observation), work placement, and site

visits (12 in Portugal and 13 in Austria). Observations were recorded in field notes (text and

voice), photography, and drawings (5 text notebooks, 64 photos and drawings). Data were

analysed in Atlas.ti using abductive reasoning broadly following the grounded theory

method to develop middle-range theory, explained next.

To further

spatialise

the approach and bring to the fore processes and relationalities,

ethnography wascombined with topology (Mol & Law, 1994; Shields, 2012, 2013) to

examine forms of connectivity and spatialisation between sites. Where ethnography

provided a protocol for field work and data collection, topology provided concepts and clues

to map complex mobilities, transformations, translations, emergences in complex

relational processes (Shields, 2012). The combined methodology which I tentatively refer to

topological ethnography

(Benedicto, 2014) is detailed in paper two.

2.2. Middle-range theory building

The objective of this thesis is to explicate the social mechanism of spatial spread in

processes of social change. To this end I used abductive reasoning and middle-range

theorising to infer a limited set of interlinked concepts and propositions from the contrasted

ethnographies.

Middle-range theory is intermediate to general theory and individual empirical observations

(Merton, 1968). It is narrower in scope than general theory and tends, at least initially, to be

connected to a specific field or discipline e.g. in this thesis spatial design, planning and

social innovation. Considered abstract enough to allow for some generalisation, middle-

range theory remains close to observations so as to guide empirical inquiry (Hassan &

Lowry, 2015; Merton, 1968). It aims to provide ‘theory on how the world works’ (Sampson,

2010). Or rather, how

parts

worlds

work, as it does not intend to explain all social

phenomena.

According to Smith, middle-range theorising is well suited to focus on

social mechanisms

understood as ‘lower-order social processes with a causal component’ (Smith, 2011, p. 171).

Analysis of social mechanisms aims to detail the ‘cogs and wheels’ of social process

(Hedström & Ylikoski, 2010, p. 2) by deploying observations, metaphors, and models

(Hassan & Lowry, 2015). Similarly, Kaplan proposes middle-range theorising is effective for

illuminating

logic-in-use

(Kaplan, 1964).

Hassan and Lowry set out a basic method for middle-range theorising: 1. Beginning with a

problem or question within a limited domain (e.g., what ways is spread a social mechanism

in social innovation as a particular type of social change); 2. identify a general idea or

imaginary (e.g. spread of practices requires infrastructures. Such infrastructures are likely

to affect the organisation of space in rural areas); 3. create intermediate categories (e.g.

practices, infrastructures, space); 4. refine emerging concepts and proposition with theory

(e.g. spread, resistance and infrastructuring); 5. evaluate originality (e.g. through publication

and conferences, part of the cumulative approach); 6. make bold statements (adapted

from: Hassan and Lowry, 2015). Additionally, middle-range theorising requires critical

reflection (Truex et al., 2006), which I present in the fourth paper and in intermediate

sections. Together, these texts reflect on the applicability and potential of the middle-range

conceptual framework produced in this thesis in spatial planning and design.

Grover and Lyytinen (2015) describe negative aspects of research which middle-range

theory can address, including data-driven inductive research, which looks for surprises in

the data while referring too little to existing theory, a symptom of architectural place-based

research, or blue ocean theorising with little grounding in empirical research. This points to

the synergies and compatibility with abductive reasoning, which aims to pursue an

innovative and creative route to theorising while avoiding these pitfalls on either side.

Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference formulated by Charles Peirce (1903). In

abductive reasoning, hypotheses are inferred from observation. A possible cause is

formulated from an observable result ‘and as such introduces a creative element into our

reasoning’ (Veen, 2021, p. 1174). According to Peirce, it is the only route to innovation in

theory making (1903). Abduction differs from inductive and deductive reasoning. In

induction, theory is ascertained from observation (particular to general), whereas in

deductive reasoning theory predicts results observed in cases (general to particular).

Instead, abduction offers a

probable

conclusion, that is

case of

theory. Creativity is

required to imagine what might explain observations made in the case, from where ‘other

forms of reasoning, such as inductive, deductive, and metaphorical inference’ can be made

(Veen, 2021, p.1175). This necessitates a looping between observation and theory to

interpret the case and build new theory, a procedure that resonates well with middle-range

theorising.

2.3. Structure of thesis

The dissertation is organised as a cumulative thesis. It consists of this introductory framing

paper (part 1), four articles forming the body of the argument (part 2), and a concluding text

with a summary of the main findings read together and their cumulative consequence on

the field, an outlook, and a reflection on the research (part 3). I had considered including a

short reflection text after each article, instead I have opted to provide an extensive framing

paper elaborating precisely how the results from each research article contributed to the

development of the mid-range theory presented here. In addition, where the texts would

have provided a short reflection per paper, I felt a more comprehensive critique on the

entire body of work was necessary.

Papers one to three develop the main argument and detail the concepts of spread,

resistance, and infrastructuring illustrated by two cases (Portugal and Austria) researched

in the RurAction framework and guided by the same research questions, outlined above.

They share the same basic ethnographic methodology and broad theoretical frame,

although these advanced as the research progressed and as my knowledge grew. Each

paper includes a theoretical and empirical section where I engage the cases to illustrate

and develop middle-range theoretical insights. Paper four differs in that it does not use

empirical material from the OTELO or EPAM ethnographies. Instead, by engaging a related

case of a living lab in rural England, it aims at critical (self) reflection on power dynamics in

self-organised and participatory spatial planning and design practices. The paper develops

aspects of critical spatial design and practices of resistance as advanced in the main thesis.

Each paper elaborates the methodologies used to collect and analyse data.

Paper one

lays the groundwork for a new materialist reading of spread and resistance in

social innovation. It does this in two steps: in a first step, it engages theoretically Gabriel

Tarde’s early work on social innovation and diffusion with Karen Barad’s materialism to

gain a perspective on material-discursive practices. The second step analyses circulation of

practices inscribed in radio equipment and agricultural technology in cases in Upper

Austria and Alentejo, Portugal. This yields the first hypothesis in recognising the

significance of the cases examined as self-organised infrastructures. It also results in early

distinction in the modes of spread which continues to be examined and articulated in the

next two papers. The paper was published in 2020 by Leibniz Institute for Research on

Space and Society and is a contribution to a handbook.

Focusing on the Portuguese case, the second paper examines the relations between the

spread of material-discursive practices inscribing visual images associated with farming

and agricultural products and their supporting infrastructures. It is concerned with how

these two levels interact and affect each other recursively. The paper shows how material

circulations, and their support systems interact with identity formation and the incremental

refiguring of subjectivities as urban professionals become farmers. The paper elaborates

the idea of together re(con)figuring of matter, meaning, subjectivity, and space. It results in

the articulation of an additional dimension to modes of spread. The paper was published in

the Journal of Rural Studies in 2021.

In paper three, I engage the concept of infrastructur

ing

to analyse the everyday practices of

spread and resistance in the Portuguese case. It describes how routine practices such as

tactical resourcing or hosting events make and service routes and connectivity in

infrastructure. It describes how infrastructures topologically fold into each other linking

spaces, places, actors in unexpected configurations. The paper has been accepted with

revisions in the Journal of European Planning.

The fourth paper, drafted in January 2022, is the latest. Although the case, methodology,

and theoretical framing differ from the main body of work, it provides a critical reflection on

my positionality in research, teaching, and practice. The primary reason to include it, is that

it articulates my position on spatial design and planning as developed through the thesis

and middle-range theorising. Effectively, in the paper I apply the knowledge produced in

the research to advance the notion of

critical spatial design

. The paper has been accepted

and is in publication in Nordic Journal of Urban Studies.

Empirical context: EPAM, OTELO and self-organised rural

development

3.1. Constructing the field

The cases of EPAM in Alentejo and OTELO in Upper Austria offer two examples of

alternative self-organised approaches to social and spatial transformation in rural areas. In

both cases systems were developed which aimed to enable and empower other actors and

social groups. In EPAM, these groups were farmers, in OTELO, diverse local community

interest groups. This is the common point of OTELO and EPAM, they are both systems

which support the spread and emergence of other social practices and social relations.

The potential of self-organised initiatives to address social, spatial, and material challenges

associated with rural regions by introducing novel approaches to development is

increasingly recognised (Christmann, 2016). In localised approaches initiatives tend to

make use of community assets including local networks, collective action, and natural and

cultural heritage to find new ways to tackle problems (Copus et al., 2011). However,

challenges are not the same across rural regions as rural locations are diverse and display

a wide variety of spatial, cultural, economic, and demographic characteristics. Rural areas

near cities, for example, may experience growth in population and development, as an

effect of spill-over from cities and processes of suburbanisation, whereas for peripheral

rural regions the migration of young people to cities in pursuit of employment, education or

better access to public, social and cultural services has a deep impact (Margaras, 2019).

Coupled with an ageing population as life expectancy increases and fertility rates decrease

(Eurostat, 2015), these factors contribute to ongoing decline in many peripheral regions, like

Alentejo and Mühlviertel (Copus & Hörnström, 2011).

The movement of people – especially to and from cities – remains is a key factor in the

uneven social and spatial development of rural regions. Although reasons for migrating

from rural areas can vary from country to country and region to region, this is a well-known

global trend (Copus et al., 2011) exacerbated by local unemployment, geographic

remoteness, ‘negative’ rural and ‘positive’ urban discourses, wider processes of

globalization, economics, and geopolitics (Bock, 2016), climate change and conflict (Barnett

& Adger, 2007), and a lack of public services and infrastructure (Copus & De Lima, 2014).

Social, economic, and environmental breakdown in rural peripheries has a cascade effect

of further marginalizing rural communities and sharpening spatial boundaries and

inequalities between territories (Bock et al., 2015).

However, the cases of OTELO and EPAM both give a perspective on a counter flow of

people from major European cities to peripheral rural areas. Although occupying different

economic, geographic, governance, political contexts, there are similarities in the

commitments, practices, and approaches each case exhibits to support the flow of people,

knowledge, and resources to rural areas. Crucial to both cases, for example, was the use of

well-defined methods, tools, and techniques to foster new social relations and forms of

collective action between diverse actors including community groups, stakeholders, state

institutions, universities and small businesses in processes of social change and spatial

transformation.

Partly for this reason, neither case fits neatly into typical organisational or institutional

structures. These types of initiatives are often described as ‘bottom-up’, but in both cases

this label is difficult to apply. For example, the actors involved wore many different hats in

their communities or acted as brokers between community interest groups and

governmental departments. In the Mühlviertel case for example, one of the pioneers

behind OTELO had for a long time worked as a manager in the development department of

the regional administration before crossing over into the social innovation scene. In the

same case, the links between governmental actors in regional development and those in

civil society are strong and synergetic but not entirely bottom-up. The regional

administration has a high level of autonomy and displays highly collaborative approaches

to development continually engaging with communities in creative and meaningful ways.

As indicated, EPAM and OTELO are both well distributed and span spatial boundaries and

scales. Networking is known to be a highly important aspect for building social relations in

social movements and social innovation as a way to overcome spatial and territorial

boundaries. It is recognised both in the literature (discussed below) and in the field, as was

described in interviews. But, as I will show, the cases were more than immaterial social

networks. Building and maintaining social relations involved materials and technologies

such as web sites, digital maps and forums, municipal buildings and underused rooms,

farming equipment and agriculture, and EU rural development funding programmes. Both

cases connected into and reused existing infrastructures. EPAM for example, cannot be

detached from farms, agricultural expos, and rural development programmes. Whereas

OTELO hosted community interest groups and events in underused usually publicly-owned

spaces across upper Austria. Without access to these spaces, places, and technologies

there would have been no OTELO or EPAM. Described in more detail below, each case

links together multiple sites into a system spanning institutional, territorial, and spatial

boundaries. In OTELO, sites are in towns and villages in different administrative areas

spanning regional and national borders (there are OTELOs in Germany, Italy, and Spain).

What became apparent is the relevance of images and discursive formations in practices of

spread and as technologies used to hold the systems together. OTELO, for example, had a

strong discursive identity where each new site took the name ‘Otelo’ and there is a website

with a map where they can be located. Alongside the name, images were used to reinforce

the brand seen on cars and at events in the regions.

‘There were some documents that were also transporting the

idea that it was a high profit sector. And this was not totally

true…’

‘It’s about engineering of collaborative action to create an

environment that is favourable to spread of innovation. To

create really a highway for innovation to reach everyone in the

ecosystem’

EPAM co-founder

3.2. EPAM

The recent constellation of crisis referred to in the media as the three c’s: climate, corona

virus, and conflict centre stages rural areas in new ways (Wallace-Wells, 2022). Food

security is a critical global issue and is concerned about food production and supply chains

as the effects caused by drought or severe flooding associated with the changing climate,

conflict e.g., most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the knock-on effects of

Coronavirus on workforces, become ever more acute. The consequences of the three c’s

are compounded as rural farmers grow older and with fewer young people stepping into

these jobs, the average age of farm managers in Europe is increasing. It currently stands at

around 65 (Eurostat, 2016).

This problem is at the core of programmes at different policy levels. In 2014 the Food and

Agriculture Organization (FAO) set out a vision for family farms to be ‘innovators’ in

sustainable rural development and to ‘care for and protect the natural environment’,

'ensuring global food security’ and putting an 'end to poverty' (Food and Agricultural

Organization, 2014). EU policy translated FAO’s vision to position small family farms as

drivers for sustainable rural development (Graeub et al., 2016). Within the frame of EU

funding, Portugal developed a suite of programmes in response to these international

concerns. They intended to encourage young people to enter the agricultural sector, a

sector considered to be structurally weak and in decline in Portugal due to small and

fragmented farms (in the north), poor distribution logistics and infrastructure, a lack of

innovation, aging rural population, low education levels, and the historic consequences of

the collectivisation of farms following the 1974 Revolução dos Cravos (Rebelo & Caldas,

2015). (See insert box 2 after the first paper for detail on1974 Revolução dos Cravos).

The funding programmes contributed to the spread of ex-urban young professionals from

cities on the Atlantic coast to the Alentejo to set-up small family farms producing medical

and aromatic herbs, known locally as the PAM sector. Many of these white-collar workers

had become unemployed as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis. And although most

who participated in the research had received tertiary level education, only few of them had

any previous farming experience.

Up until this time aromatic herbs were considered a heritage product, used in traditional

cooking and medicines. Herb farming had been overlooked or disregarded by most farmers

as not economically viable, with only a small number of producers in all of Portugal. The

introduction of funding through the national ‘Statute for Young Rural Entrepreneurs’

programme resulted in people from outside of traditional farming communities revisiting

the viability of the sector.

This changing perspective on PAM was also driven by a young entrepreneurial farmer who

was growing and producing PAM products on the edge of the city of Porto. He had become

somewhat of a minor celebrity on social media promoting PAM through YouTube and other

platforms. Farmers I spoke to were aware of him and many had visited and even

volunteered on his farm. The proximity of his farm to the city and its well-manicured

appearance and accessibility to the public all played a part in the gradual opening-up of the

PAM sector in Portugal.

The newcomers tended to have different values, including new ways of cooperating and

communicating. It was understood that they had a more entrepreneurial approach to

marketing and producing value which they had learned from their professional careers in

cities. These new values also extended to their relationship with the environment. The PAM

farmers I interviewed all farmed organically. During interviews farmers described how this

was driven at some level by an ethical position towards ‘living with nature’. This often went

hand in hand with critique on the economic and social system they had left behind in the

city which they felt was unhealthy and oppressive. They were looking to do things

differently and had come to Alentejo to establish themselves as herb farmers in order to

transform their livelihoods. However, their new situation was precarious. Effectively they

had moved in the opposite direction to flows of people, capital, knowledge, and resources

which tended to be towards the city, or least away from rural peripheries.

A local civil society organisation, called ADCMoura who had long been involved in rural

development in the region saw the emerging PAM sector as a possible mechanism to

overcome some of the problems outline above. ADCMoura together with two existing herb

farmers in Alentejo began promoting production of new medical and aromatic herb

products through workshops and training events. Their aim was to showcase the herbs

and new ways to use them in novel products e.g., cosmetics and essential oils alongside

more typical uses such as teas, and in cooking. (It was reported in an interview with a long-

standing herb farmer that fewer and fewer herbs were being used in cooking and new uses

needed to be found to sustain the sector.) A further aim of the workshops and events was

to begin building a network of farmers and those involved in the PAM sectors, including

international buyers mainly in France and Italy where the herb sector was more

established, and researchers at Evora university. These new connections, so the founders

of the ‘Entrepreneurship in the PAM sector in Portugal’ (EPAM) network thought, should

help stimulate the sector and develop new uses for herbs, and ultimately contribute to rural

development.

The EPAM network organised training courses on organic farming which spoke to the new

ex-urban farmers ideas of country life in contrast to city living (a theme I revisit extensively

in paper 2), and in the production of new products. The aim of the workshops, training and

networking was to generate and circulate new knowledge amongst potential farmers. In

this way, developing the sector was conceived from the outset as a way of doing rural

development by providing new skills to young people, promoting local plants, new

products and organic farming, ultimately with the hope to create new jobs in the region.

The co-founders examined the PAM ecosystem from plants, methods of organic farming,

production of new and existing products, international supply chains and the logistics

required for small-scale farmers to access them, and EU and national level funding

regimes to support new farmers to set up production. In doing so, they considered which

actors from which sectors needed to be connected in what they called ‘value chains’ and

which other services were needed to support the sector. The design and development of

the PAM ecosystem in Portugal by EPAM was not driven by commercial profit – ADCMoura

had no financial stake in herb farming businesses. Their intention was to provide a support

system, an infrastructure, for linking together actors and other infrastructures (e.g., local

and international supply chains), and stimulating the co-generation and sharing of

knowledge. The new self-organised infrastructure had little institutional support at a local

or national level, at least initially (eventually this changed and ADCMoura were asked to

advise on national centre for competencies on PAM, but they received little support at a

local or regional level). EPAM received funding from EU regional development and

education programmes to develop EPAM and the PAM sector in Portugal and in

cooperation with other countries in Europe. As EU funding regimes changed, it became

more difficult to receive basic funding to support EPAM. This resulted in creative

approaches to allocate resources to maintain the emerging infrastructure. I discuss these

practices of what I call

tactical resourcing

in detail in the third paper.

EPAM’s intention went beyond instrumentalising the new farmers in rural development

initiatives. The idea to network and link the new farmers together was conceived as much

to build new social relations and solidarity between the new farmers who were scattered

through the Alentejo. This action, so it was thought, would lead to the accumulation of

social capital in the network helping to stabilise it and give support to the collaborators.

Practically, these new connections allowed farmers and other actors to share resources

such as knowledge, information and equipment. The analysis in paper 2 shows that the

circulation of material and social goods was linked to new forms of subjectivity, where

actor’s values shifted as they began to collectively identify as herb farmers.

3.3. OTELO

What distinguishes Austria from Portugal is a coherent and interconnected regional

governance system where the state plays an active role through a network of regional

development agencies, and supports and re-distributes resources to other non-state actors

engaged in regional development. In addition, there is a well-equipped network of elected

and representative bodies, from villages through to regions. Such interconnected

governance, especially between the local and regional levels has led to much EU funding

support including many LEADER

funded initiatives in the regions. There are also well-

resourced non-governmental development organisations that for many years have

contributed to rural and regional development programmes in the regions. Key actors in

the early development of the Open Technology Labs (OTELO) initiative had been employed

in either extra-state organisations or in senior positions in governmental regional

development agencies.

OTELO aimed to provide local groups living in rural areas in Upper Austria spaces to share

and develop interests together. The initiative encouraged social interaction and mutual

learning in villages and towns and building social capital and new networks between

villages with low barriers to access. Woven into this was the idea to reuse existing

buildings, spaces and rooms distributed through the region, often publicly owned by the

municipality. In this way, underused spaces and public infrastructure were repurposed by

communities to facilitate workshops and events organised and hosted by community

groups.

OTELO consists of three main components. Otelo’s

open spaces are the physical rooms in

each village, town, or city. The spaces are free to access and require a small level of

organisation to manage and maintain. This was usually done by the so-called “magic 5”, a

group of five volunteers who wished to start an Otelo in their local area. The ‘Otelo Charter’

set out the basic operating principles guiding how to start an Otelo and the ethos of

managing and maintaining it. (Five was chosen, so I was informed, as two is too small,

three is difficult if one decides to leave, and four is an even number!).

Linked to the evolution of the OTELO ecosystem, is ‘Otelo Genossenschaft’. Otelo eGen, as it

is referred to, was founded in 2014, is an employment cooperative which aims to provide a

group of freelancers, including the early pioneers of the OTELO program a flexible and

collectivised employment structure. The cooperative is jointly owned by its members, up to

10, who are also employees. Members offer a range of different commercial services

depending on individual or combined skills including design, film production, regional

development, media work, and consultancy. The point was to provide employment

The term ‘LEADER’ originally came from the French acronym for "Liaison Entre Actions de

Développement de l'Économie Rurale", meaning 'Links between the rural economy and

development actions’.

I use ‘OTELO’ in full caps to refer to the overall OTELO ecosystem. ‘Otelo’ in sentence case refers to

the specific aspects and activities within the ecosystem, often followed by ‘spaces’ or ‘nodes’.

security to the worker-members involved.

Otelo eGen aimed to overcome some of the precarities associated with freelancing in rural

regions in Austria, including the isolation and lack of colleagues at hand with similar or

complementary skills to collaborate on project work. As employees, members receive

additional protection under labour laws, including better access to annual leave, insurance,

and pension schemes, as working rights are otherwise limited for freelancers. The need for

this grew in Upper Austria as a small stream of younger people had begun to migrate to

the region from cities such as Linz and Vienna. Not only did Otelo eGen support new

arrivals working in contemporary, often creative, industries e.g., social media or film

production, but the OTELO ecosystem eventually became a pull factor cited in interviews as

one of the reasons for relocating to specific rural areas where OTELO was present.

Although some Otelo eGen members can be linked to the evolution of the overall OTELO

ecosystem and some were actively involved in promoting Otelo spaces and nodes, the

cooperative is not an overarching structure and does not regulate other aspects of the

ecosystem.

Nested in the Otelo spaces are

nodes

, referring to specific local interest groups that use the

spaces for meetings, events and activities. The activities and interests of these subgroups

are vast and include, making soap, 3D printing, robotics, yodelling, cooking, repairing, fixing

and DIY, renewable energy, breakdancing, community supported agriculture, and co-

working. This variety gets to the point of the OTELO ecosystem which is designed and built

to be adaptable and responsive to local needs and changing funding priorities and politics

(e.g. there was a shift in priority during OTELO’s evolution from policies to support young

people towards boosting employment in rural areas, or from supporting ageing people

towards providing digital technology and conditions for start-ups or co-working in rural

villages). While the specific activities of nodes changed depending on local needs, interests,

funding opportunities and the influx of new people, ideas, and practices from Austrian cities

looking for alternative ways of life and work, the principle and code of conduct of managing

and maintaining flexible spaces to support local interest groups persisted.

One of the main differences between EPAM and OTELO is the deliberate attention Otelo

founders paid on developing and adapting an elaborate model of participatory governance.

It was centred around the idea of

hosting

and

sociocracy

. The founders had met and been

mentored by others who had worked on these forms of governance, and in a sense hosting

and sociocracy became a philosophy underpinning OTELO and is worth elaborating on

here.

Sociocracy is a system of governance using consent-based decision making. It provides a

set of methods for groups to organise and make decisions in a flexible and non-hierarchical

manner. It is used in for-profits,non-profits,co-ops, schools, community groups,

unincorporated projects. Differentiating it from other forms of participatory governance,

itdraws on the use of

consent

rather than

consensus

and majority voting. Whereas

consensus means that everyone agrees on the decision; consent means that people agree

on what is

good enough

in order to move forward in the process, even if they don't entirely

agree with the solution.

In sociocracy subgroups are organised into

circles

. Circles take care of specific tasks or

domains that dictate the circle’saims. The aim is to distribute organisations’ tasks and

roles, including management and vision between circles so more people take on a shared

responsibility. The OTELO ecosystem is structured according to this non-hierarchical

approach, e.g., Otelo nodes replace circles to take on the joint responsibility of maintaining

Otelo spaces. Core to this are skills of moderation and hosting.

Hosting is a significant practice in OTELO’s organisational system. It offers techniques and

methods to facilitate and moderate groups in pursuit of co-creating solutions collectively

and in so doing, instil a sense of empowerment in the participants. Although OTELO’s

version differs, the practice originates in participatory leadership and group facilitation

models which aim at developing the self-organisational capacity of groups.

Hosting in Otelo refers as much to a material practice as to an ethos. In principle, Otelo

spaces are hosted, in the everyday sense of the term, in public buildings and spare rooms

by the municipality. In turn, Otelo spaces host nodes. According to OTELO, what this means

is that nodes, or rather the community groups that come and go to use the Otelo spaces,

are facilitated and supported in very basic ways but enough to make it easy for them to use

the space, meet, and build relations through experimenting and learning together. Where

EPAM is weighted more towards mutual aid, OTLEO emphasises mutual learning.

Reframing the problematic empirically

Circulation, connectivity and linking in emerging social networks are important aspects in

both cases, but questions arise as to how linking takes place, and what else matters in

processes of dis/connectivity beyond human intentionality. Furthermore, I want to ask,

what are the material aspects and channels in networks that form connections and support

circulation? For example, spaces and places, rooms or farms are significant aspects in both

OTELO and EPAM. Reusing and retrofitting rooms and spatial infrastructure kicked-off a

process of spatial transformation which in turn supported further interaction, relations, and

socio-spatial changes; changes that set the conditions for future human and nonhuman

interactivity in space. And what are the relations between sociotechnical systems and the

everyday practices which make and unmake links, form channels, and support social

relations in processes of change? Crucially, how can we understand these socio-technical

systems – infrastructures – and the flows of material and discursive practices as part of the

transformation, or re(con)figuring of rural spaces: socio-spatial and material processes that

shape and organise life, while trans-locally folding into other infrastructures?

The aim of the next section is to elaborate this framework theoretically. I will argue it is

insufficient to examine the relations between mobile practices, infrastructures and

transforming spaces through a theoretical lens centring solely on human action. In my

conviction, it requires a framework that does not take for granted human exceptionality and

a pre-given, fully constituted and entirely rational human subject. Instead, what is required

is a conceptual repertoire that gives a perspective on subjectivation in spatial and material

processes where materiality is considered a vital force (

becoming material

), rather than an

inert object. In this line of thinking, the framework must take another analytical unit other

than the human. I argue this unit is practices, of which humans are an important part, but

practices include knowledge and materiality, they are in this way material-discursive and

travel through, across, over, and with humans, but also as part of other material

configurations.

Theoretical framework: A new materialist approach for the

research on social and spatial change in social innovation

5.1. Three interlinked levels of analysis

To account for the material, spatial, and technological aspects of EPAM and OTELO in

processes of social change, and avoid reproducing unproductive dualisms between

structure/agency, human/nonhuman, and nature/culture expressed, for example, in rural

and urban relations, a new mid-level conceptual repertoire is required, one in which cases

such as EPAM and OTELO are understood as

self-organised

or indeed

self-organising

infrastructures

. Considered with a theoretical lens that de-centres the human and shifts

focus to practices and processes in which subjects, alongside objects and space, are at

once components while being discursively constructed, the term

self-organising

becomes

particularly applicable.

Here I make use of two main vantage points. Firstly, a specific view on social change in the

contemporary field of social innovation, a field which requires further knowledge on how

practices and ideas spread to have a more complete understanding on situated (e.g.

anchored in a place and time) socio-spatial transformation. Secondly, I engage new

materialist theory in an attempt to overcome a perceived deadlock in thinking with dualities

between human and nonhuman, nature and culture, and structure and agency. The

engagement promises to foreground the vital power of material configurations (Bennett,

2010) in processes of socio-spatial transformation with a view on how configurations of

material-discursive practices spread, traverse scales and spatial boundaries, and cut across

traditional epistemic categories thereby troubling the tropes, concepts, and language with

which we think space, agency, and transformation in social innovation, planning and

design.

The following section lays out this theoretical framework according to the three analytical

levels produced during the research following abductive reasoning. Observations made in

the empirical data collected during ethnographic field research in Portugal and Austria

were compared and contrasted alongside a close reading of critical social and spatial

theory (see papers one, two, and three). Abductive reasoning was guided by a grounded

theory approach for producing concepts, categories, and theorising (Strauss & Corbin,

1998). Concepts were produced by coding interview data and field notes read alongside

theoretical insights from the literature. By circling between data-derived concepts and

theory, the following categories were assigned:

1. Practices

2. Infrastructures

3. Space

In the next step, connections were made between categories that required another reading

of data and theory. This produced to second set of integrated mid-level concepts. The

concepts and their integration to the framework is the theoretical result of this thesis.

These are:

I. Spread

II. Resistance

III. Infrastructuring

The following section proceeds by presenting the state of the art of social change in social

innovation. This is followed by a reading of new materialist theory and lays out the three

analytical categories of practices, infrastructure, space. Finally, I present the conceptual

middle-range theorising and findings of the thesis, spread, resistance, and

infrastructure/ing and how they intersect and connect categories.

5.2. Social change in social innovation

Social innovation refers both to the empirical and normative field in which social change is

the intentional goal of human action ‘resulting in new institutions, new social movements,

new social practices, or different structures of collaborative work’ (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014, p.

44). It is connected to the fields of spatial planning (Moulaert et al., 2017) and design

(Escobar, 2017; Manzini, 2015) where social innovation can address the needs of local urban

neighbourhoods (Moulaert & Maccallum, 2019), trigger processes of regional

transformation (Moulaert et al., 2013), engage in local development in disadvantaged rural

regions (Bock, 2012; Christmann, 2014; Noack & Federwisch, 2018; Richter, 2017), and drive

wider societal change and address global challenges (Ayob et al., 2016; Defourny et al.,

2014; Howaldt et al., 2014).

Social innovation is a particular type of social change understood to operate at a micro

level, concerned with microprocesses and mechanisms (Tarde, 1899/2000) in contrast to

‘macro’ and longue durée processes of epochal change (Howaldt & Schwarz, 2010; cf.

Polanyi, 1944). Social change in social innovation is often referred to as grassroots, bottom-

up, or bottom-linked (Moulaert & Maccallum, 2019), raising questions, both empirically and

theoretically, as to how change at micro levels can affect systemic social change at meso or

macro levels. Change in social innovation is situated and historic, it engages with

communities, places, spaces, and time in specific ways. The concepts inscribing the field

tend to explain change as a result of (human) action concerned with the intentional spread

of new practices to other locations e.g. by connecting, linking, imitating, learning,

reconfiguring, scaling-up or diffusing social practices, and building new social relations.

Social change and Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology

In Laws of Imitation (1903), Gabriel Tarde described how, at a micro level, societies stabilise

and change over time through the imitation of social inventions and their interplay with

other competing ideas and forces. This early explication of social innovation as a specific

form of social change explained by diffusion lead to the development of Tarde’s

microsociology that resulted in him being recognised as the grandfather of both diffusion

research (Kinnunen, 1996; Rogers, 1983) and social innovation theory (Howaldt et al., 2015;

Moulaert et al., 2013).

In An Outline of Sociology (1899/2000) Tarde delineates social change according to

microprocesses of

repetition

opposition

and

adaptation

of social inventions which travel

along and are propelled by ‘imitative rays’ (1899/2000, p.51). When inventions encounter

opposing forces in the shape of other competing social inventions, desires and ideas, they

are prevented from becoming social innovation. On one hand, Tarde points out that the

clash between the repetition and opposition of ideas can often be violent, while on the

other hand, ‘logical synthesis’ (p.64) occurs from the adaptation of a multitude of

infinitesimal social inventions. This leads to a passage of ‘gradual enlargement’ (p.79).

Tarde distinguishes between two inseparable but distinct forms of enlargement in social

innovation (1899/2000, p.80). Firstly,

extrinsic growth

, which is ‘a growth in extension by

imitative diffusion’ (p.115). This pattern of growth went on to inform Rogers’ famous S-Curve

which traces the phased adoption of innovations by users over time (Rogers, 1983).

Intrinsic

growth

, by contrast, is ‘growth in comprehension by a series of logical combinations’

(Tarde, 1899/2000, p.115). Tarde writes, intrinsic growth is ‘the tendency of a given invention

or social adaptation to become larger and more complex by adapting itself to some other

invention or adaptation, and thus creating a new adaptation, which, through other

encounters and logical combination of the same sort, leads to a high synthesis, and so on’

(p.116). Tarde illustrates this point through the example of the invention of the wheel in

combination with the domestication of the horse, both of which, so he claims, spread

independently through repetition prior to coalescing harmoniously in the form of the cart

The emergent proposition of the horse and cart was formed through the adaption of its

constitutive parts, which Tarde points out is no mere summation but the product of a

particular set of alliances in a social invention greater than the sum of its parts.

It is

relevant to note here the diffusion of one social invention (the wheel) led to the emergence

of another, the horse and cart. In this way, and as I develop through the thesis, we can

begin to understand spread not as a linear event posterior to invention (e.g., implicit in the

imitative idea of scaling-up best practices), but as a complex and ongoing process of

circulations (spread) leading to new reconfigurations.

While extrinsic growth went on to inform the concerns of diffusion theory via Rogers,

intrinsic growth remained underdeveloped by Tarde and his legacy. It is the reintegration

and interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic

forms of spread which I develop from Tarde in

combination with recent insights in diffusion research and materialist theory. In the first

paper following this introduction, I engage Tarde’s work with Karan Barad’s new

materialism. This sets out a novel approach to spread which is developed in paper two and

three. The empirical study in paper two maps the intrinsic, or what I will refer to as

intensive

spread of social imaginaries and ideas materialised in visual images associated

with organic farming and country life in Alentejo. It details how configurations of images

travel through infrastructure adapting and changing form as they go. Paper three

elaborates the tensions created as configurations of practices move between intensive

modes of spread towards

extensive

modes as boundaries are negotiated.

