New Ghosts in Old Town: Affordance Renewal and the Endurance of Infrastructure

Infrastructure is a cornerstone of modern societies. It is so ubiquitous and taken for granted that it seems to have always been there, stable, invisible, and immutable. Yet the moment it breaks down, changes become apparent, and we see how maintenance, repair, and adaptation are continuous. This paradox of how infrastructure endures yet evolves over time is still poorly understood. To understand how the enactment of past infrastructure creates changes in and through practice, we developed a historical case study of the Edinburgh’s South Bridge, from its conception in the eighteenth century to the present. We describe how a few institutional entrepreneurs envisioned the bridge to provide a set of affordances, a process we call figuration. Once the bridge was built and people engaged with it, new affordances emerged and became taken for granted through sedimentation. As people interact with infrastructure, new opportunities for figuration and sedimentation emerge, which take into account the history of past affordances and enactments of the bridge, which exists as an inventory of affordances. The regeneration of infrastructure thus results from the interaction between processes of figuration and sedimentation, mediated by inventories of affordances.