Enabling critical flows of resources, people, and information, infrastructure includes among its forms streets and highways, bridges and tunnels, waterways and railroads, water and sanitation systems, energy grids and telecommunications networks, ports, dams, airports, and myriad official buildings; such physical forms produce infrastructure’s functions, including education, employment, transportation, public health, recreation, housing, and, of course, market integration and disintegration. What does a nation’s particular physical and functional pattern of infrastructure reveal about its political priorities and cultural dynamics? This roundtable of legal, cultural, economic, and political historians delves into this question. Specifically, it inquires into how public infrastructures have reflected, produced, or exacerbated inequalities in American life.

Infrastructure is having, as they say, a moment. President Biden made it the cornerstone of his domestic agenda, recently signing into law the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the most significant provisioning act since the mid-twentieth century. Biden’s statements touting the bill have underscored his administration’s view that federal infrastructure is a crucial political resource—a counter to Chinese global influence, a shoring-up of national prestige, and, more importantly, a means to renew citizens’ faith in democracy as a regime that can deliver to citizens tangible benefits on a substantial scale.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will bring repairs and enhancements to the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, and it has drawn rosy comparisons to the heyday of twentieth-century New Deal liberalism. Yet this roundtable contends that a more complex historical appraisal of infrastructure as a category of analysis is due. Indeed, our contemporary political moment indicates the significance of looking to history as a safeguard for the present. Infrastructure’s forms and functions lend tangible shape to the “political unconsciousness” that shapes physical designs and social outcomes, often with disparate impacts.

Participants in the roundtable will explore the beneficiaries of infrastructure—and those who have not fared so well. The racial politics of infrastructural provisioning are particularly salient, with past examples abounding: the transcontinental railroads of the nineteenth century facilitated settler colonialism, the New Deal’s housing supports rested on redlining, and the vaunted interstate highway system was a concrete tool of “slum clearance” and segregation. Infrastructure’s function, then, is at least in part to produce inequality—that is, to produce a national landscape filled with winners and losers, pre-selected for either category by the blueprints, capital streams, and laws that are the first ingredients of every infrastructural system. Infrastructures provide, but they also divide.

Exploring the contention that inequality is a function of infrastructure, the four participants in the roundtable examine this provocation from legal, cultural, economic, political, and social historical methodologies, offering historical lessons in the spirit of producing a more equitable infrastructural future. Each will take 8-12 minutes to present their contributions, landing on a set of interlocking questions for discussion and audience participation.