A minor frivolity or an essential service? Assembling library value and hierarchies of infrastructure in Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper examines the public library as a space of competing conceptions of infrastructural value. It engages with the contested futures of a library building in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand to explore how the value of library services are understood, set and maintained by urban publics. In the wake of the sudden closure of Wellington’s central library in 2019, debate over the building’s future illustrated the continually shifting place of library services in imagined hierarchies of urban infrastructure. This paper illustrates that this library’s value was constructed over the next years in directly opposing ways: firstly, as a private, individualised expense or cost, and secondly, as a potential alternative conception of social value (such as a commons). Despite attempts to subsume this social infrastructure within normative narratives of fiscal cost, and privatise the library building, broader debate around the Wellington library illustrated significant resistance to these pressures from large portions of the public. I argue that the atmospheres of political feeling around urban infrastructures and public services are always in flux and being re-made, leaving open the possibility for new conceptions of value to emerge.