Infrastrucfration: towards an integrated natural and socio-historic critique of the infrastructural moment

Jessica Barker-Wren

This article argues that the movement of the markets is part of an infrastructural moment which persists in privileging the interests of capital and a narrow conception of the modern over socio-ecological impacts. I also examine the gulf between ideas used by City of London to promote relocation and the likely reality of the markets in their new home.  The inclusion of vitalist and more-than-human geographies in the calculus of infrastructure is not trivial, but necessary for a liveable future. Anthropological scholarship of infrastructure can do more to resist the telos of infrastructures as inevitable and acknowledge the existential precarity caused by tolerance of hegemonies whose projects pay no more than lip-service to sustainability. 

Billingsgate (fish) and Smithfield (meat) wholesale markets are sites of historic human and more-than-human vitality, but the multi-species presence in the markets is now a silent one. No-longer a livestock market, the bellows of cattle and barking drovers’ dogs are absent. The cacophony is one of meat rails, heavy thuds, chain curtains, shtick and un-shtick of pvc flaps, the rattle of carry cages wheeled over cobbles. Over at Billingsgate morning dawns on a staggering display of biodiversity, a temporary coral reef. There’s a spectrum of scales and textures, the saline funk of fish out of water. But it’s the call of the Ice Porters, who turn a profit on schlepping the stuff (an odd mix of heavy and ephemeral) from lorry to stall, that raise a din here. Their caustic dialogues and mock fights are broadcast across half the warehouse and are such an institution that ‘Billingsgate’: coarse or vulgarly abusive language is noted as a kind of speech itself. Those few sea creatures of Billingsgate with life left in them remain mute as ever: crustacea with bound claws. In a silent room with your ear close, you might detect a tiny ‘pop’ as a Dorset crab emits a bubble, but truly, a bowl of Rice Crispies makes more of a fuss. Unheard, un-listened-to, will these places be forgotten?

Both wholesale markets are soon to be removed to a combined site at Dagenham and Barking Docks, this was a decision taken by the City of London Corporation (henceforth CoL) who own and run both sites. Whilst the removal is made in the name of keeping the markets competitive for the future and providing more jobs in Dagenham and Barking, an area craving regeneration, it also ‘unlocks’ property for development and will create a more zoned city, something London has largely resisted. An Anthropology of our Built Environment must notice such changes, the lives they touch and the power structures they perpetuate, in order to encourage a liveable future. I argue that retaining the presence of physical markets, the people and multispecies actors enrolled in their function at the heart of cities is not only good for our urban environment, but the markets themselves. More, I suggest that the market’s removal is part of the infrastructural moment in which a ‘business ontology’ (Fisher 2009) propels us deeper into the Plantationocene. I use ‘Plantationocene’ instead of Anthropocene as it holds the people, movements and outlooks responsible for anthropogenic climate change marked in the geological record to account more successfully than ‘Anthropocene’(Lewis and Maslin 2015), which implies a ‘species act’, this is outlined in Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing’s Edge Effects dialogue (Haraway and Tsing 2019).

‘Infrastrucfration’ playfully refers to the frustration I perceive in Nathalie Buier’s recent critique of the Anthropology of Infrastructure (Buier 2023) which, for Buier, is often too vaguely and broadly drawn, neglecting the will toward an integrated natural and social history signalled in the Ontological and Multi-species turns [1].. Following Buier’s (2023) call for geo-historic and political context for infrastructural shifts, I suggest that a broader appraisal of the multispecies impacts in historic context might yield a different set of winners and losers to those advertised in the CoL plans under the auspice of environmental sustainability and infrastructural modernisation. Although the CoL pay lip-service to ‘sustainability’ in their justifications for the removal (City of London 2024), there is a lack of clarity around what is meant by the term here, and no concrete indication of how the current plans produce it.

This piece aims to illustrate potential impacts of the move through vitalist geographies (Moore 2015; Greenhough 2016; Bosch et al. 2024) and suggest that the removal of the markets is part of the same ‘infrastructural moment’ (Venkatesan et al. 2018; Buier 2023) which normalises dispossession (Hart 2006; Hodkinson 2012) within a ‘business ontology’ (Fisher 2009) and disregards the relation of environment as something we both produce and are product of (Moore 2015). In doing so, I wish to highlight the gulf between the ideas used to promote the relocation and the likely reality of the markets’ new situation.  I echo Buier’s sentiment that attention to infrastructural changes (and for my part this particular removal of the markets) is useful in so far as they seem to reveal politics in action (Rival in Venkatesan et al. 2018)alerting us to persistent power structures, best appreciated with an understanding that they are one mode in a world or many worlds of alternative lifeways. We might thereby resist the telos that regards this ‘infrastructural moment’ as inevitable.

