Re-imagining urban infrastructure: Minor ecologies,ontological conflicts and the more-than-humans

Book name: Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology by Maan Barua's

In recent years, scholars in geography and socio-cultural anthropology have engaged with assumptions underpinned by the Cartesian binary of nature/culture. The turn to ontology in the social sciences, in general and in anthropology in particular, has emerged as a response to the limitations of human-centred social theory in the context of ecological crisis and the Anthropocene (Kohn, 2015). As climate change, geological instability, and nonhuman forces increasingly shape political and economic life, scholars have questioned frameworks that treat nature as a passive background to human action (Heywood, 2017). The conventional understanding is under critique and scrutiny and scholars of the ontological turn argue for the existence of multiple worldviews, cultures, societies, or forms of knowing or understanding (epistemologies) but not in opposition to one universal nature, reality, form of being, or existence (ontology) (Heywood, 2017: 2). Instead, they propose multiculturalism (multiple cultures and multiple ways of interpreting) with ‘mutinaturalism’. The ontological turn proposes and demonstrates through ethnographic work that worlds, as well as worldviews, may vary (Heywood, 2017). Such engagement has turned the disciplines to acknowledge and accommodate the more-than-humans and to critique an anthropocentric understanding of the world. Maan Barua's Lively Cities enters human geography and anthropological research at a moment when the ontological status of the urban and infrastructure is in flux. Across infrastructure studies, multispecies scholarship, and more-than-human geography, human exceptionalism, which long supported and structured social science in general and urban spaces in particular since the Enlightenment's dichotomous understanding of the world, is being challenged. At the centre of Barua's project is the distinction between major and minor urban theory. Major urban theory consists of the familiar analytical collection of urban political economy, planning, governance, and postcolonial critique. These traditions, Barua (2023) argues, have been enormously productive but remain implicitly anthropocentric in their definition of the urban field. Minor theory, on the other hand, works immanently within these dominant languages while redirecting attention toward heterogeneous agencies that exceed the human and the dominant spaces. The urban, in this sense, becomes a meshwork rather than a network woven by multiple forms of life, materiality, agency, and movement. The way Ingold (2011) uses ‘meshwork’ against the network of ANT seems to take centre stage in this project. This conceptual move is not merely terminological. It repositions the object of urban inquiry. If cities are understood as lively meshworks rather than bounded human artefacts, then infrastructures, animals, atmospheres and informal practices must be treated as constitutive rather than supplementary. Barua's (2023) intervention, therefore, resonates strongly with broader debates in human geography and anthropology that have sought to move beyond the nature–culture divide and Aristotelian hylomorphism, as well as Cartesian Dualism.

The work also encourages urban scholarship to move from the ‘smooth’ to the ‘striated’ spaces of the cities. At the same time, Barua is careful to avoid the shortcomings of a flat ontology. The book repeatedly insists that attention to more-than-human life must remain attuned to uneven power relations, racialisation, and the differentiated capacities of urban actors. The empirical chapters substantiate this argument through detailed engagement with Delhi and London. In Delhi, rhesus macaques emerge not as peripheral wildlife but as participants in the everyday production of urban space. Barua's (2023) discussion of commensality, the routine practice of feeding monkeys, demonstrates how mundane interactions reorganise spatial proximities, informal economies, and moral obligations. Feeding sites become points where religious practice, urban governance, and animal behaviour intersect. The result is a city in which multispecies relations are inseparable from infrastructural and political dynamics.

Particularly illuminating is the book's attention to the ‘katiyabaaz’, informal electricity workers who tap into and rework the urban grid. Their practices introduce improvisational variability into the electrical network, while macaques simultaneously appropriate rooftops and wires as movement corridors. Barua describes these activities as producing a ‘beastly geometry’, capturing the extent to which urban infrastructures function as habitats as well as technical systems. The infrastructure in such cases is not just technical materials like roads and electrical wires, but also includes informal human and more-than-human cooperation, which helps a city function. Through such moments, the book demonstrates that infrastructure is better understood as a lively terrain of multispecies habitation than as a stable substrate for human life. Barua (2023) makes a clear distinction between the materials against the ‘vital matter’ (Bennett, 2010). Such distinction is important in an emerging scholarship on new materialism, posthumanism, and more-than-human, which finds matter as its central object of discussion, without clearly demarcating a distinction between discussing matter and its intrinsic agential nature, and the materials that change according to the surrounding media. One section of scholars is purely interested in the intrinsic and agential nature of matter. Another group, as Ingold (2011) has beautifully summed up, ‘the organism (animal or human) should be understood not as a bounded entity surrounded by an environment but as an unbounded entanglement’ growing together in a world of becoming.

