Wild Infrastructure

At the heart of the quest for more sustainable development is the need for better recognition of the trajectory and ongoing legacy of unsustainable development. This includes the need to repoliticise the role of critical urban infrastructure and the extractive development processes which have imposed an extreme cost on communities locally and globally. Drawing on conceptualisations of wild policy and planning, and examples from within the Australian context, this article highlights insights from new paradigms of social and ecological commons for building infrastructural futures that are ecologically balanced, community-orientated and culturally sensitive. Better understanding the contested role of ‘wild’ infrastructure in societal transformations is not just recognition of vulnerability and interconnectedness, but the need for more regenerative practices that involves working with communities from the ground up.