The Infrastructural South

The Infrastructural South PDF Author: Jonathan Silver
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262376733
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
An in-depth look at the infrastructural landscape of Africa amid the third wave of urbanization, drawing on case studies from Africa and extending further afield. The Infrastructural South represents a major theoretical contribution to the study of infrastructure’s role in the third wave of urbanization centered on Africa. Based on over a decade of empirical research, Silver’s sweeping examination probes many of contemporary urbanism’s most exciting and pressing issues through the lens of the Global South. Focusing on Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, Silver’s conceptually innovative chapters explore the way access to energy, water, sanitation, transit, and information technologies shape everyday life as they map the dynamic relations between cities, technology, and the environment. Pushing readers to look at the wider worlds that suffuse urban systems, this theoretical and geographical perspective treats Africa’s rapidly transforming towns and cities as complex sites of disruption, emancipation, and contradiction. In doing so, it shows how the proliferating urbanisms and contested techno-environments arise from shifting priorities in infrastructure planning, politics, and financing gaps. As urban issues become a key twenty-first-century challenge for Africa, Silver offers a comprehensive reworking of our understanding of urbanization. The Infrastructural South rethinks how global scholarship approaches infrastructure, laying pathways for future research at the intersection of technology, environmental urbanism, and urban politics.

The Infrastructural South

The Infrastructural South PDF Author: Jonathan Silver
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262376733
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
An in-depth look at the infrastructural landscape of Africa amid the third wave of urbanization, drawing on case studies from Africa and extending further afield. The Infrastructural South represents a major theoretical contribution to the study of infrastructure’s role in the third wave of urbanization centered on Africa. Based on over a decade of empirical research, Silver’s sweeping examination probes many of contemporary urbanism’s most exciting and pressing issues through the lens of the Global South. Focusing on Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, Silver’s conceptually innovative chapters explore the way access to energy, water, sanitation, transit, and information technologies shape everyday life as they map the dynamic relations between cities, technology, and the environment. Pushing readers to look at the wider worlds that suffuse urban systems, this theoretical and geographical perspective treats Africa’s rapidly transforming towns and cities as complex sites of disruption, emancipation, and contradiction. In doing so, it shows how the proliferating urbanisms and contested techno-environments arise from shifting priorities in infrastructure planning, politics, and financing gaps. As urban issues become a key twenty-first-century challenge for Africa, Silver offers a comprehensive reworking of our understanding of urbanization. The Infrastructural South rethinks how global scholarship approaches infrastructure, laying pathways for future research at the intersection of technology, environmental urbanism, and urban politics.

Beyond the Networked City

Beyond the Networked City PDF Author: Olivier Coutard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317633709
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse, fluid and unstable landscapes emerging beyond the networked city, this book identifies dynamics through which a ‘break’ with previous configurations has been operated, and new brittle zones of socio-technical controversy through which urban infrastructure (and its wider meaning) are being negotiated and fought over. It uncovers, across a diverse set of urban contexts, new ways in which processes of urbanization and infrastructure production are being combined with crucial sociopolitical implications: through shifting political economies of infrastructure which rework resource distribution and value creation; through new infrastructural spaces and territorialities which rebundle socio-technical systems for particular interests and claims; and through changing offsets between individual and collective appropriation, experience and mobilization of infrastructure. With contributions from leading authorities in the field and drawing on theoretical advances and original empirical material, this book is a major contribution to an ongoing infrastructural turn in urban studies, and will be of interest to all those concerned by the diverse forms and contested outcomes of contemporary urban change across North and South.

Splintering Urbanism

Splintering Urbanism PDF Author: Steve Graham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113465698X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about: *globalization and the city *technology and society *urban space and urban networks *infrastructure and the built environment *developed, developing and post-communist worlds. With a range of case studies, illustrations and boxed examples, from New York to Jakarta, Johannesberg to Manila and Sao Paolo to Melbourne, Splintering Urbanism demonstrates the latest social, urban and technological theories, which give us an understanding of our contemporary metropolis.

Democracy's Infrastructure

Democracy's Infrastructure PDF Author: Antina von Schnitzler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691170789
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

The Infrastructural City

The Infrastructural City PDF Author: Kazys Varnelis
Publisher: Actarbirkhauser
ISBN: 9788496954793
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture.

Infrastructural Lives

Infrastructural Lives PDF Author: Stephen Graham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131768639X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies. An interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging urban researchers examine critical questions about urban infrastructure in different global contexts. The chapters address water, sanitation, and waste politics in Mumbai, Kampala and Tyneside, analyse the use of infrastructure in the dispossession of Palestinian communities, explore the pacification of Rio’s favelas in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, describe how people’s bodies and lives effectively operate as ‘infrastructure’ in many major cities, and also explores tentative experiments with low-carbon infrastructures. These diverse cases and perspectives are connected by a shared sense of infrastructure not just as a ‘thing’, a ‘system’, or an ‘output,’ but as a complex social and technological process that enables – or disables – particular kinds of action in the city. Infrastructural Lives is crucial reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners in urban studies globally.

The Promise of Infrastructure

The Promise of Infrastructure PDF Author: Nikhil Anand
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002034
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

Roads

Roads PDF Author: Penny Harvey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801456452
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Roads matter to people. This claim is central to the work of Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, who in this book use the example of highway building in South America to explore what large public infrastructural projects can tell us about contemporary state formation, social relations, and emerging political economies.Roads focuses on two main sites: the interoceanic highway currently under construction between Brazil and Peru, a major public/private collaboration that is being realized within new, internationally ratified regulatory standards; and a recently completed one-hundred-kilometer stretch of highway between Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon, and a small town called Nauta, one of the earliest colonial settlements in the Amazon. The Iquitos-Nauta highway is one of the most expensive roads per kilometer on the planet.Combining ethnographic and historical research, Harvey and Knox shed light on the work of engineers and scientists, bureaucrats and construction company officials. They describe how local populations anticipated each of the road projects, even getting deeply involved in questions of exact routing as worries arose that the road would benefit some more than others. Connectivity was a key recurring theme as people imagined the prosperity that will come by being connected to other parts of the country and with other parts of the world. Sweeping in scope and conceptually ambitious, Roads tells a story of global flows of money, goods, and people—and of attempts to stabilize inherently unstable physical and social environments.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure PDF Author: Brian Hayes
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393349832
Category : Architecture, Industrial
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Covering agriculture, resources, energy, communication, transportation, manufacturing and waste, this volume explores all the major ecosystems of the modern industrial world, revealing what the structures are and why they're there and uncovering beauty in unexpected places. Photos.

Waste Siege

Waste Siege PDF Author: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150361090X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.