Socio-Material Systems and Sustainability Transitions: Integrating Climate Change into Transport Infrastructure in Ontario, Canada

Our infrastructure threatens us with carbon lock-in, because anything we build or rebuild now will be with us until well past mid-century – even until the end of the century in some cases. If we do not integrate climate change, especially adaptation, into our infrastructure now we will be left with infrastructure designed around unsustainable socio-technical systems (e.g. combustion engines, suburbanization, etc.). In order to understand the sustainable infrastructure transitions we need, however, means that we have to adapt existing analytical perspectives in order to properly address infrastructural materialities (e.g. physical form, environmental context, etc.). In this paper I develop the concept of socio-material systems in order to do this. I apply the concept by examining three transport infrastructure projects in Ontario, Canada.