Infrastructures of Plutocratic London

From a street level perspective of walking and encountering wealthy people and the neighbourhoods in which they live and work, in this lecture Caroline explores the infrastructures that make London a plutocratic city, and in the process develop a more granular understanding of what infrastructure might mean.

Keeping with traditions of ambulatory research, walking is how Caroline grasps the daily doings of urban worlds on the ground. London’s stories seep through the soles of her feet as she navigates a neighbourhood with one of the densest concentrations of wealthy people – Notting Hill – and one of the most significant locations in London’s wealth expanding machine - the financial district – probing human, algorithmic and material textures of the city for the infrastructures that make it work.

Caroline pieces together some of the entanglements that create spaces in the ecologies of the city for everyday plutocratic life and point to some new orientations in mobilising a more equitable politics of the city.