Tarde’s work, particularly the focus on microprocesses has been recognised for its proto-

more-than-human approach (cf., Deleuze and Guattari; Latour 1993; Candea, 2010). This is

expressed clearly in Tarde’s monadology which he developed from Leibnitz. Here, for

Tarde, the

social consists of the relational forces between bodies and constellations which

include not only people but ‘planets, galaxies and microbes’, where the universe is

composed of many overlapping more-than-only-human societies (Tarde, 1895/2012, p. 73)

Nonetheless, this expanded notion of the social in Tarde’s thinking has had limited impact

on social innovation theory. A field with its genealogy in social science, particularly

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983) Felix Guattari with Giles Delueze adapt

Tarde’s example to first illustrate their notion of assemblage, where the domestication of the horse

in combination with innovation in riding technology subsequently combine to become the warrior-

horse-bow, a war machine greater than the sum of its parts and possible only, according to Guattari

(2009) under the condition of the great steppe. Here we see the adaptation of innovations and their

affect not only on practices and constituents of the assemblage, but also affected by and with effect

upon the space in which they are reconfigured. And, as Guattari points out, within this assemblage

man is more-than-human, becoming a constituent part of the machine (Guattari, 2009).

sociology (Ayob et al., 2016; Godin, 2012; Moulaert & Mehmood, 2011; Mumford, 2002),

agency in social innovation tends to be anchored to the human and is diminished or

empowered in forms of governance and politics. In general, less attention has been given

to materiality beyond that of inert objects distributed

space to transport social goods and

practices. By engaging Tarde’s microsociology with contemporary materialist theory, I

begin to unpick a perceived essentialist view on matter and space in social innovation.

First, I will discuss how human practices in social innovation are currently understood to

contribute to social change.

Social innovation and social practices

Social practices are central to understanding processes of social change in social

innovation referring to new intentional ways of achieving goals or new ways of organising

to better satisfy the unmet needs of a society (Ville & Pol, 2009; Zapf, 1989). For Zapf, new

social practices solve problems better than earlier ones and are thus worth the effort of

being imitated and institutionalised, altering the direction of social change (1989). New

social practices are able to transform relations between agents and thereby build new

social bonds and ties between actors (Moulaert & Maccallum, 2019). This can achieve

empowerment through democratic governance and new forms of co-production,

collaboration, and participation (Pestoff, 2009; Pestoff & Hulgård, 2016).

Exchange of practices can occur through mechanisms of non-linear social learning (Bock,

2012; Howaldt et al., 2014; Moulaert & Nussbaumer, 2005). Novelty, i.e. innovation and

change, is strongly associated with new practices (Rammert, 2010; Zapf, 1989), however,

this does not necessary mean universally new, but where pre-existing practices travel,

spread, and become adopted in new spaces and places (Christmann, 2014a), as discussed

in more detail in a section on spread below. For new social practices to be accepted in

other locations they must 'connect to something known' (2004, p.45). In this interpretation,

social innovations are socially constructed and therefore novelty is linked to ‘perception’

(p.45) placing the human actor, or at least communicative actions between actors as

central to processes of social change.

Materiality, agency, and intentionality in practices in social innovation

The position of the human in relation to practices is debated. Although Howaldt and

Schwartz make a similar claim to Christmann and Zapf that 'social innovations are new

combinations and/or new configurations of social practices' (Howaldt & Schwarz, 2010),

their use of social practices appears to follow more closely Reckwitz's definition where ‘the

social should not be sought in intersubjectivity, nor in action based on norms, nor yet in

communication, but rather in the collectivity of behaviour patterns which are held together

by a specific ‘practicalability’ (Reckwitz, 2002 p.289 cited in Howaldt et al. 2014), i.e. social

practices. In this understanding, individuals are participants in practices rather than the loci

of practices (cf. Schatzki, 1996; Shove et al., 2012). This signals a shift in ontology where the

centrality of the human in social processes is called into question, but at least in social

innovation theory, human intentionally remains central to reconfiguring and spreading

social practices (Howaldt et al., 2014).

Similarly, there is no consensus on the location and relationship between materiality and

the social in practice theory. For some, practices are the smallest analytical unit and remain

the realm of human action but combine with other material components to form wider

arrangements (Schatzki, 1996). For others, materiality is an essential feature of practices,

where for example 'practices are routinised bodily activities', including 'mental and

emotional activities', and are too the 'site of the social', as things are also components of

practices, 'objects […] are the place of the social insofar as they are necessary components

of social practices' (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 251). However, although this brings materiality

directly into the practice framework, matter remains conceived of as inert mass able to

facilitate and transport social practice.

Practices are specific, often repetitive forms of action or praxis, ‘with intentional or

unintentional political implication’ (Ortner, 1984). This early definition of practices brings into

the frame unintentionality, an important aspect in practice theory which, I suggest, features

less strongly in contemporary social innovation discourse and which I addressed in my

approach. In the Mangle of Practice (1993), the sociologist Andrew Pickering describes how

(scientific) knowledge is produced and change is shaped as a result of intentional and

contingent forces ‘mangled’ together in practice. He described this as the dance of agency,

referring to agency not as pre-given but as the ability to act which is distributed between

human and nonhumans in practice. Karen Barad (2007) takes this a step further to suggest

it is not so much a distribution of the ability to act between consistent entities, whether

human or not, but rather thinks of agency as the reconfiguring of relations which results in

the temporary delineation of humans or nonhumans, a type of action that occurs in

material and discursive practices, and which I discuss extensively in the section below.

In the previous section social change in social innovation was shown to occur in the

repetition and opposition of practices, a microprocess with an inside and outside. This

section has developed a materialist account of practices in which non-human agency are

affective forces in the production of knowledge and change. A question now arises as to the

relationship between intentionality, contingency and how practices are spread in social

innovation, and how this relates to space. The following section unpacks these aspects.

Social practice and spatial spread in social innovation

For social innovation to be recognised as such, social practices must spatially spread

(Avelino et al., 2015; Christmann, 2014a; Druijff & Kaika, 2021; Haxeltine et al., 2016;

Montanari & Saberi, 2010; Ruijsink et al., 2017; Tarde, 1903; Westley & Antadze, 2010). That

is, they must 'emancipate themselves from a particular place' otherwise 'they remain a

social project and should not be confused with social innovation' (Christmann, 2014a, p. 45).

Simply put, new social practices must be 'transferred to other contexts' (p.45) – they must

be imitated by other actors for social change to occur (Tarde, 1903).

Some studies have emphasised the targeted nature of social practices in social innovation

(Howaldt and Schwartz 2010, p.26) which must be successfully introduced to new settings

(Conger, 2002) or social systems (Gerber, 2006) to become widely used to address concrete

problems. For Howaldt and Schwartz, social innovations are transformed in a context

specific manner (2010, p.34), making them more ‘context-dependent’ than say, technical

innovations (p.35). The authors claim that social innovations maybe successfully spread to

other locations where established institutions are lacking, or are only marginally active,

such as in rural peripheries in the cases. Similarly to Christmann, the authors acknowledge

that for new ideas or inventions to be accepted, there must be something that connects or

affords the potential user to the new idea, or practice. For Christmann, this is an internal

and subjective process within the potential adopter connecting to their 'already known'

knowledge (Christmann, 2016, p. 366). In contrast, Howaldt and Schwartz (following

Reckwitz’s practice theory) write it is in the 'compatibility', 'practical rationale' and the 'utility'

of new ideas for their future adopters which determines uptake (Howaldt and Schwartz,

2010, p.36). Utility and rationale are used to overcome perceived normativity, linking social

values and social innovations, where the effects of innovations are 'ambivalent depending

on a point of view' (p.36). This seems to suggest social innovations may be applied to

'different purposes and interests' depending 'on a point of view', presumably of the user.

Social innovations are not inherently 'good', or 'bad' but their uptake and spread depend on

how they are perceived, connect to existing knowledge, and are put to use. An

understanding in which human intentionality and knowledge remain centre-staged.

Other studies, by contrast, have acknowledged the unplanned or unintentional side of

spread in social innovation, distinguishing between two types: 'active dissemination'

through planned and coordinated actions, or 'unplanned diffusion' (Greenhalgh et al., 2004).

Greenhalgh and colleagues’ study reveals the spread of innovation to be on a spectrum

between unplanned diffusion and intentional dissemination. Where ‘emergence’ and

‘adaption’ are metaphors for spread at the unplanned pole, in contrast to ‘dissemination’

and ‘engineered’ metaphors at the intentional end of the spectrum (2004, p.585). This

insight produces a scale or gradient between intentionality and unintentionality in spatial

spread, an insight I build and incorporate into my proposed framework.

Additionally, the Greenhalgh review highlights innovations are understood by some as

objects

and others as

processes

, and that most studies of the spread of innovation have

addressed well-bounded and proactively disseminated objects (e.g., technologies or

products) whereas there are less studies on complex processes of emergent and

unplanned diffusion (2004, p. 604), a gap this thesis directly addresses.

Pathways through which social practices are disseminated include the market (Mulgan,

2006), mass media (Greenhalgh et al., 2004), technological infrastructure and web based

social networking (Howaldt and Schwartz, 2010). Nonetheless, communication through

social networks is understood to be the most effective pathway of spread in social

innovation (Greenhalgh et al., 2004; Montanari & Saberi, 2010; Rogers, 1983; Valente, 1996).

Discussed in the next section and in detail in paper two, Rogers’ (1983) and Valente’s (1996)

work dominates understanding of different types of networks in diffusion, where ideas and

inventions spread through existing communication channels in social networks. Valente

shows the diffusion of an innovation is relative not only to the entire social system but also

to an individual’s social network. This highlights the role of interpersonal influence in

adoption behaviour, an approach used to predict patterns of innovation and identify opinion

leaders in social networks to effect the rate of adoption. In his seminal study on the

diffusion of innovations, Rogers (1983) identified a typology of actors ranging from laggards

to early adopters in innovation processes linked by social networks.

This emphasis on human-centricity, intentionality, and the ephemerality of social networks

in the spread of social innovation raises problems for a materialist view of social change, as

discussed in the next sections and in detail in paper two, ‘modes of spread’.

Networks spread and social innovation

Networks can be understood as a ‘pattern of friendship, advice, communication or support

which exists among the members of a social system’ (Valente, 1996). They connect agents

across scales providing means of communication and coordination and improving the

quality of social relations (Moulaert & Nussbaumer, 2005). They span both horizontally and

vertically (Hillmann, 2009), connecting levels of governance and institutions and actors in

other locations (Moulaert & Mehmood, 2011). Networks in regional territories tend to be

place specific due to particular tacit relationships and a capacity to form new equitable

relations of power (Abramo, 2009). Building networks takes time and trust, where relations

of solidarity are said to be made through 'gift' and 'counter gift' exchanges in particular

spatial settings (Abramo, 2009).

However, other scholarship points out that networks are not as disinterested as is often

claimed. Swyngedouw (2009) provides a strong critique of the ideal of flat, networked

relations in novel forms of governance discussing how the ‘idealised–normative model of

horizontal, non-exclusive and participatory stakeholder-based governance’ is at odds with

the traditional hierarchical state forms in capitalist society. This results in opaque networks,

fuzzy institutional arrangements, ill-defined responsibilities, and ambiguous political

objectives and priorities’ (2009, p.65). A particular problem in social movements where

‘networks have become the de facto spatiality’ (McFarlane, 2009, p. 362).

In concord with Swyngedouw’s critique, McFarlane raises concerns over networks’ lack of

materiality, historicity, and accountability. He suggests a shift in thinking is required to

account for the processual and emergent characteristics of material networks (2009,

p.561). Developing this further, Shields discusses the limitations of networks as spatial

topologies including their ‘single dimensionality’, unable to account for nested and scalar

spatialising processes within or cutting across boundaries, or for their own constitutive

material practices (Shields 2013, p. 144). This critique casts doubt over social networks’

ability to account for the material and technological aspect of entangled social systems

required to support, carry and generate new practices in a new materialist account of social

change. Enter infrastructure. Understood as socio-technological systems with a historicity

and materiality, infrastructures support flows, including, as paper one, two and three

describe, the spread and resistance of material-discursive practices within and between

socio-spatial systems (what will be referred to as

intensive

and

extensive

modes).

This review shows how spread in social innovation tends to be understood as the

movement of predetermined entities, whether objects, practices, or ideas, in social

networks against the background of space. Arguably, this relationship tends to reproduce

positivist notions of container space and sits at odds with interpretations of space as

relational (e.g. Löw, 2016; Massey, 2005) or topological (e.g. Mol & Law, 1994; Shields,

2013). To address this, I argue we need new mid-level socio-spatial concepts able to

analyse space and change in its processual and relational complexity underpinned by a

new materialist ontology that can account for the liveliness of matter and its productive

interaction in non-linear social processes.

‘For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially

real and socially constructed: our material lives are always

culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural.’

Coole and Frost, 2010, p.27

5.3. Materialisms

As a collection of approaches, ‘new’ or ‘critical’ materialisms attend to the everyday

practices in which material objects, the natural environment, and human agencies interact.

This aims to call into question and rework Modern assumptions on human agency, Nature,

and technology where human agency is not taken for granted or pre-given, rather what is

looked for are the material conditions which give rise to and distribute agency in

asymmetrical ways. Ecological processes are analysed alongside economic and

technological structures to get purchase on a broader notion of the social consisting of a

multitude of human and nonhuman forces. The approaches foreground power, material

agencies, disciplining affects, processes of subjectivation and interpellation in material and

discursive practices.

Sparked by the perceived dominance of the explanatory power of discourse, language and

human-centric social phenomena over nonhuman matter, bodies and nature, new

materialisms are placed in an intellectual trajectory succeeding the so-called cultural turn

across the social sciences and humanities. ‘New’, is used to signify the shift away from

historic materialism’s preoccupation with structure, absorbing critical insights from

poststructuralism and postmodernism, placing them in a lineage including ‘Democritus-

Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze more than Hegel-Marx-Adorno’ (Bennett, 2010, p. xiii). In

this shared ongoing intellectual project, the ‘distinction between life and matter, organic

and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and man and god, are not necessarily the most

important ones to honour’ (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 48). Instead, the central epistemological

concern aims to avoid the trappings of dualistic modes of thought and their ontological

consequence.

Materialisms’ critical posture calls into question the ontology of matter and life that

underpins contemporary politics, political institutions, practices, and actions founded on

‘rational choice theory, positivism, empiricism, and dialectical materialism’ (Cheah, 2010, p.

86). For dialectical materialism, materiality refers to the historic material conditions that

continue to structure modes of production, division of labour, and social relations embodied

in the industrial worker. In contrast, new materialisms are concerned with revealing power,

including economic and state, in shaping and constraining social life and change (Cheah,

2010). This critical approach is grounded in the recognition that the concepts and images

we use to think with matter, and have political consequences affecting the way we think

ourselves as humans in relation to – and how we treat – nature and other human and

nonhuman bodies (Coole & Frost, 2010). Critical lines of enquiry aim to reveal links between

production of knowledge and scientific knowledge practices and Enlightenment-based

secular humanism and its intersection with empire and capitalism. This motivation is

grounded in the theoretical insight that epistemological practices dividing “Man” and

“Nature” have provided a means to justify the continued exploitation of nature (rendered as

inert matter ready for extraction and commodification) and “savage” bodies outside of the

humanist model of universal (White, European, rational) Man (Césaire, 2000 cited in

Braidotti, 2013).

Vitality of matter

This new materialist trajectory differs from other theoretical approaches which bring matter

into the analytic. Actor-network theory, for example, often compared to new materialisms’

critical feminism (e.g. Conty, 2018; Rodríguez-Giralt et al., 2018), has been criticised for

evenly ascribing agency to objects and subjects, blinding it to politics and human inequity

(Rajão & Jarke, 2018; Routledge, 2008), for its managerial entrepreneurialism concealing

human dispossession or oppression (Star, 1991), or its lack of (matters of) care (Puig De La

Bellacasa, 2011). While approaches are often described as ‘flat’, in critical materialisms this

alludes not to a lack of differentiation between object and subject but instead to an

ontological immanence. In Deleuzioguattarian philosophy, a stream of thought connected

to materialisms is described as the ‘plane of immanence’ where matter is in a state of pure

intensity, unorganised and prefigured (Deluze and Guattari, 1987). Ontologically this rejects

vital transcendental forces coming from super or sub structures, whether ‘God or structural

Marxism’ (Bennet 2010a). For Deleuze and Guattari, matter is mobilised by nonhuman

forces consisting of speeds and intensities which open new connections and

configurations. Matter is not inert as in the Humanist project but is vital and dynamic. For

Deleuze, the organisation of form and the limitations that restrict and shape its coming into

being are described and analysed as micropolitics.

This position recognises that infinitesimally small changes in material configurations

‘transform successive conditions for interactions among elements’ with unanticipated

effects (Coole and Frost, 2010, p.14). This is not the same as the sum being greater than its

parts, but ‘there are system effects different from their parts’ (Urry, 2005 cited in: Coole &

Frost, 2010, p.5), the consequences of which are non-linear and unpredictable. This brings

into view methodological challenges, for example, how to track complex non-linear circuits

which ‘over- and undermine material structures’ (Coole and Frost 2010, p. 27), a challenge I

take up in the following chapters by engaging Karen Barad’s specific form of materialism.

The question arises as to how this theoretical framework is applied empirically to create

new knowledge on complex non-linear and more-than-human processes of social change

and spatial transformation in the connected fields of social innovation, spatial design, and

planning, and what is gained by engaging a process-relational and materialist approach in

these fields? The following section translates the approach into an applicable conceptual

framework according to the dimensions of material-discursive practices, infrastructure,

space.

5.4. Material-discursive practices

Karen Barad’s particular form of materialism,

agential realism

, contributes to an

‘understanding of power and its effects on the production of bodies, identities, and

subjectivities’ (Barad, 2007, p. 224). Agential realism is grounded in a process-relational

ontology which rejects matter as a property of things, and instead considers matter as ‘a

dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations’ (Barad, 2007, p. 224). This rests on the

“fact” that relations precede “things” that relate (relata), where things, bodies, spaces,

subjects, objects, in short, all human and non-human configurations are constituted in

dynamic relational processes (Barad, 1996, 2003, 2007). This fundamental conceptual shift

has radical consequences on understanding space and matter and significantly to

understanding how the spread and resistance of material configurations play an agential

role in social change. It provides theoretical, methodological, and ethical tools to consider

how space, time, and matter (spacetimematter) are together

re(con)figured

, not only

socially constructed but in combination with nonhuman forces. In this radical approach,

built upon insights from social and political theory and quantum physics, the dynamic and

shifting entanglement of relations, which Barad calls intra-actions (1996),

are

more-than-

human material-discursive practices in which matter and meaning are jointly and

continually constituted.

Similarly to other materialist approaches, Barad rejects the notion of a predetermined actor

with varying degrees of agency. Accordingly, for Barad, agency is not a property of a person

or thing, instead it is about possibilities and accountability, and the reconfiguration of

boundaries (1996). It is an enactment which refers to the power of distribution and the

redistribution of power in material-discursive practices, the basic analytical unit and loci of

the radicality of this relational ontology.

‘Intra-actions are nonarbitrary, nondeterministic causal

enactments though which matter-in-the process-of-becoming

is iteratively enfolded. Such dynamic is not marked by an

exterior parameter called time, nor does it take place in a

container called space. Rather, iterative intra-actions are the

dynamics which temporality and spatiality are produced and

iteratively reconfigured in the materialisation of phenomena

and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their

constitutive exclusions.’

Barad, 2007, p.181

Materialisms, including Barad’s, aim to overturn and rethink longstanding dualisms which,

as discussed above, underwrite extractavist, exploitative, and racially violent behaviours,

certain scientific practices and epistemic cultures, and socio-economic systems i.e.

capitalism. As a loose carrier bag of theory, to evoke Ursula Le Guin’s metaphor (Le Guin et

al., 2019), materialisms give tools to consider agency distributed in everyday material-

discursive practices involved in non-linear relational processes. Consequentially to the

thesis’ objective, material artefacts are temporarily stabilised configurations of practices in

which matter and meaning are co-produced, and the materialisation of subjects, objects

and technologies is understood as part an ongoing process of spread and resistance. The

circulation of practices is productive, but how is movement supported? Presumable in this

theoretical approach is that such a system cannot be predetermined but must be produced

practice

circulation. Put differently, and as the empirical work in papers two and three

lay bare, flows of material-discursive practices are performative of the infrastructures that

support them.

5.5. Infrastructures

Infrastructures are linked to practices in multiple ways and have a double social and

technical character. On one hand, understood as large-scale technical objects (Star &

Ruhleder, 1996), infrastructures are material networks facilitating flows of goods, people, or

ideas over space (Larkin, 2013). On the other, infrastructures are relational systems

inscribing space (Collier & Ong, 2003); a social process before a result (Coutard &

Rutherford, 2016). They are at once things, and the relation between things (Larkin, 2013).

Nested in this interpretation is the recognition that infrastructure is at once a support

system for the development of new social practices and, at the same time a social practice

itself (Bowker & Star, 1999; Domanski et al., 2019). In this definition, infrastructures are both

technical, social, and political consisting of static and dynamic elements emerging out of

practices in processes (Bowker et al., 2009).

Infrastructures are social and political in as much as they provide platforms ‘for reproducing

life in the city’ (Simone, 2004, p. 408). They can provide frameworks ‘for the radical re-

organization of social relations in pre-insurrectionary form’ (Shantz, 2009, p. 103). Social

institutions, people, and communities collaboratively engage with each other in flexible and

provisional ways and with complex combinations of objects and spaces e.g., community

centres, housing and shelter, or food shares to enact infrastructure where institutional

support and financial capital is lacking (Shantz 2009; Simone, 2004). With spaces and

objects , people become engaged in infrastructural arrangements to support alternative

ways of life (Simone, 2004). To this end, infrastructure’s material and technological means

give way to the formation of new support networks and communities as the most

important resource (Niewöhner, 2015, p. 6) to become ‘sites of ontological experiments’,

‘where multiple agents meet, engage, and produce new worlds’ churning urgent questions

on how to live differently (Jensen & Morita, 2015, p. 141).

Infrastructure begins to be endowed with a certain vitality, an emergent semiotic and

material system (Niewöhner, 2015) capable of yielding new worlds. ‘Thinking infrastructure’

refers to a series of interconnected devices that are joined up to form a web of ‘material

artifacts, material practices, and broader circuits of ideas and visions’ (Bowker et al., 2019,

p. 7). As much as channelling information across ‘multiple settings and multiple temporal

scales’ (p.8), thinking infrastructures produce knowledge ‘in feedback loops of learning,

reformatting and redoing’ (p.8). The specific discursive and lively characters of these

learning and co-evolving systems means they bleed out of fixed locations ‘crossing

obsolete boundaries of the material, the human, and the social and dissolving distinctions’

between public or private (p.5).

Infrastructures of resistance

Progressive and social movement literature has long emphasised self-organisation in

activism and social change. Shantz describes ‘infrastructures of resistance’ as providing the

framework ‘for the radical re-organization of social relations in a miniature, pre-

insurrectionary form. It is the rudimentary infrastructure of alternative ways of being, an

alternative future in the present’ (Shantz, 2009, p. 102). Infrastructures of resistance are

ready-to-hand structures to support self-organisation in processes of transformative

change at the grassroots. They support working-class, anti-poverty, anti-racist, anti-fascist

struggles and lay the invisible groundwork and provide relationships for future re-

organisation.

Shantz builds on the notion of ‘infrastructures of dissent’ (Sears, 2007, p. 6) which refers to

the everyday practices by which social movements ‘develop their capacities to sustain

common memories, build collective visions, voice alternatives, and engage in debate and

analysis’ (Shantz, 2009, p.104). Whereas Sears empathised formal political organisations,

Shantz opens it up to include formal and informal social institutions addressing the needs

of the poor and working class. Infrastructures of resistance include ‘community centres,

housing and shelter, food shares, collective creches, co-op laundries, transportation,

community media, free schools, bookstores, cafes, taverns, and clubs’ (Shantz, 2009,

p.105).

Infrastructures of resistance sustain alternative institutions which can be the building

blocks for transformative change referred to by Ehrlich (1996) as

transfer culture

. Shantz

suggests that transfer cultures are not utopian longings of projected futures but express in

everyday practices a desire for alternative ways of being in the present. This is a powerful

trope which I apply to the projective regimes of spatial development, design, and planning

which are geared towards thinking in the future as discussed in the final section of this

framing paper.

Self-organised/ing infrastructure

With Shantz I wish to emphasis the

self-organised

aspect of infrastructure to re-organise

social relations. But moreover, I wish to highlight the processual nature and material vitality

of infrastructure as emergent

self-organising

system, in which, following Simone (2004)

and Niewöhner (2015), people are as much a part as the objects and spaces they connect

and, following Jensen and Morita (2015), are productive of new worlds. Drawing on Bowker

and colleagues (2019),

self-organising infrastructure

not only supports the circulation of

knowledge, but akin to Barad’s material-discursive configurations, is agential in the

production of knowledge, spaces, objects, and subjectivities. The term aims to highlight the

emancipatory potential of self-organised/ing infrastructures while engaging processual and

relational aspects of infrastructure as an emergent material-semiotic system rooted in a

new materialist process-relational ontology.

The normative aim of self-organised infrastructure is to reorganise space and social

relations deployed by those on the ground with a stake in and commitment towards

supporting different ways of life and work. Self-organising, however, brackets the

normative commitments, concerns and aims of human actors and instead brings into focus

the vitality and agency of an infrastructural system folded into and materialised in social

processes sustained by more-than-human practices. This, I believe, is the effectiveness and

potential of this double concept.

The final section of this review considers space through a materialist lens: how material-

discursive practices and self-organised/ing infrastructures are linked to the

re(con)figuration of topological spaces.

5.6. Spaces and topologies

Space, according to Massey (2005), is always under construction, a product of social

relations constituted in interaction. Meanwhile, as social space is constructed, new spatial

settings and arrangements are produced which condition ongoing social interaction in

space (Lefebvre, 1991; Löw, 2016). Grounded in social constructivism, this approach sets out

a relational understanding of space in contrast to a positivist ontology in which space is

absolute and pre-given, figured as an inert container through which bodies move. This

spatial turn through the social science began to highlight how spaces were constituted

through relations between individuals, groups, social formations, and cultural contexts

based in human action and practice. Bourdieu refers to this materialisation of social space

as ‘objectified’ space (1990), whereas Simmel (2009) refers to a process of ‘fixation’

occurring through social processes of reproduction and legitimisation where power is

made tangible in space (Nascimento, 2022). The making spatial or, spatialisation of places

and regions goes beyond the material and cartographic location of the site. It enrols a

network of many other interconnected places (Shields, 2013, p. 31). In this way, sites are

made in relation to each other and are 'cast as certain types of places e.g. romantic, harsh,

warm…(etc.)' (2013, p.31). This relies on a cultural foundation of meaning making, memory

and myth, a process and horizon over which there is intense struggle (p.31). This emphasis

on struggle, productive tension, and contestation in processes of spatialisation begins to

shift away from a purely social relational approach to space, towards a processual (or

process-relational) understanding. Moreover, it aims to consider how and through what

processes relations come into being, are reproduced, and continually change, and how

spaces are transformed (Martin & Secor, 2014), and what are the flows and blockages that

affect spatial transformations (Shields, 2013). These approaches to space, whether ‘re-

figuration’ (Knoblauch & Löw, 2020) or ‘topologies’ (Shields, 2013; Mol & Law, 1994; Martin &

Secor, 2014) aim to analyse the kind of spaces and entities that make and are made by

relational processes. It is these concerns over the reconfiguration of space, meaning,

subjectivities, and objects in spatial processes, understood here as topology, which informs

the theoretical, methodological, and empirical commitments to space in the thesis.

For Shields, who has written extensively on the subject over his career, (cultural)

topology

is a ‘critical spatial theory and method’ (Shields 2013, p.1) concerned with understanding

‘competing and contested space-time milieux which are elaborated by social interactions,

texts, and institutional relationships’ (xii). Others have made the distinction by preceding

topology with ‘social’ (Mol & Law, 1994) or ‘post-mathematical’ (Martin and Secor, 2014).

These variations share the same inspiration and goal. They utilise language, concepts, and

tools from the natural sciences and translate them to understand multiple spatialities, their

connections, and fluid relations in social processes (Blackwell, 2004). A topological

approach to space starts from the assumption that there is not

space, however socially

constructed, but multiple spaces with different logics, and that these spaces – topologies –

are constructed in relational processes in tension with one another. Social relations, social

life, social spaces, and subjectivity operate differently according to the different logics of

different topologies e.g., regional and territorial logics, networks, fluids, to name some of

the more well-known examples of topologies.

Topology is concerned with connections, disconnections, and transformations (Shields,

2012; Urry, 2004). Types and modes of connectivity differ according to the shape of space in

which relations are operating e.g., the way connections are made in a network topology by

overcoming large distances is different from connections in regional topologies where

distance, location and co-presence are important. The study of topological space is

concerned with what remains ‘qualitatively similar’ as the shape and therefore logics of

space change (Shields, 2013, p.104). As topologies transform, deform and shift, connections

and relations are twisted and distorted.

Connections and relationality between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are particularly relevant to the

study of topology, a relationship examined in detail in the thesis and relevant to the

development of modes of spread. The relation between these constitutive others can be

expressed as a diagram following two directions; ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ (DeLanda, 2016,

p. 110), reminiscent of Tarde’s intrinsic and extrinsic growth discussed above. Extensive

mappings capture features of the world extended in

space within boundaries using metrics

such as length, volume, area etc. between here and there. In contrast, intensive mappings

capture the ‘differences in the intensity of qualities’

within

a spatial system, such as

gradients of temperature, pressure, or speed (2016, p.111). Intensive and extensive

properties are linked, where the diversity of perceived phenomena bounded in extension

are the product of processes governed by gradients of intensity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987

cited in: DeLanda, 2002). Put differently, the relation between intensive and extensive can

be expressed as internalised forces pushing outwards in a desire to extensively spread met

by other competing or compatible forces. Modes of spread describes these tensions by

mapping how material circulations traverse boundaries between systems propelled and

inhibited by forces and counterforces leading to the possibility of counter-spaces of

resistance (cf. Harvey, 2000; Lefebvre, 1991).

Mobility and connectivity are closely linked in topology. This is expressed in the idea of

different types of ‘connections at distance’ (Urry, 2004). These connections must be

maintained – like in an infrastructure – to hold social life together. Travel, movement, and

the intimacy of bodily co-presence is shown to be an important aspect nourishing

connectivity and overcoming distance. As distance gets greater and technology shifts,

connections change, as do social relations (Sheller & Urry, 2006). Mol and Law (1994)

describe how anaemia flows between continents in practices, devices, and texts. By

changing shape and character, the disease enters existent regional topologies and flows

along networks adapting to spatial logics as it goes. Mapping the circulation and changing

state of anaemia brings to light the tension and difference between topologies. The authors

point to the fact that it can still be recognised even as it adapts to different topologies. They

conclude that anaemia must enact its own new topology where ‘sometimes social space

behaves like a

fluid’

(Mol and Law, 1994, p. 643). However, as Martin and Seco (2014)

suggest, the point is no longer to establish an endless list of new topologies or figures, but

rather to give depth and definition to those already being enacted.

Martin and Secor argue for a poststructuralist interpretation of topologies which aims to

open critical spatial theory up to ‘sustained consideration of difference and repetition,

poststructuralist dialectics, and multiple shaping of space’ (2014, p.435). With reference to

Deleuze and Lacan, they entertain the idea that topology has an equivalence to structure,

an immanent structure that is not separate from its effects and operates within the scene

to direct the subject (p.432). In this way, they propose topology as a poststructuralist spatial

structure, a feature of which is a ‘dialectic of continuity and discontinuity’ (Rosen, 2006, p.34

cited in Martin and Secor, 2014, p.433).

What does a new materialist account bring to this understanding of space? Simply put, and

to force the contrast, where social constructivist approaches look to the relations between

subjects in the constitution of space, a new materialist account takes relations as primary

and constitutive of all else in spatial, material, and temporal processes. Following Martin

and Secor’s idea of topology as a poststructuralist structure, the analytical levels of practice,

infrastructure and space which I have prized apart need to be rewoven to avoid historic

materialism’s trapping of transcendental sub and super structures. To this end, the

following section plaits the analytical categories back together with the concepts of spread,

resistance, and infrastructuring to consider how spatial structures – topologies – are

immanent and performative in material flows and discursive circulations.

Illustrated by the EPAM case, the third paper examines the performative dimensions of

infrastructure and space. Here, infrastructure not only supports circulation of material-

discursive configurations but, with space, is engendered in everyday practices of spread

and resistance. This is reminiscent of Law and Mol’s observation that ‘the social performs

several kinds of spaces’ (1994, p. 643), and Shields, who refers to Aboriginal

conceptualisation of space-time, that different cultures and communities embody and

perform different topologies which co-exist or clash with other performances of space

(Shields, 2013).

In the materialist framework developed here, spaces are multiple, each with their own

specific historicities. Echoing the words of Coole and Frosts, quoted at the beginning of this

section, spaces are ‘simultaneously materially real and socially constructed’, culturally

mediated, but not only cultural. The recognition of the material reality of space, not as an

absolute container, but as the product of ‘real’ processes and interactions mediated by

scientific knowledge and practices is at the forefront of research in quantum physics. Loop

theory describes the finite lines of forces which weave space into a meshwork of interlinked

loops. In

Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity

(2018), the theoretical

physicist Carlo Rovelli writes on physical space:

‘The central prediction of loop theory is therefore that space is

not a continuum, it is not divisible ad infinitum, it is formed of

‘atoms of space.’

Carlo Rovelli, 2018, p.145

And:

‘At an extremely small scale, space is a fluctuating swarm of

quanta of gravity which act upon each other, and together act

upon things, manifesting themselves in these interactions....’

