Reading the City: Urban Infrastructure in Literature

Dear Colleagues,

Infrastructure, understood as a set of built networks—whether physical, institutional, or digital—operates as a mechanism of movement and connection, linking people, goods, signs, ideas, and information across spatial and social divides. Recent studies suggest that infrastructure signals a paradigmatic shift in social and economic organization, as well as in the spatial configuration of the city, thereby advancing an infrastructural mode of analysis. If the city is conceived as a built environment, then its modern form is produced, shaped, and sustained by infrastructure. To be urban and to be modern, therefore, is “to live within and by means of infrastructure.” As a material formation, infrastructure exerts a profound metaphysical force. Through its interactions with people and the urban environment, infrastructure generates a dense, multilayered field of meanings—materiality, spatiality, banality, anonymity, (in)visibility, (dis)connectivity, relationality, positionality, productivity, and a range of discursive, affective, and aesthetic experiences embedded within the urban context.

This Special Issue investigates how infrastructure (re)defines, structures, and transforms the city, giving rise to new urban spaces, modes of living, and diversified urban experiences and perspectives represented in contemporary world literature. As a defining emblem of modernity, infrastructure materializes collective desires, expectations, hopes, and utopian visions. Nevertheless, it also provokes aversion—and even disgust—through its associations with marginality, absence, fragmentation, and various forms of violence. Moreover, infrastructure occupies a central position in articulating long-standing themes of alienation, social stratification, and the intersecting dynamics of race, gender, and identity.

We invite submissions that read the city infrastructurally—across literary genres and geographies—by attending to representations of the most physical, mundane, and everyday, yet complex and dialectical, interactions between people and the built environment. By foregrounding the material, constructive, and symbolic dimensions of infrastructure, this Issue seeks to illuminate the distinctive contributions that literary studies can make to our understanding of how infrastructure organizes not only the modern city but also the literary imagination. 

Prof. Dr. Jie Lu
Guest Editor

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