It's hard to escape the feeling that in Britain today nothing works. Economic growth and higher wages are simply not enough. This is because the so-called "cost of living crisis" is only the face of a deeper crisis of foundational liveability.

How can we address failing public services and decaying social infrastructure? What is the foundational economy and how do we rebuild it? What is the role of cultural infrastructure in this process?

On this lunchtime panel, Julie Froude (Manchester) and Sukhdev Johal (QMUL), members of the Foundational Economy Collective and two co-authors of When Nothing Works (2023), discuss these questions alongside Justin O'Connor (South Australia), author of Culture of is Not Industry (2024).

This event was hosted by the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network. For updates on forthcoming events please follow @TTinfraNetwork or join the mail list by writing to dominic.davies@city.ac.uk.

When Nothing Works, with Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, and Justin O'Connor

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

Dr Nicola Kirkby is Centre Manager for DIVERSE CDT, the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Diversity in Data Visualization, at City St George’s, University of London, and a member of the steering group for the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network. In this podcast she discusses her new book, Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel: From Platform to Plot via the Railroad, which is out now with Cambridge University Press.

The conversation explores the different ways that rail infrastructure has reshaped the novel as the nineteenth century progressed, and asks how close reading can help us to see and think differently about the social and cultural impact of infrastructure. There’s also some healthy Raymond Williams stanning. The podcast is hosted by Dom Davies and the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network (@TTinfraNetwork).

Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel, with Nicola Kirkby

How can art and storytelling help us to make sense of infrastructures as concrete and symbolic systems? How do we map the social, cultural, and imaginative aspects of infrastructure? 

Giada Peterle is a visual artist, comics author, and urban walker, and author of Comics as a Research Practice (2021). Her work explores how arts-based and narrative approaches can expand the ways we think through and with infrastructures. She experiments with creative mapping practices that include comic book cartographies and geoGraphic narratives.

In this talk, Giada presents a series of urban experiments that use comics, autoethnography, walking, and photography as methods for telling infrastructural stories. The event was hosted by the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network on 29 October 2025. A selection of images from Giada's talk are available to view on TTiN's Instagram page @TTinfraNetwork.

Infrastructure, Art, & Autoethnography, with Giada Peterle

Professor Juliet Fall is a political and environmental geographer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Juliet’s work focuses on questions of border infrastructure, biosecurity, and the boundaries between humans and nature. 

In this podcast, we discussed her new book, Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography, which interleaves ethnographic comics with academic essays. Our conversation explored what it means to research infrastructure through drawing, the layered histories of borders in Europe, and the way both infrastructure and drawing mediate between scales of the abstract and the intimate. 

This podcast is hosted by the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network. For more info, follow @TTinfraNetwork on Instagram and BlueSky. Please like, subscribe, and review this podcast to help us reach more listeners. We hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography, with Juliet Fall

What would you say if you had 5 minutes to talk to Matt Damon about the “global water crisis”? On 18 October, TTiN hosted Filippo Menga for a conversation about this and other questions addressed in his book, Thirst: The Quest to Solve the Global Water Crisis (Verso 2025). With responses from Naho Mirumachi, Professor in Environmental Politics at King's College London, and Julie Froud, Professor of Financial Innovation at the University of Manchester, this session explored Filippo’s groundbreaking account of the global water crisis and the failure of corporations and non-profits to address its worsening effects. 

Thirst: Solving the Global Water Crisis, with Filippo Menga, Naho Mirumachi, and Julie Froud

How can city makers renew urban spaces in ways that benefit existing residents, rather than displacing them? And how have communities organised to resist their displacement? 

On 28 November, TTiN put these questions and more to a panel of academics and practitioners: Charmaine Brown, community activist in Peckham and Lecturer at the University of Greenwich; Anna Minton, journalist, author, and Reader at the University of East London; Betty Owoo, Senior Design Officer in the Greater London Authority's Design Unit; and Ash Rao, urban designer and planner on the GLA’s Regeneration and Planning team. 

For more info, follow @TTinfraNetwork on Instagram and BlueSky. Please like, subscribe, and review this podcast to help us reach more listeners. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

How Not to Make a City, with Charmaine Brown, Anna Minton, Betty Owoo, and Ash Rao

Thinking through infrastructure – energy, transport, water, waste, housing, health – with methods from the arts, humanities, & social sciences. Follow @TTinfraNetwork and learn more here: https://researchcentres.citystgeorges.ac.uk/thinking-through-infrastructure-network#unit=about

How Not to Make a City, with Charmaine Brown, Anna Minton, Betty Owoo, and Ash Rao

Thinking Through Infrastructure Network

Related tracks