Carlo Rovelli 2018, p.150

Spaces are material and discursive. They are the product of a ceaseless swarm of relations

at multiple scales, from the very small, to the human and beyond. They emerge from, or

rather co-evolve with, a web of connections akin to an immanent infrastructure, the product

of both social and material forces. This differs from a relational understanding of space

resting on constructivist ontology where space is constituted by social relations. In a new

materialist understanding, space is a relational process

all the way down

where relations

are material, continually shifting and mediated by discursive practices. Implicit in this

interpretation is a potential bridge linking the hitherto divided categories of physical and

social space, an idea that requires further research outside the direct scope of this thesis,

but which haunts the understanding of an interlinked meshwork of space and

infrastructure woven together by the spread and resistance of practices.

The next section presents the theoretical findings of the thesis derived from the empirical

research. It addresses the basic question with which I started: how do material-discursive

practices spread in complex relational processes, and how is this connected to the

production of socio-spatial transformation?

Findings: A middle-range conceptual repertoire for researching

processes of social change and spatial transformation

Spread on its own is not a new concept. As I have elaborated above, on one hand it is

essential to processes of social and spatial change in social innovation, while on the other,

in its current normative state it is problematic, rendering space as background and

excluding the possibility of vital matter and agency beyond human intentionality. Where

contingency in spread was recognised, knowledge on complex processes of emergent and

unplanned diffusion was shown to be lacking (Greenhalgh et al., 2004).

To reach the following findings and address this gap, I have deconstructed the spatial

concept of spread as it appears in the literature where it is used to explain aspects of social

change in social innovation. By engaging critical materialisms, I have endeavoured to strip

back, or at least provide a counterbalance to the normative (i.e. value laden) and positivist

(i.e. reproducing space as a container and matter as inert) attributes of the concept as it

exists. Through the following articles, I have reconfigured the concept grounded on a

process-relational ontology to provide a dynamic and critical concept to explicate the

complex, non-linear and recursive relationships in social and spatial transformation in

social innovation.

I position spread in a repertoire of interlinked concepts, including resistance and

infrastructuring. In what follows, l will introduce the dialectical relationship between spread

and resistance as developed in detail the first two papers

. Spread and resistance are

closely connected to infrastructuring, the final concept developed in the third paper and

introduced below.

6.1. Spread in relation to resistance

Resistance refers to the counterforces which inhibit and restrict the spread of practices and

thereby processes of social change. Simply put, more resistance means less spread and

vice versa. Like spread, everyday practices of resistance consist of human (intentional) and

nonhuman (unintentional) forces. Until now spread has not been considered in conjunction

with resistance therefore restricting a view on the push and pull of power-full interests in

complex processes of social innovation.

The relationship between spread and resistance, as developed in the following papers, can

be diagrammed in four different modes, along the polarisations intentional-unintentional

and intensive-extensive. As already indicated, the axis of intentional-unintentional modes

refers to the degrees of human intentionality at work in spread and resistance. In the first

article, I analyse this regarding the case of EPAM, where new farming practices inscribed in

polypropylene fabric weed barriers were adopted by herb farmers and circulated through

the Alentejo. However, the circulation of these practices and subsequent resistance to

them was the result of a combinations of actions, wills, and contingencies with specific

histories linked to the commitments of particular actors who had an interest in spreading

these farming practices, and to funding regimes in which grant applications for farming

equipment were ‘carbon copied’. Resistance emerged as counter knowledge on the use of

weed barriers in farming in the Alentejo and was spread through the EPAM infrastructure.

Drawing on Tarde’s early observations on different forms of growth, the second axis of

intensive-extensive refers to spread that occurs within a system (intensive), e.g. EPAM self-

Following John Holloway, dialectics here have a poststructuralist inflection regarded as a

microprocess within a multiplicity of relations (Holloway, 2019).

organised infrastructure which spreads counter knowledge, and towards its constitutive

outside (extensive) e.g. black weed barriers crossed over from use in nursery gardens in

the U.K. to a single herb farm in Porto and from there into organic agricultural practices

across Alentejo. This draws attention to boundaries between systems, spaces, social

groups, and in the cases in hand, infrastructures. It highlights how configurations overcome

or are resisted by boundary practices.

6.2. Spread and resistance in relation to infrastructure/ing

In this framework, the concepts of spread and resistance link the categories of material-

discursive practice and infrastructure. Spread and resistance require a system of

connections and relations for practice configurations to circulate. Analytically, this brought

to light the socio-technical systems of self-organised/ing infrastructures enabling the

spread of and resistance to certain forms of knowledge and practice in both EPAM and

OTELO. Unlike Shantz’ infrastructures of resistance ready to hand for insurrectionary action,

EPAM’s and OTLEO’s infrastructures materialised in practice. Put differently, infrastructures

are performed and self-organise through everyday practices of spread and resistance. The

work that goes into producing, enacting, maintaining and connecting infrastructure can be

understood as infrastructuring. This describes the practices and process of infrastructures

in-the-making to which spread and resistance contribute, detailed in the third paper.

Infrastructuring shifts focus to everyday material and semiotic practices and subjectivation

to foreground the material, symbolic and discursive practices at work in power relations

and micropolitics of making infrastructure. This shift brings a posthuman dimension where

subjects, objects and spaces are not stable predetermined categories, but are rather

performed in practice. Infrastructuring, in this way, attends to the complex relationality that

troubles discursive (e.g., categorical) and material boundaries, such as between object and

subject or centre and periphery (Niewöhner, 2015), a point reinforced by Shove (2016) who

describes how flows of materials, knowledge and people in ‘infrastructures-in-use’

complicate territorial boundaries, particularly in urban and rural relations. Infrastructure is

conceived relationally as ‘transient embodiments of social, technical, political, economic,

and ethical choices’ which ‘build up incrementally over time’ (Niewöhner, 2015). Research

has attended to the performativity of partial connections in relational processes of structure

and agency. Perhaps the most fundamental difference to thinking with infrastructure is

considering the performativity or ‘how’ in practices and process of infrastructuring and the

conceptual shift from structure to process. Deployed here, the concept highlights how

spatial structures – topologies – and agency co-evolve and materialise in more-than-human

processes supported by infrastructure-in-the-making. This reinforces the idea that

relational processes of spread and resistance organise topologies (spatial/ising structures),

and that making, maintaining, and performing infrastructuring lays and restricts the

conditions for (future) spaces to emerge. Here lies the emancipatory potential in the

conceptual repertoire of spread, resistance and infrastructuring. Socio-material spaces are

shown to emerge from (or rather co-evolve with) infrastructure. In the cases presented

here, these were shown to be self-organised/ing infrastructures able to connect into a wider

ecology through everyday practices. And they show that performing infrastructures in this

way plays a part in the spatialisation of life and work on the periphery.

Figure 1.1: Heuristic diagramme: Modes of spread

6.3. A new conceptual repertoire to analyse processes of social, spatial, and

material change in social innovation

Modes of spread is an heuristic diagramme against which spread and resistance can be

mapped, see figure 1.1. It reveals the tensions, conflicts and transformations that arise

between the spread and resistance to competing material and discursive practices

propagated by complex combinations of human and nonhuman forces. The diagramme

consists of intensive-extensive and intentional-unintentional modes. I argue that spread

must be considered in conjunction with resistance and across these four modes to bring to

light asymmetries and conflicts of power inscribing social change and spatial

transformation as a complex nonlinear process. It is the asymmetry between resistance

and spread, inside and outside, combinations of human and nonhuman forces which

mobilises, accelerates, and decelerates the circulation of material and discursive

configurations. It is these forces that engender aspects of spatialisation. Here, the

significance of novelty recedes and instead the generative force between power

asymmetries and its unpredictable emergences come squarely into focus.

The spread and resistance of material-discursive practices produce and connect social-

technical and infrastructural arrangements that span territories and spatial boundaries in

precise ways. During these flows of matter and meaning, values, commitments, moral

orders are shared and shaped, effecting the formation of group and individual subjectivities,

who are simultaneously part of these arrangements. Spread and resistance together with

infrastructuring connect the categories of practices, infrastructure, and space,

with which I

started

to provide a process-relational materialist understanding of space and change. The

following section reflects on the consequences of this theoretical framework on spatial

planning and design.

Consequences of a process-relational middle range theory of

space and change on spatial design and planning

In this framing paper I have argued for a conceptual framework to understand social and

spatial transformation as a relational process of re(con)figuration powered by resistances,

contingencies, and will to change. This understanding has consequences for actors,

community groups, practices and disciplines directly engaged in spatial transformation. I

will briefly focus on the consequence to planning, development, and design.

Typically, design and planning are based on a projective mode, casting the past into the

future, materialised in spatial arrangements; a position I elaborate in paper four. Shields

expresses a similar idea, although not directly applied to planning and design, where the

future quality of life is imputed to a location in the present, drawing both the past and future

into spatialisation through space-images, myths, and practices of space (2013, 34). He

refers to this as

anticipatory spatialisation

, which ‘pitches the future as a recapitulation of a

past that is believed to be better than the present’ (Lyotard, 1984, cited in Shields 2013,

p.35). Consequently, this may lead to injustices and inequities of the past being reproduced

in future space through positivist practices of design and planning. Similarly, Shantz

suggests infrastructures of resistance are the building blocks of transfer cultures which

express a desire for alternative ways of being in the present, rather than utopian longings of

projected futures (Shantz, 2009). In relation to the spread of other cultural products, Mark

Fisher expresses a similar idea looked at from a different direction, where the present is

haunted

by cultural products of the past. Fisher gives examples from contemporary music

which, he argues, so heavily rely on imitating past genres that innovation is severely

restricted (Fisher, 2018).

I argue spatial transformation understood as complex relational processes wrought with

combinations of intentionality and contingency in which not only projection, but resistance

plays an active role in future-making may find ways to escape haunting and a lack of

innovation. Spatial design and planning must build the tools and conceptual frameworks to

enact forms of resistance to present injustices. Bringing practices of resistance into spatial

planning and design’s repertoire refocuses attention onto the present to reorganise the

conditions of possibility for ‘other’ futures to arise. This requires a critical understanding of

spaces of the present and their situated histories. Only with this understanding can spatial

and material interventions be made to prevent ongoing injustices. This differs from

projecting utopian or prosaic spatial imaginaries based in contemporaneous discourse on

to the future. It draws on an epistemological mode of

negation

which, with Holloway, I

argue in the final paper can strengthen the critical posture of professional spatial disciplines

that tend towards a naive positivism. I refer to this novel approach as

critical spatial design.

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Fig. 1.3 Photo Alentejo, Portugal

Fig. 1.4 Photo herb farm Alentejo

Insert Box 1.

Multi-sited ethnography and the topological study of spread and

infrastructure

Multi-sited Ethnography

In multi-sited ethnographies, ‘multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut

dichotomies such as the "local" and the "global," the "lifeworld" and the "system"’ are

studied (Marcus, 1995, p. 95). In this way, multi-sited approaches challenge the notion of

site as location (Karasti and Bloomberg, 2018). This approach was pertinent to the cases of

OTELO and EPAM in the research, as much of the activity was distributed between different

settlements spread over territorial boundaries. In the field work it became apparent that the

connections between sites, whether farms or agricultural expos in the case of EPAM, or

labs and villages in the case of OTELO were significant. Of further significance was the flow

between urban and rural, or rather how the boundaries between shifted as people,

knowledge, resources, and values spread. In this way, delineating the field geographically

in terms of rural or local etc. was problematic. Equally, usual separation according to work,

social, or home life did not hold. In the case of EPAM, the hard distinction between home

and work was what the new farmers aimed to overcome. In OTLEO the types of new

(micro) activities supported by the new lab space in villages or towns were diverse, ranging

from co-working to repair cafés, yoga and breakdance clubs, to community supported

agriculture. These initial observations required an approach which would not erase these

connections, boundaries, flows and importantly, the forces of spread and resistance.

Henriksen, referring to the work of Marcus (1995), points out multi-sited or multi-locale

fieldwork and focuses on ‘connections and circulations between multiple sites ’(Henriksen,

2002). This mode of research works to define the object of research which cannot be

accounted for in a single site of investigation (Marcus, 1995). Henriksen adds to Marcus ’

approach

virtual sites

and

distributed objects

of research in ongoing processes of

infrastructuring across multiple sites with

both on and offline connectivity

. An approach

necessary for the study of EPAM especially, whose digital infrastructure was as important

as the material practices and events held in co-presence (see paper 3). Henriksen reflects

on how the approach was used to overcome methodological challenges of infrastructure in

the making in the ‘here and now’. An example she gives is how in workshops ‘Carl ’is

continually involved in (re)defining what the information infrastructure is, its benefits, the

associated problems, and future actions although the project is

live.

I witnessed this

performative character of infrastructure/ing during my ethnographies (see paper 3 for a

description in EPAM). Henriksen goes on to reflect on how attempting to pre-define the

object of research prior to entering the field failed to address the difference in the object of

study at different times and places, whereby adjusting the research design to include a

multi-site approach and the tracing of the connections between allowed these paradoxes to

come to the fore. Again, similar observations were made in my study, where, for example,

the visual configurations of nature in the form of ‘images ’put together by the new farmers

in the case of EPAM shifted as they spread through different infrastructures (e.g. supply

chains in the form of herb packing illustrations or photos of their farms circulated in social

media). As discussed in detail in paper 2, the materialised visual configurations of nature

(images) transformed according to the infrastructure they circulated. But significantly to the

study, they also altered the infrastructures they interact with (e.g. herb packing illustration

and their stories lending material character to the shops they were being sold in) in a

posthuman performativity (Barad, 2007).

Karasti and Blomberg consider how to investigate infrastructures and processes of

infrastructuring as empirical real-world phenomena. Rejecting small-scale and short-term

studies, and drawing on methods from STS and anthropology, the authors argue for

‘studying the heterogenous, extended, and complex phenomena of infrastructuring with an

emphasis on the necessarily emerging and open-ended processual qualities of information

infrastructures ’(2018: 2). To this end, they develop Marcus’s multi-sited ethnographies with

special attention on how to

construct the field

making it more applicable to studying

extended and complex phenomena in processes of infrastructuring. This methodological

approach serves to remind researchers of their own entanglements in the research through

the choices they make when delineating the object of research, especially complex spatial

and temporal phenomena that extend beyond a single site. They point out that, this

process of construction relies on the interests, motivations, resources, and opportunities

which the researcher has access to. It is therefore a relational process and a consequence

of ‘interactions in the field ’between ethnographer and phenomena (Karasti and Blomberg,

2018: 11). Addressing this requires ongoing critical reflexivity on the part of the researcher, a

practice I cultivated and discuss in paper 4.

Karasti and Blomberg argue for an expanded understanding of intentionality and

intervention in infrastructuring, where the role of designer, user and researcher of

infrastructures becomes more fluid and blurred. Expanding these notions in

infrastructuring, they suggest, can account for the partiality and ongoing emergence of

infrastructures, and how infrastructures extend beyond a single-site and temporality.

Furthermore, in acknowledge their role in constructing the field, researchers are reflexively

accounting for their participation in their construction of the phenomena and thereby

intervening in the open-end process of infrastructuring. This underscores their observation

that the “object” of inquiry is not singular nor stable and as such requires ‘new strategies for

both following connections and allowing for emergence” (13). This enrolling of the

researcher into infrastructure is conceptualised in the idea of ‘piggybacking ’which I have

elaborated in papers 2 and 3. What was omitted from the manuscript during editing is the

recognition of the ways science and research infrastructures, of which I am part was

enrolled to in small ways into EPAM. EPAM was a partner in the RurAction project and by

hosting us they were able to access some financial capital. Also, publishing on EPAM’s

activities draws further attention to and spreads knowledge on their work. And possibly our

analysis and reflection on EPAM’s activities and the specific way I have constructed the field

may have impact on their understanding of their work.

Constructing the field

The multi-sited approach forces the reflexive decision-making particularly toward the

extension and boundaries of the field. To empirically grasp complex spatially and

temporally multi-sited phenomena in circulation, especially where connections between on

and offline behaviour are relevant, it is necessary to ‘construct the field ’(Karasti, 2014). This

involves, (1) questioning the initial notion of the “field”; (2) spatially and temporally

extending the field by following connections; (3) bounding the field by processes of

sensitising and reflexive decision-making. There are limited examples of research papers

which elaborate on how the field was constructed, notable examples include (Henriksen,

2002; Karasti, 2014; Karasti & Blomberg, 2018; Parmiggiani, 2017; Winthereik et al., 2002).

Winthereik et al. 2002 describe how, in their study of GP surgeries, it was not possible to fill

in a pre-established structure, but like the GPs themselves, in order to generate knowledge,

the fieldworker had to construct a new framework based on the information available to

her through her access to the field, in this case, as a receptionist worker. Their second

observation is that an object of study emerges from interactions in the field. They describe

the fieldworker becoming more attuned to the specific problems encountered in the field

relating to sharing patient information or gaining ethical approval. In this way, Winthereik et

al. found the notion of the site being ‘co-constructed ’a useful way to think about the

interactions at work in the construction of site, object of study and fieldwork ‘in action ’

(p.56). To attend to biases in the research design, the authors argue researcher’s pre-

existing assumptions about the field maybe addressed by experimenting with different

ways of framing the field (p.56). In this way, the suggest research may avoid making

“discoveries” that support their initial assumptions.

In the same vein, Parmiggiani (2017) rejects a universalist approach to constructing the

field, but suggests practices of continuous self-reflexivity by discussing how the strategies

employed to carry out research can help to account for the position of the researcher. In

addition, she describes how her ethnography of information infrastructures at work in the

oil and gas industry followed ‘people, events, and things’, with particular attention on and

collaboration with the designers of infrastructure, worked as ‘pragmatic entry points ’to the

case study where actors became ‘strategic allies ’to access and construct the field (p.30).

As Karasti and Blomberg (2018) note, constructing the field is relevant to studying the

emergence of infrastructures whose existence is only partial, however, this requires a

theoretical and methodological flexibility and attentiveness and a reflexive sensitivity to

unfolding the process which is being studied (Karasti and Blomberg, 2018). But not only is

the ethnographic approach of constructing the field well suited for studying infrastructures,

it was born out of a need to account for the complexity of infrastructuring as a distributed

‘object ’of inquiry (Karasti, 2014; Karasti and Blomberg, 2018). To aid the researcher in

grasping the complex phenomenon of infrastructuring, Karasti and Blomberg recommend,

as with all ethnographic research, a range of “methods” including observation, interviews,

document analysis. (2018, p.13). In line with this, interviews and observations were the

primary methods of data collection in my study.

Winthereik et al.’s (2002) suggests that researchers should experiment with different ways

of framing the field. Drawing on the self-description of EPAM as

a network

and the historic

importance of networks in processes of diffusion as highlighted in the introduction, I initially

conceptualised the field along these lines. However, this created blind spots to the material

processes and non-human agencies at work in the overall case. It left little room for

contingency and the reconfiguring of subjectivities, materialities, and spaces as I was

witnessing in the ethnographies. To accommodate this, an ANT approach was considered,

but where this foregrounded nonhuman agents, it also assumed pre-existing entities, fully

loaded with agency, thereby missing the political dimension of how agency is a not given

nor the same for all, but is rather distributed in processes and practices of becoming,

discussed in the framing paper. Eventually, conceptualising EPAM as an infrastructure

allowed me to get an overview and analytical purchase on the circulations and the everyday

material-discursive practice as work within the emergence of infrastructure, shifting the

focus from a pre-given object to the making of relations – a central aim described to me by

one of the co-founders. As the research developed, I shifted focus from infrastructure to

infrastructuring, which provides a conceptual framework to foreground both relations and

processes of relating such as cooperating and collaborating.

Topological ethnography

In contrast to Karasti and Blomberg, who aimed to de-centre the notion of space (2018

p.12), the objective in my study is to consider how spaces are transformed in

infrastructuring. In this way, I found it productive to work with topology (Law & Mol, 2001;

Shields, 2012, 2013) which foregrounds complex more-than-human relational processes.

Compatible with the multi-sited approach, topography provided concepts and clues to map

complex mobilities, transformations, translations and emergences in complex relational

processes, weaving through scales, rather than starting from geographic spatial tropes,

such as “local” and “global” (Shields, 2012). Notionally this combination, although

underdeveloped, has been referred to as

topological ethnography

(Benedicto, 2014; cf.

Harvey, 2012). I discuss topography at length in the framing paper, and I elaborate my

combination of mutli-sited ethnography and topology in paper 2.

Fig. 1.4. Early map showing spread and resistance of plastic practices 2007-2010

Fig.1.5 Early map showing spread and self-organisation of EPAM infrastructure

Fig. 1.4. Early map showing spread and resistance of plastic practices 2007-2010

Fig.1.5 Early map showing spread and self-organisation of EPAM infrastructure

Fig.1.6 Spread of Otelo spaces, Upper Austria. Still from moving map 2013

Fig.1.7 Spread of Otelo spaces, Upper Austria. Still from moving map 2018

Fig. 1.8. Polypropylene fabric weed barrier, Portugal

Fig. 1.9. Radio equipment and community broadcastings booth, Krems, Upper Austria

Part 2

Research Papers

Part 2 consists of four research papers constituting the main body of the thesis.

Papers one to three develop the main argument and detail the concepts of spread,

resistance, and infrastructuring illustrated by two cases (Portugal and Austria) researched

in the RurAction framework and guided by the same research questions, outlined above.

They share the same basic ethnographic methodology and broad theoretical frame,

although these advanced as the research progressed, and my knowledge grew.

Paper four differs in that it does not use empirical material from the OTELO or EPAM

ethnographies. Instead, by engaging a related case of a living lab in rural England, it aims at

critical (self) reflection on power dynamics in self-organised and participatory spatial

planning and design practices. The paper develops aspect of critical spatial design and

practices of resistance as advanced in the main thesis.

The papers are preceded by an information page prior providing detail on type of

publication, date, publication status and the article abstract.

Article one

Socially innovative infrastructures and practices of spread

Author

Jamie-Scott Baxter

Publication Status

Book chapter. Published (2020) in The RurAction Network (Eds), Social Enterprises in

Structurally Weak Rural Regions: Innovative Troubleshooters in Action: A Handbook for

Practitioners. Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space. Erkner.

Additional information

The following article is a book chapter in a rural social innovation handbook published in

2020. The full book chapter was originally co-authored with two colleagues. However, the

text was structured into three subsections, which, although thematically related, were

written independently based on each author’s own research and results. A joint introduction

and conclusion drew together the subsections and provided a coherent contribution to the

handbook. For clarity, both conceptual and authorship, I have included only the subsection I

authored. I include the original chapter in the Appendix for reference. In the same vain, have

removed from the text referencing to the other author’s subsections and subsection

numbering.

Citation

Baxter J-S., Novikova, M. and Umantseva A. (2020) “The emergence, spread, and impact of

social innovations in rural regions” in The RurAction Network (Eds), Social Enterprises in

Structurally Weak Rural Regions: Innovative Troubleshooters in Action: A Handbook for

Practitioners. Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space. Erkner. ISBN: ISSN 2701-

228X.

leibniz-irs.de/fileadmin/user_upload/IRS_Dialog_Transferpublikationen/IRS_Dialog_Handbook_RurAction.pdf

Abstract

The paper charts the spread of different types of equipment in two rural cases of social

innovation in Alentejo, Portugal and Upper Austria. In Upper Austria, radio equipment was

exchanged between Open Technology Labs (OTELOs) in villages and towns across the

region. The research maps how the equipment and knowledge on community radio

broadcasting was shared and circulated between successive labs, a process which shaped

the overall constitution of the OTELO network. Conversely, the Alentejo case describes how

a group of herb farmers and local development actors (EPAM) resisted the spread of

polypropylene fabric weed barriers (deemed undesirable) which were being inadvertently

circulated by a combination of forces. The paper describes how new shared meaning,

values, and knowledge were produced during the spread and resistance of technical

equipment in the cases. Spread is shown to be supported by local community driven

infrastructures, which rather than being ready-at-hand, were performatively produced as

farming and broadcasting technologies were circulated.

Socially innovative infrastructures and practices of

spread

Introduction

This section reconsiders the material and process-relational aspects of spatial spread in

social innovation as a generative, more-than-human

and performative practice. It opens

with a short introduction to the cases, then briefly reflects on ‘practices of spread’ in social

innovation and theoretical advances in new materialisms – a novel theoretical framework

suitable to advancing this proposal. Following on from this, the contribution asks the

questions: what are examples of practices of spread, and what do practices of spread

consist of? It ends with a short summary putting forward the concepts of

material

circulations

and

process-relation dynamics

as components of practices of spread

The two case studies exemplify two extensive social innovations that have traversed usual

More-than-human or posthumanism refers to a shift in contemporary critical theory to think the

world beyond the anthropocentrism that has marked much of post-enlightenment rationalist

epistemology. More-than-human practices, as I invoke them here, refers to feminists STS which has

forged this new theoretical trajectory to overcome the nature-culture divide and to decentre the

archetypal figure of ‘Man’ as the reference point for being in and knowing the world. See for example

Haraway, 1985; Barad, 2007;, Braidotti, 2013.

territorial boundaries to support fragmented social groups across large rural landscapes.

The first example comprises a socially innovative project intended to support, disseminate,

and co-generate knowledge-practices in the emerging herb farming sector in rural

Portugal. The second, is an integrated system of rooms spread throughout upper Austria

that provide open spaces, or ‘labs’ in villages and towns for residents to meet, learn, and

experiment together. Both social innovations aim to support specific groups. In Portugal,

these groups are new young farmers recently arrived in the countryside from urban areas,

and in Austria, residents are supported to start small interest groups which may, and often

do, evolve into new socially innovative initiatives, known as ‘nodes’. Both projects are highly

networked, a resource often valorised in the social innovation literature (e.g., Moulaert and

Mehmood 2011) and are invoked to explain spread or diffusion (e.g. André et al. 2009).

However, explaining growth and spread of social innovations though social networks often

ignores the materiality at work in such projects. For example, in the Portuguese case,

networking and forging new social relations between new farmers entailed much bodily

work, e.g. driving around the region in hot summers to meet new farmers and see their

specific farms, and organising and attending events, conferences, and workshops in air-

conditioned rooms, gardens, or farms. Similarly, in Upper Austria, where public transport in

the region is more readily available than in Alentejo, long drives between remote locations

(often at night, as many lab volunteers work during the day) became regular routines in

spreading labs to new locations. In this sense, acknowledging both the material and social

dimensions of these highly networked and geographically extensive support systems,

they

can be more accurately described as infrastructures

Putting forward generative, more-than-human practices of spread

In Laws of Imitation, Tarde (1903; 2000) identified the repetition of social innovations and

their interplay between other, opposing inventions to elucidate – at a micro-level – how

societies stabilise and change over time. According to Tarde (2012), the

social

refers to the

relational forces between bodies and constellations, including people, planets, galaxies,

microbes, etc. (p.73), where the universe consists of many overlapping, more-than-only-

human societies. Tarde is recognised by some as the grandfather of both diffusion research

(Rogers 1995; Kinnunen 1996) and social innovation theory (Howaldt, Kopp, and Scharwz

2013; Moulaert et al. 2013). By the middle of the 20th Century, diffusion research had shifted

towards a more human-centric notion of the social, turning its attention to the spread of

technical innovations by the diffusion of information as “one individual communicates a new

idea to one or several others” (Rogers 1995, 18) across a social network. Networks of actors

and the communication of knowledge between them explained how ideas – as (immaterial)

representation of innovations – spread. More recently, attention has turned away from the

representation and primacy of ideas (e.g., Hacking 1983), to ways of doing and saying things

in, or as, social practices (e.g. Schatzki 1996). Here, ‘bundles’ of practices are the loci of the

social (Reckwitz 2002), consisting of the interplay of capacities, recourses, and materiality

(Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). Social innovations are often described as novel social

practices targeting specific situated problems, which spread to other locations and become

social innovations as they transcend from being seen as instances of deviant behaviour to

socially accepted norms, routines, and patterns of behaviour (e.g. Howaldt and Schwarz,

2010; Christmann, 2016; etc.).

Scholarly work under the rubric of New Materialism has turned to consider the effects of

more-than-human agency (Latour 2005), multispecies

becoming-with

(Haraway 2008) and

intra-activity (Barad 2007)

in practices in deeply relational and material ways. Barad’s work,

in particular, provides fertile ground and theoretical tools for re-thinking practices of spread.

Barad’s performative posthumanism (Barad 1996, 2003) aims to draw attention to the re-

distribution of agency within entanglements of material-discursive practices, claiming

matter and meaning to be deeply interwoven and generative of each other. Here, “bodies,”

‘things”, “subjects”, and “objects” do not enter into practices as coherent entities, but instead

such relata are co-generated through relations within material-discursive practices

(Barad

1996). Barad calls this intra-action in order to highlight that things are already connected

(exterior-within), and, in fact, what occurs is a reconfiguring of relation-yielding bodies. This

is an idea that resonates with Howaldt and Schwarz’ practice-orientated definition of social

innovation

Taken together in this way, Barad and Tarde call for a shift away from recording the

movement of pre-existing objects or practices from location to location as the only measure

of spread, or further still, bring into question pre-existing networks lying in wait, ready for

the diffusion of ideas. Rather, relations are already spread and their reconfiguration leads to

the generation of bodies, objects, and spaces and new meanings, values, norms, and

behaviours. Networks, or in these cases, the infrastructures are performative, that is, they

emerge from an interplay of relations, materials, and discourses as they re-spread. This has

implications for the concept of spread and the methods used to “measure” it. Spread, in this

interpretation, is a generative, material-discursive, and more-than-human practice. It is the

notion of practices of spread that will be examined further below.

Where and how agency is distributed is a central focus to more-than-human literature and

discourse and takes many guises. Core to many of the discussions in the field is to show how other

actants, beyond only humans, are agential in productive social situations. In Haraway (2016) for

example, different species interact and symbiotically co-produce and affect one another, that is

becoming together.

‘New combinations or configurations of practices in areas of social action, prompted by certain

actors or constellations of actors with the goal of coping better with needs and problems than is

possible by using existing practices’ (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010, p.27)

Methodology

To reach this performative notion of spread, methodologically, it was first necessary to

identify the circulation of materials and discourses and then consider how these ‘doings and

sayings’ produced the infrastructures through which they were spreading. As a second step,

we consider how these material circulations began to shape and define other components,

such as participating individuals. The third step was to identify the forces that propelled or

obstructed the spread.

3.1. Mapping Equipment

In both cases

equipment

circulated, serving as a means of sharing or exchanging

technologies and techniques between different locations and actors. Here, equipment is not

only a set of technical objects required to carry out particular tasks, but also refers to the

process of supplying equipment necessary for undertaking such tasks (

to equip

), and it

denotes the mental resources required to complete tasks (

intellectual equipment

Therefore, it is at once a material object, mental process, and a set of practices mapped in

both cases.

Cases

4.1. Open labs, Upper Austria

This social innovation is an integrated system of rooms spread through upper Austria that

provide open spaces or ‘labs’ in villages and towns for residents to meet, learn, and

experiment together. Residents are supported to form small interest groups which may,

and often do, evolve into new socially innovative initiatives, known as ‘nodes’.

The buildings or rooms are owned by the municipality and loaned at no cost. Events in the

spaces are hosted by nodes and open to other communities. The number of nodes in the

entire infrastructure varies, as new ones start and others end, and include, for example,

food co-ops, solidarity agriculture initiatives, dance studios, repair cafes, etc. Currently, there

are around 35 labs across Austria, and instances in Italy and Germany.

The open lab social innovation’s aim is to provide residents who have their own specific

interests and skills and wish to share them with others, the space and capabilities to do so,

with few barriers to access. The labs reuse under-used municipally owned rooms and

buildings across the region. Prior to this, such spaces for these purposes did not exist in

rural areas in Upper Austria. The social innovation responded to specific rural conditions as

experienced in Upper Austria in the early 2000’s, but also in other places across Europe. A

significant factor in the project’s development was the perceived threat to rural areas in

upper Austria, as young people were moving away (usually to cities such as Lintz or further

to Vienna) for higher education or to find work. However, what distinguishes Austria from

other European locations such as Portugal or the UK post-2010 is a coherent and

interconnected regional governance system where the state plays an active role through a

network of regional development agencies, and/or supports and re-distributes resources to

other non-state actors undertaking regional development.

In addition, there is a well-equipped network of elected and representative bodies from

villages, through to regions. Such interconnected governance, especially between the local

and regional levels, has led to many LEADER funded initiatives in the regions. There are

also well-resourced non-governmental development organisations that for many years

have contributed to rural and regional development programmes in the regions. Key actors

in the emergence and spread of the open lab social innovation have backgrounds in either

extra-state organisations or had held a senior position in (governmental) regional

development agencies.

The open labs aim to address and counter rural decline by providing space to educate

through self-directed experimentation, aimed initially at introducing young people to new

technologies. In the mid-2000’s, technology (particularly digital) and education were two

areas that were attracting project funding in Austria, as it was perceived that these themes

could address the effects of rural depopulation and youth out-migration and help re-skill

workers.

4.2. Herb farms, Alentejo, Portugal

The social innovation, EPAM, supports and facilitates young farmers that are new to

agriculture to start and develop small family farms in rural Portugal. By supporting new

famers, the aim is to develop an emerging herb farming sector and, thereby, support

development in rural regions across the country.

To do this, the project founders designed and implemented a web platform and an ongoing

series of face-to-face events to connect the geographically distributed and fragmented

groups of farmers. The intention was to create better communication between farmers and

new methods of collaboration, otherwise uncommon to agriculture in Portugal. Together,

these modes of interaction and communication work as an infrastructure to distribute

information and co-generate new knowledge-practices for herb farming.

