Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2009287
O. Salamanca, Jonathan Silver
ABSTRACT This intervention discusses the relevance of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the study of splintering urbanism, as an uneven socio-spatial process that simultaneously produces dispossession and racial differentiation. Reflecting on our work in Palestine and South Africa we grapple with what leaks in processes of splintering urbanism and we propose “excess” as a provisional analytical space to focus on the racialized political economies of infrastructure. We argue that excess is a generative concept: to render legible the often-silenced histories, geographies, and experiences produced and managed through infrastructure; to reflect on the way stratified social relations materialize in and through urban networks; and to speculate on liberating horizons. In doing so, we consider infrastructure as an archive, a lively ethnographic repository where modern histories of excess live, and where the contested material relations of racialized political economies unravel.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2004068
P. Guma
ABSTRACT This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also socio-material practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism.
{"title":"The Temporal Incompleteness of Infrastructure and the Urban","authors":"P. Guma","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2021.2004068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2004068","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also socio-material practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism.","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76698389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2004066
K. Furlong
ABSTRACT The goals laid out in Splintering Urbanism have largely been met. Infrastructure is no longer ignored in critical scholarship, technical determinism is broadly challenged, and infrastructure is widely studied in socio-technical and assemblage terms. Going forward, critical engagement with contradiction, confinement, and consumption are worth contemplating. Contradiction emphasizes how infrastructure is often both-and: social investment and capitalist extraction, unifying and divisive, flow and confinement. Confinement, unlike its analog, receives little attention in infrastructure studies. Infrastructures of control and concentration, however, have a long history and have been expanding in recent decades, enrolling and reconfiguring infrastructures of circulation (or flow) in turn. Last but not least, consumption usually comes into infrastructure studies through a concern with processes of exclusion and fragmentation. It is rarely analyzed in critical, socio-technical terms as an active and complex agent that structures and is structured by infrastructures of production. Through these three themes, we can continue to build on the gains of SI@20.
{"title":"Splintering Urbanism @ 20: Reengaging Contradiction, Confinement, and Consumption","authors":"K. Furlong","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2021.2004066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2004066","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The goals laid out in Splintering Urbanism have largely been met. Infrastructure is no longer ignored in critical scholarship, technical determinism is broadly challenged, and infrastructure is widely studied in socio-technical and assemblage terms. Going forward, critical engagement with contradiction, confinement, and consumption are worth contemplating. Contradiction emphasizes how infrastructure is often both-and: social investment and capitalist extraction, unifying and divisive, flow and confinement. Confinement, unlike its analog, receives little attention in infrastructure studies. Infrastructures of control and concentration, however, have a long history and have been expanding in recent decades, enrolling and reconfiguring infrastructures of circulation (or flow) in turn. Last but not least, consumption usually comes into infrastructure studies through a concern with processes of exclusion and fragmentation. It is rarely analyzed in critical, socio-technical terms as an active and complex agent that structures and is structured by infrastructures of production. Through these three themes, we can continue to build on the gains of SI@20.","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75712434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2005934
S. Graham, Simon Marvin
As the authors of the book we do, indeed, find it hard to believe that it is 20 years since Splintering Urbanism was published. We are delighted, however, to have this opportunity to use this anniversary to look back at the book’s role in the wider so-called urban “infrastructural turn” that has occurred across the humanities and social sciences in the past two decades. We would also like to offer an agenda for future urban infrastructural research. Our aim in writing Splintering Urbanism was to encourage critical social science to move beyond a view of the material, networked infrastructures sustaining urban life as technical, hidden, and taken-for-granted domains. Although in France a much healthier situation pertained, we were frustrated that debates in the Anglophone world about infrastructure tended to be partitioned off from critical urban research, to be addressed overwhelmingly within the sector-specific and techno-economic worlds of engineers and specialized policy makers. It seemed to us that the healthy debates about urban and infrastructural history then underway needed to be balanced by a dramatic growth in analyses of the contemporary dynamics of urban and infrastructural change. Indeed, we made the bold accusation in the book that networked urban services like communications, energy, water, and mobility services remained the “Cinderella” of critical urban research: that urban economic and social geography, especially, featured burgeoning debates about all aspects of more “point-specific” urban services, those that were not organized through complex assemblages of networked technologies strung out across, within, and between places. Full of the boldness of (relative!) youth, we therefore sought in Splintering Urbanism to be ambitious: to problematize the material connectivities sustaining urban life. Indeed, we wanted to demonstrate that an explicit focus on networked materialities, and the many mobilities and connectivities that they sustain, actually provides much-needed analytical purchase to help understand the complex and fast-moving dynamics linking urbanism and globalization, understandings that might cut-across the always problematic partitions within urban debates across advanced capitalist, post-communist, and postcolonial/Global South(s) contexts. We thus aimed in the book to show how the “relational” turn then underway in social and urban theory needed to be extended to encompass the ways in which multiple, networked connections were continually enrolled and invoked in the dynamic processes and