The London chapters extend the argument through the figure of the feral, focusing particularly on ring-necked parakeets. Here, Barua (2023) traces how biopolitical techniques, bird counts, ecological modelling, and population forecasting make avian populations calculable and governable. Simultaneously, it shows that ferality unsettles dominant ecological imaginaries by exposing the racialised and colonial histories embedded in urban environments. Efforts to regulate parakeets frequently intersect with broader anxieties about migration and belonging, revealing how more-than-human governance participates in the micropolitics of urban citizenship. A collection of these cases provides substantial empirical grounding for Barua's claim that cities are best approached through a minor analytics open to lively entanglements. The book's conceptual framework and ethnographic depth make it an important contribution to more-than-human urban scholarship. At the same time, the very strength of Barua's metropolitan cases opens an important line of questioning, such as how minor urbanism travels to contexts where infrastructure is not relatively stable but persistently volatile?

Barua's (2023) framework becomes particularly interesting when placed in dialogue with recent work on the ontological turn in anthropology and human geography. A growing body of scholarship has argued that infrastructures are not simply technical supports for social life but sites where competing assumptions about space, materiality, and agency encounter one another (Jensen & Morita, 2015). From this perspective, breakdown is not merely a technical malfunction but a moment when the limits of modernist linear infrastructural imaginaries become visible. Much infrastructure research has already emphasised that failure, maintenance, and repair are constitutive of infrastructural systems rather than exceptional interruptions (Anand et al., 2018). This insight complicates narratives of seamless connectivity that often accompany state- and corporate-led infrastructure projects. When reading through this literature, Barua's lively urbanism raises additional questions. His analyses convincingly demonstrate how animals and informal practices shape urban infrastructures, yet the empirical focus remains largely on environments where infrastructures continue to function, despite frictions. In many regions of the world, however, infrastructures are marked by chronic instability. For example, roads wash away, electrical grids falter, pipelines leak, and communication networks consistently collapse. In such settings, more-than-human forces do not merely recombine infrastructural systems. They repeatedly expose their fragility.

My research on the western Himalayan region of Ladakh, India, explores chronic infrastructural breakdowns and engages with divergent ontological assumptions. I engage with state-sponsored, blacktopped four-lane highways and tunnels with the indigenous concept of ‘Laam’. While the state's projects are built upon anthropocentric and hylomorphic assumptions, the locally embedded pathways of Laam recognise a more-than-human mobility. Laam is not designed solely for human use. It encompasses Nor Laams (sheep trails), Baa Laams (cow trails), and Raa Laams (historically designated pastoral trails), as well as pathways reserved for non-organic processes such as floods and water flow (Rot and Cho Laam). Just as Barua discusses the ‘meshwork’ of an entangled city, Tim Ingold (2011) employs this concept to challenge the rigid ‘networks’ often associated with Actor-Network Theory. Modern tunnels and roads function as networks, linear connections between specific nodes that reflect the state's agenda of nation-building and connecting remote territories in the Himalayas.

Applying Ingold's framework, I argue that while modern roads follow this network imagery in their planning, Laams emerge as a meshwork. Unlike networks that simply link point A to point B, Laams constitute ‘entangled lines’ of habitation and movement that transcend the logic of human design. It acknowledges and accommodates both humans and more-than-humans in its world. These shared spaces demonstrate the interspecific entanglements in the indigenous communities of Ladakh. People negotiate with state engineers to avoid the obliteration of ancestral inter-species pathways into the blacktopped, four-lane state-sponsored highways, which are regulated and maintained by local communities. These pathways are shared common spaces of mobility maintained and carried forward by the indigenous communities for centuries. Although only a few communities rear and herd animals, people think they have to protect these commonly shared or interspecific pathways. Local ecologies inform such practices. Modern state-sponsored highways break down, and people lose their lives and properties every year. Such chronic infrastructural failures, I argue, are mainly caused by the ontological incommensurability between two worlds – the ontological assumption of the modern state infrastructure and the embedded practice of local mobility and its spaces. The former assumes a linear time-space compression with its engineering and planning, and the latter is a practice of adaptation with the minor ecologies of the sensitive and lively mountains. The latter is not a fixed line as in a network. It is always growing in different trajectories, like a line in a meshwork.

Bringing Barua's (2023) minor analytics into conversation with the ontological turn foregrounds these conditions of infrastructural precarity. This way, infrastructure appears less as a stable meshwork and more as a temporally uneven assemblage continually threatened by geomorphic processes, climatic volatility, and material instability. The ontological turn has encouraged scholars to take seriously the possibility that landscapes, waters, and atmospheric processes possess forms of agency that exceed modern infrastructural design. Braua points out hylomorphism beyond human design and planning. When infrastructures fail repeatedly in the face of such forces, the issue is not simply poor engineering or planning, but the friction between different assumptions about how space and materiality behave. The materials change their properties in response to the surroundings, frequently sidelined in the ‘form’ that humans are supposed to put on the matter or the landscape. These ‘incommensurable Worlds’ take centre stage in my research on the multispecies and more-than-human mobilities and spaces of mobilities in the western Himalayas. This perspective does not contradict Barua's argument; it extends it. His work shows how more-than-human relations animate urban life. The infrastructure literature suggests that these relations sometimes manifest not only through adaptation and recombination but through interruption, delay, and unmaking. Minor urbanism, in other words, may operate through breakdown as much as through improvisation.