Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

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Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

9781800889149 Edward Elgar Publishing
Edited by Olivier Coutard, CNRS Researcher, Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires, Sociétés (LATTS), Ecole des Ponts and Université Gustave Eiffel and Daniel Florentin, Assistant Professor in Environment and Urban Studies, Mines Paris PSL (ISIGE, CSI), and Associate Researcher, LATTS, France
Publication Date: 2024 ISBN: 978 1 80088 914 9 Extent: 482 pp
Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

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Critical Acclaim
Contributors
Contents
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Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a thorough discussion of infrastructure as a social phenomenon. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Providing cutting-edge insights into the field, the Handbook explores the analytical category of infrastructure, clarifying and expanding upon the importance of an infrastructural perspective within academic and policy debates. An interdisciplinary range of contributors provides an ambitious examination of infrastructures and cities, with chapters covering the transformations of traditional networked infrastructure systems; novel understandings of how infrastructures matter; socio-technical processes of infrastructuring; forms of social violence involving infrastructural developments; and the role of infrastructures in human pressures on the biosphere. Ultimately, this Handbook proposes directions for further infrastructure research, highlighting its relevance in a shifting socio-political landscape.

The Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities provides valuable insight for scholars of urban studies, urban sociology, human geography, planning and regional studies. It will also prove to be a vital reference point for academics and policy-makers seeking to progress social equality and challenge current structural obstacles to the advent of more sustainable infrastructures.
Critical Acclaim
‘Entering the realm of infrastructures is of prime importance for anyone wishing to understand contemporary urban issues, whether social, ecological, political or technical – and often all at once. This indispensable Handbook provides guidance on the keys issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, giving a place to cities of the north and south, and highlighting the social forces and impacts of urban materiality.’
– Sabine Barles, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

‘At last we have a guide to the so-called “infrastructure turn” in the social sciences and humanities! Coutard and Florentin’s Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities combines incisive coverage of how infrastructure studies have evolved with a superb and erudite range of thematic essays. It is essential reading for anyone trying to get to grips with the radical transformation in the infrastructural structuring of our cities and our world.’
– Stephen Graham, Newcastle University, UK and Simon Marvin, University of Sheffield, UK

‘This monumental Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities offers a forward-looking perspective on the study of the material relations that humanity inhabits, demonstrating that studies of urban technology and territories are living through an enormously generative moment. The 29 contributions put together by Coutard and Florentin illustrate the contradictory nature of relations around infrastructure, from the mundane to the monumental. Whether examining the prosaic ways in which infrastructures structure and apportion time in the rhythms of daily life or the deployment of infrastructural violence in routine and spectacular ways, the Handbook portrays infrastructure not only as a fixture of urban life but also as a means to imagine and make urban futures. In contemporary societies, infrastructure is increasingly deployed as a remedy for all urban ailments, from economic growth to inequality and environmental degradation. This Handbook takes a detour showing infrastructure’s dirty realities in a compendium that resonates with Bruno Latour’s adage, “there is no cure for the condition of living in the World.”’
– Vanesa Castán Broto, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK
Contributors
Contributors include: Jean-Paul Addie, Jens Alm, Philip Ashton, Nacima Baron, Hanna Baumann, Anselmo Cani, Damien Carrière, Sarah Charlton, Liza Rose Cirolia, Costanza Concetti, Olivier Coutard, Jérôme Denis, José-Frédéric Deroubaix, Pierre Desvaux, Ignacio Farías, Oscar Figueroa, Daniel Florentin, Julie Gobert, Jean Goizauskas, Govind Gopakumar, Emmanuelle Guillou, Carole Gurdon, Ludovic Halbert, Anique Hommels, Lindsay Blair Howe, Sylvy Jaglin, Yogi Joseph, Yassine Khelladi, Paulette Landon, Charlotte Lemanski, Claudia Mendes, Morgan Mouton, Carola Neugebauer, Binh N. Nguyen, Kei Otsuki, Alexandra Parker, Alexander Paulsson, Andrea Pollio, Sreelakshmi Ramachandran, Leonardo Ramondetti, Holly Randell-Moon, Mélanie Rateau, Margot Rubin, Julia Valeska Schröder, Wladimir Sgibnev, Elizabeth Shove, Roman Solé-Pomies, Muhammed Suleman, Carole-Anne Tisserand, Priyam Tripathy, Sarah Turner, Tauri Tuvikene
Contents
Contents:

