RESEARCH ARTICLE Obstruction: counter-pedestrianism and trajectories of an infrastructure public Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay Published online: 11 May 2017 Ó Indian Institute of Management Calcutta 2017 Abstract The paper advances ‘obstruction’ as a key to unlock urban infrastructures. Conceptualizing the modern city in terms of motion (of bodies, things and finances) has been our academic commonsense since the growth of research interest on urban settlements in the mid-nineteenth century. The motion narrative posits obstruction as its negation, which it eventually conquers, and keeps on deferring obstruction’s final advent—the deathly city. The paper is a critique of this urban autobiography. It shows how obstruction makes certain forms of collective living possible. It describes the possibility of such collective living as ‘infrastruc- ture publics’—a rather new noun compound—that interrogates the taken for grantedness of both ‘public’ and ‘infrastructure’. Keywords Infrastructure Á Public Á Sidewalk Á Street vending Á Pedestrian Á Zoning Introduction In this paper, I revisit unobstructed motion as a central aspect of urbanism and show how obstruction makes certain forms of collective living possible. I describe the possibility of such collective living as ‘infrastruc- ture publics’—a rather new noun compound—that I hope can interrogate the taken for grantedness of both ‘public’ and ‘infrastructure’. Some recent developments necessitating my revi- sion of the binary between obstruction and motion are firstly the increasing multiplication of graded precarity under conditions of neoliberalism, especially as it might apply to street vendors and similar kinds of livelihood earners on the streets. A related develop- ment of this order is the increasing limitations impressed upon the street as a public site of protest whereby specific spatial and temporal demarcations tend to specify exactly what part of our material existence can be accessed as the infrastructure of political activity. A third development may refer to a new spell of protests in our times that try to create a climate of conversation and solidarity among social classes. 1 How to characterize these emergent collec- tives? Who constituted the ‘people’ in these R. Bandyopadhyay (&) Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali, Mohali, Punjab 140306, India e-mail: ritajyoti.csssc@gmail.com 1 In Hyderabad, a street hawkers’ association publicly pro- claimed its logistical support to the students’ movement at Hyderabad Central University (HCU) when the University authority cut the provisioning of electricity, internet, food and water in the protest-ridden campus. Perhaps, for the first time in history, street hawkers and University students organized a joint March in Kolkata after the suicide (widely interpreted by the protesting students as an instance of ‘institutional murder’) of Rohith Vemula (a Dalit student at the HCU). In a press conference, the largest federation of street hawkers in India expressed solidarity with the protesting HCU and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students. 123 Decision (June 2017) 44(2):121–132 DOI 10.1007/s40622-017-0155-7