Upkeeping and maintaining infrastructures

Exploring the ways and means through which infrastructures are upkept, this special issue of Flux is less focused on the analysis of fluxes’ circulations or the characterisation of the evolution of the fluxes circulating in infrastructures, but rather pays close attention to the conditions, activities, functions, links and relationships that make them circulate. At the centre of our concern lies the issue of infrastructure continuity (and of the services intertwined with it), grasped through a variety of infrastructure maintenance configurations in diverse sectors such as rail, road or energy systems. The series of articles sheds light on 4 main issues: the labour represented by maintenance activities; the frictions between infrastructure maintenance and infrastructure exploitation; the uncertain valuation of maintenance; the fragility of maintenance as a collective concern in spite of the seemingly urgent decay and ageing of some infrastructures.