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

'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 (