In what follows, I approach a Political Ecology of the Market’s relocation. I explore potential human and non-human multi-scalar impacts in geohistorical context, to suggest persistent structures in novel guises which may have lead to the removal decision. Firstly, I locate the contemporary market in historic context using Chien-Hi Li’s (2021) Multi-species history of Smithfield’s transition from a livestock market; Secondly, I reflect on Buier’s appraisal of scholarship of the ‘infrastructural moment’ and the removal of the markets in light of Stuart Hodkinson’s New Urban Enclosures (2012). Peter O’Brien and other’s (2019) study grounds Hodkinson’s (2012) framework within the financialisation of the ‘infrastructural rush’ (Abdoumaliq Simone in Venkatesan et al. 2018) seen in austerity Britain where unshakeable faith in market forces typified the ‘business ontology’ permeating Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009, 17). With this socio-economic background I then appraise justifications for the markets relocation, taking account of human and non-human perspectives, conceptions of urban access (Kwan 2013; Watson 2009), uneven exposure (Roberts 2017) at the site of the microbiome (Greenhaugh 2016; Bosch et al 2024), the body (Agard-Jones 2013), the skin (Winz and Söderström 2021), as well as flood risk. Finally, I look to the beleaguered Thames Water as a salient example of the importance of questioning the anthropocentrism of business ontology (Fisher 2009) in relation to infrastructure.

Below I use a combination of Larkin and Buier’s scholarship to define infrastructure as: An historically specific human intervention into the built environment (Buier 2023, 54) to facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space (Larkin 2013, 2). A broader rendering risks subsuming environment into a Western infrastructural ontology in places where infrastructural projects lack cosmological purchase or relevance as Laura Rival attests (Venkatesan et al., 2018), this is not to say infrastructure is independent of environment, but environment is not reducible to infrastructure. The political is painted broadly here in terms of ‘unequal correlations of power’ (Chantal Mouffe 2005).

In order to understand the significance of the wholesale markets’ removal we require some historic socio-economic context. The fish market was initially situated in Billingsgate Ward, near Tower Bridge. The area is pictured in, fig 1. but relocated to its current more peripheral site at Canary Wharfe in 1982. Today, both Billingsgate and Smithfield sites are owned by the CoL, who govern ‘The Square Mile’. Located in Central London, (see red inset in the fig.1) CoL is the oldest continuous municipal democracy in the world. It has its own police force, mayor and voting system whereby both residents and companies listed within CoL vote for councillors who run largely as independent candidates. Of votes cast in the 2017 general election, about 9000 were residential and 11,000 from company representatives.  In its own words: ‘The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City, supporting a diverse and sustainable London within a globally-successful UK’(City of London 2022); business rules the roost.      

A multi-species assemblage has been present on the Smithfield site (see fig1. Marked green) for more than 1000 years. Built on an ancient grazing site known in Saxon as ‘smooth field’ its location along the river Fleet made it an easy place to graze and water livestock. Historically a livestock market, the site became contentious as the noise, smell and sight of its operation was perceived as a threat to the moral and physical health of Victorian London (Li 2021) and moved to Islington in 1855.  Smithfield is now a meat market only, with no livestock on site. Chien-hui Li’s (2021) account of Smithfield resists an interpretative agenda to appraise the multi-species entanglements which led to its 1855 removal to Islington, representing concern for the welfare of the many species entangled in the Smithfield assemblage, not only from animal welfare lobbyists, but from those enrolled in the meat industry (Li 2021). There is thick description from historic observers who relate the horrors of the livestock market to convey the awareness and concern for animal welfare, as well as the physical constraints of the buildings which ,stretched to capacity, forced the arriving herds into painful contortions. Here, the fifty year delay in removal of the livestock market (Robyn Metcalfe 2012 in Li 2021) is attributed in part to actors seeking to defend the Free Market as a source of Britain’s pride and wealth (Otter 2006) and the CoL who acted in its own interests to defend the annual market rents it received. Noting vivid contemporary portrayal of Smithfield’s malign influence on public health, and the moral economy of animal welfare increasingly felt in Victorian London, Li appraises the removal of the livestock market not consciously ‘anti-animal’ as some would theorise it (Geier 2018) but as a serious attempt by the Victorian public to deal with multi-species encounters in the city (Li 2021).

