Beyond the Storm: Climate Change, Repair, and Reimagining Networked Infrastructures in Southeast Louisiana
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This dissertation examines how coastal communities live with and reimagine networked infrastructures amid planetary change and uncertainty. The study is situated in southeast Louisiana, where the ongoing legacy of extractive industries has led to uneven development and deep socioeconomic disparities, while the increased impacts of climate change, including more frequent and intense hurricanes, causes damage to aging infrastructures. Drawing on 22 months of ethnographic and design-based fieldwork with policymakers, regulatory agencies, telecommunication companies, utility workers, and residents, it reconfigures networked infrastructures in four main ways. First, understanding the multiple visions, assumptions, and expectations that shape existing networked infrastructures makes visible the gaps, exclusions, and frictions around how these networks are assumed to work and who they should work for. Second, attending to shifting temporalities in the process of large-scale infrastructural restoration reveals new forms of labor, practices, and plans for uncertain futures along the coast. Third, reframing network intermittencies and failures highlights the systemic issues regarding how, for whom, and under what conditions infrastructures are restored. Finally, cultivating alternative infrastructural relations through the co-design of a community-based emergency communications network requires reworking existing infrastructures to support immediate disaster response and longer-term climate resilience. Altogether, this dissertation shows the intertwined sociotechnical, political, and ecological relations that shape networked infrastructures. It concludes by suggesting reparative design as an approach to working with infrastructures in an age of planetary change, where restitutions are made for the consequences of historical uneven development with consideration to designing for livability and mutual care in the face of ongoing crisis. As the impacts of climate change unfold unevenly on a planetary scale, it argues for the importance of understanding the vulnerabilities of networked infrastructures and creating pathways towards just and sustainable futures.