Our resilience should not become someone – or something – else’s vulnerability. Historical experience can help us avoid narrow understandings and practices of infrastructural resilience and appreciate its socio-material dimensions.
Tim Moss is a Senior Researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Honorary Professor at the Leibniz University Hannover. Tim’s research is distinctive for connecting historical studies of infrastructure with contemporary debates on sociotechnical and urban transitions. He draws on relational and socio-spatial concepts from urban geography and science and technology studies to analyse past infrastructural trajectories, setting an example in theoretical grounding for historical research. Conversely, he uses analysis of the past as a source of historical contextualisation and critical reflection for scholarship on current transitions to urban networked infrastructures. He is particularly interested in the processes by which energy and water infrastructures reflect and reproduce the multiple geographies, power relations and socio-materialities of a city.