As Chen-Hui Li’s (2021) account of the History of the Smithfield attests, it was partly concern for the moral and physical health of Londoners which lead to relocation of the livestock market from Smithfield. Yet the abattoirs did not cease to exist, and the welfare of the creatures within Smithfield were not (necessarily) improved though certainlydisplaced. Paula Arcari and other’s scholarship (2021) notes that abattoirs are as ever, noisy, smelly, violent, bloody sites but are now rendered tolerable through their invisibility (Vialles 1994 in Arcari et al 2021). The removal of these places to sites with less public scrutiny did not guarantee a reduction in cruelty, far from it, merely that cruelty was less likely to be observed by the public. The majority of Londoners still consume meat as part of their diet. This piece does not seek to comment on the moral economy of meat consumption. Rather, it draws a comparison between the factors which conspired to encourage the illusion of meat without the animal (Geier 2018) for the Victorians, and today, the city without it's markets.

How easily this sequestering out of sight (Arcari et al 2021) has become naturalised in so many aspects of urban life as to seem immanent of modernity. For Arcari it is this anthropocentrism and hierarchy of creatures —some carefully conserved as ‘biodiversity’, others invisible —that hampers responses to the Anthropocene (Arcari, Probyn-Rapsey and Singer 2021). How smoothly we render invisible all those lives co-opted to serve us, to book a meal, a ride, a cleaner, to repair or maintain (Graham and Thrift 2007). I contend that this erasure works to the detriment of maintenance of community cohesion and broader wellbeing.

Recent multi-species and vitalist approaches (Greenhaugh 2016; Kwan 2013; Bosch et al. 2024) outline the entanglement between (built) environment, socio-temporal (Kwan 2013) and uneven geographies of mental (Winz and Söderström 2021) and physical health (Agard-Jones 2013). These entanglement newly acknowledged by the academy, do something to unseat existing hegemonies which dominate co-production of our environment. Jason Moore’s ecology of Capitalism (2015) suggests we both produce and are product of our environment (2015, 230). Recent scholarship (Bosch et al. 2024; Lorimer and Hodgetts 2024) reveals, the inseparability and co-becoming of the individual and environment at the scale of the microbiome and might demand that we recalibrate our understanding of what an equitable built environment really means (ibid). It is considering this scholarship that I appraise the City’s reasoning for the markets’ move.

The trend toward an increasingly all-encompassing, even primordial (Buier 2023) concept of infrastructure is a point of frustration for Nathalie Buier (2023) where the inherently political and ecological nature of fixed capital remains unacknowledged (Buier 2023,9). For Buier, scholars such as Brian Larkin, do much to elaborate the role of materiality and aesthetics (2013; 2018) in the wielding of infrastructural power but remain agnostic as to its generative impacts, risk becoming enrolled in the projects they set out to describe if they fail, as Buier suggests, to acknowledge the latent power manifested through such projects. For Larkin the poetic power of infrastructure emerges where form is loosened from function (2013, 9). Later (2018) Larkin locates technical function as the source of its social power and influence, but that infrastructure itself is merely an assemblage ‘caught-up in’ political systems (2018, 2). This analysis fails to acknowledge that the unifying factor in these apparently contradictory characterisations is that the power to provide, impose or withhold such infrastructures lies with the capital. The balance in taking the decision to build is often held by remote actors who are stakeholders in capital, but not (necessarily) place. Whilst there is huge heterogeneity in reasoning behind infrastructural decisions (O’Brien & Pike 2019); scholars who focus on the nature of infrastructure post hoc, omit the economic and ontological diversity (Tsing 2015, Rival in Venkatesan  et al 2023) that would accommodate the absence of infrastructure, instead strengthening the appearance of infrastructural inevitability. Larkin’s poetics and promise (2013; 2018) figure strongly in some of CoL proposals whilst remaining stub bornly (business m)anthropocentric.

For Stuart Hodkinson the private infrastructures of the neoliberal agenda are new urban enclosures which destroy existing use and publicness of places, acting to exclude the urban poor from the city, namely through the privatisation of British Housing (Hodkinson 2012). Theorists of the infrastructure and the urban commons (Hart 2006; Hodkinson 2012; Frederici 2017) trace the acceleration of the new enclosures to the 2008 economic crash and following ‘infrastructural rush’ amid state retrenchment and coalition’s rhetoric of austerity and fiscal consolidation (Inderst 2010; Dalakoglou 2017; Venkatesan et al. 2018; O’Brien and Pike 2019) whereby financialization of infrastructure and thereby public space was naturalised. The financialisation of infrastructure saw its transformation from a public good into an alternative asset class in the global investment landscape (Inderst 2010).                                                                                          

