Infrastructures in Practice

Infrastructures in Practice PDF Author: Elizabeth Shove
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351106155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Infrastructures in Practice shows how infrastructures and daily life shape each other. Power grids, roads and broadband make modern lifestyles possible – at the same time, their design and day-to-day operation depends on what people do at home and at work. This volume investigates the entanglement of supply and demand. It explains how standards and 'normal' ways of living have changed over time and how infrastructures have changed with them. Studies of grid expansion and disruption, heating systems, the internet, urban planning and office standards, smart meters and demand management reveal this dynamic interdependence. This is the first book to examine the interdependence between infrastructures and the practices of daily life. It offers an analysis of how new technologies, lifestyles and standards become normalised and fall out of use. It brings together diverse disciplines – history, sociology, science studies – to develop social theories and accounts of how infrastructures and practices constitute each other at different scales and over time. It shows how networks and demands are steered and shaped, and how social and political visions are woven into infrastructures, past, present and future. Original, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book puts the many practices of daily life back into the study of infrastructures. The result is a fresh understanding of how resource-intensive forms of consumption and energy demand have come about and what is needed to move towards a more sustainable lower carbon future.

Infrastructures in Practice

Infrastructures in Practice PDF Author: Elizabeth Shove
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351106155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Infrastructures in Practice shows how infrastructures and daily life shape each other. Power grids, roads and broadband make modern lifestyles possible – at the same time, their design and day-to-day operation depends on what people do at home and at work. This volume investigates the entanglement of supply and demand. It explains how standards and 'normal' ways of living have changed over time and how infrastructures have changed with them. Studies of grid expansion and disruption, heating systems, the internet, urban planning and office standards, smart meters and demand management reveal this dynamic interdependence. This is the first book to examine the interdependence between infrastructures and the practices of daily life. It offers an analysis of how new technologies, lifestyles and standards become normalised and fall out of use. It brings together diverse disciplines – history, sociology, science studies – to develop social theories and accounts of how infrastructures and practices constitute each other at different scales and over time. It shows how networks and demands are steered and shaped, and how social and political visions are woven into infrastructures, past, present and future. Original, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book puts the many practices of daily life back into the study of infrastructures. The result is a fresh understanding of how resource-intensive forms of consumption and energy demand have come about and what is needed to move towards a more sustainable lower carbon future.

Learning Across Sites

Learning Across Sites PDF Author: Sten Ludvigsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136943919
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
The ever evolving, technology-intensive nature of the twenty-first century workplace has caused an acceleration in the division of labour, whereby work practices are becoming highly specialised and learning and the communication of knowledge is in a constant state of flux. This poses a challenge for education and learning: as knowledge and expertise increasingly evolve, how can individuals be prepared through education to participate in specific industries and organisations, both as newcomers and throughout their careers? Learning Across Sites brings together a diverse range of contributions from leading international researchers to examine the impacts and roles which evolving digital technologies have on our navigation of education and professional work environments. Viewing learning as a socially organised activity, the contributors explore the evolution of learning technologies and knowledge acquisition in networked societies through empirical research in a range of industries and workplaces. The areas of study include public administration, engineering, production, and healthcare and the contributions address the following questions: How are learning activities organised? How are tools and infrastructures used? What competences are needed to participate in specialised activities? What counts as knowledge in multiple and diverse settings? Where can parallels be drawn between workplaces? Addressing an emerging problem of adaptation in contemporary education, this book is essential reading for all those undertaking postgraduate study and research in the fields of educational psychology, informatics and applied information technology.

Inverse Infrastructures

Inverse Infrastructures PDF Author: Tineke M. Egyedi
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1781952299
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
'The traditional analysis of infrastructure networks has provided the conceptual rationalization for centralized monopolies for a century. In recent years, liberalization has shown that much wider participation can be beneficial. Innovative development in decentralized networks can be driven from below if government policies permit it, as vividly demonstrated by the Internet. This book contributes to a much needed exploration into the characteristics and implications of decentralized networks being driven from below, introducing new perspectives on the conception and analysis of infrastructure networks.' William H. Melody, Aalborg University, Denmark and Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands The notion of inverse infrastructures that is, bottom-up, user-driven, self-organizing networks gives us a fresh perspective on the omnipresent infrastructure systems that support our economy and structure our way of living. This fascinating book considers the emergence of inverse infrastructures as a new phenomenon that will have a vast impact on consumers, industry and policy. Using a wide range of theories, from institutional economics to complex adaptive systems, it explores the mechanisms and incentives for the rise of these alternatives to large-scale infrastructures and points to their potential disruptive effect on conventional markets and governance models. The approach in this unique book challenges the existing literature on infrastructures, which primarily focuses on large technical systems (LTSs). Rather, this study highlights unprecedented developments, analyzing the differences and complementarity between LTSs and inverse infrastructures. It illustrates that even large infrastructures need not require a blueprint design or top-down and centralized control to run efficiently. The expert contributors draw upon a captivating and wide-ranging set of case studies, including: Wikipedia; wind energy cooperatives, Wireless Leiden, rural telecom in developing countries, local radio and television distribution, the collection of waste paper, syngas infrastructure design, and e-government projects. The book discusses the feasibility of temporary infrastructures and unheard of ownership arrangements, and concludes that inverse networks represent a critical transformation of the accepted model of infrastructure development. Laying a foundation for future research in the area and suggesting ways to bridge the gap between policy and practice, this path-breaking book will prove a riveting read for academics, students and researchers across a number of disciplines including economics, business, management, innovation, and technology and policy studies.

