Taking infrastructure in a narrow material sense, Civic Matter is about thinking through the social, ethical and political work of infrastructural design, (re)construction and maintenance, and the ways in which anticipated and obsolete infrastructures are imagined, remembered, destroyed, recycled or eschewed. Our central aim is to explore the past and potential of infrastructure as a civic project through a combination of (inter)disciplinary angles, from architecture to archeology, geography to history. We plan to discuss the forms of labour and imagination that materialize past and future polities, and to identify the threats posed by neglect, exclusion, dysfunction and privatisation to this project, and the material effects –from immobility to toxic exposure—that infrastructural disenfranchisement might produce.