{ (Post-)Infrastructural Grief }
Infrastructural grief describes a collective condition of mourning that emerges in relation to environmental damage, displacement, and the loss of access and agency caused by infrastructure and urban expansion. It names both visible forms of destruction and quieter, often unacknowledged emotional states—resignation, anxiety, and exhaustion—that arise as ecological and social worlds are dismantled.
This concept attends to grief as something sensed rather than resolved: an accumulation of observations, affects, and embodied knowledges embedded in post-industrial and liminal landscapes where nature and industry coexist. These spaces, frequently dismissed as marginal or temporary, hold deep ecological, social, and cultural significance. Their disappearance produces not only material loss, but a rupture in relational, multispecies ways of being.
Drawing on revolutionary brokenheartedness (Gargi Bhattacharyya, 2023), infrastructural grief understands sorrow as politically generative rather than paralysing. It exposes the lack of shared languages and practices for mourning environmental loss, where expressions of grief often struggle to become collective. By witnessing both physical damage and hidden emotional impacts, grief becomes a site of connection, care, and resistance.
It’s easy to find that we lack ways to express the often overwhelming sense of loss, anxiety, and resignation. Efforts to express sorrow become struggles to connect with each other, too. By honouring worlds that are being destroyed by colonial forces, we can expose the unacceptable circumstances of our collective conditioning. Guided by ancient wisdom and multispecies ethics, our radical collective potential lies in the nourishment of relationships that are reciprocal, accountable, and consensual.
A Love Letter for Worlds in the Making by Jenni Laiti, 2019
Infrastructural grief insists on honouring worlds eroded by colonial and extractive logics, while remaining accountable to those closest to the harm. Guided by multispecies ethics and reciprocal relations, it reframes grief as an act of love—one that links loss to desire, memory to responsibility, and mourning to the possibility of collective transformation.