Citizenship and Infrastructure

Citizenship and Infrastructure PDF Author: Charlotte Lemanski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781351176156
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
This book brings together insights from leading urban scholars and explicitly develops the connections between infrastructure and citizenship. It demonstrates the ways in which adopting an 'infrastructural citizenship' lens illuminates a broader understanding of the material and civic nature of urban life for both citizens and the state. Drawing on examples of housing, water, electricity and sanitation across Africa and Asia, chapters reveal the ways in which exploring citizenship through an infrastructural lens, and infrastructure through a citizenship lens, allows us to better understand, plan and govern city life. The book emphasises the importance of acknowledging and understanding the dialectic relationship between infrastructure and citizenship for urban theory and practice. This book will be a useful resource for researchers and students within Urban Studies, Geography, Development Studies, Planning, Politics, Architecture and Sociology.

Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructures

Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructures PDF Author: Ronald Maier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540897682
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Success of an organization is increasingly dependent on its capability to create an environment in order to improve productivity of knowledge work. This book focuses on the concepts, models and technologies that are used to design and implement such an environment. It develops the vision of a modular, yet highly integrated enterprise knowledge infrastructure and presents an idealized architecture replete with current technologies and systems. The most important streams of technological development that are covered in the book are communication, collaboration, document and content management, e-learning, enterprise portals, business process management, information life cycle management, information retrieval and visualization, knowledge management, mobile computing, application and network infrastructure, Semantic Web and social software. It includes learning goals, exercises and case examples that help the reader to easily understand and practice the concepts.

Repairing Infrastructures

Repairing Infrastructures PDF Author: Christopher R. Henke
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360683
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures--communication, food, transportation, energy, and information--are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them.

Perspectives and Implications for the Development of Information Infrastructures

Perspectives and Implications for the Development of Information Infrastructures PDF Author: Constantinides, Panos
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1466616237
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In the same way that infrastructures such as transportation, electricity, sewage, and water supply are widely assumed to be integrators of urban spaces, information infrastructures are assumed to be integrators of information spaces. With the advent of Web 2.0 and new types of information infrastructures such as online social networks and smart mobile platforms, a more in-depth understanding of the various rights to access, use, develop, and modify information infrastructure resources is necessary. Perspectives and Implications for the Development of Information Infrastructures aims at addressing this need by offering a fresh new perspective on information infrastructure development. It achieves this by drawing on and adapting theory that was initially developed to study natural resource commons arrangements such as inshore fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and pastures, while placing great emphasis on the complex problems and social dilemmas that often arise in the negotiations.

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities PDF Author: Olivier Coutard
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800889151
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
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.

Sustainable Infrastructure: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice

Sustainable Infrastructure: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice PDF Author: Management Association, Information Resources
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1799809498
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1044

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Book Description
The continued growth of any nation depends largely on the development of their built infrastructures and communities. By creating stable infrastructures, countries can more easily thrive in competitive international markets. Sustainable Infrastructure: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice examines sustainable development through the lens of transportation, waste management, land use planning, and governance. Highlighting a range of topics such as sustainable development, transportation planning, and regional and urban infrastructure planning, this publication is an ideal reference source for engineers, planners, government officials, developers, policymakers, legislators, researchers, academicians, and graduate-level students seeking current research on the latest trends in sustainable infrastructure.

Infrastructure Delivery Planning

Infrastructure Delivery Planning PDF Author: Morphet, Janice
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447316827
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This important text book is the first to be written about infrastructure planning in Britain. Written by an experienced author, the book reviews the rapid rise in the use of infrastructure delivery planning at national and neighbourhood level. The key components of infrastructure delivery are set out and analysed, including the development of government policy, planning regulation, funding, environmental processes and legal challenges. Situating this within international, European and domestic economic, territorial and social policy, the author draws on a variety of practical examples to discuss the role of different institutions in the delivery of infrastructure and to illustrate the various issues and merits of each approach. This is a key text for those engaged in the study and application of infrastructure delivery planning including planners, engineers, public administrators and policy advisers.