Infrastructure is comprised of systems or networks so complex that we can never see them in their physical totality. Yet they also shape the most immediate conditions of our lived experience, unevenly redistributing wealth, time, and life itself across society. What kind of stories do we need to apprehend infrastructure? How can we see it and bring it under our collective control? How do we contest its arrangement of deep inequalities and begin to organise around alternatives?

Chaired by Dom Davies, this discussion is led by Zack Polanski, Deputy Leader of the Green Party and Member of the London Assembly, and Joel De Mowbray, founder of Yes Make, an infrastructure delivery organisation that specialises in empowering communities through the construction of public spaces, with members of the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network.

Building Stories Around Infrastructure, with Zack Polanski and Joel De Mowbray

Professor Alex Tickell is a historian and critic of global literatures in English. This panel event launched his book, City Fictions of the New India, published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. In the book and this recorded discussion, Alex discusses how fiction, literary journalism, the graphic novel, and television drama have reimagined the relationship between infrastructure and citizenship in contemporary Indian cities.

Alex is in conversation with Professor Ruvani Ranasinha (King's College London) and Professor David Johnson (Open University). The discussion is hosted by Dr Dom Davies (City St George's) and the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network (@TTinfraNetwork). 

City Fictions of the New India, with Alex Tickell, Ruvani Ranasinha, and David Johnson

Thinking through infrastructure – energy, transport, water, waste, housing, health – with methods from the arts, humanities, & social sciences. Follow @TTinfraNetwork

Building Stories Around Infrastructure, with Zack Polanski and Joel De Mowbray

Thinking Through Infrastructure Network

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