Mapping Temporal Infrastructures is a participatory mapping workshop that invites participants to explore a seemingly ordinary but deeply political question: who gets to have time?
The workshop begins with the idea that time is the existential cell of our lives. It shapes both the quantity of our lives - how much or how little time we have - and their quality - how we are able, expected or forced to spend that time. Yet time is often treated as something natural and universal: everyone supposedly has the same twenty-four hours in a day. Time, like wealth, is unequally distributed.
Our experience of time is shaped by the infrastructures surrounding us. A reliable bus route can give someone an extra hour in their day; an inaccessible station can take that hour away. A washing machine saves time, while a long commute consumes it. Money can allow someone to outsource domestic labour, live closer to work, take a taxi or access services more quickly. Care networks can redistribute responsibilities, while the absence of those networks can create significant demands on someone's time.
The workshop describes these systems collectively as temporal infrastructures: the physical, social, economic, technological and cultural structures that organise our relationship with time. Through drawing, reflection, conversation and collective mapping, participants will make these often-invisible infrastructures visible.