The 2007-2008 financial collapse took its toll on Portugal, and many young professionals in

urban centres along the Atlantic coast found themselves out of work. For some, the crisis

provoked existential questions that led them to leave the cities to pursue new lives in

agriculture in the Portuguese rural interior. As they looked around for opportunities, herb

farming – as seen and heard in the media – became an attractive option. Most had no prior

farming experience, and herb farming provided the possibility of a profitable business with

low barriers to access and potentially low maintenance and labour – if done with specific

equipment. Importantly, to these newcomers, this type of farming could be carried out

according to sustainable and ecological principles on small family farms.

Around this time, a small group of entrepreneurs, farmers, and rural development

consultancies had begun to form and establish themselves as “pioneers” in herb farming.

This constellation was forming in the north-east of the country. Although not fully

institutionalised, it was a powerful assemblage that was setting the discourse and the

material practices of herb farming in Portugal. At their disposal, actors had access to

mainstream diffusion channels, such as national television networks, print media, and

popular YouTube channels and blog sites – many “new rurals” initially heard about herb

farming though narratives spread via these channels.

Other actors in the constellation became gatekeepers to EU structural funding, as they had

experience and a track record in obtaining funding for rural development projects. Many of

the new farmers required access to EU funding to help them establish farms in the

countryside and made contact with actors in the north-east constellation.

Discussion

5.1. Open lab infrastructure

In the first example, radio equipment was exchanged between Open Labs in villages and

towns across Upper Austria. Beginning with two sets of rooms in two villages in 2011,

iterations of the labs continue to spread regionally, nationally, and internationally, forming a

well-connected infrastructure of lab spaces, ‘nodes’ (resident led initiatives), activities, and

actors.

In 2012, a third lab opened in a village 60km away from the first. Here, the first sub-initiative

node was a community radio station. Radio stations were not a part of the initial blueprint of

the labs, but were the result of the specific

adaption

between the relatively new open lab

concept and the specific resources and cultural capital available in the village, attributed to

the interests and experiences of a particular local actor. These factors, in combination with

local political will and access to funding and equipment (mental and material) led to a

succession of later labs taking up radio broadcasting as an activity. In a reversal of

direction, one of the first labs decided to incorporate the practices and also established its

own radio station.

These adaptations to the open lab concept and practices turned out to be powerful and

defining for the growth and spread of the open lab infrastructure across the region. Radio

broadcasting was popular with young people and attractive to funders and development

agencies. As an outreach activity, learning radio broadcasting provided access to often hard

to reach younger people. Crucially, the skills for learning and maintaining the radio

equipment were established and could be shared through the emerging infrastructure.

What does this mean for the practices of spread? Firstly, social practices were being

repeated in other locations as mental and material equipment was circulated between

villages in the form of lending and exchanging microphones, mixing desks, headphones,

etc. and sharing the know-how to operate and maintain these technologies. This meant

driving at least 60km between locations, resulting in face-to-face contact that would

otherwise not have happened. Such physical encounters reinforced and strengthened social

relation through numerous unplanned interactions, like having lunch together or sharing a

drink, which often led to new ideas being discussed (there is now a shared kitchen in both

these labs). Furthermore, symbolic associations were formed between the labs working on

radio broadcasting. They were able to share their successes, problems, and mistakes with

each other, learning together. In this way, as radio broadcasting was taken up in other

locations across the region, knowledge was fed back into and disseminated through the

emerging infrastructure. The infrastructure, taken to include human actors and the

practices they participated in, was co-evolving. In Barad’s terms, this is performative, that is,

as practices were carried out the objects (infrastructures) and bodies (individuals) who were

doing and sharing the practices were being (re)made.

Secondly, as I have indicated, social practices co-evolved as they adapted to local

conditions. For example, the labs did not follow a blueprint, but were conceived to adapt to

the specific needs and capacities of the rural settlements they spread to. This confirms the

idea that practices, objects, people, etc. are not coherent entities spreading through space,

instead, they co-evolve with space and other practices as they travel. Spread is generative

Thirdly, spread is not linear, from one location to the next. In fact, here a previous iteration of

the lab learned from and adapted to later versions by incorporating radio broadcasting into

their activities. Spread is complex and non-linear.

Finally, in addition to equipment spreading between labs, labs spreading to new locations,

infrastructure being performed as it spreads through regions, and shared and individual

meanings emerging as materials move around, radio shows were being broadcast across

the region. This provided a powerful means to extend its spatial and temporal reach

(programmes could be archived and listened to at any time), communicating between labs,

with the infrastructure serving to discursively weave it together as it unfolded. According to

Tarde (2000), this is a process of intrinsic, qualitative growth, similar to Barad’s intra-activity,

through which relations are reconfigured. Additionally, these discursive practices were able

to reach potential members not yet enrolled, a form of spread described by Tarde (2000) as

extrinsic or qualitative growth, a growth in numbers as constellations or infrastructures

expand. Both of these forms of spread are beneficial to traverse large geographic distances

in rural regions. Typically, diffusion channels such as radio, television, etc. would have

restrictions and barriers to access mediated by mainstream institutions, broadcasting

schedules, journalists, commissioners, etc. However, in this social innovation, the

infrastructure was publicly owned, operated, and maintained by the community groups

involved.

5.2. Herb farms

The second example illustrates a socially innovative infrastructure that was conceived to

support new farmers and to develop an emerging herb farming sector, thereby, supporting

rural development in Portugal.

In this case, the propagation of landscape fabric weed barriers as an equipment for

preventing the spread of unwanted plant species between profitable herb plants

unintentionally worked to generate and circulate certain discourses between farmers.

These discourses had the effect of creating new shared meaning between farmers. As the

case study highlights, the repetition of bureaucratic application procedures led to many new

farmers adopting practices and equipment that they later perceived as inadequate for

farming herbs in the hot and arid climate of the Portuguese interior.

Farming medical and aromatic herbs is hard work, consisting of weeding, planting,

harvesting, cutting, and preparing, and then once the herbs are collected, drying, cutting,

sorting, packaging, and transporting them for sales. Keeping the fields ‘clean’, free of

weeds, is crucial to an efficient and effective harvest. Buyers prefer sacks of single,

unpolluted species: the higher the grade the better the price. This, however, requires

ongoing maintenance of the farm infrastructure, including the fields. Woven polypropylene

fabric weed barriers (initially adapted from market and domestic gardening) were being

experimented with and used effectively in farms in the north-east of the country, in

proximity to the Atlantic coast.

This equipment (alongside others) had been incorporated into early funding applications –

made by other actors in the north-east – to help new farmers cope with weeds and lower

the need for additional labour and maintenance on their farms (labour costs were not

eligible for funding, only partial contributions towards material costs of equipment and

capital cost for property were eligible). Application protocols were repeated for new

applicants, thereby spreading the same equipment specified within the application across

new farms in the Alentejo. Polypropylene fabric is not an expensive material per sq./m, but

over three hectares the costs are not negligible, especially factoring in the costs of other

necessary proprietary equipment, such as staples to hold the fabric down, etc. However, it

was not the price of the equipment as much as the performance of the material, it’s

aesthetic impact on the landscape, and its material impact on the soil and microorganisms

within, combined with the symbolic value it came to hold that affected the farmers most.

Herb plants are perennial and can last up to 4 years and yield between 2-4 cuttings per year.

After preparing the fields, the weed barrier is laid with holes that are cut or melted every

50cms or so for saplings. Once laid and planted, the fabric remains in place for the lifespan

of the plants, as to remove it would be time and labour intensive and would risk damaging

the plants. Why then, would farmers want to remove the weed barrier, as was happening

across the region?

It started to become apparent that the equipment was not suitable for the climate of the

interior for organic farming as carried out by these farmers, and it began to symbolise a

funding procedure that the farmers were beginning to resent. One example of the material

inadequacy is that under the hot sun of the Alentejo, the polymer weave and weft would

eventually break down and individual fibres would mix into, and merge with, the soil. The

new famers had placed great personal significance on the eco-ethics and organic farming

practices, and these practices had begun to inform the emerging identities of the new

farmers, which were incompatible with potentially contaminating the soil. Paradoxically,

this breakdown of material and its symbolic significance came to partially connect and

weave together the farms as they co-generated novel counter

practices supported by, or

indeed in collaboration with, the social innovation infrastructure.

Farms were not only supported by infrastructure but became enmeshed with the

infrastructure, becoming both destinations (objects of support) and the conduits through

which relations where

re-spread

. In this way, new farmers became unwittingly embroiled in

the politics and practices of rural development. This seemingly immaterial and transient

infrastructure benefited from, and piggybacked on, other more stable and established

infrastructures, including roads, conferences circuits, overhead phone lines, international

supply chains, EU structural funding, UN rural development policy, etc. to operationalise

itself.

With recourse to Barad’s insights, we can see the entangled nature of materiality and

discursive orders in this example. That is, as equipment spread, so did discourses and vice

versa, or, more accurately, new shared meanings emerged as equipment was circulated

and, in this example, broken down

. A further point to take away is that spread is not an

entirely intentional practice. That is, when equipment is circulated as the result of other

practices (e.g., repetition of funding applications), in this sense, it is a more than only human

practice, one which includes other materialities and types of agency.

Following insights from Tarde, we can say that the social innovation in the project, at least

partially, emerged in relational opposition to other prevailing equipment (knowledge,

discourses, and material practices) spreading from elsewhere (the constellation in the

north-east). In this way, the innovation emerged, at least in part,

in relation to the spread of

other competing inventions. Moreover, Tarde also registered the dynamics of competing

forces of repetition, opposition, and adaption. However, by drawing attention to the

processual dynamics of innovation through practices of spread within infrastructure, I aim to

provide an alternative reading of spread to the prevailing and normative idea that spread is

simply the number of instances a social innovation is found across a space. In this

mainstream interpretation of spread, which seems to have forgotten Tarde’s observations,

spreading of social innovation objects is a product of human intentionality alone and is

Infrastructure becoming visible on its breakdown is widely discussed in STS and infrastructure

studies, see for example Star 1999 or Larkin 2013

usually seen as a good practice, or termed “best practices” that should be repeated in other

locations, which as this case depicts, often has little regard for the on-going and co-

emergent spatial conditions constituting locations such as climate (which is far from stable)

or soil types, or to the unpredictable combinations of practices and meanings as witnessed

in new urban professionals-cum-farmers, whose eco-ethics were as much a result of their

distance from country life, as from actually working in fields.

Connected to this, and what Tarde could not have realized at the time of his observations, is

how agency is re-distributed through practices of spread. New materialist theory,

particularly with recourse to Barad, provides us with tools to re-think agency as “a doing” in

re-distribution (Barad 2007), where agency is not pre-given to subjects (or objects), but

occurs within intra-activity. In the examples above, it is possible to see how the particular

material re-distribution of equipment, such as radio broadcasting, funding protocols, or

weed barriers and their discursive entanglements, such as communicative practices,

shared symbolic meanings, subjectivation, etc. contributed to the re-distribution of agency

within emerging constellations (e.g., a shift in power from the north-east of Portugal to the

rural interior, empowerment).

Conclusion

Materials were circulated in infrastructure, yielding new shared meaning, and

gained

momentum through the relational dynamic of repetition, opposition, and adaptation. As

materials circulated, new relations were made, or following Barad’s observations,

reconfigured. Such relations, as in the second case study, can be relations of power leading

to the re-distribution of agency. Furthermore, we see how in both cases the projects

“piggybacked” on or incorporated other existing, established infrastructures, extending both

spatial and temporal reach.

Through the cases presented, I have attempted to illustrate examples of material-discursive

circulations

(equipment) and process-relational dynamics (repetition-opposition-

adaptation). Together, these rubrics begin to constitute a more-than-human performative

reading of practices of spread in social innovation. Such performative practices, in one way,

distribute practices (of social innovation) through infrastructure and, in another way, the

circulation of material practice

makes

infrastructure by spreading and re-spreading

relations, therefore, providing two types of spread.

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Fig. 2.1 PAM herb packaging

Fig. 2.2 Otelo Neumarkt in Muhlkreis

Article two

Modes of spread in social innovation: A social topology case in rural Portugal

Author

Jamie-Scott Baxter

Publication Status

International peer-reviewed article. Published. Received 1 March 2021. Accepted 29 April

2021 in The Journal of Rural Studies (Elsevier. Impact factor 5.1). Article licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Key words

Social innovation, Space, Diffusion, Peripheral rural regions, Topology, Agential realism,

Process-relational

Citation

Baxter, J-S., (2021). Modes of spread in social innovation: A social topology case in rural

Portugal. Journal of Rural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.04.016

Abstract

The potential of social innovation to address intersecting social and spatial inequalities in

regional territories is increasingly recognised. Against this background, the results in this

article are based on a qualitative study of constellations of actors in peripheral rural regions

engaged in socially innovative approaches to regional development. Empirically, the

example of EPAM — a network of new young farmers across Portugal — is investigated

using social topology methodology to demonstrate how social innovation spreads through

rural regions. Data were collected and analysed across spatial scales to examine how

images circulate ecologies of infrastructure –including EPAM – and traverse territorial

boundaries. In this way, images as specific material-discursive configurations are shown to

be agential in the performative spreading of social innovation.

To conceptualise these observations, the article is based on the assumption that social

innovation has dual spatial properties. The first, an empirically legible and bounded object

moving

space (regional). The second, an trans-scalar relational process in which objects,

subjects, and spaces are reciprocally reconfigured (process-relational). This assumption has

implications on understanding diffusion dynamics in social innovation, specifically how does

social innovation spread in a process-relational mode? Against this background, the

primary aim of the article is to examine and elaborate the diffusion dynamics of social

innovation in its process-relational mode in the case of EPAM. Applying social topology

methodology with agential realist theoretical sensitivity is well suited to theoretically

elaborate modes of spread in social innovation according to their spatial properties.

III

Modes of spread in social innovation: A social topology

case in rural Portugal

Introduction

Rural regions across Europe are heterogenous, displaying a diversity of spatial, cultural,

economic and demographic characteristics. Nonetheless, movements of people —

especially to and from cities — remains a key factor in uneven social and spatial

development across rural areas. For remote rural regions, the migration of young people to

cities coupled with an ageing population continues to be a significant factor in decline, lack

of development opportunities and chronic depopulation (Copus and Hörnström, 2011;

Johansson and Kupiszewski, 2009). The potential of social innovation to introduce novel

approaches in rural development and thereby, to an extent, address these disparities and

socio-spatial inequalities is increasingly recognised (Bock, 2016; Christmann, 2014;

Neumeier, 2017; Ubels et al., 2019). However, knowledge on how social innovation diffuses

— especially in rural regions — remains incomplete (Moulaert and MacCallum, 2019;

Rabadjieva and Butzin, 2019).

For novel approaches, such as EPAM

— a network of new young farmers across Portugal

— to have broader societal impact it is recognised social innovations must diffuse

(Christmann, 2014; Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010; Tarde, 2000; Westley et al., 2014) and the

role of networks in diffusion dynamics (discussed in section 2) is acknowledged (Burt, 1987;

Granovetter, 1983; Rogers, 1983; Valente, 1996). However, social innovation is a diverse field

Empreender na fileira das Plantas Aroma ticas e Medicinais em Portugal, (Entrepreneurship in the

medicinal and aromatic plants sector in Portugal). Author’s translation.

with many analytical approaches. These approaches are broadly categorised in two streams

which, although they share commonalties, have different characteristics. Simply put, one

stream is concerned with well-bounded ‘solutions’ to social problems, the other with

transforming social relations through collective processes (cf. Ayob et al., 2016; Moulaert

and MacCallum, 2019). While the streams offer different analytical approaches to social

innovation, what is overlooked are the differences in spatial dynamics between these types

of social innovation. Therefore, this paper begins from the assumption the categories are

not only analytical, but that social innovation has differing spatial properties according to

these interpretations. The first, an empirically legible and bounded object moving

space

(regional). The second, a complex trans-scalar reciprocal process in which objects, bodies

and spaces are performatively (re)made (process-relational). This assumption has

implications for understanding diffusion dynamics in social innovation, whereas the

diffusion of innovations as ‘objects’

space has a long history of research (section 2),

significantly less is understood about diffusion dynamics in a complex relational process

with outstanding questions still to be answered (Moulaert and MacCallum, 2019; Rabadjieva

and Butzin, 2019).

Empirically, the case of EPAM is investigated using social topology methodology (Mol and

Law, 1994; Shields, 2012a, 2012b, 2013) with agential realist theoretical sensitivity (Barad,

1996, 2003, 2007) to demonstrate how social innovation spreads through rural regions. Data

were collected and analysed across spatial scales to examine how images traverse

territorial boundaries through ecologies of infrastructure (Niewöhner,2015), including:

bodies, social networks, online platforms, international supply chains and social media etc.

Images, recognised as performative acts (c.f. Bachelard, 1969; Bakewell, 1989; Latour,

2002; Morgan, 2014; Shields, 1992) are understood here with an agential realist approach as

ongoing material-discursive configurations in spatial processes. Accordingly, the research is

guided by the question

how do material-discursive configurations, in this case images,

contribute to the spread of social innovation as a relational-process, and what is this

productive of?

To answer this question, the aims of the article are fourfold:

1. To briefly conceptualise and introduce the process-relational approach using

agential realist theory and social topology.

2. To give a short account of diffusion research in social innovation highlighting

empirical and theoretical gaps in knowledge.

3. To empirically examine in the case of EPAM how social innovation spreads as

images transform and traverse infrastructures.

4. Finally, to set-out a theoretical approach to modes of spread in social innovation

according to differing spatial dynamics.

These aims are structured according to the following sections: Section 1.1 provides a short

contextual background and introduction to EPAM. Section 2 lays out the conceptual

framework through which the case is analysed, where section 2.1 introduces the process-

relational approach in agential realism in combination with social topological methodology.

In section 2.2 I introduce social innovation and give a short review on diffusion and networks

within the broader field. Section 3 sets-out in detail the research design elaborating the

suitability of social topological methodology to analyse the spatial and temporal dynamics

of complex mobilities and transformations; events across multiple scales; processes,

relations and connectivity; reciprocal emergences and spatialisation. Structured according

to scale, section 4 presents the research findings examining how social innovation was

diffused in the circulation of images traversing interconnected infrastructures, and how

subjectivities, infrastructures, and regional spaces were reconfigured in the process. The

main results are summarised, discussed, and a heuristic diagram of modes of spread is

presented in section 5.

1.1 Background

Alentejo is a peripheral rural region occupying about 30% of the total area of mainland

Portugal with about 7% of the national population (Instituto Nacional de Estatística Statistics

Portugal, 2021). In the 1960’s the region’s rural population reduced by half due to emigration

and industrialisation and continues to decrease (Varela, 2019). Consisting of a particularly

hot and arid agricultural landscape supplying about 75% of the country’s wheat, Alentejo is

characterised by its rolling plains and cork orchards on the one hand, and a decreasing

number of agricultural holdings (Gabinete de Planamento, Políticas e Adminstração Geral,

2017), a lack of economic dynamism and ageing population on the other (Andr e and Abreu,

2009; Fonseca, 2008).

However, existing quantitative research on the emerging medicinal and aromatic herb

(PAM) farming sector indicates a small but legible counter-pattern emerging. Over the last

15 years the number of new, often young farmers entering the PAM sector increased

(Gabinete de Planamento, Políticas e Adminstração Geral, 2013). This rate of growth rose

after the 2008 financial crisis as evidenced by the successful funding applications for new

young farmers to establish themselves in the sector — part of the Rural Development

Programme, ProDer. Between 2008 and 2013 there were 138 new projects started by young

farmers (Gabinete de Planamento e Políticas e Adminstração Geral, 2013). A 2018 survey of

PAM farmers for the municipality of Almodôvar in Alentejo reported 75% of respondents

had higher education qualifications, three-quarters of which were not related to agriculture

(ADCMoura, 2018). Supported by the empirical research in this paper, these findings show

young farmers were new to the agricultural sector. Together, these data indicate a small

and focused migration of young ex-urban professionals to the Portuguese countryside,

including Alentejo to start family farms in the new PAM sector.

Against this background, a local development association based in Alentejo recognised that

the influx of young people into the region, the growth of a new farming sector and the

circulation of knowledge, resources and social capital could contribute towards local rural

development. Subsequently, the project EPAM was founded to support new farmers and

the emerging sector. EPAM is an infrastructure consisting of a digital platform and face-to-

face events fostering collaboration between farmers and actors in other sectors. By

disseminating and supporting the co-production of knowledge on the sector, EPAM aims to

animate and strengthen networks and support new social relations. It is recognised in both

scientific and practice discourses as a social innovation in rural development in Alentejo

(e.g., Ferreiro et al., 2018; Rogowski and Sita, 2020).

Conceptual framework

2.1. Social topology with agential realist sensitivity

Corresponding with a process-relational approach, agential realism (Barad, 1996, 2003,

2007) foregrounds the primacy of relations over relata, that is, over the things anticipated to

be whole and pre-determined prior to entering relations. In this way, agential realism

focuses on the performativity of practices through which space, time and matter

materialise. Practices are the unit of analysis and are material (matter) and discursive

(meaning) configurations. Accordingly, matter and meaning are mutually constituted in

‘intra-actions’, where matter, ‘is not a fixed essence or property of things’, rather it is

‘generated and generative’ (Barad, 2007, p. 137). Following Foucault, discursive practices

are ‘the material conditions that define what counts as meaningful statements’ (2007, p. 64).

Together, material-discursive practices in a posthumanist sense ‘are material

reconfigurings of the world’ through which ‘boundaries, properties and meanings are

differentially enacted’ (151).

Against this theoretical background, topological methodology (Shields, 2012a, 2012b, 2013)

combined with agential realist theoretical sensitivity was selected and applied to the

empirical object of images. Discussed in detail in section 3, topological methodology is well

suited to map nonlinear and performative circulations of material–discursive configurations

agential in spatial processes, in this case exemplified by images (c.f. Bachelard, 1969;

Bakewell, 1989; Latour, 2002; Morgan, 2014; Shields, 1992).

2.2. Social innovation, diffusion and networks

Early research linking the diffusion of innovations to networks tends to be quantitative and

actor-centric measuring the innovativeness of individuals (time of adoption) and influence

on the rate of adoption of others (opinion leaders) e.g., how many times an individual was

mentioned as part of a network (Rogers, 1983). Here, innovations tend to be well-bounded

objects (e.g., technologies, ideas or behaviours) and diffusion refers to the process of their

adoption through a social system describing, for example, adopter categories ranging from

‘early adopters’ to ‘laggards’ (Rogers, 1983; Ryan and Gross, 1943).

From the 1980s onwards focus shifts to examining the role of social networks in the

diffusion process. Here, networks tend to be understood as a ‘pattern of friendship, advice,

communication or support which exists among the members of a social system’ (Valente,

1996). Valente shows the diffusion of an innovation can be relative not only to the entire

social system but also to an individual’s social network. Through this dual approach Valente

highlights the role of interpersonal influence in adoption behaviour. This approach is used to

predict patterns of innovation and identify opinion leaders in social networks in order to

affect the rate of adoption.

Greenhalgh and colleagues’ (2004) comprehensive review of innovation literature across

fields shows the spread of innovation to be on a spectrum between unplanned diffusion and

intentional dissemination. Here, social networks are regarded as the dominant mechanism

of unplanned diffusion where ‘emergence’ and ‘adaption’ are metaphors for spread. This

contrasts with ‘dissemination’ and ‘engineered’, metaphors at the planned end of the

spectrum. The review highlights innovations are objects or processes and that most studies

of the spread of innovation have addressed well-bounded and proactively disseminated

innovations (e.g., technologies or products). It reports less studies on complex processes of

emergent and unplanned diffusion. The authors claim that this division has received little

attention in the literature (2004, p. 604). It is worth pointing out, the review does not include

social innovation. At the time of publication, the contemporary field of social innovation was

in its infancy with few empirical studies on diffusion and spread, as is still the case.

Understandings of networks were being advanced in other fields in which complexity theory

provided background. Actor-network theory (ANT) for example, famously examines the

effects of non-human actors in networks. Furthermore, ANT shows how networks are

topological spaces differing from Euclidean regional space (Mol and Law, 1994). Here,

networks do not exist as social ties between (human) actor categories in regionally bound

space between here and there. Instead, networks are shown to be both objects and spaces

where topologies describe the non-Euclidian relations constituting and connecting them.

Further advances were made in the role of networks in social movements specifically

turning towards their materiality and historicity. MacFarlane’s emphasis on a process-

relational approach, or ‘relational topology’ as he refers to it, calls for a shift in terminology

from network to assemblage to foreground stabilisation, emergence and co-causality

through processes of territorialising and deterritorialising (Mcfarlane, 2009). In this turn to

materiality networks are theorised as infrastructures with weak boundaries through which

agency is distributed (Shields, 2013), a position akin to Barad’s agential realist analysis of

material-discursive apparatus.

The observations above regarding the dual spatial character of networks (as object and

space) is applicable to social innovation where it is seen as both a solution-oriented object,

referring to ‘the development and implementation of new ideas (products, services and

models) to meet social needs’ (Mulgan et al., 2007), and as a collective process in which

relations are transformed (MacCallum et al., 2009). Other interpretations bring together

social innovation as a solution-orientated object and process for example, Zapf defines

social innovations as ‘new ways of achieving goals, particularly new ways of organizing,

new regulations, new ways of life, that will alter the direction of social change, will solve

problems better than earlier practices, and are thus worth the effort of being imitated and

institutionalised’ (Zapf, 1989). To distinguish from other processes of social change and

innovation, Howaldt and Schwarz (2010) add that social innovations are ‘goal orientated’

and ‘the result of intentional and targeted action’ (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010, p. 64).

The diffusion of social innovation has roots in early diffusion and innovation theory (Rogers,

1983; Tarde, 1903) discussed above. With reference to Rogers, Howaldt and Schwarz

describe diffusion as the spread of ideas and inventions through existing communication

channels. Channels include technological infrastructures and web-based social networking

(2010, p. 36). Others add to this list the market (Moulaert and Nussbaumer, 2005), and

organisations (Mulgan et al., 2007) as diffusion channels. Howaldt and Schwarz point out

that, as social innovations are special forms of social practice, bodies and artefacts can be

carriers (2015b, p. 36) thereby providing infrastructure for diffusion. Their definition of social

innovations follows closely Reckwitz’s understanding of practices, whereby the social is

sought in the ‘collectivity of behaviour patterns ... held together by a specific practicalability’

(Reckwitz, 2002, p. 289). For Reckwitz, materiality is an essential component of social

practices and in this way is a site of the social (Reckwitz, 2002). As Law observes, materials

are durable and hold their shape well over time serving to stabilise networks, but material

configurations are the effects of relations and therefore are not permanent (Law, 2007).

Coupling social innovations to social practices marks a shift away from actor-centric

approaches, although social innovations still tend to be coherent bundles of practices

operationalised to meet specific local needs in a regional topology.

In contrast, Tarde’s microsociology spells out an early processual approach to diffusion of

social innovation, where a social

invention

must be repeated to become a social

innovation

During this repetition it encounters forces of

opposition

in the shape of other competing

inventions, potentially hindering its spread, and thus negating it from becoming a social

innovation (Tarde, 2000). Together, with a third force of

adaption

, Tarde’s Laws of Imitation

account for the ongoing micropolitical struggle within social processes towards the

formation of wider societies. Tarde elaborates this as a process of growth which occurs in

two ways. First, intrinsically,

which he describes as a ‘growth in comprehension by a series

of logical combinations’ (Tarde, 2000, p. 80). Second, extrinsically, which he formulates as

‘growth in extension by imitative diffusion’ (2000, p.80).

Tarde’s early process-relational approach, which informed Deleuze’s philosophy of

immanence (upon which the topological methodology presented in the next section is

partially built) and Latour’s early ANT, was less influential than the positivist inclination of

Rogers’ diffusion research. Tarde’s approach provides an early attempt to dethrone the

central role of human actors in innovation processes; account for micropolitical power

relations in the struggle between repetitional and oppositional forces; consider relational

processes as generative (adaption), thereby placing spread prior

emergence and

rendering the process of diffusion productive of innovation. This last move undermines the

idea that coherent pre-determined entities are spread through space and opens the door for

an agential realist account for the reciprocal imbrication of bodies, spaces and objects in the

spreading of trans-scalar processes of social and spatial change, as I propose and illustrate

in section 4.

The merit of Tarde’s microsociology and process-oriented approach for contemporary social

innovation theory is recognised by Howaldt and colleagues in their project SI Drive (Howaldt

et al, 2015a, 2015b, 2017). Here, Tarde’s emphasis on micro phenomena, events, inventions

etc. is combined with practice theoretical approaches providing a methodology to

‘meticulously trace social inventions and innovations as well as the associated social

practices of their imitation’. (Howaldt et al., 2015b, p. 28). In this way, relational structures at

the micro level and the intentional dissemination of practice elements reaching a meso or

macro level is examined as a process of social change. Developing a practice orientated

approach, Rabadjieva and Butzin (2019) focus on traveling elements (of practices) including

materials, competences and meanings in the diffusion of social innovation. Here, traveling

elements are facilitated in practice fields

which are bundles of social innovations doing the

same thing appearing in different locales. This approach provides an analytical procedure to

account for trans-local connectivity between places through an emerging practice field,

however, how spaces, bodies and meanings are co-produced ‘on the ground’ through

practices is less in view. The emergence of a social innovation precedes spread, although

by means of diffusion a broader practice field emerges. In this way, spread partially takes on

generative characteristics.

Using the multi-level perspective approach Westley et al. (2014) provide a typology

describing how and why organisation shift their focus from ‘scaling-out’ (disseminating

innovations to other communities) to ‘scaling-up’ (to affect system-level transformation).

Using complexity perspectives, the typology provides 5 main approaches to scaling. The

focus here is on an organisation’s selection of pathways to affect change at higher

institutional levels towards system change. Arguably, the insistence on scaling-up over

scaling-out reproduces a hierarchical spatial structuring and cuts against empirical insights

on the significance of horizontal networks in diffusion of social innovation, as discussed

next.

Similar to early diffusion of innovation research outlined above, networks are valorised in

their ability to spread social innovation (e.g. André and Abreu, 2009) by overcoming

material, social and spatial boundaries connecting across spatial scales, levels of

governance and institutions. For example, supra-local networks connect agents across

scales providing means of communication and coordination through regions improving the

quality of social relations (Moulaert and Nussbaumer, 2005). Networks span both

horizontally and vertically (Hillmann, 2009) connecting levels of governance, institutions

and actors in other locations (Moulaert and Mehmood, 2011). Territorial networks tend to be

place specific due to the particular tacit relationships in each (Abramo, 2009). They have the

possibility to form new, more equitable relations of power (Hillier, 2013).

This review highlights different approaches to diffusion in social innovation revealing

common and conflicting characteristics often according to how social innovation is

perceived. What tends to be agreed is that social innovation is distributed with the help of

social and material infrastructure consisting of networks, supply chains, bodies, artefacts

etc. For some, intentional action is significant to distinguish social innovation from other

types of change, whereas for others microprocesses, event and relations precede and are

productive of human agents and other entities. Furthermore, approaches to scale, distance

and levels vary, where for some networks cast horizontally in space are significant, for

others incremental steps from micro to macro explain social change in social innovation

processes.

Methodology: Social topology

As pointed out by Christmann, ‘an analysis of innovation processes must also consider the

socio-spatial environmental conditions’ (2014, p. 46). To research complex spatio-temporal

processes of exchange between environment and object topological methodology

(Bachelard, 1969; Barad, 2007; DeLanda, 2002, 2016; Deleuze, 2019; Deleuze and Guattari,

1987; Mol and Law, 1994; Shields, 2012a, 2012b, 2013) was selected, and in combination with

agential realist theoretical sensitivity applied to the empirical object of images.

Topology is a spatial framework to examine how spaces, bodies and objects are produced

through the combination of mobilities, transformations, trans-scalar events and relational

emergences. Topologies map complex mobilities and translations (Shields, 2012a) and are

therefore well suited to map images understood as performative material-discursive

configurations agential in spatial processe. Bachelard uses topoanalysis to track and

analyse the spread and transformation of poetic images as they reverberate through human

memory and imagination into texts and spaces of the home showing how subjects extend

themselves into space, and how spaces affect subjectivity. Here, imaginations, domestic

spaces and texts are understood as infrastructures with weak boundaries through, and

between which, images circulate.

Grounded in the observation that sites are made in a relation of difference

to each other,

‘cast — or spatialised — as certain types of place: romantic, harsh, warm etc.’ (Shields, 2013,

p. 31), Shields develops the methodology further (Shields 2012a, 2012b, 2013) to bring-to-

the-fore and examine topological and mutually productive relations between images,

matter and space. Spatialisation enrols a relational network of many other interconnected

sites constructed on a cultural foundation of events, histories, memory and myth. It is ‘a

process and horizon of meaning’, over which there is an ‘intense struggle’ (2013, p.31) where

places vie with each other for their unique capacities and identity. Instrumental in this

struggle for meaning are images, which ‘over-write’ (32), or rather enfold into sites. Shields

elaborates topology to show how images as visual and textual representations and

intersubjective cultural imaginaries are cast into sites (34). By collecting diverse multi-scalar

data the approach affords analysis of circulation of images across scales.

According to the theoretical assumption that social innovation has dual spatial properties

(object and process-relational) outlined in section 2, social topology is used to analyse

messy objects, where messy objects are ethnographic complex objects appearing to have

shifting ontological properties (Law and Singleton, 2005, p. 11), applicable to material-

discursive configurations of images in the case.

To address the second aspect of the research question, the method attends to emergences.

This provided a lens to examine what was (re)made and performed as images de/re-

materialised in circulation. The aim here was to consider the productive role of images in

the spatialisation of rural peripheral space in Portugal, thereby contributing to a process of

social innovation, understood as a relational trans-scalar process of socio-spatial change.

