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Zombie infrastructure: A legal geography of railroad monstrosity in the California desert.
- Source :
-
Environment & Planning D: Society & Space . Aug2021, Vol. 39 Issue 4, p758-775. 18p. - Publication Year :
- 2021
-
Abstract
- This paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure to understand the entangled histories of railroad colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and corporate power in the California desert. I examine debates over the Cadiz project, a contemporary water project that proposes to take water from a California desert aquifer and transport it to the California coast. I argue that the life of the Cadiz project depends on Cadiz Inc.'s ability to revive the legal rights and body of a little-used railroad shortline, thus bringing back a legal infrastructure and corporate power from the late nineteenth century in the service of a new corporation. In so doing, the Cadiz project enlivens the racialized dispossession of land and labor that the railroad initially required. Routing the politics of a contemporary infrastructure project through the railroad and its octopus past, I argue, places the politics of infrastructure at the intersection of laws, monstrosity, and dispossession. Drawing on economic and legal geography, this paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure, a concept that builds on what activists call zombie projects in order to show the life and death of infrastructure, and reveals how contemporary capitalists enliven old infrastructures for new purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *HISTORY of railroads
*RAILROADS
*DESERTS
*GEOGRAPHY
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 02637758
- Volume :
- 39
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Environment & Planning D: Society & Space
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 151896816
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758211023504