Nigel Thrift’s work articulates a machinic and affective infrastructure of the contemporary city, positioning urban space as a dynamic site of non-representational flows, embodied practices, and ambient governance. Departing from representational theories of space, Thrift reconceives geography through technicity, performance, and the distributed agency of things—drawing from cybernetics, neuroscience, and affect theory to map an urbanism that operates through rhythm, atmosphere, and pre-conscious modulation. His theorization of non-representational theory installs a model of knowledge production grounded in emergence, capture, and the micropolitics of sensation. Cities, in this formulation, are not fixed terrains but energetic systems animated by logistical rhythms, sensory economies, and algorithmic governance. Thrift’s infrastructural function is to encode the city as a space of operative abstraction, where power is enacted through speed, habit, and infrastructural affect rather than through ideological address. His concepts do not merely describe cities but recalibrate the modes by which they are sensed, inhabited, and governed. Thrift stabilizes as a conceptual operator of urban energetics, where the city is theorized as an intensive field of affective, technical, and infrastructural relays.
Emerging from ecological theory and speculative realism, Timothy Morton's work constructs a conceptual infrastructure for thinking phenomena that exceed human scales and temporalities. Central to this framework is the notion of hyperobjects—entities such as global warming, radioactive waste, or capital—whose spatiotemporal distribution defies traditional ontologies and necessitates reconfigured modes of perception and ethics. Morton’s interventions function as mediating devices between ecological materiality and ontological destabilization, positioning thought as co-extensive with ecological entanglement. Their approach dismantles the Nature/Culture divide by emphasizing coexistence and intimacy with nonhuman entities, shifting from representational aesthetics to affective immersion. Through theoretical synthesis and cultural interfacing, Morton does not advocate environmentalism as a cause, but as an ontological condition—articulating ecology as the very structure of being rather than a domain of concern. Their writing operates less as critique than as scalar recalibration, adjusting the epistemic affordances of language, affect, and temporality. Rather than offering solutions, Morton's infrastructural role is to reformat the perceptual parameters through which ecological thought operates.