From the Guest Editors: Splintering Urbanism at 20 Mapping Trajectories of Research on Urban Infrastructures (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
On technology, infrastructure and the contemporary urban condition: a response to Coutard
2002
I very much welcome Olivier Coutard's (2002) further examination of the concept of premium network spaces that I developed in a recent IJURR article (Graham, 2000). As he states, in the current period of rapid transition, the most glaring issue in the analysis of the complex relations between technology, infrastructure and urban space is the need for more detailed, critical, nuanced and comparative empirical work.
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.
Reconnecting the disconnected: The politics of infrastructure in the in-between city
Cities, 2010
This paper explores the politics of infrastructure in the evolving socio-spatial landscape of what we call the ''in-between city," that part of the urban region that is perceived as not quite traditional city and not quite traditional suburb . We posit that this new urban landscape which surrounds urban regions in many parts of the world is the remarkable new urban morphology where a large part of metropolitan populations live, work and play. While much attention has been on the winning economic clusters of the world economy and the devastated industrial structures of the loser regions, little light has been shed on the urban zones in-between. This paper deals specifically with these zones from the perspective of accessibility issues around urban infrastructures, in particular transportation. It is argued that only a combined understanding of scaled and topological approaches allow us to capture the complexities of the politics of urban infrastructures in the in-between city. Conceptually, we outline the definitive characteristics of this new landscape with a particular view towards urban Canada. Applying these concepts to a North American city, Toronto, Canada, we look specifically at the 85 sq km around York University, an area that straddles the line between the traditional suburb and the inner city.
2014
To speak about infrastructure is to invoke both the promise of a future as well as imminent trauma. Underground or above ground, systems that makes urban flows possible are always a threat, even when black-boxed and separated from the smooth flow of conscious urban life (Graham 2010). The city might be turned into a weapon or the city is constantly broken and must be fixed. The city is overflowing and must be contained or the city is too contained and must grow and let off steam. The story of infrastructure always begins with one or another of these historical moments – it is never a story of which infrastructure is itself the subject but a narrative about growth, decay or the end of the city, in which infrastructure happens to play a leading role. This paper grows out of eavesdropping on many conversations about infrastructure not the least of which are the shrill cries of despair about the “infrastructure problems” of mega-cities of the South. My intuition is that part of the cont...
City 19(2-3)344-355, Taylor and Francis, 2015. , 2015
Through an analysis of ethnographic data gathered from two communities using Bucharest’s urban infrastructures, we argue that studies that privilege the large-scale analyses may be enriched by paying closer attention to small-scale, non-structural factors that create local citizenship claims and local forms of belonging to the city. The template of neo-liberal transformations of urban networks acquires unexpected forms at the infra-city scale, which may be fruitfully approached ethnographically. We begin with a historical overview of networked infrastructures during socialism and postsocialism in Bucharest. We then describe and contrast two of the many forms of belonging and exclusion from the city—grounded in infrastructural connections and disconnections—that we call “maintenance and repair citizenship” and “incomplete citizenship.”
2018
This article argues for the importance of social imagination in the understanding of urban infrastructures, especially those designed and built by engineers. It begins by defining social imagination as image-based systems of representation and values that are shared by various collective stakeholders concerned with infrastructure, such as engineers, but also politicians, administrators, operators, maintenance technicians and indeed users, and then introduces a tripartite model of infrastructure. Infrastructure is interpreted as the result of the interactions between a material basis, professional organizations and stabilized socio- technical practices, and social imagination. The notion of network is interpreted from such a perspective. Its dependence on imagination is outlined. Through two case studies, the nineteenth-century networked metropolis, epitomized by Haussmann’s Paris, and the rise of the contemporary smart city perspective, the role of social imagination in the conception of urban infrastructure is analyzed further. What seems at stake in the transition towards the smart city is the increased importance given to occurrences, events and scenarios as the basis for urban infrastructure regulation.
Book review: Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context
Urban Studies, 2016
Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context is a timely publication that brings together a wide range of scholarship on the interactions between urban lives and socio-material infrastructures across different socio-political and geographical contexts. In the introductory chapter, Graham and McFarlane envision that the edited volume will fill a gap in the current scholarship on infrastructure and urbanism. In bringing together accounts of how complexes of infrastructure mediate urban life, the authors aim to make visible 'the people of the world's burgeoning cities, and the ways in which they experience urban lives that intermesh with, and are sustained by, the complexes of infrastructure' (p. 1). In order to focus the debate on the ways in infrastructures are produced, lived with and contested, and how infrastructures subjugate or facilitate urban lives, the authors have split the 10 chapters in four thematic parts.
Multi-infrastructure studies: ethnographic and historical explorations
Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2022
These two fascinating books on the politics of urban infrastructures in two important cities of the Eurasian landmass not only offer rich descriptions of those cities’ relations with their infrastructures, they also present two intriguing ways of showing how infrastructures shape urban life and, ultimately, two different ways of producing knowledge about them. To be sure, the two volumes differ significantly in terms of academic discipline, analytical approach, empirical evidence, objects of study, theoretical conversations, and understanding of politics. Read together, however, they outline a productive conversation about how to foreground the interactions between different types of infrastructures in cities. Most social studies of infrastructures have analyzed only one network at a time. These two volumes suggest (Moss’s explicitly, Björkman’s implicitly) that there is much to learn from analyzing urban infrastructures together rather than in isolation. I will briefly compare and contrast them, and close by suggesting that both outline a space of theoretical exploration and offer a generative entry point into urban life, located in analyzing multiple city infrastructures simultaneously.