1 Researching infrastructures and cities: origins, debates, openings 1
Olivier Coutard and Daniel Florentin

PART I VALUE(S) AND VALUATION OF INFRASTRUCTURES
2 Capture and control: two intersecting logics of infrastructure finance 49
Philip Ashton
3 Power disruptions: power system reconfigurations reassembling the state 63
Costanza Concetti
4 Smart city new deals: unpacking the recursive entanglements of
infrastructures and administrations 77
Julia Valeska Schröder, Claudia Mendes and Ignacio Farías
5 Commoning roads: maintenance and the labour of infrastructure 92
Alexander Paulsson and Jens Alm
6 Intermediate and interminable: a railway regeneration drama in two acts 102
Nacima Baron and Yassine Khelladi
7 Urban infrastructures’ maturity and the age(s) of maintenance 117
Jérôme Denis and Daniel Florentin

PART II THE MANY FACES OF CONTEMPORARY INFRASTRUCTURATION
8 Security as infrastructure: controlling the rhythms and spacetimes of the city 131
Damien Carrière and Priyam Tripathy
9 Financial infrastructure and the production of the built environment 144
Ludovic Halbert
10 Landscape interpretations of infrastructure-led developments: plans,
spaces and appropriations in contemporary China 158
Leonardo Ramondetti
11 Spectrums of infrastructural hybridity: insights from urban Africa for
a propositional research agenda 176
Liza Rose Cirolia and Andrea Pollio
12 Material politics on and off the grid in Sub-Saharan African urban
electricity configurations: an essay on hybrid urbanism 193
Sylvy Jaglin, Mélanie Rateau and Emmanuelle Guillou
13 Infrastructures, practices and the materiality of daily life: revisiting
urban metabolism 209
Olivier Coutard and Elizabeth Shove

PART III INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE ON SPACES, SOCIETIES
AND BODIES
14 First Nations foundations: cities and the infrastructuring of settler colonisation 223
Holly Randell-Moon
15 Infrastructural violence and its temporalities 237
Kei Otsuki
16 Representing infrastructural violence: artistic engagements with
Lebanon’s waste crisis 252
Hanna Baumann
17 Contesting mobility injustices and infrastructural violence: the frictions
arising from a modern transportation project in Hanoi, Vietnam 268
Sarah Turner and Binh N. Nguyen
18 Urban motorways inducing mobility and immobility 280
Oscar Figueroa, Carole Gurdon and Paulette Landon
19 Street-side citizenships: claim-making and the reordering of streets in
Indian cities 292
Yogi Joseph, Sreelakshmi Ramachandran and Govind Gopakumar
20 Multiple publics, disjunctures, and hybrid systems: how marginalised
groups stake their claims to transport infrastructure 307
Lindsay Blair Howe, Margot Rubin, Sarah Charlton, Muhammed Suleman,
Alexandra Parker, and Anselmo Cani
21 Infrastructural citizenship in post-networked contexts: hybridity in
South Africa 319
Charlotte Lemanski

PART IV THE INFRASTRUCTUROCENE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
22 Seeing like an urban service operator: making urban circulations of
matter and energy legible in the digital age 336
Morgan Mouton
23 Coding urban metabolism: infrastructuring metabolic pathways 349
Pierre Desvaux
24 Material knowledge and practices in the making of a building resource
out of excavated soils: a case study in the Paris Region 362
Jean Goizauskas and Carole-Anne Tisserand
25 The resistance of centralised socio-technical systems: the ‘dynamic
status quo’ between centralised wastewater sanitation and decentralised
storm water management in France 371
José-Frédéric Deroubaix and Julie Gobert
26 Post-socialist urban infrastructures: learning from systems of less 386
Tauri Tuvikene, Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola S. Neugebauer
27 Science, technology and society studies perspectives on urban
responses to infrastructural breakdown 400
Anique Hommels
28 Re-negotiating infrastructural boundaries in urban spaces: road
maintenance as a dualistic mode of infrastructuring 413
Roman Solé-Pomies

PART V CONCLUSION
29 Getting to work on time: the temporalities of urban infrastructure 427
Jean-Paul Addie
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