Topologies provide diagrams of networks, assemblages and the forces within (Deleuze and

Guattari, 1987; Shields, 2012a; DeLanda, 2002). Diagrams follow two directions: intensive

and extensive (DeLanda, 2016, p. 110), reminiscent of Tarde’s intrinsic and extrinsic process

of growth in innovation, as discussed in section 2. Extensive mappings capture features of

the world extended

space within boundaries and regions using metrics such as length,

volume, area etc. between here and there. In contrast, intensive mappings capture the

‘differences in the intensity of qualities’ within a spatial assemblage, such as gradients of

temperature, pressure or speed (Ibid.). Intensive and extensive properties are linked, where

the diversity of perceived phenomena bounded in extension are the product of processes

governed by gradients of intensity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 cited in: DeLanda, 2002). In

this way, intensive forces are the autopoietic enfolding of spaces, objects and bodies in

intra-active material-discursive practices.

By applying the topological method with agential realist theoretical sensitivity outlined here,

the research in this paper diagrams the intensive

and more-than-human forces at work in

the spatial dynamics of diffusion in social innovation in a process-relational mode, to

analyse:

• circulations and transformation of material-discursive configurations of images;

• relations and connectivity through scales (trans-scalar);

• the reciprocal production and performativity of bodies, objects and spaces (e.g.

farmers, infrastructures and peripheral space).

Following Shields (2012b), social topology is combined with ethnographic fieldwork to

collect diverse primary data supplemented with secondary data analytically divided along

two spatial scales (zoomed-in and zoomed-out), as follows:

For zoomed-in analysis, primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews

(+22 h) and conversations with PAM farmers, local and regional development experts, social

entrepreneurs, local civil servants, residents and participant observations, including a work

placement in a local development association (2 months), farm stays and multiple

farm/agricultural production site visits (12 no.) in Spring 2019. Fieldwork conducted across

the country was documented with extensive notes (15,849 words and 4 no. notebooks),

photographs and drawings (+65 no.). Data were coded using an inductive approach in

grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). This approach was applied to map and

diagram drawing (iii) (Author, forthcoming b). MaxQDA and ATLAS.ti software was used.

For zoomed-out analysis secondary data were collected through desktop research including

documents (policy documents, research reports, statistical reports, scientific papers). In the

paper,

visual images including, photographs and illustrations collected from social

media and websites and herb packaging

were analysed in relation to primary interview

data and observations. For analysis across scales and to reveal relations between data

maps, spatial drawings and animations were made (6 no.).

Findings

The following section topologically charts the de/re-materialisation and circulation of

images in the infrastructures connected to and including the infrastructure of EPAM

. The

topology reveals how images transformed between different infrastructures adapting to the

modalities of each, and how in reciprocal processes subjectivities, infrastructures and

peripheral rural space were together reconfigured. Accordingly, it is shown how social

innovation as reciprocal trans-scalar process of socio-spatial change involving more-than-

human relations intensively spreads. In this topology, the spread of social innovation is

shown to be in an unintentional mode. Analytically, findings are presented according to

three circulations which cross scales, from zoomed-in to zoomed-out. Each circulation

examines a different infrastructure, and between circulations the de/re-materialisation of

images is described as images transfer across scales and infrastructures.

4.1. Circulation 1: nature-images/self-images

As discussed in section 1, EPAM was designed to support new young farmers entering the

herb farming sector who had recently migrated from urban centres towards the rural

interior. Herb farming was attractive as it can be done organically, on small family farms,

supported by specific technologies to ease the intensive labour required for organic

production, and with relatively little pre-existing farming knowledge. Funding was available

through a national rural development programme to support new young entrants into the

agricultural sector. Interviewees (EPAM co-founders and new farmers) reported that the

information received as part of the funding application process was to some extent

inaccurate, to the point of being detrimental to the economic viability of some farms. The

farmers reported not having training in organic methods at point of entry. It was said that

the inaccurate information and lack of specific training contributed to unrealistic ex-

pectations regarding anticipated crop yield and financial gain, size and amount of land

For an in-depth analysis of social innovation infrastructure in this case, see Author (forthcoming a).

required, labour intensity, timeframes, technological and equipment requirements. The

information was widely circulated, this was likely due to the repetition of applications by an

agency employed (by applicants) to support the application process. Compounding this,

many new young farmers had unrealistic, romantic images towards country life, organic

farming and nature more broadly. Images configured in the city and cast onto rural Alentejo.

‘Because we like nature, we’d like to live in the countryside ....

we decided to start this project of aromatic plants.’

PAM farmer

‘Really to bring information that would be real, realistic and try

to tell people that there will not be any romanticism in the

sector.’

EPAM co-founder

Apart from providing support for new young farmers, interviewees reported that the EPAM

project aimed to disseminate ‘real’ and accurate information about the sector, including

counteracting the romantic images of nature and country life regarded by more experienced

actors as unrealistic and detrimental to the development of the sector and survival of the

new farms. Similar to the competing micropolitical innovation process described by Tarde

(section 2), EPAM emerged as an infrastructure in a micropolitical process of repetition

and

opposition

(section 2), consisting of a network of new farmers and associated actors, a web-

platform and through a host of events including local and regional meetups, training

sessions, expos and conferences.

Fieldwork, including interviews and observations suggested that the self-image of farmers

had been, and were still being constructed in relation to changing imaginaries of nature,

organic farming and country life. For example, in one interview nature was repeatedly

figured as vulnerable and requiring protection. It was regarded that in his new role as an

organic farmer part of his responsibility was to protect nature

Imagining nature in relation

to self in this way contributed to the reconfiguring of the ex-urban professional’s identity,

part of the process of becoming an organic herb farmer/ custodian of nature in Alentejo.

Interviewees described the reason for leaving the city not only as a negative effect of the

financial crisis on their urban livelihoods, but as an opportunity to work with and learn from

nature, some described how bees, insects, plants and farmers cooperated in the production

of herbs. This value laden image of nature is supported by statements on farmers websites.

Farmers rehearsed and performed their emerging identities in relation to nature in

practices of organic farming, including the layout of farms to encourage the interplay

between species in the production of herbs, discussed below. This material and symbolic

relation between images of nature and self-image continued to be discursively performed

and spread as farmers spoke about their new roles and circulated knowledge, photographs

and illustrations (discussed below) using the EPAM infrastructure. The flow of images of

self in relation to nature co-constructed shared meanings

between farmers. Social relations were stabilised and a new cultural imaginary specific to

New Rurals working in peripheral rural space in Portugal gradually emerged.

Performing nature, self and collective identities through organic herb farming practices and

the EPAM infrastructure had specific ethical components which led some interviewees to

set themselves apart from other traditional farmers. Interviewees reported such farmers

were seen to be polluting the soil by using chemical fertilizers. These boundary making

practices stabilise and give further definition to an emerging subjectivity. A quality of

contingency and experiment was perceptible as the farmers rehearsed their ethical

positions in the interview. These ethical, aesthetic and practical considerations lead to

specific material configurations of farms (discussed in section 4.4) and the curation and

circulation of self- images, which I discuss next.

As pointed out in section 2, it is recognised that diffusion of innovation requires an

infrastructure which in this case consists of networks of actors, bodies, artefacts, supply

chains etc. In the following subsection I analyse herb package images to consider how the

emerging material- discursive configurations of nature, self and collective translated into

herb packaging circulated

a wider ecology of infrastructures. I refer to this translation as a

process of

de/re-materialising

so as to foreground how images adapt to and lend materiality

of other infrastructures.

4.2. De/re-materialisation 1: herb packaging

As discussed in the introduction (section 1.1), the young professionals who moved from

metropolitan areas on the Portuguese coast to the rural interior, as they moved they

brought with them specific practices cultivated in their professional lives in the city. For

example, graphic designers-cum-farmers capitalised on their capacities to produce

attractive brands to market herbal products (such as, teas and oils). The branding and

images varied between producers, but typically consisted of illustrations of herbs, leaves or

part of the plants in combination with typography on paper, card or glass packaging.

In one example, the tea packaging consists of a white vertically proportioned cylindrical box

made from card with a black plastic lid. Text above and below frames a decorative and

highly abstract illustration of an herb plant. Visual analysis of the images deconstructed the

relations between components (e.g., text, fonts, illustration, proximity, contrast, colour, tone,

proportion etc.) to show how the specific material configuration of box, text and illustration

performs particular values, ideas and aspirations regarding nature. In the example, the

configuration does not indicate place, climate, weather nor is there any reference to utility

e.g., drinking tea, or cooking etc. In order to enhance their ornamental and decorative

quality, images were abstracted from a specific socio-spatial setting. The products are

marketed as gourmet and appear in boutique shops online and across Europe.

100

In a further example, brown, unbleached paper bags are used to package herbs. A label

applied to the bag contains a small logo, minimal text and a strong decorative geometric

background pattern. Images are rendered in one pastel colour set against white

background and the brown bag. Again, there is no visual reference to what the herbs are

used for. But, in this example, the logo consists of three parallel undulating lines with two

small tree shapes. According to the designer, this is an abstraction of the Alentejo

landscape. Further refence to the region is made through the geometrical background

pattern that, according to the designer, references patterns found on traditional rugs from

the region. The products are marketed at a medium-high price point.

Both these examples, which are not isolated, are highly aesthetic and ornamental

configurations and construct nature in specific ways. In the first example, the extensive

abstraction of the herbs, relation between text, illustration and white space, and the

contrastive colour range suggests a highly abstract and decorative rendition of nature. In

the second, the unbleached brown bag is suggestive of being natural and authentic. These

images enact nature in a romantic and idealised ways and coincide with the construction of

nature reported in interviews and on websites (see section 4.1).

Recalling the conceptual framework in section 2, I have described how images performing

nature in relation to self and translate between modalities (e.g., from urban imaginations of

rural life to herb packaging). Through this de/re-materialisation and adaption to other

modalities, images are able to translate between and connect infrastructures. Next, I shall

examine how the herb packaging images circulate through national and international

supply chains. I argue that nature in relation to rural Alentejo and the emerging cultural

identity of the new herb farmers is discursively performed in other locations as images

continue to spread through interconnected infrastructures. In this way, images of rural

Alentejo-nature-herb farmers enter into a trans-scalar process of socio-spatial change

relation to

other socio-spatial systems.

4.3. Circulation 2: illustrations and infrastructures

The herbs and their packaging were sold in shops in Lisbon, Porto and in the Alentejo,

mainly catering to tourists. Additionally, herbs were exported to other European capital

cities, circulating a wider ecology of infrastructure (e.g., supply chains, transport logistics,

recreation travel etc.) and online market places (pointed out in section 4.2). Effectively, the

images circulated vast territories through interconnected infrastructures.

In addition to spreading through cities and social media (examined in section 4.5), images

circulated shops in the Alentejo. During extended fieldwork in the region (section 3), I met a

shop owner and his partner selling herb products. They were proud of the boutique

selection lining the shelves of their exquisitely choreographed shop. Products were few but

each had a strong aesthetic materiality and were carefully arranged in the shop. The

owners enjoyed recounting the stories attached to each object (e.g., boxes of herbs, tins of

sardines, bottles of olive oil etc.), the producers, and where in Alentejo they lived. These

101

performances in which images, products, shop, owner and customers interact reproduced

and spread imaginaries about herb farming in Alentejo, and as products were bought their

images and stories recirculated further afield. Meanwhile in reciprocal relation, the images

and their entangled stories co-constitute the shop by lending it materiality. This illustrates

how material-discursive configurations spread through, cross between, connect and

perform infrastructures, and how human actors are enrolled in these practices.

Infrastructure here is not the same as the EPAM infrastructure described above which was

intentionally designed to disseminate information, knowledge and meaning between

farmers. Nonetheless, as the case depicts, this wider ecology of infrastructure is agential in

the diffusion of social innovation through circulation of images, where social innovation is a

trans-scalar relational process of socio-spatial change which EPAM infrastructure is weaved

into. In line with the theoretical insights outlined in section 2, this suggests that there is an

unintentional dimension to the spread of social innovation which must be accounted for

when considering diffusion dynamics.

These empirical findings support the notion that infrastructure is at once an object without

clear boundaries and a set of relations (Larkin, 2013) inscribing a topological space

(Niewöhner, 2015) materalised in the interweaving ecolgies of infrastructures. I suggest a

characteristic of social innovation infrastructures, such as EPAM, is their ability to piggyback

other established infrastructures, such as supply chains and logistics thereby amplifying

spatial reach and effectiveness (Author, forthcoming a).

4.4. De/re-materialisation 2: spatial arrangements and photos

Images of nature, self, rural life and farming were re-materialised in the spatial

arrangement of farms, where farms offered a novel way of living in contrast to the

separation between work and home individuals had been accustomed to in the city.

Observations showed workspaces and domestic spaces overlapped and interconnected on

farms. For example, in the proximity of herb gardens and production areas to kitchens and

external terraces, or how onsite utility infrastructures such as solar panels, water catch,

filtration and sewage systems supported domestic and work spaces. The spatial proximities

of work and domestic life were reported in interviews as being advantageous and a special

characteristic of farming that facilitated novel relations within the family. Observations and

fieldwork showed farms to be carefully curated where plants were arranged to attract

specific insects to manage others which farmers described in interviews as an example of

working with nature (section 4.1). In one example where a farmer had previously worked as

a landscape architect (this was not unique and it was reported to me that architecture and

landscape architecture had been hard hit in Portugal during the 2008 financial recession),

the organisation of the fields, structure of the warehouse and production area had been

carefully crafted and detailed. For example, the general layout of internal spaces had been

artfully arranged, materials carefully selected for tonal and colour consistency. The spaces

had clearly been carefully designed and choreographed beyond the technical requirements

of a working space. Although this was unusual, it was not isolated.

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Furthermore, as in the example of the shop earlier, boxes waiting to be packed with herbs

lined walls of production areas. Fieldwork showed farms often had visitors including

volunteers and other farmers in the network who would be exposed to the images and

packaging, the architectural quality of warehouses and storerooms and the spatial

arrangements of farms and the wider site. These observations were supported in interviews

where farmers reported to have volunteered on other farms prior to starting their own.

Like packaging images described above, photographs of these material and spatial

arrangements circulated the on internet e.g. Facebook, Instagram, web-shops, regional

marketing campaigns and tourist information, graphic-design portfolios, photographers’

homepages etc. thereby translating and piggybacking other infrastructures.

4.5. Circulation 3: photos and social media

Marketing products on social media relies less on placing an advert and instead on

integrating products into sets and sequences of visual images promoting a sense of

“authenticity” with the user’s lifestyle. In this way, images depicting a particular lifestyle are

used to promote products. In this case, farmers circulated photographs of herbs, gardens,

fields, with domestic life in the countryside, family and pets against the backdrop of trees,

fields, sunsets, farming equipment etc. to promote their businesses. As a side point, the

digital fluency of the new young farmers was specifically remarked upon in interviews with

regional development agencies, further setting them apart from traditional farmers in

Alentejo.

Images were collected from new farmer’s Instagram and Facebook accounts and visually

analysed. They were split into two main categories: ‘Packaging and products’ (1) and ‘Spatial

arrangements’ (2). The second category was subdivided into three further subcategories,

including:

Farming practices (e.g., removing plastic sheeting, tending to herbs etc.);

landscape (e.g., static, often sweeping shots of landscape carefully composed and

contrasting natural elements with human practices e.g. large skies and clumps of trees

with tractors or rigid lines of planting etc.);

close-ups (e.g., shots of objects suggesting domestic life in the countryside such as toys

next to carefully arranged flowers in proximity to a window overlooking the garden).

Common to these sets of images are the compositional relationships between nature and

social practices intensified for aesthetic effect. For example, filters increased light and dark

and saturation levels, or the application of blue tints to cool down highlights and shadows,

effectively exaggerating contrast between mid-tones and skin hues. These visual

manipulations aim to evoke a sense of nostalgia by softening the focus and bleeding out

highlights. These visual data support the reports in interviews (see section 4.1) that many

new young farmers brought with them romantic and unrealistic images of nature and rural

103

life to herb farming in the Alentejo and present a similar refined aesthetic as the packaging

images (section 4.2).

A quick online image search for “herb farming Alentejo” yields a large amount of highly

aestheticized images in line with what is described above. Coupled with the circulation of

images regionally across the EPAM network, and those distributed along supply chains

reaching customers and shops in other European cities (see section 4.3) a distinctive visual

discourse on life, work, and herb farming in relation to nature in rural Alentejo is evident.

These material-discursive practices extend beyond herb farming and can be seen in other

sectors such as artisanal production of traditional Aquardente de Medronho (strawberry tree

brandy), mushroom collecting, and eco-tourism (e.g., Brul, 2012).

Discussion and conclusion: Modes of spread in social innovation, a

process relational approach

The aim of this article was to analyse how circulations of material-discursive configurations,

in this case images, contribute to spreading

social innovation as a relational trans-scalar

process, and to examine what was produced therein. This objective was met by applying

social topology with agential realist theoretical sensitivity in order to foreground

performativity, material-discursive configurations, and more-than-human practices.

Together, this approach showed that the circulation of material-discursive configurations

spreads social innovation. This type of spread did not follow an extensive linear process, or

an intentional dissemination strategy, instead the approach yielded results which can be

summarised as follows:

Images are material-discursive configurations produced through reciprocal relations (e.g.

topologically between urban and rural sites, or self and nature).

Images circulated through an ecology of infrastructures, including EPAM.

EPAM can be said to be a socially innovative infrastructure connecting into other

infrastructures including, supply chains, shops, farms and farmers, social media.

Images and infrastructures were shown to adapt to the each other in a process of re/de-

materialisation. This resulted in images transgressing infrastructures which had the effect

of connecting and reconfiguring spatial systems trans-locally.

Circulations of images were performative of emerging subjective and collective identities.

To answer the question how images contribute to the spread of social innovation, a cascade

of images (Latour, 2002) circulating an ecology of infrastructures weaving a discursive web

as they go, can be imagined. In an act of reciprocal inherence, images lend infrastructures

their materiality and, as they enfold, they establish new topological relations and spread a

process of socio-spatial change. A process in which subjectivites, objects, and spaces are

together reconfigured and which shows spread to be generative and precede emergence.

104

To elaborate this idea, I offer a topological diagram of the spatial dynamics of spread in

social innovation. This diagram consists of four poles on two axes, the first connects/holds

apart intensive and extensive forces (referencing Tarde and DeLanda’s theoretical

observations, as laid out in section 2.2 and 3), the perpendicular axis separates intentional

and unintentional forces (referring to Greenhalgh et al.’s observations discussed in section

2.2).

5.1. Extensive/intentional

As discussed in section 2, social innovation may be understood as both an object and a

relational process. When understood as a pre-determined object (e.g., a bundle of novel

social practices or solutions) spread or diffusion

space maybe mapped extensively tracing

its movement against contained regional space. These properties of social innovation as a

solution-orientated object diffused across networks in regional space is well elaborated (see

section 2.2). The aim is to intentionally scale-out or scale-up a social innovation object to

increase uptake or impact, either horizontally across a network or vertically through

institutional or systemic levels.

5.2. Intensive/unintentional

However, where social innovation is understood as a relational process according to the

conceptual framework laid out above, the extensive diffusion of objects

space does not

hold. Therefore, as I have argued in this paper, a different understanding of spread and

methods for analysing it was required. Spread in this mode is the result of the internal

reordering of relations and boundaries reminiscent of — but not identical to — Tarde’s

overlooked intrinsic growth (section 2.2). The agential realist approach presented here adds

to Tarde’s observations by sharpening the focus on the internal reconfiguring of relations

and boundaries in posthumanist performative practices. Following DeLenda, I refer to this

mode as

intensive

(see section 3).

In contrast to practices of scaling-up or -out in, in an unintentional mode social innovation is

spread by the circulation of material-discursive configurations, in this case images. The

spread of social innovation by the circulation of images was not intentionally planned.

Indeed, as the results show, human subjectivity was, at least partially, produced through the

circulation and performativity of images. In this way the pole of intentionality and

unintentionality serves to foreground more-than-human agencies at work in relational

processes.

By distinguishing these modes of spread according to the diagram the article i) foregrounds

a process-relational interpretation of social innovation and spatial spread, ii) contributes

knowledge to a less prevailing discourse on diffusion in social innovation, iii) by doing so, it

brings to the fore spatial assumptions underpinning the dominant interpretations of social

innovation.

105

It is intended that this diagram may provide a useful heuristic for further diffusion studies in

social innovation research and analysis. A number of question arises from this article, for

example how do images behave differently to circulations of other material-discursive

configurations in relational processes of social innovation and spatial spread?

I have argued in this paper for a process-relational approach to social innovation and spatial

spread to be distinguished from social innovation’s as predetermined objects and regional

diffusion dynamics. I use the approach to describe, map and analyse connectivity across

scales through which things, subjectivities and spaces are reciprocally reconfigured in

processes of social innovation

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110

Insert Box 2.

Revolução dos Cravos and Rural Co-operatives in Portugal

On 25th April 1974, a date commonly cited as the beginning of the revolution in Portugal, a

left-wing faction of the military linked with the communist party revolted against the

authoritarian Estado Novo corporatist government, an evolution of Antonio de Oliveira

Salazar’s repressive conservative Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship) regime.

However, other (Marxist and postcolonial) histories suggest the beginning of the revolution

is traced back to the anticolonial uprising of forced cotton workers in Angola, a then colony

of Portugal in December 1960 (

Workingclasshistory.Com

, n.d.) (Varela, 2019). In the

following months, with the political support of America, the Portuguese military bombed

approximately 17 villages killing many thousands Angolans (Grassi, 2015). Not only did this

mark the beginning of Angola’s struggle for independence, but it ignited anti-colonial

sentiment and political action in Portugal culminating in the leftist military coup on 25th

April and the ensuing social and political revolution ending a year and a half later in

November 1975 with a right-wing coup d’état and the implementation of social democracy

and reassertion of capitalism.

The year following the Revolução dos Cravos was characterised by ongoing political unrest

marked by numerous attempted coups and conflict between not only left and right forces,

but between the multiple left-wing factions, significantly (but not exclusively) between the

socialist party and the communist party vying for power. The revolution was inscribed by

numerous social innovations across civil society, particularly in workplace relations and the

collectivisation of large farms in the south (including Alentejo) and estates owned by

wealthy families (latifúndia). Here, most rural workers were poorly paid wage-labourers

with no land, precarious and seasonal work, and little power. In contrast, peasants in the

north tended to own and farm small land holdings, a spatial pattern of landownership still

evident in and a determining factor in shaping of rural communities today; a spatial

distinction marked by the Tagus River which played into the course of the revolution. North

of the river, rural populations tended to be catholic and more conservative (the Catholic

Church had been supported by Salava’s regime), whereas south in the Alentejo – the largest

southern region – the communist party was powerful and popular, and after the 25th April

workers supported land reforms through, for example, farming cooperatives and land

occupations.

In this context, Varela (2019) distinguishes two types of workplace struggle. The first is

concerned with better conditions for workers, e.g., increased wages; the second with

fighting for workplace takeovers and self-management by the workers. Varela claims over a

quarter of arable land was occupied by rural workers during the revolution, ‘one of the

largest acts of collectivisation of its kind in European history ’(Varela, 2019, p.183). In

January 1975 a land occupation in Beja, Alentejo sparked numerous other autonomous

farm takeovers by rural workers across the region leading to the collectivisation of many

111

large estates by rural workers. Landowners, many of whom fled to the colonies, typically

Brazil, received compensation for the land over the following years. The New York Times in

December 1975, citing ‘official sources’, reported that ‘about three-quarters ’of the

agricultural land in the south had been taken over by workers led by the communist Union

of Farm Workers, the principle areas being Beja (750,000 acres), Evora (582,500 acres) and

Portalegre (500,000 acres) (New York Times, 1975), all sub regions of the Alentejo.

The general view, on both sides of the political divide, is that the land reforms and

collectivisation were on the whole of limited success, although reasons for and definitions

of success tend to vary. For example, The New York Times points to a lack of finance

available to the collectivised workers following takeover as problematic but goes on to

suggest the actions and practices of the workers – as a consequence of this lack of capital –

and the new communist institutions surrounding them, were ill prepared to cope with

managing farms. Meanwhile, others suggest that in fact the reforms were not radical

enough and that landowner-employers were simply substituted for elected workers’

councils, concerned only with increased benefits for workers rather than full social,

economic and political transformation (Workingclasshistory.Com, n.d.). This critique claims

rather than worker liberation they had exchanged one master for another, the capital

landowner for the central organised communist party, as the party’s apparatus took over

and weaved together a network of cooperative farms across the south aiming to

consolidate power in rural areas, a power base still evident today in Alentejo. Valera argues,

under the conditions of central control, coupled with trying to operate co-operatives within a

market framework, compounded by the fact that many of the workplaces had their capital

stripped out and were already bankrupt prior to takeover, long-term success was always

going to be limited. Nevertheless, the reforms resulted in the cultivation of thousands of

hectares of previously un-farmed land, increased production, and employment (Valera 2019,

186). According to Mailer (2012), another aspect of the revolution was the impact of

‘revolutionary tourists ’coming from other countries, such as the English Workers’ Socialist

Party who ostensibly came to join the revolution but, according to Mailer’s first hand report,

many of whom became part of the problem as their liberal values, especially towards sex,

did not coincide with the more socially conservative rural workers and emerging collectives

in Alentejo. Arguably, this reticence to the motivations of ‘do-gooders ’coming from outside,

is still detectable in some parts of the Alentejo worker’s populations today, a perspective

reported to me by interview partners during fieldwork.

Grassi, A. de. (2015). Rethinking the 1961 Baixa de Kassanje revolt: Towards a relational

Geo-History of Angola Repensando a revolta da Baixa de Kassange de 1961: Rumo a

uma geo-história relacional de Angola.

Mulemba

(5 (10)), 53–133.

Mailer, P. (2012).

Portugal: The Impossible Revolution?

(p. 288). PM Press.

Special, M. (1975). Portugal Facing Crop Loss Under Agrarian Reform.

New York Times

, 2

Varela, R. (2019).

A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution

. Pluto Press.

112

113

Article three

Infrastructuring resistance at the periphery. Or how material-discursive infrastructures

materialise and spread

Author

Jamie-Scott Baxter

Publication Status

International peer-reviewed article. Accepted with revisions. Submitted September 2021 in

European Planning Studies (Taylor & Francis. Impact Factor: 3.2). This is the original

manuscript of an article submitted to Taylor & Francis in European Planning Studies.

Keywords

spatial planning, rural development, collective, processes, more-than-human, multi-sited

ethnography

Abstract

This article develops the term infrastructuring resistance in the field of spatial planning in

the context of Alentejo, in rural Portugal. The little-known but important term,

infrastructuring implies a shift in emphasis from structure to an open-ended relational

process. I begin by introducing selected elements from Barad’s concept of agential realism;

second, I review infrastructuring in other related fields; third, I describe how the empirical

field was constructed and data collected ethnographically; fourth, I turn to the case of EPAM

to discuss infrastructuring in resistance to social and environmental breakdown in

collectivist modes of planning inscribing rural space in Portugal. I focus on two main

aspects, first, the everyday material-discursive practices through which infrastructuring is

performed and by which infrastructures materialise. I then examine how infrastructures

transgress spatial boundaries as they topologically spread, enfolding with a wider ecology.

Linked to this, I describe how infrastructuring troubles epistemic boundaries in knowledge

practices. I analyse how these interconnected aspects of infrastructuring contribute to the

ongoing re(con)figuration of peripheral space. I conclude by considering the benefits of this

approach and how infrastructuring resistance is applicable to other spaces, raising the

question of whether it can provide an effective alternative to “planning for development”.

114

Infrastructuring resistance at the periphery. Or, how

material-discursive infrastructures materialise and

spread

Introduction

Engaging the empirical of case “Empreender na fileira das Plantas Aromáticass e

Medicinais em Portugal”

(EPAM) in Alentejo Portugal, I seek to present and theoretically

develop a process-relational approach to the concept of infrastructuring resistance in spatial

planning. A term which, to date, has enjoyed less scholarly attention compared to the noun

infrastructure, infrastructur

ing

is a dynamic and open-ended process which transgresses

and troubles boundaries, analytical categories and epistemic divides, thereby participating

in re(con)figuring spaces. There is a recognised need (Karasti and Blomberg, 2018) more

empirical studies of infrastructuring that contribute towards new ways of conceptualising

infrastructuring . As I illustrate through the case of EPAM, infrastructuring is a more-than-

human process which leads to the materialisation of infrastructures as material and

discursive configurations of embodied subjects in relation with non-human objects. A

process-relational approach (after Barad, 2003) underpins the interpretation of

infrastructuring as presented here. As the case illustrates, infrastructuring is performed in a

relation

of resistance to

other forces, including the reproduction of social structures,

situated material conditions, competing discourses, the diffusion of other social and

technical innovations (Baxter et al., 2020), and environmental processes experienced in and

Entrepreneurship in the medicinal and aromatic plants sector in Portugal. Author’s translation

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shaping rural spaces across Europe. From this relational process material–discursive

infrastructures emerge.

Contextually, peripheral rural areas, especially those with low population densities like the

Alentejo with less than 22.8/inh.km2 in 2018 (Eurostat, 2016) are ageing as life expectancy

increases and fertility rates decrease (Eurostat, 2015). This demographic change is

exacerbated by the out-migration of young people in pursuit of employment, education or a

better access to public, social and cultural services (Margaras, 2019). Although reasons for

leaving can vary from country to country and region to region, this is a well-known global

trend (Copus et al., 2011) exacerbated by local unemployment, geographic remoteness,

‘negative’ rural and ‘positive’ urban discourses, wider processes of globalization, economics

and geopolitics (Bock, 2016), climate change and conflict (Barnett and Adger, 2007), and

significantly for this article, a lack of public services and infrastructure in many peripheral

areas (Copus, 2011). This social, economic, and environmental breakdown has the cascade

effect of further marginalizing rural communities and sharpening spatial boundaries and

inequalities between territories (e.g., Bock, Kovacs and Shucksmith, 2014). These economic,

social, political, and environmental processes are underpinned by meta-narratives (e.g.,

concerning agriculture, rural-urban relations competitiveness) and lead to spatial

differentiation between rural areas, between urban centres and rural peripheries, and

between localities in relation to other places, a local-global dynamic (Shucksmith et al.,

2011). Shucksmith and colleagues propose two key interrelated issues to understand spatial

differentiation namely, the ‘interaction between places’ and the ‘assets’ which communities

can use to shape their futures, e.g. social networks, identity, ability for collective action, and

natural and cultural heritage (2011: 34), and I would add, community owned infrastructures.

Illustrating the interaction between places, the future of food security at a national or

international level is threatened by local ageing rural populations. In Europe, one-third of

farm managers are over the age of 65 (Eurostat, 2016). Prior to, and now further heightened

by the Covid-19 pandemic, food security is a critical issue in Europe as concerns about

climate change, food production and supply chains have become more acute. In response,

EU policy suggests small family farms should be the drivers for sustainable rural

development (cf. Graeub et al., 2016). A recent Food and Agriculture Organization report on

the state of food and agriculture sets out a vision for family farms as ‘innovators’ in

sustainable rural development to ‘care for and protect the natural environment’, 'ensuring

global food security’ and putting an 'end to poverty' (Food and Agricultural Organization,

2014). Arguably, this is a tall order for small family farms at the frontline of climate change

and social and economic decline.

Against this background, Portugal has developed a suite of national programmes

supported by EU funding encouraging young people to enter the agricultural sector (e.g.

Statute for Young Rural Entrepreneurs). The initiatives resulted in ex-urban professionals

moving to rural Portugal, including the Alentejo to set-up small family farms. Many of these

white-collar workers were unemployed as a consequence of the 2008 global financial crisis

and had no prior farming experience. In this paper I examine how a local group including a

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local development agency (hereafter “co-founders”) based in Alentejo designed and

implemented a new infrastructure (EPAM) where there was a lack of support for the new

influx of rural workers. At one level, this new peripheral community infrastructure aimed to

connect farmers, supply chains, buyers, research institutions, local development agencies

and other institutions. The co-founders believed supporting the new rural workers could

contribute to developing a new agricultural sector specialising in medical and aromatic

herbs (PAM) and be a trigger for wider rural development. On another level, the

infrastructure aimed to produce and circulate social capital, knowledge and social relations

in resistance to the social, economic and environmental breakdown experienced at the rural

periphery. As I elaborate, infrastructure, therefore, is not necessarily a large- scale technical

object (cf. Starr and Ruhleder, 1996), rather, as illustrated by the case, it is an emergent

material and discursive configuration of shifting human and non-human bodies which

materialises and topologically spreads in relational processes of infrastructuring resistance.

I use and develop below the term topological spread to refer to the spatial extension of

infrastructure through infrastructuring. Topological spread, as I use it, describes the

enfolding of infrastructure transgressing boundaries in an ongoing re(con)figuring of space.

I have elaborated this approach elsewhere (Baxter, 2021) spelling-out what I call 'modes of

spread’ to foreground the more-than-human process-relationally between contingent and

intentionally planned aspects of topological spread, and how spreading occurs within a

system and extends it.

In the empirical research presented below, I aim to describe and examine the concept of

infrastructuring. I present and outline the relational process of infrastructuring resistance in

the ongoing materialisation and topological spreading of infrastructure within a wider

ecology. The research is guided by two basic questions, firstly, what are the everyday

material and discursive practices at work in relational processes of infrastructuring in the

case of EPAM? and secondly, how were boundaries transgressed, and in which ways did

this contribute to re(con)figuring space? These questions focus on, firstly, the everyday

material and discursive practices through which infrastructuring is performed and by which

infrastructures materialise and topologically spread. I attend to specific material conditions

and discursive practices which conflict and limit EPAM’s extension. Secondly, I explore how

infrastructures transgress boundaries as they enfold in wider ecologies of infrastructure.

Linked to this, I describe how, in the case, infrastructuring troubles analytical and epistemic

divisions between objects of knowledge and ways of knowing, and thus extending

infrastructures spatial and temporal reach.

