11 Redundant infrastructures

Louise Rondel y Laura Henneke prepared this issue. Photogs: Laura Henneke y Álvaro Márquez Fernández.

Editor’s note: This number resulted from an ethnographic exercise led by Laura Henneke and Louise Rondel, in which a group of ten people explored the socio-material entanglements and contradictions of a car-centered infrastructure in Berlin. After such a fantastic walk, we decided to turn that experience and their reflections into a zine, discuss the notion of redundant infrastructure, and provoke further urban explorations worldwide.

Content

Introduction: Infrastructural Explorations

Infrastructural Explorations is a series of urban walkshops co-founded by Louise Rondel and Laura Henneke in 2018 in London. Wanting to get out of the classroom, in these walkshops, we invite participants – members of the public, researchers and students – to join us in walking through the city, tracing different forms of urban infrastructure and critically engaging with their impacts on the landscape. As part of the series, we have walked along the River Thames, hunted for above-ground clues to the London Underground, visited municipal- and volunteer-run public libraries, and followed household rubbish to the incinerator and recycling plant. We have also walked around the canals of Castlefield in Manchester, taken DeWaterbus along the Scheldt in Antwerp passing oil refineries and cargo ports, and carried out an infrastructural scavenger hunt over Zoom during the pandemic.

In November 2024, we facilitated a walkshop in Berlin-Steglitz, walking adjacent to and along infrastructure built for highways that never were. We finished our walk in the Schlangenbader Tunnel, recently closed to undergo repairs, affording a pedestrian experience of the wide, smooth asphalt of the highway leading to it, usually solely for motor vehicles. As we walked, we considered the (car-centric) futures that were imagined when these infrastructures were built, what it feels like to be a pedestrian in an auto-landscape, how they have been made redundant, and the other futures which are possible, how they could be (made) non-redundant again to enable different ways of living in cities.

In the following, we present our walk through this part of Berlin, from the Bierpinsel to the Schlangenbader Tunnel.

Walkshop: From the Bierpinsel to the Schlangenbader Tunnel

‘Out-of-place: Redundant infrastructures and walking in auto-landscapes’

Date: Thursday 14th November, 12:00 – 15:00

Starting location: U Bahnhof Schloßstraße

The route: From the iconic Bierpinsel into the Schlangenbader Tunnel

Information for participants: Focusing on urban landscapes designed for driving and contestations to this ideal of the car-centric city, this walkshop will explore out-of-placeness – both highway infrastructures that were redundant before they were ever used and how it feels to be a walker in places built for cars. In an exercise in opening our sociological imaginations to the city, this is not a guided tour but rather an open and experimental collective exploration. We invite participants to attune to their bodily and emotional experiences in the places through which we walk, to allow our conversations to be prompted by what we encounter and to be open to the unexpected and happenstance. In connecting our ‘personal troubles’ to ‘public issues’, together we will reflect on how these embodied and affective encounters with the auto-infrastructure can attune us to questions of infrastructure’s social life, the politics of its siting, urban power dynamics, distributional (in)justice and forms of (infra)structural violence. We also consider how this out-of-placeness alerts us to questions of the future of auto-landscapes, in particular in the current context of plans to extend Berlin’s A100.

The walk will be approximately four kilometers, with the pace set by participants. The terrain is paved with a variety of textures. It includes several flights of stairs which can be circumnavigated if necessary. Otherwise, the walk is generally flat with some slopes and may be uneven in places. It will involve walking along and crossing busy roads. There is a public toilet along the way.

Documenting the walk: Participants are invited to contribute to a shared Padlet as we walk. Please upload any reflections, images, sound recordings or videos onto the map.