Antoine Picon, "Urban Infrastructure, Imagination and Politics", in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 42, n°2, March 2018, pp. 263-275. (original) (raw)

Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008

There has been a profusion of work in recent years exploring the links between infrastructure and the city. This has entailed a conceptualization of cities and infrastructure that recognizes their mutual constitution and the inherently political nature of networked urban infrastructure. In introducing this symposium, we find that a comparative approach to infrastructure can reveal a diversity of ways in which the urban fabric is produced, managed and distributed, and comes to matter in everyday life. We argue for a more globally informed conceptualization of the politics of infrastructure by exploring three key themes in the symposium: fragmentation, inequality and crisis.

Conceptualizing the Political Ecology of Urban Infrastructures: Insights from Technology and Urban Studies

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2009

The debate on urban sustainability has now been on the research agenda for a number of years. One element that has, however, been undertheorized and empirically understudied is the crucial importance of networked urban infrastructures for the ecological sustainability of cities. These infrastructures mediate resource flows and vitally shape environmental practices and sociotechnical innovation in cities. It is thus argued that we need adequate conceptual approaches which reflect the complex interdependencies between cities, networked infrastructures, and urban ecologies and which broaden our understanding of the ways we can develop, govern, and renew our infrastructures in cities in a sustainable way. Scrutinizing the relevant debates both in technology studies and in urban studies, the author reveals that none of the theoretical approaches discussed seems entirely suitable for conceptualizing these interdependencies and the requirements for the sustainable redesign of urban infrast...

From the Guest Editors: Splintering Urbanism at 20 Mapping Trajectories of Research on Urban Infrastructures

Journal of Urban Technology, 2022

's Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (2001) brought the study of infrastructure to the core of urban studies and inspired the "infrastructural turn" in the social sciences more widely. The book catalyzed a rich trove of research on how technology and society are implicated in the production of contemporary cities. More than any other publication, it has animated the socio-technical systems of water, energy, transport, and telecommunications as fundamental to the functioning and livability of cities. It has inspired scholars to seek out the vital processes and politics of the cables, wires, pipes, and roads that undergird urban development. The twentieth anniversary of the book provides a good opportunity to reflect on the impacts of the book and to consider the emerging trajectories of scholarship on urban infrastructure. Splintering Urbanism has taken on that rare quality in the history of urban thought and research in that it is both a text and an event. Of course, it is not the first book to focus on the relationship between the city and its infrastructure systems. It builds upon the work on large technical systems (

Designing the City as an infrastructure

During the 50 th to the 70 th , Paris and its region was transform with the construction of new infrastructure. Streets and boulevard were not any more considered as a tool to build the city, new forms and models were chosen.

Finding Fragility in Paris: The Politics of Infrastructure after Haussmann

2009

This essay develops an analytic term coined elsewhere: "the fragility of modernity." 1 The term indicates the special fragility of urban modernity, what historians of technology call "the networked city." Modern urban life increasingly depends on complex heterogeneous systems that combine social organization, technological artifacts, and natural resources in delicate assemblages, recalling Graham's and Marvin's recent and sonorous term "splintered urbanism." Simply put, networked infrastructures are delicate, and because modern urban life has come to depend on them so vitally, this fragility not only compromises subways or water pipes, but also destabilizes urban modernity more broadly—socially and spatially, materially and symbolically. 2

Urban Infrastructure as Materialized Consensus

Infrastructure that shapes and facilitates daily life, such as pathways, conduits and boundary walls, constitutes one of the most dynamic forms of architecture in both ancient and modern cities. Although infrastructure is conceived and designed with particular goals and capacities, its temporal and spatial scale means that it is a constant work in progress that engages numerous agents: civic authorities design and implement infrastructure; designated agencies maintain and repair infrastructure; and ordinary people utilize, modify, ignore or destroy it. Infrastructure can be thus analyzed as a materialization of ongoing communication, in which there are often conflicts among different constituents to achieve consensus. The linguistic concepts of expert language and turn-taking are utilized to assess three brief case studies: historical New Orleans; a multipurpose micro-park in Vienna, Austria; and the archaeological city of Sisupalgarh, India.

Social Infrastructure as a Means to Achieve the Right to the City

2011

In "The Right to the City" Henri Lefebvre states that urban praxis requires "places of simultaneity and encounters" that make room for the fluid, shifting relationships of everyday life and social interaction (Lefebvfre 1996). Designers cannot create these relationships; they come from the people who actually inhabit the city. Designers can, however, "clear the way" and "give birth to the possible" by creating opportunities for praxis to occur. This paper discusses how contemporary design activism realizes Lefebvre's "right to the city" through techniques rooted in historical participatory design. It presents examples from the work of Aldo Van Eyck and Lucien Kroll and builds on these with the work of the contemporary activist designers Teddy Cruz and Urban Think Tank. These designers approach design as a facilitator of social interactions that can be shaped to meet the needs of diverse users and generate new types of social and economic relationships. Designed as systems rather than objects, their projects are open-ended and flexible while remaining functional and they make use of the informal systems already operating in their communities. These projects not only serve needs through spatial infrastructure but also create opportunities for urban praxis by operating as social infrastructure. Disciplines Architectural History and Criticism | Architecture Comments This paper license under a Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5