O’Brien and Pike’s study of financial models (2019) seen in the UK City Deals details the political economy of the transition from managerialism to entrepreneurialism identified by Harvey (1989) under New Labour’s Local Development Authorities toward The Coalition’s financialisation and funding model. Cities and local authorities under an economic climate of reduced funding effectively negotiated deals blind, with limited access to parameters of assessment and little guarantee that agreements would be upheld (O’Brien and Pike, 2019) . Although the uneven powers of contracting parties meant conditions for these financing structures took place far from what we could describe as the free market, they were justified in this mode appealing to faith in market forces which Marks Fisher labelled the ‘business ontology’ of Capitalist Realism (2009). In this ontology the economic replaces the political as the ‘horizon of the thinkable’ (ibid) and undergirds funding (O’Brien and Pike 2019), maintenance (Graham and Thrift 2007) and access (Harvey 1989; Hodkinson 2012; Kwan 2013) to infrastructures from water to education in globalised life today, profoundly altering the nature of our surroundings (West, Igoe and Brockington 2006).

Following the deposit of a Private Bill to relocate the markets in November 2022, Chris Hayward, Policy Chairman of The City Corporation briefed: “This is a major milestone in an ambitious programme with economic growth at its heart – something our country so clearly needs”. Certainly here we see the centrality of the business ontology (Fisher 2009) in the Corporation’s logic, but this was accompanied by claims of accessibility, carbon targets and reduced emissions amid invocations of sustainability and modernity. Below I wish to interrogate some of these claims and aspirations more closely.

On the 5th March 2024 I attended the CoL public exhibition at a WeWork space in Barking. The exhibition was an opportunity for the people of Barking and Dagenham to ask questions about the project and share their ideas and concerns. I intended to interview people on their perceptions of the plans, but as one of only two people in attendance, I spoke with two city representatives responsible for logistics and ‘social aspect’ respectively. The ‘social aspect’ focussed on a scheme already in place at the current site which offers an academy introducing young people to the food industry geared at maintaining expertise in fish mongering, butchery and adjacent industries (City of London 2024). Perhaps this really will create jobs in the Barking and Dagenham area, it is certainly an idea replete with infrastructural promise (Larkin 2013).                               

In terms of logistics, improved accessibility is a justification for the relocation (City of London 2022). The CoL dedicated a whole slide to accessibility in their public exhibition of plans; yet there are no plans for investment in accessible infrastructure beyond the warehouses. The nearest station (Dagenham Dock) lacks step free access, leaving the new location inaccessible by rail to step-free access users (see Fig 2). For Sophie Watson it is ease of access which constitutes the market’s positive impact and forces “rubbing along” a “minimal form of encounter by inhabiting the same space as someone different from oneself” ( 2009,1581-2 ) which ameliorates social isolation, encouraging social cohesion by reducing stereotyping of the other (ibid). In a society increasingly siloed by social media, accessible markets are a lifeline. Thus, market spaces can be regarded as a public good. Set across a motorway on a mainline train branch that public good is diminished.              

Kwan Mei Po (2013) highlights the importance of temporallity in accessibility of infrastructure. If facilities are available at times when people are unable to access them, they are rendered nugatory.  During my conversation with the Logistical Planner, it was admitted that provision for shuttle bus routes would drop workers off at specific times of day, (City of London, 2024) but that public bus routes do not currently reach the location and so this access will be unusable to those visiting at other times. However state-of-the-art the accessibility might be within the warehouses, the current plans therefore offer a reduction in accessibility for the non-car-owning public.                                                                                                                                   

In the City’s documents they contend that more modern and sustainable markets will aid The City in achieving their net zero target (City of London 2022) but refrain from claiming the same impact for Barking and Dagenham. In a strikingly honest statement, Hayward articulates the factors that may truly be galvanising the move: “Relocating our markets will help ease traffic and improve air quality to inner London, while unlocking land at Billingsgate for new housing.” (City of London 2022) Note here, inner London’s air quality will be improved, presumably with a corresponding degradation in air quality for Barking and Dagenham. A quick comparison in populations— in 2021 CoL and Barking and Dagenham population’s were 8618 and 218,534 respectively (ONS Census 2021)— suggests that the move will expose twenty five times more people to worsened air quality. This is what Asli Duru might term ‘ordinary’ or ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011)‘inseparable from the mess of everyday life’ (Katz 2017, 299 in Duru 2019). Vanessa Agard-Jones extends Trouillot’s analytical scales (village-nation-world) to include the body (Trouillot 1988 in Agard Jones 2013). Here, focus on seemingly marginal people (for our purposes market traders, live marine creatures) enriches understanding of power systems and reflect on the potential impacts of the infrastructural moment at the site of the body and the importance of noticing these changes.          

