Infrastructural Times in Planning: Rethinking Temporality Through Infrastructure

Urban and regional planning has always operated through time—through projections, sequences, and visions of development, growth, and transformation. Recent scholarship has moved beyond linear or teleological accounts of time to explore its multiplicity, contingency, and materiality (Besedovsky et al., 2019; Hutter & Wiechmann, 2022; Lennon & Tubridy, 2023; Wiechmann, 2024). Within this evolving field, infrastructure has emerged as a particularly rich terrain for rethinking temporality in planning (Abram, 2014; Addie et al., 2025; Durrant et al., 2024; Eranti & Zhelnina, 2025; Kallianos et al., 2023; Mattern, 2018; Monstadt, 2022; Wiig et al., 2023). Infrastructure is inherently temporal: planned and built over decades, subject to cycles of maintenance, decay, and obsolescence, and embedded in everyday rhythms, routines, and disruptions. It both stabilizes and produces time (Beauregard, 2015).

This thematic issue examines infrastructural times (Addie et al., 2025)—the temporalities of and through infrastructure—as a critical lens for planning theory and practice. While building on an infrastructural entry point, it also explores how planning instruments such as scenarios, zoning codes, strategic plans, or regulations shape and are shaped by infrastructural temporalities. Bringing together diverse perspectives, the issue investigates how infrastructures mediate, materialise, and challenge planning’s temporal assumptions and logics.

We distinguish between infrastructural temporalities—emerging from the lifecycles and rhythms of built systems—and planning temporalities—embedded in instruments, institutional routines, and strategic visions—while recognizing their entanglements. The issue seeks contributions that explore infrastructure and time in varied empirical, conceptual, and methodological contexts. It invites scholarship that questions dominant time regimes, highlights the politics of (de)synchronisation, and traces temporal injustice, obsolescence, latency, care, and waiting. The aim is to rethink temporal dimensions of infrastructure in planning, bridge conceptual and empirical gaps, and foster new interdisciplinary dialogues around infrastructural times as both scholarly inquiry and political struggle.

References:

Abram, S. (2014). The time it takes: Temporalities of planning. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20, 129–147.

Addie, J.-P. D., Glass, M. R., & Nelles, J. (Eds.). (2025). Infrastructural times. Temporality and the making of global urban worlds. Bristol University Press.

Beauregard, R. A. (2015). Planning matter: Acting with things. University of Chicago Press.

Besedovsky, N., Grafe, F.-J., Hilbrandt, H., & Langguth, H. (2019). Time as infrastructure. City, 23(4/5), 580–588. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2019.1689726

Durrant, D., Saxe, S., Siemiatycki, M., & Dean, M. (2024). Planning, ethics and infrastructural time. Time & Society, 33(1), 25–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x231178132

Eranti, V., & Zhelnina, A. (2025). Temporalities of closure in urban planning conflicts. Urban Affairs Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10780874251340271

Hutter, G., & Wiechmann, T. (2022). Time, temporality, and planning – Comments on the state of art in strategic spatial planning research. Planning Theory & Practice, 23(1), 157–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2021.2008172

Kallianos, Y., Dunlap, A., & Dalakoglou, D. (2023). Introducing infrastructural harm: Rethinking moral entanglements, spatio-temporal dynamics, and resistance(s). Globalizations, 20(6), 829–848. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2153493

Lennon, M., & Tubridy, F. (2023). ‘Time’ as a focus for planning research: Exploring temporalities of coastal change. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 25(3), 301–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2022.2122420

Mattern, S. (2018). Maintenance and care. Places Journal.

Monstadt, J. (2022). Urban and infrastructural rhythms and the politics of temporal alignment. Journal of Urban Technology, 29(1), 69–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2007205

Wiechmann, T. (2024). Temporality in planning thought – A new turn? disP - The Planning Review, 60(2), 64–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/02513625.2024.2424109

Wiig, A., Ward, K., Enright, T., Hodson, M., Pearsall, H., & Silver, J. (2023). Infrastructuring urban futures: The politics of remaking cities. Bristol University Press.

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