London's ‘Super Sewer’: A Case Study for the Interdisciplinary Possibilities of Anthropologists and Economists Investigating Infrastructure Together

Abstract

Despite the fact that recent anthropological interest in infrastructure has done much to illuminate the infrastructure asset as an assemblage of actors, technologies and ideas, an interdisciplinary approach is required to unpack how the infrastructure project comes together as an assemblage and to define the role that financial technologies and discourses play in shaping it. Here, an interdisciplinary approach is applied to a novel infrastructure asset, London's Thames Tideway Tunnel, in order to show how multiple actors and visions of the world are brought together to make the infrastructure asset come to fruition. The paper concludes that this interdisciplinary approach to infrastructure can allow us to keep multiple sides of the infrastructure project in sight simultaneously. This includes both the creation of a rhetorical vision and spectacle around the asset, and the underlying financial arrangements that bind it together. If we do so, we can understand how new infrastructural forms utilise particular financial technologies and ideas to change the relationship between the public and the private, and between consumers and providers, and act towards the creation of a new ‘public good’ that normalises private provision.

Citation

Bowles, B.O.L., Bayliss, K. and Van Waeyenberge, E. (2021), "London's ‘Super Sewer’: A Case Study for the Interdisciplinary Possibilities of Anthropologists and Economists Investigating Infrastructure Together", Wood, D.C. (Ed.) Infrastructure, Morality, Food and Clothing, and New Developments in Latin America (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 41), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 5-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120210000041001