Alison L. Bain is Professor of Geography in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Ontario. She is co-editor of Urbanization in a Global Context (second edition 2022) and author of Creative Margins: Cultural Production in Canadian Suburbs (2013). Julie A. Podmore is Affiliate Assitant Professor in Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, Montreal and Professor in Geosciences at John Abbott College, Montreal. She is the coeditor of Lesbian Feminism: Essays Opposing Global Heteropatriarchies (2019).

Examining the diverse forms of infrastructure that facilitate cultural practice and make cities distinctive, this interdisciplinary collection eschews currently dominant but limited explanations of cultural infrastructure grounded in economics and the creative industries by introducing broader insights from across the arts and social sciences. In so doing, it provides policymakers, researchers, and students alike with wide-ranging opportunities to engage with fresh perspectives and to probe the complexities of urban cultural infrastructure as it is lived, made and governed.

• 1. Introduction: configuring urban cultural infrastructure Alison Bain and Julie PodmorePart I: Producing culture 2. Clustering cultural infrastructure in districts Alison Bain3. The relational infrastructure of Open Creative Labs Suntje Schmidt4. Affordable studio space as cultural infrastructure: land trusts and the future of creative cities Rhian Scott, Luke Dickens and Phil HubbardPart II: Performing culture 5. The infrastructural politics of post-pandemic theatrical performance Megan A. Johnson and Marlis Schweitzer6. The performative contingency of cultural infrastructure Jessie Stein7. Embodying cultural infrastructure in Carnival Martha Radice8. Youthful city-making through peripheral cultural infrastructure Antonio Moya-LatorrePart III: Consuming culture 9. Hawker culture and its infrastructure: experiences and contestations in everyday life Lily Kong and Aidan Wong10. Aestheticizing hipster retail infrastructure: from Neapolitan to cosmopolitan Bryan Mark11. Crafting alternative urban fashion infrastructure in a digital and pandemic age Taylor Brydges, Deborah Leslie and Norma Rantisi12. Embodying arts festivals as infrastructural transformation of places Bernadette QuinnPart IV: Collecting culture 13. Infrastructuring museums Friederike Landau-Donnelly14. Becoming socio-cultural infrastructure: librarizing practices in public libraries Rianne van Melik15. Queer counter-topographies: LGBTQ+ community archives as urban cultural infrastructure Julie Podmore16. Conclusion: Reconfiguring urban cultural infrastructure Alison Bain, Julie Podmore and Chan Arun-Pina