I introduce selected elements from Karen Barad’s feminist (new) materialism in order to

theoretically develop the concept of infrastructuring in relation to spatial planning; I then

review infrastructuring as it is emerging in other fields, notably science and technology

studies (STS), anthropology, and urban studies; I describe how the empirical field of my

research was constructed and data collected ethnographically; and then turn to the case of

EPAM to discuss infrastructuring resistance in collective self-organised forms of spatial

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planning. I conclude by considering how these interconnected aspects of infrastructuring

contribute to the ongoing re(con)figuration of space, and whether infrastructuring resistance

to social and environmental breakdown can offer a counterpoint to positivist and spatially

restrictive approaches to “planning for development” founded on neoliberal logics.

Theoretical Framework

2.1 Agential Realism

Karen Barad’s agential realism (1996, 2003, 2006) foregrounds the primacy of relations over

‘relata’, that is, the things we usually expect to be wholly constituted before entering into

relationships. Agential realism can be linked to a process-relational approach in which

relations are the starting point of reality and from which all else emerge. Process-relational

thought provides an alternative to the materialist-idealist dichotomy dominant in western

philosophy, which, either views matter as fundamental and mental processes a by-product,

or, that material relations are secondary to the realm of ideas. In agential realism practices

are the primary unit of analysis and are material (matter) and discursive (meaning).

According to Barad, matter and meaning are mutually constituted and inseparable, where

matter, ‘is not a fixed essence or property of things’, rather it is ‘generated and generative’

(2006: 137), and discursive practices, following Michel Foucault, are ‘the material conditions

that define what counts as meaningful statements’ (ibid: 64). Together, material-discursive

practices in a posthumanist sense ‘are material reconfigurings of the world’ through which

‘boundaries, properties and meanings are differentially enacted’ (151). Performativity, for

Barad, refers to the materialisation of bodies, subjects, objects, spaces and so on (‘relata')

through the ongoing re(con)figuring of relations within more-than-human practices. Barad

elaborates this by showing how apparatuses play a role in the determination of particles or

waves (97-121). Here, the object is not pregiven, but ‘intra-acts’ with the materiality and

discursive knowledge formations constituting the apparatus. Barad offers ‘intra-activity’ to

emphasis the ‘exteriority-within’ practices to overcome the interior-exterior duality inherent

in interactions. Apparatuses extend beyond and trouble boundaries enfolding with material-

discursive practices in unexpected locations. By examining the practices through which

‘differential boundaries are stabilised and destabilised’ (66), Barad calls into question pre-

given categories rejecting, for example, the separation between ways of knowing

(epistemology) and ways of being (ontology). Barad’s ‘onto-epistemology' forms the

theoretical frame for the research presented below. I specifically borrow the concepts of

posthumanist performativity and material-discursive practices to develop an approach to

infrastructuring resistance. Additionally, I lean on Barad’s notion of ‘re(con)figuration’ to

consider how, through the transgression and shifting of boundaries in processes of

infrastructuring, space is materially re-structured, – Barad, brackets ‘con in re(con)figuration

to highlight the notion of ‘with’ or ‘within’. Analytically, therefore, infrastructure territorially

grounds Barad’s apparatus (described above), whilst agential realism, liberates

infrastructures from being rigidly anchored to territorial space and provides a route to think

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how infrastructuring connects to a wider ecology of infrastructures overcoming spatial and

onto-epistemological boundaries.

2.2. From infrastructure to infrastructuring

Infrastructures structure structures, embedded within rather than lying beneath.

Infrastructures are material networks facilitating flows of goods, people, or ideas over space

(e.g. Larkin, 2013) and have been described as large-scale technical objects (Starr and

Ruhleder, 1996). For Shantz (2009), infrastructures of resistance provide frameworks for the

radical re-organization of social relations in a miniature, pre-insurrectionary form. They

prioritise formal and informal social institutions addressing the needs of working-class

communities and include e.g., community centres, housing and shelter, or food shares.

Domanski et al., (2020) point to the double character of infrastructure, recognising it as both

a support system for the development of new ‘bottom-up' social practices and, at the same

time, a new social practice in itself. This remains to be examined, especially in peripheral

contexts. Less well understood are the processual and contingent characteristics of

infrastructures as conflictual relational systems embedded into space (Courtard and

Rutherford, 2016). In this reading infrastructure is a relational process before it is a result

(ibid P.8). Courtard and Rutherford's interpretation edges closer to a process-relational

approach, however it remains a socio-technical assemblage of pregiven components

including ‘technology, actors, skills, knowledge’s, practices, cultural meaning and values,

resources, money, and politics (8). In contrast to technical interpretations of infrastructure,

some approaches in STS and anthropology attend to infrastructure‘s ‘peculiar ontology’

(Larkin, 2013) which consist of 'things and also the relations between things’ (ibid: 329)

serving to highlight the materiality and social connectivity of infrastructures. Further,

infrastructures are sites of ‘ontological experiments’, ‘where multiple agents meet, engage,

and produce new worlds’ raising questions on how to live differently in a more-than-human

world (Jensen and Morita, 2015). Infrastructure is both an object of knowledge and a

knowledge object (e.g. Bowker and Star, 1999), that is, an empirical thing which can be

researched and a conceptual apparatus to think with, troubling the epistemic division

between research object and ways of knowing.

The shift from infrastructure as an assemblage of pre-given material objects towards the

social and discursive processes at work in practices of making and maintaining

infrastructure is further marked by Bowker et al. who convincingly claim infrastructure

‘emerges for people in practice’ and consists of both ‘static and dynamic elements’ (Bowker

et al., 2009), thereby bringing to the fore the emergent quality and partially processual

nature of infrastructure through practices. The material practices and social processes from

which infrastructure emerges are referred to as infrastructuring, first coined by Pipek and

Wulf (2009). The term is used to refer to the affects, ‘practices, materials and settings' (Blok

et al., 2016) of 'doing' (Star and Bowker, 2005), 'creating' (Donovan, 2015) ‘maintaining and

‘redesigning’ (Pipek and Wulf, 2009) infrastructure. That practices play an important role in

the composition of infrastruct

ure

is long recognised, whereby 'infrastructure both shapes

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and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice' (Star and Ruhleder, 1996).

However, this differs from infrastructur

ing

which attends to the everyday ‘material-semiotic

practices’ (Niewöhner, 2015) at work in processes of subjectivation and interpellation

(Niewöhner, 2015). That is to say, what is important is not only how infrastructure emerges

through practices but how these practices, or performances of infrastructuring affect

subject formation.

Shifting focus to everyday material and semiotic practices and subjectivation foregrounds

the material, symbolic and discursive practices at work in power relations and micropolitics

of infrastructuring. This shift, I suggest, brings a posthumanist dimension where “subject”,

“object”, “thing”, “body” and “space” are not stable predetermined categories, but are rather

performed through everyday practices. Infrastructuring, in this way, attends to the complex

relationality that troubles discursive (e.g. categorical) and material boundaries, such as

“object-subject” and “centre-periphery” (Niewöhner, 2015), a point reinforced by Shove (2016)

who describes how flows of materials, knowledge and people in ‘infrastructures-in-use'

complicate territorial boundaries, particularly in urban and rural relations. Niewöhner goes

on to discuss how increasingly in fields of in sociocultural anthropology and STS,

infrastructure is conceived relationally as ‘transient embodiments of social, technical,

political, economic, and ethical choices’ which ‘build up incrementally over time’

(Niewöhner, 2015). Research attends to the performativity of (partial) connections in

relational processes of structure and agency. Perhaps the most fundamental difference to

thinking with infrastructure is considering the performativity or ‘how’ in practices and

process of infrastructuring and the conceptual shift from structure to process. That is, how

structures and agency co-evolve and materialise in more-than-human processes of

infrastructuring. This reinforces the idea that infrastructures structure structures and

making, maintaining and performing infrastructuring lays the groundwork for alternative

conditions and future structures to emerge. Here lies the radical emancipatory potential in

infrastructuring resistance.

Niewöhner coins the term ‘minor infrastructure’ as a decentralised system in which ongoing

infrastructuring work needed to coordinate and maintain infrastructure is distributed in

minor interventions throughout the network thereby ‘forcing an already existing tension

between centre and periphery’ (2015: 6). The risk here is when decentralising fails and the

work is not carried out, infrastructures will collapse, a tension I return to in the case below.

This reconceptualization opens up infrastructures to include humans, ‘where the material

and technological means are minimal and forming support networks and communities

becomes the most important resource' (Niewöhner, 2015: 6) - it could be said,

infrastructuring infrastructures. Minor infrastructuring, Niewöhner argues, ‘tries to imagine

and create the conditions for life’ and, I argue, is an underdeveloped approach which has

productive overlaps with Barad's ‘posthumanist performativity’ (1996) outlined above.

A consequence of the spatial enfolding of infrastructures which is that they may bleed ‘out

of any fixed material location’ crossing obsolete boundaries of the material, the human and

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the social and dissolving distinctions between public or private sector (Bowker et al., 2019:

5). The authors coin the term ‘thinking infrastructure’ to refer to series of interconnected

devices that are joined up to forming a web of ‘material artifacts, material practices and

broader circuits of ideas and visions’ (Ibid: 7). Thinking infrastructures produce knowledge

as much as channel information across ‘multiple settings and multiple temporal scales in

and out of the market, in feedback loops of learning, reformatting and redoing’ (8). This

serves to highlight the spatiality of more-than-human infrastructuring processes whereby

as the boundaries of infrastructures shift, entangle and cross other spatial material and

analytical boundaries, spaces are reorganised and reconfigured. This, I illustrate through the

case, is process relational spatiality, kinetically motivated and temporarily stabilised by the

tension in partial connections and resistances. As infrastructures become increasingly

more spatially complex, mobile, distributed, and entangled in online and offline practices,

Karasti and Blomberg (2018) warn against privileging pre-existing spatial tropes and

suggest specific methodological approaches are required to extend the field beyond a

singular location.

Methodology

As discussed above, infrastructures can be thought in at least three ways, empirically, as an

object of research typically a predetermined large-scale technical object; epistemologically,

as a conceptual apparatus to think with, where empirical phenomena become categorised

as infrastructure through research; thirdly, as boundary objects (Bowker and Starr, 1999)

circulating and participating in the production of knowledge (e.g. Karasti, 2014; Bowker et

al., 2019) and thereby, troubling the discursive boundaries between researcher and object.

Against this background, Karasti and Blomberg consider how to investigate such discursive

infrastructures and processes of infrastructuring as empirical real-world phenomena.

Drawing on methods from STS and anthropology, the authors argue for ‘studying the

heterogenous, extended and complex phenomena of infrastructuring with an emphasis on

the necessarily emerging and open-ended processual qualities of information

infrastructures’ (2018: 2). To this end, they build on the ethnographic approach of

"constructing the field" familiar in social sciences for studying extended and complex

phenomena in processes of infrastructuring. Their methodological approach serves to

remind researchers of their own entanglements in the research through the choices they

make when delineating the object of research, especially complex spatial and temporal

phenomena that extend beyond a single site. Reminiscent of Barad’s onto-epistemology

(see above), this challenges the idea that the field already exists prior to the researcher

entering it and highlights the constructed, or co-constructed nature of the ‘field’ of research

(e.g., Amit 2000). This process of construction relies on the interests, motivations, resources

and opportunities which the researcher has access to. It is therefore a relational process

and a consequence of ‘interactions in the field’ between ethnographer and phenomena

(Karasti and Blomberg, 2018: 11). Constructing the field is relevant to studying the

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emergence of infrastructures whose existence is only partial, however, this requires a

theoretical and methodological flexibility and attentiveness, and a reflexive sensitivity to the

unfolding process which is being studied well suited for the complexity of infrastructuring as

a distributed ‘object’ of inquiry (Ibid).

In the EPAM case, I constructed the field using a multi-sited approach. Focusing on

‘connections and circulations between multiple sites’ (Henriksen, 2002), this mode of

research works to define the object of research which cannot be accounted for in a single

site of investigation (Marcus, 1995). Multi-sited approaches challenge the notion of site as

location (Karasti and Bloomberg, 2018). In the EPAM case, although much of the active

initially centred on, and eventually spread out from the, Alentejo region, it quickly became

apparent that other rural locations were involved as new farms emerged across the country.

Furthermore, as the research developed, it became apparent that rural–urban relations

were significant, or rather the boundaries between the two became more troubled as ex-

urban professionals spread across the country to become PAM farmers bringing with them

particular social capital, in the form of knowledge, recourses, and specific ethical values in

relation to rural space (Baxter, 2021). In this way, delineating the field geographically in

terms of rural or local etc. was problematic. However, Henriksen (2002) includes virtual

sites and distributed objects of research, by studying ongoing process infrastructuring

across multi-sites with both on and offline connectivity, well suited for the case of EPAM.

Data were collected though ethnographic field work during a two-month field stays using

interviews, observations, work placements, home stays, and sending my children to the

local school. 12 sites extended across farms, local development organisation, universities

and crossed spatial boundaries (e.g. farms across several rural regions, consultancies in

metropolitan areas, universities in provincial cities etc.).

A case of Infrastructuring resistance

4.1. EPAM – Infrastructuring peripheral space

As alluded to in the introduction, the new farmers were highly educated often with tertiary

level qualifications, but most had no prior farming experience. PAM farming had been

presented to them as a means to support a new life “closer to nature”, with more equitable

forms of production and labour relations, where home, family and work could be carried out

in close proximity to each other with an increased level of autonomy. Through discourses

and representations in the media, they were led to believe herb farming had low barriers to

entry (e.g. skills, size and type of land, initial capital investment) and could be carried-out

with potentially low maintenance and labour costs. Significantly to the newcomers, herb

farming could be practiced according to organic principles and eco-ethics on small family

farms. Clearly, these groups had a certain level of privilege to be able to even contemplate

making this move. Even with funding, they required economic capital investment of their

own, some, but not all were able to turn to family ties for help. Many had highly developed

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social networks, not least through their education and early professional careers. All of

those I met had accessed EU funding, suggesting an ability to navigate complex socio-

cultural and highly bureaucratic systems.

Quickly it became apparent to EPAM co-founders that the new farmers had inaccurate

information about herb farming in the interior of Portugal. This ranged from inappropriate

equipment and oversized plots to unrealistic expectations about the amount and type of

work involved. Crucially, the anticipated financial yield of their farms had been

overestimated in many cases. Some of these inaccuracies can be traced back to funding

procedures in which grant applications were “carbon copied” by a consultancy which many

new farmers employed to help access the national funding programme. In addition, some

farmers had constructed romantic imaginaries of country life (Baxter, 2021) connected, at

least in part to a renewed interest and idealisation of rural life – a trend further reinforced by

the Covid pandemic which has an increased popularity in rural areas. What the new farmers

lacked in specific knowledge of herb farming (or agriculture more broadly) they made-up for

with specific competencies and know-how cultivated in the city, especially in social media

and digital economy, visual and aesthetic practices, and novel forms of (net)working and

collaborating, modes of production not typically associated with agricultural production in

Alentejo.

Against this background EPAM co-founders realised three things: first, if the new farmers

were to survive they needed to act together and find ways to cooperate and not only

compete; second, in order to achieve the first aim, the disparate farms must be connected

to overcome the territorialising effects of distance, spatial differentiation, and lack of

infrastructure that would otherwise isolate them; third, producing social capital the

constellation could form resistance to the effects of social and environmental breakdown

by, for example, providing services and infrastructure where it was lacking, supporting

small-scale organic farming within traditional landscape structures (e.g. montados),

creating jobs, overcoming the effects of remoteness and social isolation by connecting

farms and farmers together. EPAM co-founders realised if new farmers were connected

infrastructurally, they could combine knowledge and practices cultivated in the city with

better information and resources on farming in the Alentejo, this would generate novel

modes of farming, production, marketing etc., and support an agricultural economy new to

Alentejo. New farms would result in local jobs and opportunities for longer-term local

residents. Furthermore, such new collaborative modes of farming and production carried

out on small family farms according to organic principles, could, so EPAM founders

believed, stand in resistance to large-scale, water-intensive monocultural farming practices

and modes of production spreading across the Alentejo (a wine region and expanding

market attracting investors from abroad).

The co-founder's aim was to link together actors in the sector, e.g. farmers, local

development agencies, universities and researchers in the field- both nationally and

internationally, the ministry of agriculture, international supply chains and buyers etc. They

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did this by installing an infrastructure to share material resources, e.g. farming equipment,

labour, or research and information on farming, but, simultaneously to infrastructure a

discursive web of language, knowledge, common values and social relations. Linking was

done through everyday practices in events and spaces by human and nonhuman bodies,

including organising local meetings, facilitating workshops and training sessions, traveling

to trade expos, etc. These were supported in two ways: firstly, online through e.g. a forum,

an interactive map etc. and, secondly, in meeting rooms, conference spaces, farm kitchens,

public gardens, cafes etc. across the region. The objective was to build and animate a

network which could produce and circulate social capital and knowledge, as well as

providing a system to share material resources e.g. farming equipment, research,

information etc. Through the circulation of material resources social relations were forged.

The system that emerged to facilitate these aims and objectives can, I argue, be described

as a material-discursive infrastructure, which was performed and materialised in processes

of infrastructuring resistance.

I deploy the term resistance to signal the productive, relational process at work in

infrastructuring through which infrastructures materialise and topologically spread. This has

two aspects. Firstly, I describe and analyse infrastructuring as a process constituted by

relations of resistance (and connectivity) in which forces, tensions and dissonances are

threaded through everyday material and discursive practices. The case illustrates how,

through these forces and power differentials infrastructures take shape, spatially and

temporally extend, and enfold with other infrastructural systems and the counterforces that

resist and limit this materialisation. Furthermore, unpacking the idea that infrastructures

structure structures, I argue processes of infrastructuring have the capacity to lay the

groundwork for new ways of living and working

in resistance

to existing structures, material

conditions and hegemonic discursive practices. In this way, the term goes beyond Shantz’s

‘infrastructures of resistance’ (2009). For Shantz infrastructures include material resources

e.g., community centres, housing and shelter, or food shares, whereas, I use the term with

posthumanist sensitivity attending to the performance of everyday material-discursive

practices in the (radical) reorganisation of (social) relations. Furthermore, the approach

presented here shifts focus to the dynamic processes by which infrastructures and the

possibility of new future institutions materialise. The second aspect of infrastructuring

resistance, as I set it out, attends to the ongoing re(con)figuration of peripheral space which

occurs as material and discursive infrastructures take shape, extend and connect with other

systems. I develop this by examining some of the everyday practices performed by which

infrastructure becomes intentionally enfolded with a wider ecology of infrastructure thereby

spatially and temporally extending its reach and transgressing spatial boundaries. However,

not all actions to extend EPAM were successful, as I put forward, infrastructuring is a

relation of resistance and at times the material conditions and competing, or as in the

example below, absent discourses can limit the spatialisation of infrastructure.

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‘In the past in Portugal there used to be this kind of support

from the state which does not happen anymore. So, really, we

are replacing the state.’

EPAM co-founder

4.2. Decentralising

The co-founders describe EPAM as a providing a public service to support farmers and

develop a nascent agricultural sector in Portugal replacing the extended agricultural

services once provided by the ministry of agriculture. These services had since been

terminated as a result of reduced budgets and public spending, and austerity politics. When

I met the EPAM co-founders, the extensive labour required to provide, extend and maintain

a public service which did not receive direct funding from the state was becoming

overwhelming. The main actors had other projects and responsibilities and needed to focus

on revenue generating work to support themselves. This meant much of the work required

to develop, manage and maintain EPAM was done outside of work hours, voluntarily and

usually late into the night. Nonetheless, the founders continued to reject the idea of

monetising EPAM e.g. through membership or paywalls, and in line with the self-view of

providing a public service, they refused to adopt a singular discursive identity e.g. through

marketing and branding. Instead, the co-founders preferred to provide a background

infrastructure to support farmers with the aim to collectivise, decentralise and extend the

operation and maintenance of EPAM between the users, predominantly farmers who are

the main beneficiaries. This had three aims: firstly, to share the material burden of providing

a public infrastructure which was under resourced, lacking ongoing state support and

funding; secondly, ideologically, to empower the farmers to take control of the infrastructure

and direct it for themselves; thirdly, politically, by decentralising control and decision-

making across the infrastructure, in this way EPAM could extend it’s reach more effectively

than with centralised control.

However, collectivising, decentralising and thereby extending infrastructure proved difficult

in EPAM for the following reasons. Firstly, a lack of visibility and recognition by farmers that

they were using EPAM meant they undervalued its relevance and effectiveness and were

therefore less inclined to participate in its management and maintenance. Farmers

reported an ambivalence to EPAM, suggesting they didn't really know what it was, or they

didn’t use it except occasionally visiting the website. However, it transpired in conversations

with the same farmers that they often attended events organised by EPAM unbeknown to

them, which they reported as useful to market their products and develop national and

international business networks. Those with closer relationships to the founders, however,

were more aware of the services EPAM provided, and were also more active in its

development, management and maintenance. In this way, EPAM is reminiscent of what

Neiwöhner describes as a ‘minor infrastructure’, in which infrastructuring work is often

invisible and where minor task are distributed through the system (2015).

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Secondly, a division of labour between desk- and web-based work and agricultural labour

meant farmers could not easily switch between tasks and different projects. For example,

even switching between weeding with gloves on to using a mobile phone to take a call or

check messages was impractical. As a result, much of the desk- and web-based work was

done in the evenings, usually after long days working in the fields. This time was usually

reserved for administration or product marketing leaving little time and energy for

additional collective tasks, even though many could see the benefits of a collective project.

Thirdly, there was a scepticism of formalised cooperatives amongst some of the new young

farmers. After the 1974 revolution, especially in rural areas like Alentejo, the popularity of

the communist party, and the social innovations of work place takeovers and self-

management cooperatives spread across the region (Valera, 2019). Farming cooperatives

are still prevalent in traditional agricultural sectors e.g., olive production, despite this,

support for the communist party and the associated collective initiatives has steadily

decreased in the region. In principle, younger farmers associated with PAM support a loose

form of collaborative action, but, at least for now, they are reluctant to institutionalise these

relations. At least for some new farmers, cooperatives are associated with traditional

agricultural practices, which, for number of reasons including ecological impacts of

traditional farming and use of chemical fertilizers, they have distanced themself from

(Baxter 2021). Alentejo has is a strong history and culture of radical social innovation (in the

post 1974 period), but remains (temporally) disconnected to new forms of collaborative

action, and may even be stigmatised by younger actors. It was suggested to me, by an early

pioneer in the PAM sector that, young farmers are not ‘emotionally’ connected to that

political tradition and culturally lacked the ‘vocabulary’ which united workers in the past.

Arguably, by not overtly connecting to the political history of the region, EPAM founders by-

passed an opportunity to ground contemporary collective action in an existing cooperative

tradition by tapping into a forgotten and temporarily absent discourse. Through a process-

relational perspective, such extension may have provided a connection to a historic

infrastructure (of resistance) struggling to temporally spread and (re)materialise, in an

ongoing albeit interrupted process.

Fourthly, I suggest there is dissonance between the ideology of providing collectively

managed and decentralised infrastructure and the logics of the market which were

inadvertently engineered into the system early on. For example, on one hand, EPAM was

built on conventional rural development logics of growth and job creation. It aimed to

support capital relations between farmers and buyers, indeed overtly EPAM’s aim was to

establish and support the growth of a new PAM market in Portugal, on the other hand, it

rejected relations of capital in its own constitution and did not aim to produce, circulate or

extract money capital from users insofar as it was conceived as a public service. Rather, it

supported an alternative economy producing and circulating social capital, knowledge and

social relations.

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‘I organise the training session on the same day as I also

organise a local meeting because I think the local meeting of

the stakeholders is much more important than the workshop

itself....Yes, it dictates what I can do, but I try to do different

things and in an innovative way to continue doing what I think

it’s basic and needed.’

EPAM co-founder

4.3. (En)folding

Reading EPAM's actions as relational processes of infrastructuring in resistance to the

material conditions and pervasive (or absent) discourses, sheds light on the dynamic

(en)folding of infrastructures. There were limited resources available for EPAM’S

infrastructuring work in Portugal post 2008 and the aim to decentralise and collectivise the

infrastructure to offset these deficiencies was resisted. The resistance met by the co-

founders meant that other tactics needed to be pursued in order to maintain and extend

EPAM. Finance was important. To this end, the co-founders sought structural funding from

the European Union. Securing new funding requires much work in its own right, as does the

bureaucracy entailed in managing and reporting public funding especially at EU level. For

example, the short-term ‘project-ification’ of new EU funding models did not support longer

term infrastructuring work being carried out by EPAM. This meant that securing funding,

where it was possible, was fragmented which in turn affected the continuity of EPAM’s

infrastructuring work. In response to this, the co-founders develop creative ways to fold

existing long term infrastructural projects, such as EPAM, into many new short-term

projects. This had the effect of both spatially and temporally extending EPAM as

connections and alliances were made with new actors and institutions, and with other

infrastructures nationally and internationally e.g., European science, research and

innovation infrastructures.

However, new funding would cover specific workshops and training sessions, but not basic

financial support for ongoing infrastructuring work essential to EPAMs programme. The co-

founders knew from experience that it was in these ongoing events valuable social

interactions and trust building occurred. Important events not funded by grants (e.g., regular

local meetings) were folded into events (e.g., workshops or training) supported by the EU

grant. This may be described as tactical resourcing. However, in order to maintain basic

funding, the co-founders ended up doing work that they felt was not central to the

development of EPAM an which effected the direction and co-evolution of the programme.

Such tactical resourcing makes new alliances with actors and institutions in other locations,

disciplines and fields spatial and temporally spreading infrastructure beyond an immediate

context. During the EU Horizon2020 funded project RurAction, EPAM founders partnered

with international research institutions across Europe. Researchers were hosted by the co-

founders and research made on the project. Journal articles were published and

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presentations delivered at conferences. These discursive practices served to further

establish and topologically spread EPAM. Moreover, some researchers continue to work

with the co-founders to develop EPAM and connected projects. Reminiscent of Barad’s

agential realist apparatus (discussed above), spatial boundaries and discursive boundaries

between empirical research object and research apparatus shift as knowledge is co-

produced and circulated across the usual analytical division emphasising the open-ended

processual qualities of infrastructuring resistance as trans-local connectivity is made. This

illustrates the nonlinear enfolding of infrastructures within a wider ecology through specific

material-discursive practices e.g., making alliances, tactical resourcing, folding events into

one another etc. in an ongoing re(con)figuring of spaces. Arguably the performance of

enfolding infrastructures is high risk and requires significant energy and will on the part of

those doing the infrastructuring work, but, as the case illustrates when well executed it has

high potential to significantly spatial and temporally extend infrastructure beyond an

immediate context by re(con)figuring and transgressing material and discursive boundaries.

‘Learning with mistakes and doing it again, and again.’

New farmer

4.4. Performing

I argue infrastructuring in EPAM is a relational process of resistance and connectivity, on

one hand resisting the material conditions, social and environmental processes, and

discursive practices through which territorial structures emerge e.g., divisions of labour,

geographic distance, water scarcity and monocultural agriculture, cultural traditions,

dominant (market orientated) discourse, and lack of an alternative vocabulary. On the

other, by making connections and alliances boundaries inscribing infrastructures are

continually reconfigured and topologically enfolded with other spatialities and temporalities

(e.g. research and science infrastructures, international supply chains, and the materialites,

locations and actors embroiled in these systems etc.). Infrastructuring in this way is a

spatial and temporal counter process in resistance to dominant socio-environmental

processes, material conditions and discursive knowledge practices through which

infrastructures are performed. In turn, performing resistance is supported by the

infrastructures which materialise in infrastructuring work. For example, as indicated above,

at a very basic level EPAM’s infrastructure consist of discrete but interconnected spatio-

temporal events in the form of local meetings.

Meetings in EPAM are intermittent events for people to talk where members share ideas,

get to know each other, share problems, solutions, and mistakes, during which time trust is

built. In this way, informal meetings provide a spatial encounter where weak ties and new

alliances are made. They support the making of social relations which leads to the co-

production and circulation of social capital, knowledge, and in turn, the topological spread of

infrastructure as it enfolds with other spatialites. In this way, I argue events are a

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fundamental component to infrastructure, and the everyday material-discursive practices of

which events are composed, both organisationally in their construction and which occur

within their intermittent spatio-temporality are part of the performativity of infrastructuring.

There are two types of meetings in EPAM, those held ‘at-a-distance' using digital

technologies supporting trans-local interaction, and those where bodies are co-present in

the same place at the same time. These can be distinguished as ‘embodied co-presence’

and ‘trans-local' meetings. Embodied co-present meetings are a basic component of

infrastructure as they support connectivity much like a relay between circuits, and in this

way, as connections are made between actors, they themselves become part of a discursive

channel producing and supporting flows of social capital and knowledge. Put differently,

human actors interact with other human and non-humans e.g., furniture, meeting-places,

spatial atmospheres, data and contact request information, food etc. in intermittent spatio-

temporal events where “meeting” takes place. Co-present meetings are repetitive: formats

are similar, members return, they are situated and participants (human and non) are

spatially co-present. Here bodies interact e.g., eyes meet, hands are shaken, food is shared

– important aspects to build relations of trustfulness. Building trust takes work and is joint

performances by bodies-in-action in co-presence (Urry, 2003). Embodied co-present events

are inscribed by everyday material-discursive practices which are also repetitive (e.g.,

collecting participant data, circulating information, hosting meetings). It is through this

repetition and corporeality that “thick” connectivity is made, and in so doing the labour of

infrastructuring performed. It is in the more-than-human performance of infrastructuring

that infrastructures – composed of material-discursive practices – inscribing and delineating

space.

Trans-local meetings

provide a different rhythm and spatiality. Where embodied co-

presence requires additional time, labour and technologies for people to travel

simultaneously to other places, trans-local meeting requires other competencies,

technologies, infrastructures and practices e.g. an internet connection, IT hardware and

software, IT competencies etc. EPAM’s trans-local interaction occurs online through a web

platform which includes a forum, a marketplace, an online map with shared contact

information, list of relevant institutions, a notice board with a schedule of upcoming events,

a news page, and a repository of research and information on PAM etc. In this way, and in

contrast to being co-present, meeting others does not (necessary) occur simultaneously or

in the same place. As indicated above, most farmers would tend to go online in the

evenings from their home offices, in this way overcoming the barrier of distance and lack of

transport infrastructure, material conditions characteristic of peripheral rural space which

limits the frequency of meeting in co-presence. It was suggested that meeting in the

different modalities (trans-local and co-present) served different purposes and in this way,

one could not replace the other. For example, where embodied co-presence could provide

thick connectivity only intermittently, online communication was always available but

asynchronous and dis-embodied. We might say that these circuits had different rhythms,

where trans-local online events provide a regular pattern sending a repetitious signal across

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the infrastructure, letting others know it is still in operation though ‘last seen’ or ‘recent

posts’. Whereas, the co-presence of bodies requires more labour in peripheral landscapes

and therefore such events are less frequent. But these events tend to last longer, even up to

a few days in special cases, and are full of sensory performativity– embracing, eating

together, handling plants, soil and equipment, sampling each other’s latest herbal products

etc.

Meeting is the basic repetitive spatial and temporal component of infrastructure and the

work required to organise and perform meetings and events is part of a relational processes

of infrastructuring resistance and connectivity. It is in these spatio-temporal events

constituted by, and shot through with multiple everyday material practices those norms,

values and vocabularies are co-produced, empathy is enacted, relations of trust made, and

ultimately infrastructure performed. As infrastructure is performed through a process of

infrastructuring and in the interaction between human and non-humans in material-

discursive practice, people become a part of infrastructure as both destination and pathway.

This occurred in multiple ways in EPAM, for example, as farmers became embroiled in rural

development politics at the point of accessing EU funding, they became numbers in

bureaucratic procedures and conduits for circulating risk and money capital. Or, and more

subtly, EPAM’s objective was to utilise the well-distributed farmers as a framework for rural

development creating jobs and circulating social and human capital through the region.

And again, as co-founders and other members circulated through the landscape making

connections, organising and hosting meetings, and ultimately building social relations and

trustfulness.

Conclusion

Rural spaces are considered to be structurally weak as a result of economic, social, political

and environmental process leading to spatial differentiation, for example remoteness from

urban centres, or relative isolation from other places regionally or globally. Market-oriented

spatial development and planning regimes aim to overcome these effects with policies

supporting economic growth, innovation, entrepreneurialism and competitiveness etc., for

example, where tenable, absorbing rural space into urban economies. While such policies

may benefit localities in proximity to urban centres, by the same move, they may serve to

reinforce spatial differentiation and social inequality experienced at the periphery, especially

in sites which have suffered from long term disinvestment in public services and

infrastructure.

However, when considered outside of neoliberal planning and development logics the

socio-spatial characteristics which distinguish periphery from centre may provide the

material conditions for alternative futures to emerge. As the EPAM case illustrates, to be

effective, peripheral space requires (re)structuring and communities must build alliances

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and make connections with likeminded actors, social innovations and movements, and

institutions in other localities by transgressing multiple boundaries. This requires new

infrastructures founded on entirely different logics. I argue shifting focus from

infrastructures as state-controlled or privately-owned large-scale technical objects to

relational processes of infrastructuring provides a novel conceptual framework attending to

the (re)structuring, or re(con)figuration of peripheral space through the emergence and

topological spread of what I call, material-discursive infrastructures.

As the paper illustrates, infrastructuring is a dialectical process at work in the resistance

between competing forces. One of its characteristics is the intra-action between human

intentionally and contingent more-than-human forces. For example, on one hand, the

EPAM co-founders aimed to support a new agricultural economy based on social values

and solidarity, while on the other, their desires to decentralise and redistribute agency

within the community were met by resistance from other forces (e.g. a lack of visibility,

divisions of labour, scepticism etc.). Despite this, tensions and dissonances are co-

productive, (albeit not in a fully intentional mode), and through competing forces material-

discursive infrastructures take shape and inscribe spaces enfolding infrastructures

anchored to other sites (e.g. science and research infrastructures). In this way new

connections are built extending reach and facilitating new alliances. Engaging a process-

relational perceptive, I refer to this spatial and temporal extension by which spaces are

re(con)figured as topological spread.

