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100			_aWakefield, Stephanie _958140
245			_aMaking nature into infrastructure: _bconstruction of oysters as a risk management solution in New York City/
260			_bSage, _c2020.
300			_aVol. 3, Issue 3, 2020 ( 761–785 p.).
520			_aThis paper investigates how nature is transformed into infrastructure through an examination of New York State’s Living Breakwaters project, a $60 million risk management experiment to grow oyster reefs in order to better govern storm surge, rising seas, and coastal flooding. While oysters’ infrastructural nature is portrayed by designers and planners as an inherent natural property which now simply needs harnessing, in reality making oysters into infrastructure requires extensive concrete work—by humans and oysters. Drawing on historical research, site observation, interviews, and media and design analysis, this article traces this work required to make oysters appear, and then function, as a risk management solution. In part one, I trace the narrative work involved in establishing the idea of oysters as infrastructure. In part two, I look at what it takes to build this idea in reality, to make oysters actually function within desired governmental parameters. Making oysters into infrastructure, I conclude, is a kind of biopolitics, both in the traditional sense of making certain forms of human life live, but also in which the goal is to make nature live in a particular way, albeit one imagined as natural to the oyster. While biopolitics forwards a dystopian view of human and nonhumans as vulnerable to threatening environmental processes and heavily secured, it may be undermined by the inability to make nature’s imagined “vitality” appear.
773	0		_012446 _917117 _dLondon: Sage Publication Ltd, 2019. _tEnvironment and Planning E: Nature and Space/ _x 25148486
856			_uhttps://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619887461
942			_2ddc _cEJR
999			_c14782 _d14782