Abstract

Infrastructures are widely considered integral to modern societies. As the built structures of modern cities, infrastructures provide the necessities for human life, economic growth and political stability. Infrastructures not only connect rural and urban areas with each other, they also link cities, nations and continents in vast and ever expanding networks of technologies, political decision making and regulatory requirements. The following chapter is an attempt to provide orientation regarding how infrastructures might be analyzed by philosophical means and how some of their features might be understood in relation to human action and experience. Such insight is especially beneficial for a philosophy of the city, since the concepts of city and infrastructure are so deeply connected that they can hardly be distinguished from one another.