When understanding potential impacts of infrastructure, Kwan Mei Po invites us to attune to spatiotemporal inequalities (2013) and suggests that the propensity for an individual’s environmental exposure to be measured at the locus of residential neighbourhood can lead to erroneous data that do not account for exposures at work and elsewhere (Kwan 2013). We should note then the increased exposure of workers and visitors to emissions as the markets alongside the A13 (labelled Choats Road in Fig.2), with attendant consequences for long-term health, birth weight, overall mortality and cognitive function (Yuchi et al., 2020). In a 2013 review by WHO regional office for Europe in Copenhagen of health impact adjusted for co-exposures indicate health affects at 300-500m of a main road.                                                         

This displacement rather than reduction of pollution may be seen as an analogue for hypocrisy of environmental injustice everywhere, which allows displacement of environmental waste in its many forms, in trajectories which follow the path of least resistance from global North to global South (Graham and Thrift 2007), and from fortunate to less fortunate, often visited on bodies of the global majority (Agard-Jones 2013). Moving from the scale of bodily exposure to the skin, Winz and Söderström’s biosensory ethnography measures impact of urban exposures at the frontier of the skin using electrodermal activity (EDA) to understand the relationship between the built environment and psychosis (2021). Noting that even the dermal barrier is somewhat illusory, recent research suggests future built environment practice should welcome a diverse microbiome to support a buoyant immune system or risk exacerbating existing health disparities (Bosch et al. 2024). As Liz Roberts put it so eloquently, ‘The particulate exposure of unregulated industrialization that allowed some to live as impermeable exposed all to the Anthropocene.’(2017 no page).  

I attended the exhibition of plans keen to hear elaboration on the possibility that the demands of central London’s restaurant trade could be met whilst lowering congestion in the centre through the use of freight on Thames (City of London 2024, slide 4). Disappointingly this was admitted to be an imaginative flight, stemming from an idea that the Uber catamaran might extend its route down to the docks. However, this vessel is too slight to bear freight and even if it could, additional vehicles would be required to transport goods from the river. The future promise of a hydrogen fuel cell depot in the adjacent former Ford factory was also discussed (though this does not appear in published plans) and could provide a much-needed answer for low emissions freight. It is true that low carbon infrastructure may form part of a liveable future, but it strikes me as cynical of CoL to advertise technology not yet realised as a solution to intrinsic flaws.

Conversely, a projected future conspicuous for its absence is the projected image of Thames flooding in 2030 (fig 3).  In NASAs graphic visualisations we have a stark forecast of Jason Moore’s ‘modernity as environmental history’(2015, 230). Red shading indicates the zone in which swathes of London (including Barking and Dagenham docks) will experience severe flooding on a regular basis by 2030 due to ice-cap melt and fluvial factors (V. Masson-Dermotte et al.2021).

Indeed, water is an issue of prescience to London’s infrastructural moment as the UK government decides whether or not to re-nationalise an exemplar of infrastructure financialised to the neglect of function and corporeal reality: Thames Water. As an organisational body Thames Water is tasked with maintaining the supply of water for human consumption within the Thames watershed, a task that cannot be successfully achieved without acknowledging deep entanglement with the more-than-human—geology, ecology of the river, ecology of the human biome (Bosch et al. 2024)—and repair (Graham and Thrift 2007). It is embracing the complexity of such entanglements which moves us away from the radically simplified ecologies of the Plantationocene (Haraway and Tsing 2019). Attempts to evade more-than-human processes within the business ontology have culminated in the poisoning of London’s rivers and riparian systems, an abdication of care. Meanwhile private investors in the Thames Water utility were paid dividends of 2.7 billion pounds between 2006-2017 under Macquarie’s ownership, as debt tripled to nearly 11 billion pounds (Young 2023) with scant maintenance of infrastructural function. Although the relocation of the markets is far less clear-cut than the Thames Water enclosure in terms of winners and losers, I have argued that the markets’ removal will undermine much of their publicness and quality as a common good and therefore represents an urban enclosure (Hodkinson 2012). What makes the markets part of the commons is their accessibility, the opportunity for sociality that they provide (Watson 2009), the prominence and visibility of the many human and non-human creatures entangled within them. When sequestered (Arcari, Probyn-Rapsey and Singer 2021) to a zoned periphery these aspects will be lost to the detriment of the public and the markets themselves.

[1] The Ontological turn within Anthropology proposes that worlds as well as worldviews may vary (University of Cambridge et al., 2017)and the multi-species turn centres the entanglement of human life with the more-than-human: microbes, fungi, plants, and animals transcending conception that these figure merely as fuel, symbol, background or accessory.

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