Material-discursive infrastructures are not constructed in the same way as state-controlled

or privately-owned large-scale technical systems. Rather, through for example, repertoires

of parasitising and borrowing etc. they temporarily piggyback and absorb other systems

(e.g., farms, public gardens, etc.). They are sustained through subversive practices such as

tactical resourcing, albeit practices which have consequences on the co-evolution and

materialisation of infrastructure, as the case depicts. A further and significant difference is

that infrastructuring is performative; a process in which humans and non-humans are

assembled in events (e.g. informal meetings) effectively becoming constituent parts of

infrastructure. Spatio-temporal events (after Whitehead, 1987), are bounded segments

temporarily cut-off from the ongoing re(con)figuring of space and are inscribed by everyday

practices (e.g., organising and hosting). Events are a basic component of material-

discursive infrastructures.

Nonetheless, for infrastructuring to be part of effective process-relational space-making

repertoire it requires interaction with existing institutions and planning authorities. Planning

agencies can support this process by providing material infrastructures to be borrowed and

absorbed, for example, lending spaces for events including meetings on long-term basis,

and providing basic funding to cover hospitality and maintenance costs of meeting rooms

etc. Furthermore, trans-local planning networks which already connect actors and

institutions in other sites can be used to make alliances with infrastructuring processes

elsewhere. Extending across global sites to connect with entirely different places in different

131

but entangled struggles engages with what Cindi Katz calls, ‘countertopography’ (2011).

Taking this further, I suggest by shifting attention from “planning for development” to a

concept of infrastructuring resistance as I have sketched-out above, provides a novel

approach to spatial planning applicable to sites not only at geographic peripheries, but

those spatial differentiated through similar exclusionary processes in urban spaces.

Following Barad’s notion of ‘exteriority-within’, we might think of these in terms of

peripheries-within. To understand more about infrastructuring resistance trans-locally in

other sites, and whether similar practices are required to resist situated material conditions

experienced in other localities, or how boundaries are transgressed, and connections and

alliances made in other ways, further empirical studies are required.

Social and environmental breakdown is experienced in different but interconnected ways in

multiple sites across the world. In this paper I have demonstrated that a planning focus on

infrastructure as material, large-scale technical objects is, by itself, inadequate to account

for contingent, self-organised more-than-human relational process at work in the

re(con)figuration of peripheral space. I have introduced and empirically explored the

concept of infrastructuring in a case study from rural Portugal and illustrated the benefits of

thinking with infrastructuring to foreground the material power relations, discursive

practices, and more-than-human forces, tensions and conflicts at work in resistance to

interlinked socio-spatial problems with a process-relational approach to space.

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Article four

From Urban Living Labs towards Sites of Unity: Decolonizing knowledge in spatial design and

urban research using critical reflexivity.

Author

Jamie-Scott Baxter

Publication Status

International peer-reviewed article. Accepted with revisions 16th March 2022 in Nordic Journal of

Urban Studies (Scandinavian University Press). This is an original manuscript of an article

published by Scandinavian University Press in Nordic Journal of Urban Studies published on 24th

November 2022. https://doi.org/10.18261/njus.2.2.3. Article published as: “From Urban Living Labs

towards Critical Spatial Design: Decolonising Knowledge in Urban Design and Planning Using

Critical Reflexivity”

Key words

Urban planning, Knowledge, Hybridity, Epistemologies of the South, Critical spatial design theory

Abstract

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are valorised for their participatory and user-centred processes which

combines research and innovation in “real-life” communities and settings. They embrace different

forms of knowledge by engaging diverse stakeholders, while promoting “experimentation” in

knowledge production. ULLs provide an ideal ecosystem to integrate analytical urban research

with action-orientated architectural design to creatively and collaboratively shape urban futures.

However, while urban researchers, designers, and policy makers have readily adopted the ULLs,

there has been surprisingly little critical reflection on the epistemological assumptions

underpinning the approach. This is a critique ever more urgent as ULLs spread globally and

become a powerful tool in the context of knowledge production and urban innovation processes

in the global South.

The article sets out to problematise ULLs through postcolonial theory in order to unearth the

epistemic foundations that structure ways of knowing and subsequent courses of action. Critical

reflexivity is engaged to analyse methodologically the ULL approach through the example of an

integrated urban research and architectural design lab in the UK, with which the author was

closely involved. With recourse to the literature, the analysis critically reflects on: (1) the

epistemological assumptions that structure ways of knowing and subsequent courses of action

embedded in ULLs; and (2) the un/intentional reproduction of oppressive structures in ULLs. The

article concludes by marking a path towards a new approach to ULLs founded on decoloniality.

'Sites of unity’ support ecologies of knowledges, modes of situated un/re-learning and critical

hybridity which integrate urban research and architectural design in a novel, critical spatial design

praxis.

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From Living Labs to Sites of Unity: Decolonizing

knowledge in spatial design and urban research using

critical reflexivity

Introduction

In the context of contemporary crises of human-environment relations and planetary health, the

Urban Living Laboratory (ULL) approach is being (re)discovered and valorised as a‘user-centred’

and ‘participatory’ apparatus capable of affecting transformative change in cities in the global

South and North (cf. Lupp et al., 2021; Steen & van Bueren, 2017). Defined by an ‘experimental’

approach to collecting data and ‘co-creating’ innovative solutions in ‘real-life’ settings (cf. ENoLL,

2016), ULLs rely strongly on transdisciplinary ways of knowing and doing, bringing urban

researchers, design and planning practitioners, and urban dwellers together to generate new

ideas, knowledge, practices, and solutions in relation to complex urban problems. ULLs, so it

would seem, provide an ideal format to integrate analytical urban research with solution-

orientated design to creatively and collaboratively shape future urban ecologies. However, while

international agencies, city administrators, policymakers, universities, businesses, urban

researchers, planners, designers, and artists have readily adopted ‘urban labs’ (e.g. UN-Habitat

Urban Lab), the approach has received relatively little critical attention in comparison to other

forms of participatory and co-design in urban planning and innovation (cf. Huybrechts et al., 2020;

Krivý and Kaminer, 2013; Schalk, 2014). A critique is ever more urgent as ULLs spread globally,

transporting ways of knowing and doing grounded in ideologies derived from the global North to

become powerful tools in knowledge production and transformative urban processes in the

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Global South. This has urged some researchers to question the appropriateness of living labs and

through the imperative to decolonise knowledge, to call for a shift from living labs to sites of unity

(Kelemu, 2020).

Joining this call, the paper seeks to problematise the relations between urban living labs and the

spread of neoliberal urban development, planning practices and discourses, asking: what are the

power relations and epistemological presumptions that structure and undergird the ULL

approach, methodology, and forms of organisation in urban design and participative planning

processes? By engaging the Critical Reflexivity methodology (Idahosa and Bradbury, 2020), to

critically self-reflect and analyse the case of an integrated urban research and design lab in the

UK with which this author was intimately involved, the paper aims to show how colonialism,

capitalism, and patriarchy – what Santos (2018) calls ‘epistemologies of the north’ structure the

ideologies underpinning urban living labs. The Neighbourhoods Made living lab was set up by

academics and practitioners (predominantly White men) to support participatory neighbourhood

planning processes in non-metropolitan regions in England. The paper seeks to understand how

we can begin to unlearn the Western epistemology that structures ways of knowing and doing so

as to meet the challenge of combining a diagnostic mode of inquiry found in critical urban

research with a solution-oriented mode of action in spatial design, the aim of this special issue.

This results in reframing the problem and opens a new horizon for a critical spatial design praxis

as a novel hybrid approach (Baxter et al., 2020) suitable for reformatting ULLs on the path

towards sites of unity, in which discourses of experimentation and innovation are exchanged for a

politics of solidarity and practices of conviviality guided by feminist relational ethics of response-

ability (Barad 2007, Haraway 2016). The article is structured as follows: Firstly, I will discuss the

assumptions which have structured the development of the living lab approach, in particular

foregrounding the entanglement between scientific discourse and neoliberal urban development

agenda expressed, for example, in the private-public organisation of living labs. The discussion

extends to include the spread of living labs internationally and their recent (re)discovery as

instruments for research, innovation, development, and transformation in the global South. Next,

I will introduce the post/decolonial theory of Bonaventure de Sousa Santos to contextualise and

elucidate how science and development grounded in Western epistemology continues to

perpetuate colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in the global South and North. Santos provides

the theoretical tools required to rethink and decolonize knowledge and practices ULLs. Following

on, I will introduce the methodology which guides the critical reflexive analysis of the case. From

here I will introduce the case of Neighbourhoods Made living lab in more detail and critically

reflect on the assumptions and epistemology underpinning the practices, behaviours, and

motivations. I will conclude by reviewing the limitations of the research and laying out a path

toward ‘sites of unity’ grounded in a hybrid mode of critical spatial design and highlight the

problems which still need to be addressed for future research.





Living Labs

Living labs date back to the 1990s when a group of urban researchers at MIT Media Lab and

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School of Architecture began to experiment with teaching methods in urban neighbourhoods

addressing “real-life” problems faced locally. Bajgier et al. first described students’

experimentation with a problem-solving approach in inner-city neighbourhoods as a ‘living

laboratory’ (1991, p. 701). Living labs have since spread internationally with many counties,

institutions, cities, and localities adopting the approach. In 2006 the Helsinki Manifesto which set

out a strategy for ‘human-centric’ competition and innovation in Europe referred to Living Labs as

the first step in a ‘new paradigm in European research design and innovation (RDI) System’ (EU,

2006). The central ambition was to streamline and pool resources by combining private and

publicly funded research, development, and innovation in new strategic policy and initiatives

(e.g. EU’s ‘Innovation Union’) geared toward new products and services to meet market demands

through private-public partnerships. An approach which continues to shape EU funding programs

e.g. Horizon 2020 and Smart Specialisation Strategies. The Helsinki Manifesto constituted the

European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), a membership-based network of international Living

labs funded by EU Research and Innovation (EU, 2006). ENoLL positions itself as an international

benchmark for living labs certifying member labs in the network. It defines living labs as ‘user-

centred, open innovation ecosystems based on systematic user co-creation approach, integrating

research and innovation processes in real-life communities and settings’ (ENoLL, n.d.). Even

though there is no consensus on a singular definition of ULL (cf. Leminen, 2015), in their

systematic review of ULL literature Steen and van Bueren (2017) note that many of the cases in

the articles they reviewed adopt ENoLL’s definition.



Urban Living Labs

Urban living labs root participatory objectives and user-centred open-innovation processes in

urban environments. Cities and neighbourhoods become the loci of experiments ‘to develop, try

out and test innovative urban solutions in a real-life context’ (Steen & Van Bueren, 2017, p. 5).

According to Lepp and colleagues' extensive review (2020), ULL's common goals include: ‘co-

creation of knowledge’, ‘participation’, ‘user-centred', ‘design’ and ‘solutions’ and more recently

‘transition' and ‘transformative change’. ULLs leverage collaborative methods and participative

planning approaches to engage actors across fields, disciplines, sectors, and social groups

around shared urban problems towards ‘local sustainable solutions addressing wicked problems’

often associated with sustainable and economic development (Steen & Van Bueren, 2017). Based

on a literature review of empirical research, Nesti (2018) sets out three main characteristics of

ULLs, including co-creation, cooperation, and open innovation. ULLs utilise co-creation, including

co-design methods, to understand the needs of local people and places and to generate novel

solutions. Learning occurs as experimental solutions are tested in “real-life” urban situations. In

addition, citizens and other stakeholders participate in co-design methods and in decision-

making processes. Utilising co-design and participative methods and engaging multiple

stakeholders and multi-sectoral actors is characteristic of the “open” innovation process within

ULLs. The formalisation of knowledge through the dissemination of ‘lessons learnt’ is what sets

ULLs apart from other similar urban innovation systems (Steen & Van Bueren, 2017). Specifically,

in the context of spatial and urban planning, knowledge relates to e.g. urban plans, interventions,

spatial development strategies, neighbourhood development processes, community design and

planning, etc.



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Nordic Urban Living Labs

Nordic Urban Living Labs (NULL) was developed by the Nordic Council of Ministers through the

organisation Nordic Innovation. The aim of the council (consisting of Denmark, Finland, Iceland,

Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland was to ‘make the Nordic region the

most sustainable and integrated region in the world’ (Norden n.d.). Nordic Innovation promotes

‘sustainable growth… entrepreneurship, innovation and competitiveness in Nordic businesses’

(nordicinnovation/about us, n.d.). To meet these objectives 14 Nordic cities have implemented

NULL to ‘become smarter, more sustainable, and more liveable cities’ (nordicinnovation/urban

living labs n.d.). In this context, Nordic ULLs are used to accelerate business by working with

start-ups and smaller companies ‘to test and develop solutions in real-life settings’ (Ibid). The

main partnership is between city administration and businesses with the hope to attract more

companies and investment to the Nordic region.



The underlying assumptions of Nordic Innovation and the Nordic ULL program are clearly market

innovation-led and growth-oriented. These assumptions and ideologies are in line with the

trajectory ULLs in Europe have taken as supported by the Helsinki Manifesto and promotional and

regulatory networks such as EnoLL. In fact, Nordic Innovation funded its own regional ULL

network project between 2018 and 2020 in association with the Nordic Smart City network. The

focus of the Nordic ULL network was ‘to develop best practices for living labs and urban

development’ across the region (nscn/city labs, n.d.). Interestingly the participative and user-

centred rhetoric central to other definitions and discourses in Europe is much less prominent in

the Nordic ULL network. ‘Collaboration’ does appear, but it becomes evident that the intention is

to stimulate partnerships between countries and cities and between businesses. Arguably, the

ULL discourse being established and spread by the Nordic Council of Ministers through Nordic

ULL focuses much less on co-creation and inclusion of citizens and is more geared toward

attracting private investment into (smart) city development solutions, e.g. digital wayfinding

products (Helsinki), smart bins (Reykjavik), collecting pedestrian an cyclist mobility data

(Copenhagen).



This specific Nordic ULL orientation is supported by other projects in the region. For example, the

‘Living Labs Methodology Handbook’, an output from Transnational Nordic Smart City Living Lab

Pilot (SmartIES) between 2010-2012, aimed to exchange, analyse, and disseminate knowledge on

Smart City Living Lab pilot initiatives across the region. The lab's thematic focus was energy in

households and transportation. The project and handbook define living labs as both an

environment and methodology ‘to support the innovation process for all involved stakeholders,

from manufacturers to end-users, with special attention to SMEs and a focus on potential users’

(Ståhlbröst and Holst, 2012 p.1). Another example of a regional living lab network is Nordic

Business and Living Lab Alliance 2015-2018 which aimed at ‘creating an ecosystem for Nordic

collaboration between municipalities and companies’ (livinglaballiace, n.d.). The thematic focus

was on testing and scaling health and care products and services. The alliance was also funded

by Nordic Innovation.

This suggests a strong relationship between the desire to promote the Nordic Region as an

integrated, sustainable and highly innovative region through a specific orientation and active

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dissemination of a ULL approach blending ‘smartness’, ‘technology’, ‘future orientation’ and

business-city partnerships in urban development to make Nordic cities and the region as a whole

attractive to global investment. There are other examples of localised ULL across the region

which do not actively promote all these aims, the example of Malmo ULL embraces participation

between research, design, municipalities, and urban inhabitants. But, at an institutional level,

supported by the resources and capacities of powerful organisations such as Nordic Innovation,

there does appear to be a desire to gear ULLs towards a neoliberal vision of urban governance

and development strategy expressed strongly in business-city administration relations.



Experimentation and Ethics in Living Labs

Thinking through the ethics of experimentation in living labs, Taylor (2020) differentiates between

bottom-up ‘citizen-driven’ labs and commercial ‘data-driven’ labs, sighting her critical analysis on

the latter. Taylor rightly argues that the behaviour of academic researchers is governed by (an

imperfect) code of ethics to protect those engaged in their research projects. Research ethics

provides a ‘sceptical lens on power and authority with practical tools for governing action’ (p.1910).

The argument is made that research carried out in data-driven living labs should not be exempt

from ethics, rather there should be an obligation to ensure users and their behaviours expressed

through their data, do not unwittingly become the object of experimental research without the

necessary protective measures. Taylor remarks on how living labs turn towards a ‘public-private

technology partnership as a mode of intervention on the community’ without any corresponding

accountability (p.1910). The article sets out a series of measures aiming to protect residents and

provide an ethical approach to research and innovation in public-private partnerships living labs,

including regulation by city authorities, research contracts between city and lab, and time limits to

project and data collection so urban dwellers can manage their expectations and know when they

are part of a research program or not. Although Taylor levels her critique at the commercial ‘data-

driven’ living lab, the point of an ethical approach to experimentation is, I would suggest valid for

ULLs engaged in urban development with research and innovation. Specifically, ethics in ULLs

may provide a lens on power and legitimacy in the co-production of knowledge and intervention

in urban space asking who is ultimately responsible in complex multi-stakeholder relationships.



Power relations and politics in living labs

That participatory processes in urban planning do not necessarily lead to social and political

equality, democratic decision-making, or the reconfiguration of power relations is acknowledged

in the wider planning literature. Krivý and Kaminer identify a ‘participatory turn’ in urban planning

which can be traced back to the radical social and political movements of the 1960s. The authors

argue that these forms of participation, underpinned by progressive social ideologies have since

been diluted by commercial, individualistic, capitalist interests. Demands for legitimate forms of

sovereignty and the decentralisation of power have been cooped by neoliberal ideologies of

freedom and so bypass the main aim of the original movement which was, ‘to give voice to the

subaltern and expanding political equality’ (Krivý and Kaminer 2013 p. 2). The authors go on to

argue that often even well-meaning urban designers, planners, and architects engaged in

facilitating participatory processes overlook the fact that diverse forms of participation correspond

to diverse democratic political theories. Lacking this contextualisation, they rightly suggest, risks

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failing to consider beyond the immediate and visible impacts of participation. Or worse,

unwittingly reproducing the power asymmetries and injustices that they hoped to overcome.

These insights, I suggest, work to further the argument for a more profound relationship between

design and critical thinking associated with, urban studies in which power and politics are central

concerns[jsb1] . However, whereas power and the (post) politics of participatory and co-design

processes (Huybrechts et al. 2020, Schalk, 2014) have received critical attention in the literature,

as inherent features of living labs they have tended to be overlooked. Exceptions to this include

Mangan et al. (2009) who show how ‘sense-making’ and ‘negotiation' are significant attributes of

communication between diverse actors in living labs. With Foucault’s knowledge/power work, the

authors argue that these techniques made use of my specific ‘knowledge brokers’ must be

understood as a political act and inescapable from power relations. Whereas Hillgren, a designer,

and colleagues (2016) take a more optimistic view of power relations in urban living labs arguing,

with the case of Malmo’s ULL, power asymmetries are addressed through participatory design

which enabled ‘weaker voices’ in minority groups to be heard thereby overcoming 'social

exclusion of urban actors’. Participatory design can give a platform for some urban dwellers to

voice opinions in (already restricted forms of) urban development, whether this is a measure of

overcoming social exclusion and the oppressive structures that continue to reproduce social

inequality is debatable. This example also serves to illustrate the difference between how critical

urban research and design disciplines tend to grapple with power. Where urban research makes

use of theoretical tools (e.g. Foucault’s power/knowledge) to analyse power relations, design

tends to seek to overcome (some) power asymmetries by using participatory or co-design

techniques. This begs the question, can design alone without the conceptual tools available to

urban research reveal and then go on to address the politics and power relations that structure

social exclusion in the manifold everyday practices in which inequality is reproduced? Moreover,

what power relations structure living labs themselves? This question is addressed by Segenet

Kelemu who points to how Africa has long fascinated ‘researchers, innovators and investors

earning the continent the moniker of a “living laboratory”’ (2021: p.3). Kelemu claims this

discourse has perpetuated extractivist practices by international ‘experts’ and the subjugation of

African researchers to data collectors or local facilitators. To remedy this, Kelemu calls for the

decolonisation of knowledge in an international effort toward socially just transformation. This

requires a plurality of thought by mainstreaming marginalised geo-histories and ways of

knowing. Or, as Santos points out, to engender meaningful transformative change ‘learning a

certain kind of knowledge may imply unlearning another kind of knowledge (2018: p. 40).



The focus on cooperatively problematising urban situations and generating novel solutions to

real-life problems in open innovation processes would suggest ULLs present an ideal

environment to nurture productive relations between urban research and spatial

design. However, what is often overlooked in the rapid take-up of ULLs is a critical appraisal of

the assumptions, ideologies and epistemologies that underpin them. As the literature indicates,

organisations such as the EU funded ENoLL serve to spread a specific definition and discourse of

ULLs which support private-public partnerships and connect experimentation with research and

urban development embedded in participatory and user-centred rhetoric. Looking at the

definitions and wording of policy documents and reports by high-level supporters of the ULL

approach, such as ENoLL, it is evident that innovation and urban development are geared toward

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neoliberal marketisation and economic growth and that this is intended as an international

approach towards “transformation”. Built into the blueprint of ULLs is an approach closely

associated with forms of new public management and neoliberalism which orientate public

service provision towards the market through public-private partnerships and economic growth.



This section has indicated some of the contestations in the ULL approach by unearthing the

assumptions and motivations that underpin ULL definitions being spread globally. ULLs in this

mode are recognised as being problematic in the context of urban development in the global

South and North as they perpetuate power relations and extractivist behaviour (e.g. extracting

knowledge from urban dwellers without consent and lacking ethical rigour and converting it into

data for commercial purposes) concealed in a rhetoric participation and co-creation. The next

section turns to Boaventura de Sousa Santos to further elucidate how these practices and

assumptions are perpetuated by what he calls epistemologies of the North.

Rethinking Epistemologies of the North

Epistemologies of the North valorise Western modernity’s knowledge and marginalise other

kinds of knowledge and wisdom, especially from the global South. This is the foundation for

injustice through a failure to recognise different ways of knowing which provide meaning to other

ways of living. To restore social justice a revolution of theory is required grounded in

epistemologies of the South. Santos defines this alternative as a bottom-linked cosmopolitanism,

which embraces a plurality of knowledge valorising solidarity over social regulation, and

conviviality over extractivism. Epistemologies of the South resist the interlinked systems of

capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy that structure northern epistemologies fuelled by logics of

growth, competition and individualism. Santos’ project is for an epistemological transformation to

reinvent social emancipation on a global scale. In this way, he provides a different understanding

of transformation than that found in the typical ULL approach outlined above. To elaborate this:

Santos distinguishes between two basic types of knowledge, the knowledge that serves social

regulation and knowledge that serves social emancipation. Modern functionalist theory is

grounded in the first, whereas the latter is the foundation for Modern critical theory. Of the latter,

’knowing consists in rendering possible the move from exclusion to solidarity’ (Santos, 2018, p.

41). Knowledge as regulation is applied to colonial rule and any knowledge not serving this

objective i.e., towards a knowledge of emancipation is violently suppressed. Repression of

knowledge is perpetuated by Western modernity’s three systems of domination: capitalism,

colonialism and patriarchy which structure epistemologies of the North. In this knowledge

system, objectivity is a criterion of trust and is legitimised through scientific knowledge

production and linked to social regulation. Whereas ecologies of knowledges in the South are

born directly out of struggle, or for utility in struggle where struggle is a form of resistance.

Knowledge in this mode is hybrid, containing scientific and non-scientific (e.g., artisanal,

indigenous etc.) ways of knowing. A common feature of non-scientific knowledges is that they are

not separated from social practices (e.g., resistance) as Western scientific knowledge-practices

are. Santos refers to this type of hybridity as, ecologies of knowledges. Trust in ecologies of

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knowledges depends on the efficacy of knowledges in struggle and resistance. This does not

replace but supplements scientific objectivity (i.e., the reliable use of methods, epistemic values,

explanatory power etc.) Objectivity here is not to be confused with neutrality, ‘where neutrality is

an ideological device claiming contextual indifference’ (ibid, p. 44). Modern scientific methods,

Santos argues, are ‘designed according to a logic of extractivism’ (p. 129). Here, cognitive

extractivism (cf Cusicanqui, 2010)refers to the extraction of ideas and knowledge converted into

data and assimilated into scientific production to be sold on - much like the extraction and

conversion of knowledge to data in ULLs. It denies conversation or exchange between, for

example, indigenous people from where the knowledge arose. Hybrid methods in ecologies of

knowledges must be rid of the extractivist mindset. ‘Epistemologies of the south are both

interruption and a moment of imagination’ (Santos, 2018, p.126) that is, they are simultaneously a

negation of the status quo through resistance and struggle and a projection of hope through the

(re)imagination of epistemology and a politics of solidarity. This relation between negation and

projection is well articulated by Holloway with the figure of the scream, where the scream is

simultaneously a negation against social and ecological breakdown and a scream for hope for a

better world. The scream connects and gives form to the dialectical relation between the

diagnostic and projective, or what Holloway refers to as the indicative and subjunctive (Holloway,

2019). In this hybrid mode of knowledge production and action criticality (e.g., in urban research)

and design (e.g., in architecture) coproduce and inform each other, and, as I argue, the scream

becomes the emblem of a decolonised and hybrid critical spatial design praxis inscribing and

reconstituting the urban living lab.

Deploying critical reflexivity,the following section proceeds to unearth and reveal the

epistemological assumptions and oppressive structures that reproduce injustice in ULLs

engaging the case of Neighbourhoods Made, an urban living lab in the U.K. The choice of case is

discussed further below. The author, a White male, directed the ULL.



Methodology: Critical Reflexivity

Critical reflexivity (CR) (Idahosa and Bradbury, 2020) is a method of self-reflection and process of

decolonising knowledge in transformative change. It promotes reflection, learning and unlearning

to ‘dismantling legacies of oppression’ (Ibid, p.33) reproduced in knowledge production. Using a

mode of critical (self) questioning, it seeks to unearth and disrupt the epistemic foundations

which structure knowledge practices, specifically in epistemologies of the North. In this way, the

method aims to challenge and destabilise linear ways of knowing, embracing complexity and

plurality of knowledges. That is, it encourages and develops an ecology of knowledges which

includes perception and experience alongside rationality, and multiple ways of eliciting and co-

producing knowledge beyond those shaped by Western Modernity through the science and

innovation industry. In so doing, CR challenges the way we know the world by enabling ‘a critical

consciousness of the systems, structures, rules, discourses and assumptions that operate to

reproduce Eurocentrism at the individual and systemic level’ (p. 33).



CR is well-suited to analyse and unlearn the presuppositions that structure ULLs, which, after all,

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are spaces in which knowledge production and action are in direct contact and recursively inform

one another, and where indicative and subjunctive modes challenge each other. As discussed

above, ULLs are spaces for teaching, researching, designing, and interacting with communities,

and therefore invite actors to cooperate in diverse constellations to co-produce knowledge in

participative ways and to directly act upon it through experimentation in real-life situations. As

discussed, these cooperations enabled by ULLs are inevitably structured by power relations and

undergirded by epistemologies of the North. They are therefore not neutral or ambivalent spaces

and require critical reflection to make them fit for the purpose of transformative change.



Corresponding with the requirement to address power and politics in transformative change in

ULLs, the motivation of CR goes beyond the purely epistemic and methodological. It aims to

disrupt and dismantle power asymmetries built into and reproduced through knowledge and

science which underpin and determine courses of action in ULLs. To achieve this, I have

translated the questions and guides provided by CR in relation to the ULL literature and Santos’s

conceptual framework. By guiding the analysing of the case with these questions (see below), I

critically self-reflect and reveal un/intentionally reproduced epistemic assumptions and power

relations in the case. The focus is on the epistemological, disciplinary methodological and

organisational structures.



Epistemological

1. What underlining assumptions structured the production of knowledge and courses of action

in the ULL case, and how might this relate to the ULL approach more broadly?

Disciplinary

2. In what ways did disciplines influence knowledge production in the case, how might this relate

to ULLs more broadly?

Methodological

3.In what ways did a transdisciplinary methodology and its specific tools dismantle or

un/intentionally reproduce power asymmetries, and what contradictions were raised? How might

this relate to the ULL approach more broadly?

Organisational

4. How did the participatory organisational format in the case dismantle or reproduce power

asymmetries, and what contradictions were raised?



In the following section, I critically analyse the case guided by these questions.



The Case of Neighbourhoods Made Living Lab, Essex.

Neighbourhoods Made was an initiative set-up by academic staff at the University of East London

department of Architecture which used the ULL approach. It consisted of a group of academics

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and practitioners from architecture, urban design and spatial research and local community

groups in rural Essex in collaboration with industry professionals from the built environment

sector, including an alternative housing developer.It aimed to leverage the competencies,

resources, and social capital available in academic and professional networks to support

community-driven spatial planning and transformative processes in rural England.

Neighbourhoods Made used a participative and co-design techniques in combination with Design

Studio, a teaching program typical of architectural higher education in the U.K. The primary

objective of Neighbourhoods Made was to support disadvantaged rural communities in the U.K.

undertake neighbourhood planning and establish new locally driven Neighbourhood

Development Plans. The Neighbourhood Development Plan is a tier in the National Planning

Policy Framework (NPPF) which was introduced in 2012 as an instrument in the government's

localism agenda. According to the then Department of Communities and Local Government, the

changes were intended to ‘streamline the planning system by replacing previous planning

guidance and policy and to ameliorate local resistance to development (DCLG, 2010). A principal

objective was to fuel a lagging construction industry after the financial crash in 2008.

Ameliorating local resistance to development by encouraging local people to participate in the

planning process, so it was conceived, would speed up decision-making and overcome barriers in

planning and development across the county. Neighbourhood Planning was the participatory

process that, according to the then Minister of Planning would “allow communities, both

residents, employees and business, to come together through a local parish council or

neighbourhood forum and say where they think new houses, businesses and shops should go”

(DCLG, 2011). ‘Following the rhetoric of Localism, it promoted a devolution of power to local

communities enabling popular engagement in local decisions, bridging the divide between

participatory and representative democracy” (Bradely, 2014, p.4). The intended outcome of

neighbourhood planning is to establish a 15-year vision for the spatial organisation and

sustainable development of neighbourhoods constituted by a local referendum and enshrined in

a local Neighbourhood Development Plan.

As became evident in the research, the abrupt changes to planning law coupled with ongoing

disinvestment in local councils served to reinforce spatial differentiation between well-resourced

neighbourhoods and those without access to planning knowledge, funding, social and cultural

capital. Simply put, the capacities and competencies required to volunteer in participatory

planning were unevenly distributed across the U.K. Many local councils and planning authorities

were not sufficiently equipped to deal with the new approach to super-localised spatial planning

which required new knowledge on the legislation and planning instruments and new forms of

communication between different levels of governance and communities, which, at least in the

case were challenges not easily met.A specific and significant example in the case was the lack

of clarity around the minimum amount of new housing the parish council should accommodate

as part of the neighbourhood plan. The NPPF intended that this quota should be set by

municipalities according to surveys carried out locally and based on factors including the

perceived development capacity of the village to absorb more housing according to its proximity

to public infrastructure provision (e.g., schools, transport, shops, etc.). In fact, this number was

highly politicised as once set and enshrined in the neighbourhood plan it would effectively open

the doors to and lubricate development in the village. In the case, and not isolated to the region,

146

this information was delayed and opaque adding uncertainty at the local level and stalling the

planning process.

Many residents participating in Neighbourhoods Made were sceptical and even angry about the

prospect of development in the village. However, the power and ability of the instruments they

had at hand, including neighbourhood planning to resist the commercial and political pressures

to increase housing stock was somewhat overestimated. Neighbourhood planning, as much as it

had been worked out, could give local people a say in determining

where

new housing may go,

but ‘no development’ was not an option and the amount of housing (ascertained at higher levels)

could of course be exceeded in the planning process but not reduced. In the case, as in other

regions, commercial developers were aware of the changes to planning policy and the

opportunity it presented to acquire land which may not have otherwise been available for

development. Neighbourhoods Made aimed to generate and spread knowledge to local

residents in aspects of land development to experiment with alternative models in which local

land could be retained in community trusts and revenues generated from the change-of-use of

land class (e.g. agricultural to housing) and development uplift directed back into community

infrastructure (e.g. local green infrastructure, pocket parks, upgrades to local community and

sports centres etc.) organized at the community level. 



Fig 5.1. Model. Copyright Author

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A Critical Reflection on Neighbourhoods Made

Unlearning prior to situated relearning

To introduce the idea of a community-orientated approach to land development, the living lab

invited residents and those with interests in the village to attend co-design workshops. One of

these events, facilitated by local leaders and staff from the university, aimed at brainstorming

innovative ideas to inform the spatial plan. It centred around a large 1:500 scale model of the

village. The model was not a fixed ‘presentation’ model displaying a resolved development

solution or predetermined options to be discussed. Instead, using participatory and co-design

techniques, a ‘working model’ made of card, wood, paper, and foam displayed the existing village

and its surroundings. During the workshop, students made physical representations of ideas

generated by the community, staff from the university, planning and design professionals, and

students. This allowed local people to immediately visualise, test and discuss the material and

spatial implications of the ideas proposed. The process was experimental and open-ended, and

during the event it was possible to see attitudes towards development held by local’s shift. At the

beginning of the workshop, the model and those presenting it were met with hesitation and even

some hostility, the assumption being they represented ulterior motives, perhaps even the interest

of commercial developers. By the end of the event, attitudes towards development in the village

had begun to shift from ‘no development’ to entertaining 400 new homes, their impact on the

village and how such development might raise revenue for self-determined projects with a

common purpose.

