The movement of foods as commodities and cultural artefacts rests on infrastructure as a form of engagement, care, and as an ongoing process. In this issue of Roadsides, we think through such cosmologies alongside the infrastructure that moves food around the world, and ask: how do foodways and their socio-cultural-cosmological scaffoldings condition each other?

For decades, infrastructures have been widely seen as the backbone of modernity. But in the current historical moment, these futures have become increasingly toxic. Not only are infrastructures involved in domesticating, enabling, and mediating toxic flows as part of their regular operating cycles, but they also constitute contaminants themselves as they often consist of toxic materials and heavily treated substances.

Infrastructures often represent the materialization of modernity, progress, mobility and positive influence of the state. However, they can also be the cause or manifestation of decline, and thereby invoke a sense of anxiety regarding the present and/or the future. Infrastructure (its failure, ruin or decline) can thus be considered a tangible, material conduit for anxiety.

Concrete is emblematic of modernity, symbolizing progress and development. It has been both a symbol of political power and a marker of social and environmental challenges. Papers in this issue explore concrete’s social, technical, and political entanglements worldwide. They analyze its role in shaping built environments, economies, and communities, while addressing sustainability challenges in the twenty-first century.

As cities have to bear up against storms, high tides, and other extreme weather events, urban design increasingly turns to non-human life-forms and processes for solutions. Our main question for this Roadsides collection is: does the emerging trend of developing bioinfrastructures change understandings of urban life and how so?

In this edited collection of Roadsides, we aim to add to the scholarship that tackles the conceptual and analytical intersection of gender and infrastructure. Thinking infrastructurally, we posit, implies thinking about gender relations and their myriad manifestations in social life. Instead of thinking about gender as one variable in infrastructure, we contend that gender fundamentally shapes infrastructure and is, in turn, shaped by infrastructure.

What can thinking with animals and infrastructure can reveal about the expectations and failures of modernity? This relationship is often understood as one of obsolescence and separation. Railways, for example, led to the replacement of pack animals, while barbed wire fences were erected to keep animals off the tracks. Both obsolescence and separation are conventionally understood as merely technical matters, but are also central to the politics and poetics of infrastructure.

This thematic collection of Roadsides takes a closer look at the various disappearing acts and occasional spectacles of logistics. Typically, logistics figures only as a secondary dimension of infrastructure in its mundane register as “the study of boring things” (Star 1999). As a managerial science for designing the operative logics of “flow” through various infrastructures (e.g., trade, migration, data), logistics also appears as the handmaiden to the distinct movements it mediates.

This edited collection of Roadsides focuses on the sensory dimensions of infrastructure that have yet to be adequately explored and theorized in the literature. The proliferation of scholarship on material infrastructures continues to emphasize the social and the technical over the sensorial, rather than bring these approaches together to study the dense networks that facilitate the provision of goods and resources.

This curated collection of Roadsides is concerned with one particular relational aspect of infrastructure that so far has scarcely been explored: the links between infrastructure and archive. The point of departure is an awareness that the history of the infrastructures lies in particular bodies of texts. These archives are central to the imagining of infrastructure, to its planning as well to its construction, yet their relations are seldom addressed.

Drawing on emerging conversations between architects, urban planners, geographers, and anthropologists, this issue calls for a perspective on contemporary cities that interrogates how architecture and urban design function as and with infrastructure. Architecture and infrastructure come together through social practices and material networks. Looking beyond the discrete infrastructural systems that underlie cities, this issue examines the social and political practices that shape urban architecture.

This edited collection aims to bring into conversation the emerging social sciences of outer space and recent social science research on infrastructure. It seeks to explore how insights from the “infrastructural turn” can advance scholarship of outer space, and vice versa. Hence, it seeks to address the following question: How does the conceptual and empirical focus on infrastructure advance our understanding of the cultural, political and economic relationality of outer space?

This second collection of Roadsides employs artistically rendered depictions of labor to show how infrastructures become political and material things through social relations of work. Aesthetically creative and methodologically experimental, the articles utilize photographs, paintings, cartoons, and videos to examine and reveal the impacts and experiences of technological intervention that sometimes escape the frame of textual analysis.

The first curated collection of Roadsides advances the argument that infrastructure is inherently lively and fragile because it is always a complex web of multiple temporalities. The texts in this collection show a few examples of the variety of temporalities that make and unmake infrastructure. Focusing explicitly on those temporalities should provide food for thought in terms of rethinking infrastructure as an asynchronic timescape.