What if we think about infrastructure not only in utilitarian terms, but as culture and politics? What if we consider the ways infrastructure has been used and abused, sometimes in very different ways to those intended by its designers? And what if we emphasise how infrastructures have changed over time, sometimes radically evolving? We set up the interdisciplinary ECA Infrastructure Group in 2025 to explore these questions. Led by Richard Williams (Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures, History of Art), the core group includes Moa Carlsson (Lecturer in Architectural Design, ESALA), Sepideh Karami (Lecturer in Architecture ESALA) and Craig Martin (Design).
We have expertise in diverse areas – anything from motorways, to shipping containers, to nuclear power stations. Books published by group members include The Expressway World (2025), a history of motorway transformations around the world, Shipping Container (2016), a history of a ubiquitous infrastructural object, and Infrastructural Love: Caring for our Architectural Support Systems, a collection of essays celebrating infrastructure as profoundly human culture. Scenic Calculations: Landscape, Industry and Planning in Twentieth-Century Britain, Moa Carlsson’s account of the conflicts and accommodations between landscape and infrastructure is forthcoming. A collection of papers on the visual representation of infrastructure is in the advanced planning stages. Group members have given papers on infrastructure recently in Atlanta, Bonn, Glasgow, and Newcastle as well as Edinburgh. The group is in dialogue with researchers from the universities of Aberystwyth, Copenhagen, London South Bank, Oslo, São Paulo and many others. The Projeto Ocupações (Occupations Project), funded by FAPESP in São Paulo, put the group in contact with a remarkable project repurposing an abandoned 13-story office in São Paulo into a thriving live/work community of artists.
We plan much more activity, and we are always interested in hearing from anyone, inside and outside ECA, who also thinks of infrastructure as culture. For more information about the group, and to propose any kind of activity or collaboration, email r.j.williams@ed.ac.uk
