Since the beginnings of human habitation, people have been storing ‘stuff’—food, water, textiles, energy in various forms, information and more. People have stored all this in and with pots, jugs, boxes, bags, barrels, trunks, and many other artefacts and technologies of containment. After all, according to feminist author Elizabeth Fisher (1979), the very first cultural device used by humans was probably a carrier bag, itself a storage container. Through the many centuries since, an increasingly diverse array of storage implements and infrastructures has emerged, mediating resource, commodity and other flows at and across a range of scales.

In this collection, we argue for approaching storage as infrastructure and for attending to the infrastructures of storage. Our age of global circulations and on-demand delivery is made possible not only by distributive infrastructures like roads, pipelines, cables and container ships but also by all kinds of storage arrangements. Think of silos and refrigerators for our food, of jerry-cans and reservoirs for potable water, of pumped hydro and batteries for energy, of large data centres and flash drives for data. As storage temporarily suspends circulation, it captures value and capital or balances circulatory mismatches between supply and demand (Banoub and Martin 2020; Mitchell 2026). Looking at storage thus complicates flow-based perspectives, inciting critical reflection on the assumption of (material) circulation as a structuring condition of contemporary worlds.

Despite their long history and contemporary ubiquity, storage infrastructures have been relatively overlooked by scholars (but see Lewthwaite 1969; Sofia 2000), leaving much of their conceptual and empirical potential untapped. Recent work has begun to develop this perspective, approaching storage as a socio-material arrangement deeply imbricated with spatial, temporal and infrastructural politics (Braun 2025; Kasper 2025; Randle and Archer 2025). We believe that such reflection is particularly timely. Ongoing transformations—digitization and AI, ‘green’ transitions, the compounding effects of climate change and geopolitical upheavals—all serve as catalysts for the expansion of storage capacities across scales. On the one hand, major storage infrastructures become ever-more important: grid-scale batteries, green hydrogen storage, large data centres, massive water reservoirs. On the other hand, at the everyday scale we experience an individualization of infrastructural responsibilities and thus an increased emphasis on minor storage arrangements: LPG cylinders, battery-enabled solar power and all kinds of household water containers, to name a few.

Proceeding from the recognition that there is still much to explore, understand and analyse about the many storage arrangements of our infrastructural worlds, we invite contributions that consider the significance and role of storage in infrastructure across the urban–rural continuum, preferably based on empirical research. Submissions may address different notions of storage (stockpile, backup, buffer, containment, etc.), and we especially encourage visual and multi-modal contributions—such as those exploring variegated (in)visibilities or multi-scalar arrangements of storage infrastructures. To productively channel such heterogeneity, we specifically but not only welcome contributions exploring the following three threads:

• The temporalities of storage: Storage infrastructures are usually future-oriented. A closer look may allow for a nuanced view of infrastructural temporalities, from everyday rhythms of domestic spaces to the longue durée of large-scale storage projects and beyond.
• The labour and care of storage: Storage arrangements of all scales require intense attention, labour and care. Addressing who is (made) responsible for the storage of resources and commodities, and in what ways, may provide new insights into infrastructural labour/care, inequalities, injustices and agency.
• The variegated (in)visibilities of storage: (In)visibility or opacity have been cornerstones of debate in infrastructure studies, and storage infrastructures also occupy variegated positions on the spectrum of visibility. With multi-modal contributions particularly in mind, storage provides a fresh lens for exploring not only infrastructure’s own (in)visibilities but also the question of what it further reveals or conceals.