However, arguably the Neighbourhoods Made living lab legitimised economic and political

presuppositions by making the connection to academia and research. Can it be understood that

although well-meaning, the participatory workshop and the technology of the working model in

fact served to unintentionally reproduce a neoliberal development regime, that, according to the

framework set out above, is said to be ungirded by epistemologies of the north constituted by

colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal practices? Significantly, could a more critical diagnosis from

the outset have offered alternative outcomes, or found practices of resistance to development

and the planning framework entirely, producing other forms of knowledge in solidarity (see

above) with skeptical community members. The answer might well be that the solution-

orientated approach inherent in the living lab method in the case did inadvertently serve to

perpetuate neoliberal development and planning practices and the epistemologies of that

underpin them. By not giving enough time to unpack and unlearn its own practices and the

political context in which it was operating it foreclosed the possibility of a different course of

action. If, as set out in critical reflexivity, unlearning had occurred prior to situated (re)learning, it is

possible that knowledge generated in the workshops could have better served the purpose of

social emancipation (rather than social regulation) in the struggle against growth-oriented urban

development entirely.

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Discursive Practices: What else in being circulated?

Regardless of the well-meaning intentions of the living lab’s coordinators, arguably the project

could not escape capitalist logics of economic growth and urban development which structured

the lab’s epistemic foundations, methodology and the entire planning framework in which it was

situated.The idea of development and innovation was built into and arguably perpetuated

material-discursive practices such as naming, branding and image-making.

In another example of a participatory workshop, local primary school children were encouraged to

draw pictures of the village ‘now’ and in an imagined ‘future’. Posters and fridge magnets were

made from a selection of the drawings and circulated and displayed in the village. The intention

was threefold, to engage local primary school children in the neighbourhood planning process

(people whose voices are often excluded); to inspire out-of-the-box ideas with their work, and; to

advertise and communicate the planning process to the wider community. But what other

discourses did the posters and magnets spread? In fact, the images and text glossed with

children’s drawings inadvertently propagated a presumption of development around the villages’

public (e.g. notice boards, shops etc.) and domestic (e.g. kitchen fridges) space by displaying

imaginative suggestions to how the village could be improved through the Neighbourhood

Planning process. In addition to the drawings, the posters and magnets displayed the lab’s name

‘Neighbourhoods Made’. So conceived, the named had aimed to express the physical material

aspect of building neighbourhoods collectively. However, it can also emphasise a built and

concrete ‘solution’ to the neighbourhood ‘problem’, a relation otherwise understood in

conventional planning terms as ‘development’.

These examples aim to illustrate the contradictions and tensions between the living lab’s desire

to support community building and emancipation through co-design and its ability and

effectiveness to engender transformation when it’s ‘best practices’ the and socio-political and

policy context in which it was operating (e.g. the national planning policy framework) were not

directly called into question. This insight offers another marker for living labs which aim at

transformative change, that is, how to deal with the complexity and ambivalence of having to

operating in a system whilst working to change it.

From Urban Experiments to Relations of Solidarity

Neighbourhoods Made arrived with sophisticated and well-intend ideas about how to negotiate

urban development, planning, and land use and turn it for the benefit of the community, ideas

that were experimental and required testing in a ‘real-life situation. In the case, experimentation

was shown to be a common and problematic trait structuring both the living lab approach and the

changes to planning law. A so-called national ‘frontrunners’ scheme was set up to provide

funding from DCLG and to encourage parishes and forums to experiment early on with

neighbourhood planning. However, this was mainly effective for communities with existing

resources and know-how. Arguably, this experimental disposition which valorises and claims

neutrality in scientific knowledge production inadvertently concealed ulterior motives and

reproduced existing inequalities grounded in neoliberal ideologies – ideologies which are shown

to be unpinned specific Modern and Northern epistemologies with a direct link to capitalist,

colonial and patriarchal practices. A process of critical reflection with communities may have

149

worked to unearth these deeply buried assumptions which went on to structure the living lab

practices. Investing time in such a process may not have directly arrived at technical planning

solutions but, and learning from experiences of urban research engaged in postcolonial or

indigenous context, this may have served to build deeper bonds of trust and solidarity within a

wider network.



Decolonising knowledge

Could the ulterior motives in the case be understood as an expression of an unreflected form of

patriarchy and white saviourism? The main actors in the living lab were highly educated White

men, including this author. The case was set in predominantly white working-class region so the

usual divisions that structure white saviourism as the rescuing of people of colour by white

people do not apply. However, the patriarchal epistemology which privileges powerful white men

in a hierarchical system and serves to a produce a (self) perception of moral and social superiority

could be applied to the motivations for wanting to rescue those perceived as less privileged.

Arguably, the epistemologies of the North which perpetuate this (self) perception could find

expression in the motivation ‘to do good’, to appease guilt structured by race, class, and gender.

This may be understood more thoroughly by bringing in another situated example from the case.

Neighbourhoods made coincided with the Brexit referendum. Part of the campaign and discourse

to support leaving the EU was to claim political elites were making undemocratic decisions.

These discourses mutated in the press as a vilification of the ‘metropolitan elite’ who were

portrayed as ‘out of touch’ with, and not serving the interests of ‘ordinary’ presumably ‘working

class’ people — outside of metropolitan centers. This agitated existing divisions and reinforced a

link between class and the metropolitan periphery. In the villages in Essex, these discourses

materialised in placards in back gardens supporting the leave campaign, a campaign which is

well-known to have had racial and nationalist undertones. The referendum results went on to

express this division with metropolitan centres tending towards remain and a significant part of

the rest of the country voting leave, including districts in the case. Did the living lab represent

privileged metropolitan elites coming to disadvantaged rural regions with a sense of patriarchal

moral superiority in order to tell them how to live? I hope not, but comments posted online which

had racial and nationalist undertones in responses to a short film documenting the

Neighbourhoods Made living lab reinforced this perspective. But this does raise the question of

how to ethically engage in urban planning, development and situated knowledge production in

ways that do not serve to reproduce and circulate specific northern epistemologies structured

according to class, gender, and race.

Limitations of the research

The cases provide an effective example of how research, design and teaching engage with real

situations and how oppressive structures were unwittingly reproduced through a positivistic

solution-orientated mode of action applicable to design disciplines. The author was a key

member of the living lab, this provided access and detailed knowledge of the case. Critical

Reflexivity aims to overcome the bias of reflecting upon one's own work which could otherwise

be problematic in this mode of inquiry. Furthermore, extrapolating and generalising results from

one case is difficult. This limitation was addressed by referring to the literature and showing how

150

the issues in the case are common to ULLs more generally.

Why use a de/postcolonial framework to analyse a case from the global North which does not

appear to present colonial power relations? Using this framework as means of critical reflection

to understand how colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy structure knowledge production, need

not be performed on cases only from the global South. In fact, arguably it is more urgent to begin

a process of critical decolonisation on practices and structures in the global North which are

perpetuating and reproducing their epistemologies globally. ULLs are highly mobile and whether

they are operating in the global North or South the logics and assumptions that tend to underpin

them have commonalities inherited from their shared Western historicity. This is not to foreclose

the possibility of homegrown ULLs outside of the North, but they are less likely to be spreading

with the same momentum globally due to global socio-spatial inequalities.

In this paper, I have cast a critical gaze over the assumptions, methods, and ethics embedded in

ULLs. This serves to prepare the groundwork for a process of decolonisation of knowledge in

ULLs marking a transition to sites of unity. Consciously, I have excluded from this paper other

aspects of Critical Reflexivity which aim at deep reflection on personal motivations and

positionality in transformative change. This is due to limitations of space in such a format;

however, this aspect of the decolonizing process is underway and is the subject of a forthcoming

paper (Baxter et al. forthcoming).



Conclusion - Towards Sites of Unity

By problematising ULLs through critical reflexivity’s decoloniality the paper has exposed the

power relations, neoliberal ideology, and epistemologies (of the north) that undergirded and

structured the Neighbourhoods Made urban living lab. By referring to the literature, I have

suggested this is not only confined to the case in hand, but oppressive systems glossed over with

rhetorics of participation and co-design and discourses of experimentation and innovation are

embedded in the very makeup, history, and ideology of ULLs.

Critical reflexivity methodology aims to push beyond self-reflection toward action in

transformative change. It is related to John Holloway’s motif of the scream; a scream of

which

negates the reproduction of oppressive structures, negate the status quote, and negates

business-as-usual. Simultaneously, the scream is of hope, hope for a different world and

therefore a projection into the future. With this first step in the decolonisation of urban living labs

we scream for a transdisciplinary approach to urban planning and scientific knowledge

production founded on non-extractivist modes and epistemologies of the south, an approach

guided by an ethical sensitivity in matters of responding to and recognising, not only the Other's

otherness, but also acknowledging that we are reciprocally (re)made through and with the other.

Feminist scholars including Karan Barad and Donna Haraway refer to this as an ethics of

response-ability which does not rely on predetermined rules and regulations but on the ability to

respond to the situatedness of “real-life” contexts.

151

Decolonising ways of knowing and doing in urban living labs opens the door to a new approach,

what we might call following Kelemu,

sites of unity.

Sites of unity, as set out here, are founded on

and guided by epistemologies of the south and valorise ecologies of knowledges. In this

approach, discourses of experimentation and innovation are exchanged for a politics of solidarity

and conviviality inscribed by material-discursive practices able to deal with the complexity of

simultaneously

operating in and against an oppressive system

and guided by a

relational ethics

of response-ability.

This approach calls for constant reflection to facilitate

a critical practice of

unlearning and situated (re)learning

in processes of resistance to social and environmental

breakdown. Like the scream, sites of unity have the potential to link the diagnostic criticality of

urban studies with the projective modes of design, what Holloways calls the indicative and

subjunctive in a mode of critical negation. I suggest this turns the problem with which this special

issue is concerned inside-out, that of overcoming the indicative mode of inquiry in research with

the subjunctive mode of projection in design. Rather than trying to link the two through a

solution-oriented approach e.g., encouraging urban studies to step into the projective mode of

design, we might better embrace Holloway’s double-headed figure of the scream to

simultaneously negate the present and the reproduction of power relations and oppressive

structures into the future. This hybrid approach, which inscribes and informs sites of unity can be

understood as c

ritical spatial design

. It requires rethinking spatial design as a form of resistance

to be engaged in the struggle for transformative change. As discussed throughout the paper,

transformative change cannot be brought about with instruments rooted in oppressive

epistemologies where knowledge is a means of social regulation. Instead, knowledge produced

in struggle is knowledge for solidarity, convivial relationality and social emancipation.

Nordic outlook

How is a decolonized approach to ULLs relevant to the Nordic Context? As I have argued in the

paper, the lack of a perceived contemporary contact between ULLs and the global South does not

preclude the need to begin the process of decolonizing assumptions, ideologies, and

epistemologies which structure ways of knowing in, and the spread of ULLs in the global

North. Arguably, the imperative to decolonize knowledge is applicable to the specific Nordic ULL

approach promoted by e.g. Nordic Council of Ministers through Nordic Innovation identified

above. Linking cities across the region through a Nordic ULL network is an effective means to

achieve strong business-city partnerships for urban development and to promote an integrated

Nordic region attractive to global investment. The market and growth lead ideological

assumptions seem to be evident, however further research is required to unearth the specific

relations between the spread of (oppressive?) practices and discourses and the epistemologies of

North than underpin them in or connected to the Nordic context.

152

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Part 3

Conclusion, Outlook, and Critical Reflections

Conclusion

Guided initially by the question, how do social practices spatially spread, the research

presented in this thesis examined processes of social and spatial change in social

innovation. In this concluding chapter I briefly summarise the main results of the research

and reflect on the consequences on social innovation and cognate fields of spatial planning

and design. From here, I speculate on new questions and avenues of research, and

potential forms of action opened up by the results. I conclude in the last section with a short

personal reflection set in dialogue with the preface with which I began this cumulative

dissertation.

Constituting the main body of the thesis, the first three articles, drafted over three years,

were built upon each other, thickening and elaborating specific aspects of the concept of

spread and closely related concepts of resistance and infrastructure/ing. Methodologically, I

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followed abductive reasoning and the grounded theory approach. Data collected from

multi-sited ethnographic field research in two European rural cases were engaged with a

close and ongoing reading of critical theory. This yielded a novel middle-range theoretical

framework for explicating complex relational processes in social and spatial

transformation, as set out in Part 1.

Social innovation offered a lens on microprocesses of social change. Regarded as bottom-

linked, it is concerned with lower order social mechanisms, the ‘cogs and wheels’ of social

change at, or at least connected to grassroots self-organisation. Laid out in part 1, the

literature recognises the significance of the spread of new social practices as an aspect of

social change in social innovation. New ways of doing and knowing are said to circulate

between places, and as adopted by social groups, a horizon of change unfolds. Despite this,

little was understood about the complex relationalities in these temporal and spatial

processes. For example, what types of forces propelled and hindered the spread of

practices? What role did materiality play in shaping practices? How is knowledge and

discourse (re)produced in the spread of material practices? Over what systems do material

and discursive practices travel, and how do they interact, adapt to, and shape these

infrastructures? And moreover, what are the relationships between spreading practices,

infrastructural support systems, and the transformation of spatial topologies, especially

rural spaces on the constitutive periphery? These are the gaps in knowledge and precise

research questions which I have continually turned over and sought to answer throughout

the body of work.

This required initially deconstructing the concept of spread to reveal the normative and

positivist assumptions loaded within, especially regarding space, time, and matter. Then,

by engaging critical new materialist theory to interpret the complexities witnessed in the

two multi-sited ethnographies, spread was reworked and connected to the concepts of

resistance and infrastructuring. This provided an account of social, spatial, and material

change as an ongoing circulatory process, pregnant with tensions, conflicts, and gradual

becomings.

In this account, relationality reaches beyond an understanding of mere relations between

given social entities. Instead, it refers to the not entirely predictable emergence of

subjectivities, materialities, and spaces yielded in tensions and power asymmetries

between competing material-discursive figurations. This is expressed in the concepts of

spread and resistance and brought to light through the heuristic modes of spread. This

consists of a four-pole diagramme setting out a scale between intentional-unintentional on

one axis and intensive-extensive on the other. Together the axes overlay a designated

spatial/ising system e.g. a location, a network, or in this case, infrastructure. A circle

containing the axes represents the boundaries of the system. As an heuristic, it is a device

to think with. It maps the circulation of specific objects and practices bringing to attention

the human and nonhuman forces accelerating or resisting, spread both internally and

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externally. In this way, it raises questions as to the type of boundaries between systems,

how they might be overcome or inhibit the spread of ideas, objects, or practices.

Figure. 6.1. Modes of spread. Heuristic diagramme

In this novel conceptual framework, and in contrast to the other interpretations, spread is

not so much preceded by the emergence of new social practices, but rather social change

in social innovation is, at least partially, engendered in the ongoing spread and resistance of

practice configurations supported by historical, material, and socio-technological

infrastructural arrangements. Emergence, or rather, re(con)figuration was shown to occur

in conflictual processes of spread, in this sense spread preceded ‘emergence’ and

transmission was not a neutral process but shown to be generative. This was the main

insight in paper 1. But what does it mean for those engaged in social innovation on the

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ground? Well, it suggests at least two things: Firstly, that new knowledge and forms of

action arise out of the resistance to spreading hegemonic practices and discourses.

Although these, novel emergent material-discursive configurations cannot be entirely

predicted, as they result from combinations of intentional and not-fully-intentional forces,

they are potentially disruptive to the status quo. Secondly, designing and building self-

organised infrastructures with translocal connectivity is an effective

first step

in the spread

of social innovation.

These consequences on social action may be understood as part of a wider turn to

materiality in the social and spatial sciences and humanities. For example, the insights

above shift focus from socially constructed networks to the material and technological

dimension of infrastructure in grassroots action, a shift which I believe to have far reaching

consequences on the struggle for social self-determination. Self-organised infrastructures,

as I have presented them, have an emancipatory dimension. They are designed, managed,

and maintained by civil-society and interest groups at a community level. In contrast to

social networks, the spatial, material, and epistemic boundaries of self-organised

infrastructures were shown to be porous (or rather, constantly shifting), so that other

diverse actors including public, professional, or scientific can be enrolled. In this way, self-

organised infrastructures are less characterised as bottom-up but as

topological

, able to

connect other infrastructural systems by folding people, places, spaces, and potentially

times into their commitments and struggles, themes developed in papers 2 and 3

The case of EPAM supported by observations from OTELO illustrates that self-

organised/ing infrastructure consisted of collective strategies, tactics, and events shot

through with everyday practices. For example, in paper 2 and 3

piggybacking

was shown to

be a strategy used in both cases to fold into other infrastructure (e.g. science and

technology), making use of their assets and capacities.

Tactical resourcing

was used to

creatively fund long-term infrastructural projects (no longer attractive to funding bodies

such as the EU) through short-term project funding regimes. This strategy, developed out

of necessity, impacted the evolving shape of EPAM, where the co-founders were required

to discharge obligations from new funding sources in order to pay for what they believe to

be essential (infrastructural) work.

Self-organised/ing infrastructure facilitate mutual learning and mutual aid, opening new

channels for dialogue and exchange by the spread and resistance of knowledge, ideas,

skills, methods, information, capital, and resources. Paper 2 described how they are

understood as complex emergent and co-evolving systems (self-organising), agential in the

In paper 2 EPAM’s co-founders did not associate their contemporary collectivist struggle with the

strong history of cooperative takeovers in the Alentejo after the 1974 revolution. This was considered

by some interview partners as a missed opportunity which may have had a strengthening effect on

the network.

159

ongoing re(con)figuration of subjectivities, materialities, discourses, and spaces. Paper 3

elaborated this finding through the concept of infrastructure/ing to conceptualise the

collective and everyday practices and processes of infrastructure-in-the making and

design-in-use.

Such infrastructural practices and collective processes for designing and making self-

organised/ing infrastructure were shown to be pertinent to rural transformation. Rural

spaces are considered as ‘structurally weak’, a result of economic, social, political, and

environmental processes. This is not the same for all rural areas; for example, remoteness

from urban centres, or relative isolation from other places regionally or globally exacerbate

these problems. Contemporary market-oriented spatial development and planning regimes

aim to overcome these inequalities with policies supporting economic growth, innovation,

entrepreneurialism, and competitiveness, for example, where tenable, absorbing rural

space into urban economies. While such policies may benefit localities in proximity to

urban centres, by the same move, they were shown to reinforce spatial differentiation and

social inequality experienced on the periphery, especially in peripheral sites which have

suffered from long term disinvestment in public services and large-scale state or privately

operated infrastructure. In short, rural peripheries, in a large part because of their

geographic isolation, have particular sets of challenges.

However, when considered through the spread and resistance framework the socio-spatial

characteristics which distinguish periphery from centre may provide the material conditions

for alternative futures to emerge. As both cases illustrate, young people looking for

different ways of living and working were moving to rural peripheries. But peripheral

spaces required restructuring and communities had to build alliances and make

connections with likeminded actors, social innovations and movements, and institutions in

other localities. I argued this spatial restructuring is a topological endeavour in which

infrastructuring, spread, and resistance play a part. In this way, the middle-range theorising

presented here can reframe

rural development

guided by market logics, or even the notion

transformation

shaped by discourses of progress and rooted in logics of Modernity as a

type of

peripheral resistance

in which new topologies are at stake. Here, materialist

structures (‘structurally weak’) are replaced with

new

materialist processual topologies.

This places the concepts of spread and resistance firmly in the fields of spatial design and

planning, as elaborated in detail in the framing paper and in paper 4. Resistance, as

opposed to, say, resilience, is a form of struggle against the spread of ongoing exploitative

and extractivist practices undergirded and empowered by forms of negation. This opens a

line of flight for a critical approach to spatial design and planning that I have called critical

spatial design.

But how should we understand a new materialist approach to space in critical spatial

design? I suggest the framework above has at least two main consequences for

160

understanding space. Firstly, by including movement (via the concept of spread) into the

heuristic, space is furnished with a processual character, ultimately bringing the dynamics

of time and change into the analytic. Secondly, by highlighting the ways spread is negated

by, for example, competing materials and ideas opens the possibility for a broader

spectrum of relations to be registered, including relations of power, relations of conflict,

mutual relations of aid and learning, and relations between human and non-humans. With

this, I plea for a new materialist approach to space.

Outlook: Towards critical spatial design

What is the impact of the spread, resistance, and infrastructure/ing framework, and

specifically its understanding of social, material, and spatial re(con)figuration on spatial

design and planning? Throughout this thesis I have argued the inherent logic of planning

and design is geared towards organising and imagining future space and that, in their

normative, positivist and unreflexive modes, tend to cast world views, discourses, and

knowledge of the soon-to-be-pasts onto yet-to-be-futures, inscribed, for example in spatial

imaginaries and planning policy. These imaginaries and their discourses become

materialised in urban space and architecture and set the spatial conditions of im/possibility

for future action. I have referred to these spatial structures as topologies.

The middle range theoretical framework of spread, resistance and infrastructure/ing, opens

an avenue for a critical spatial design theory with the capacity to build futures by not only

projecting spatial imaginaries of difference, but more potently by resisting exploitative

forms of knowledge, extractivist practices, and injustices in the present for new disruptive

topologies to emerge. Following Santos (2018) and Escobar (2017), this is understood as

being grounded in an epistemology of the South where knowledge is produced in and for

struggle. Recognising the need for a plurality of ways of knowing and doing, it is at odds

with highly disciplined forms of knowledge production in the North. Southern

epistemologies hold emancipatory potential and undergird critical spatial design theory.

Connected to this, the idea that social and spatial change is a flow of ‘solutions’ to

‘problems’ (often determined elsewhere) is inverted. Instead, an approach is valorised

which opposes the ongoing spread of problems determined and jointly produced by those

at the coal face of social and environmental degradation and their alliances.

In this mode, design is de-centred and ‘the tension between planned and emergent change‘

is recognised (Karasti & Blomberg, 2018, p. 25). The distribution of agency and intentionality

undermines the notion of the heroic lone genius e.g., ‘the starchitect’, it opens-up

alternative paths of thought for development and planning and design. It acknowledges a

plurality of agencies and alliances, including research as a constituent part of critical spatial

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design and, as I argued in paper 4, addresses a perceived duality between diagnostic and

projective modes of research and design.

This theoretical grounding opens three concrete avenues. Critical spatial design as praxis,

in teaching, and as a matter of research.

Critical spatial design: praxis

Together with colleagues from sociology and urban design we have established a critical

spatial design working group (CSD). The group brings together expertise from the sociology

of knowledge, sociology of space, urban design, planning, and architecture. Our aim is to

develop the approach set out theoretically in the thesis, integrating both research and

design; indicative and subjunctive modes reconfigured through critical negation. A further

objective is to develop a research agenda and questions for future work and funding

proposals. Together, as a group, we will further interrogate some of the ideas described

above alongside others in seminar-style workshops and action-orientated work, such as

collective field work and design competitions.

Design competitions offer a platform to think practically about how to operationalise a

critical approach to space, design and the regimes that regulate and discipline knowledge

in planning, urban governance, and the procurement of space. This approach is tested

through the entry to South Designs, a call for projects organised by the University of Basel

urban studies programme. The proposal was guided by some of the learnings from this

thesis, including a critical approach to design based on knowledge in and for struggle and

the idea of self-organised/ing infrastructures.

Critical spatial design: teaching

In parallel, I have begun to develop these ideas in teaching seminars at the Chair of

Urbanism and Urban Design at TU Berlin and a recent proposal for a teaching fellowship at

the London School of Economics Cities Programme. In two examples, I investigate an

understanding of design as a practice of

response-ability,

borrowing Haraway’s term (2016),

and, reminiscent of Anne-Marie Willis (2006) observation, that as ‘we’ design, the world

‘designs’ back. This begins to unpack an understanding of design as intervention into socio-

ecological systems, a practice that affects ecologies in ways that are hard to predict even

with sophisticated techno-scientific models. Acknowledging this uncertainty is a significant

first step in de-centring the human and, using collective practices of drawing, mapping, and

negotiation, students are taught to speculated on the impacts their interventions may have

on the social, environmental, and subjective ecologies that constitute and connect sites.

Central to this teaching practice is the integration of critical research into design praxis in an

effort to overcome the perceived positivism lingering in architectural education, indicated in

the preface to this thesis. I realise this is not true for all courses, but those that are engaging

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in design in this way are certainly in the minority. The critical spatial design approach was

further developed in collaboration with a sociologist in a seminar that taught research

methods to design students. This was extraordinarily fruitful for both the students (so they

reported) and for us as teachers. It hammered home the point that the investigative tools

(in this case mapping) that design students are equipped with through their education

require significant reflection, reworking, and complimenting with methods from social

sciences, in this case, qualitative interviews. The seminar also reinforced the observation

on the normative, (e.g. value driven) epistemologies that underlie design-oriented research

in what is commonly described as design-research. By this I mean researching with the

objective to develop a design proposal is problematic. For one reason, the outcome drives

the course of the research. Where design as the outcome is understood as a solution to

problems, this renders the design proposal as ‘positive’ and ethically ‘good’ undermining its

critical potentiality and power to negate. Additionally, it has the effect of tuning research as

a justification for a design proposal, in this mode research is about identifying problems

which can be solved through design. This sets the scene for the ongoing conversations and

work in the CSD group.

Critical spatial design: research

In the thesis I have argued for a process-relational and new materialist understanding of

space, which I have developed by reworking the main concept of spread and the related

concepts of resistance and infrastructure/ing. This approach centre stages the material

flows of information, knowledge, technology, and the discourses which they carry and

transform as they adapt to spaces, places and people and their commitments and

struggles, to determine other ways of living at the edge of mainstream society. This has

opened-up many questions and avenues for new inquiry. For example, in the research

presented above, the spread of ideas and ways of implementing them was restricted to

European regions. I am curious to understanding how this phenomenon plays out in other

geopolitical contexts and at different scales. For example, how do ideas and spatial

imaginaries, spread from say the global North, materialise in cities in the near-South, to

evoke AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept

(2014)? Moreover, what types of knowledge, values,

ideas, norms, discourses are transported, inadvertently and/or intentionally – and in which

way are they transformed and transmitted in cities and their buildings, their building

materials, and their hinterlands, urban plans, blueprints, visions and visualisations of the

future associated with urbanisation? And in what ways are imaginaries and discourses

transported in specific technologies, planning policies and regimes, institutional networks,

best practices, nature-based solutions, and finance, for example?

Simone’s concept of the ‘near-South’ aims to re-connect marginalised urban knowledges and

projects by urban actors across the world. This calls into question the now commonplace binary

between the ‘developed’ North and the ‘underdeveloped’ South, conceptualising the South as an

urban condition rather than geographical location.

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I will examine questions connected to these in the Berlin University Alliance funded project,

‘Rescaling Global Health.Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet’

(Re-health). The project brings together a consortium of scholars with a shared interest in

multispecies urbanism, urban natures and health. In a postdoc position on the project, I will

be researching biophilic urbanism, understood as the (re)introduction and

operationalisation of nature, in the form of trees, plants, soils, non-human animals, water

etc. into cities towards more ‘healthy’ urban environments (for humans). Research will

centre around the metropolitan region of Perth in Australia, which has associated itself with

the Biophilic city discourse. On a concrete level, together with an ecologist, we are curious

to assess the multispecies health threats and perceived benefits associated with the

reintroduction of nature in the urban coastal ecosystem of Perth metropolitan area.

On a more abstract level, but more directly connected to the outcomes of this thesis, I am

interested to understand how specific constructions of nature and space are circulated in

‘biophilic’ urban and planning policies, how they differ from knowledge on nature and space

held by indigenous Noongar peoples of south-western Australia. Research is centred

around Pinjarra, 80KM south of Perth city centre and the urban expansion along the Murray

River and Fremantle, 20 KM south of Perth, which self-identifies as a biophilic city. The

assumption being that these space-nature imaginaries are not always compatible and in

these tensions, power dynamics exist. The question arises as to what extent this can be

understood as a conflictual process between competing topologies, reaching back to at

least 1826 when British colonial settlers set up a military outpost at Kinjarling (known now

as Albany), through Modernity, to now as we look for new ways to organise urban space

and natural resources (“nature”) in the face of climate change and massive species loss.

The agenda is geared towards recent research attentive to new forms of domination and

colonialism disguised in ‘green’ and ‘hygienic’ rhetoric and to understand what, if any, forms

of resistance exist.

Critical reflection

This ending and new beginning offers a suitable way to enter the final reflections I would

like to make on the thesis. To do this, I will recall the opening words, ideas, hopes, and

intentions which I set down in the preface of this body of work. In it, I questioned

architecture’s contemporary relation to society and the environment. I rhetorically posed

the question, as a discipline with a long history but strongly shaped by Modernity, how can

architecture adjust to contemporary social, ecological, and planetary needs? I suggested, to

get close to being able to address this question, architecture must critically reflect on how it

produces not only space

for

society, but knowledge

space and society. It was this

motivation that drove me to undertake doctoral research. To find the mental space and

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tools to first reflect on my own practices as an architect, teacher and researcher. And with

this critical distance, develop the theoretical and methodological knowledge required to

nudge architecture along its social and scientific twists and turns, and perhaps in doing so,

resolve my relationship to it on the way. Did I meet this ambition?

Looking back as I draft this in the final days of writing, I feel, at least on one level, I have

achieved this aim. I am fairly sure that one thing that shines through the work is the

affection I have discovered for theory. I say discovered, but more accurately, uncovered as I

think the love for ideas and conceptualising was already there, bubbling at the surface. This

is not intended to diminish the richness of the intellectual experience over the last four and

a half years. Quite the opposite. It has furnished me with the capacity to make sense out of

what had motivated me before, to frame and understand the intellectual trajectories and

histories of thoughts and ideas previously untethered but by which I was intuitively guided.

I think it is clear I have spent much time in the realm of ideas during the thesis which has

resulted in the conceptual framework above. Perhaps there are similarities between

building concept and ideas and building buildings and landscapes. Both use frameworks,

structures, metaphors, models, diagrams to think with. Both start from observations in and

of the world, interpreting them with methodological procedures such as site analysis,

existing drawings, sketches and concept modes in architecture, and grounded theory,

inference and reasoning, MaxQDR, coding and categories, field notes and interview

transcripts in theory building. But theory, when done well, changes the way we think and

know the world. Buildings don’t. They are technical material arrangements that can keep

us warm, and dry, and safe, and provide home; they are complex interweavings of matter

and spaces imbued with memory. But both knowledge and buildings change the way we

interact, relate to each other; they are affective. I have been moved by discovering

knowledge new to me over these four and half years.

But the desire to theorise and conceptualise what I was witnessing in the ethnographies

arguably came at a cost. Should I have stayed with the trouble a little longer, kept my feet

in the rich and fertile soil of Alentejo or Upper Austria before taking off into the lofty world of

abstraction? Perhaps. It is hard to know exactly what this would have done to my findings.

Likely, it would have added more depth, filled out the concepts a little more. Did getting to

this level of analysis too quickly restrict my view on the material struggles, for example,

associated with the intersection of class, race, and gender? Maybe sticking with the stories

of the people I met in Moura or Vöcklabruck longer would have given further definition and

detail to the practices of resistance I sought to delineate. But I think that, as concepts, they

hold. After all, it is the job of theory, unlike buildings, to inform hypotheses. Or, as in the

case of middle-range theory, to present a plausible description of how a case of a social

mechanism, such as spread works. And with further research, to find other cases that

confirm or displace this knowledge. In this sense, I have set up what I believe to be a

convincing research agenda for future work.

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But I am also left with a feeling of discomfort when I think about the people I met and the

time they spent telling me their stories. Some with the hope that recounting their tales

might serve to directly change their situation, while others were happy to have an ear to

hear what they thought. I’m left with the lingering concern that I have in some way

capitalised on these people’s struggles by turning them into data, treating and abstracting

in pursuit of theory making, publications, and a doctoral degree. Critical self-reflection must

of course be ongoing, but for now, and while I am designing the next research project, I am

confronted by the question, how will I address these concerns in my next encounters?

One way, I think, will be to hesitate before engaging theory, and when I do, perhaps with

less intensity, or maybe just to varying degrees. But I can only say this now, after the thesis,

as I feel I have a better grasp on theory and methodology, or at least parts of them. I don’t

pretend I will be able to ignore theory when entering the field, but I am more equipped to

pick and choose according to what is needed to delicately interpret what I witness. I realise

this observation runs the risk of sounding naïve, but I feel it’s important for me to declare.

But what of this new theoretical knowledge? Personally, I have claimed it has helped frame

some of the rawer motivations that had intuitively guided me. What do I mean by this?

The reflections I have made structured by the capacity to build and connect knowledge and

ideas has led to the notion of critical spatial design, a new trajectory at least for me, and as I

develop it in further work and with colleagues, I hope for others. Can this serve to nudge

architecture along and, at least in a small way, to resist the ongoing vocationalisation of

architectural education and market readiness which it supports. Can critical spatial design

provide a framework to critically reflect on producing architectural space, or moreover can

it be a steppingstone on the path to reconfigure a mode of architecture which rejects space

as capital, which rejects the socially and ecologically extractivist practices that underpin the

construction industry in general. Can a critical mode of architecture and planning

acknowledge its colonial legacy and engage in struggles for self-determination and land

rights in new ways. This is a tall order and of course no one idea or framework is expected

to do all the heavy lifting. But I believe there is much work to be done to reorient spatial

design and planning, whether buildings, cities, landscapes, or peripheral rural regions, by

first shining a bright light on where the problems are and how we as architects reproduce

them. Perhaps, in a small way, the ideas and concepts developed in this thesis will

contribute to a new understanding of knowledge on building and the building of new socio-

spatial knowledge.

References

Escobar, A. (2017).

Design for the Pluriverse

(p. 290). Duke University Press.

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Haraway, D. J. (2016).

Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucence

. Duke

University Press.

Karasti, H., & Blomberg, J. (2018). Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically.

Computer

Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

(2), 233–265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-

017-9296-7

Santos, B. de S. (2018).

The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of

Epistemologies of the South

(p. 392). Duke University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002000

Simone, A. M. (2014).

Jakarta: Drawing the city near

. University of Minnesota Press.

Willis, A.-M. (2006). Ontological designing.

Design Philosophy Papers

(2), 69–92.

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