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2004069
R. Keil
ABSTRACT Disappointingly to many who grew up at the time, promises of flying cars in the 1960s as a future form of urban transportation were not kept. That future never arrived. In this short commentary, I want to board the metaphorical flying car and steer it into a different direction. At the height of the first wave of Covid-19, a more widespread sentiment took hold that saw the anticipation of increased mobilities dashed by a general anticipation of disaster considered typical for our age today. We might conclude: We don't get the technologies we want because we have left the era of technological progress and entered the era of risk and anticipation of disaster. My commentary appreciates and discusses the lessons we can learn from Splintering Urbanism for our period of pandemic urbanism. How does the kind of networked urbanism that the book examines and critiques provide a framework in which we can understand the emergence, presence, and management of the pandemic as it affects our urban world today?
{"title":"Of Flying Cars and Pandemic Urbanism: Splintering Urban Society in the Age of Covid-19","authors":"R. Keil","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2021.2004069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2004069","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Disappointingly to many who grew up at the time, promises of flying cars in the 1960s as a future form of urban transportation were not kept. That future never arrived. In this short commentary, I want to board the metaphorical flying car and steer it into a different direction. At the height of the first wave of Covid-19, a more widespread sentiment took hold that saw the anticipation of increased mobilities dashed by a general anticipation of disaster considered typical for our age today. We might conclude: We don't get the technologies we want because we have left the era of technological progress and entered the era of risk and anticipation of disaster. My commentary appreciates and discusses the lessons we can learn from Splintering Urbanism for our period of pandemic urbanism. How does the kind of networked urbanism that the book examines and critiques provide a framework in which we can understand the emergence, presence, and management of the pandemic as it affects our urban world today?","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82918002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2004067
Jennifer Gabrys
ABSTRACT Smart cities typically involve the digitalization of transport and buildings, energy and communications. Yet urban natures are also becoming increasingly digitalized, whether through processes of monitoring, automation, mitigation, or augmentation. This text considers what “splintering urbanisms” materialize through programming nature as infrastructure. By focusing specifically on smart urban forests, I suggest that the management logics of smart infrastructures attempt to program and transform vegetation and its ecologies into uniquely efficient and responsive urban organisms. In the process, these programs of efficiency have the potential to exacerbate extractive economies and social inequalities that amplify and materialize through the “Internet of nature.”
{"title":"Programming Nature as Infrastructure in the Smart Forest City","authors":"Jennifer Gabrys","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2021.2004067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2004067","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Smart cities typically involve the digitalization of transport and buildings, energy and communications. Yet urban natures are also becoming increasingly digitalized, whether through processes of monitoring, automation, mitigation, or augmentation. This text considers what “splintering urbanisms” materialize through programming nature as infrastructure. By focusing specifically on smart urban forests, I suggest that the management logics of smart infrastructures attempt to program and transform vegetation and its ecologies into uniquely efficient and responsive urban organisms. In the process, these programs of efficiency have the potential to exacerbate extractive economies and social inequalities that amplify and materialize through the “Internet of nature.”","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77477988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2022.2026162
M. Sheller
ABSTRACT Covid-19 has made self-evident the insidious effects of infrastructural splintering, especially in the United States, which are the outcome of the very processes first identified by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin 20 years ago. Splintered infrastructures have left behind unequal access to safe streets, public transit, urban green space, social distancing, and remote work, revealing deep racial, ethnic, and class disparities in risk exposure and vulnerability. Inequitable mobilities within splintered infrastructural contexts are key contributing factors to the vast racial and ethnic disparities seen in SARS-CoV-2 exposure and death rates in the United States. This brief commentary on the intersection of infrastructure studies and critical mobility studies argues that a racial justice perspective offers an understanding of the materialities of injustice at multiple sites and scales that have shaped the pandemic in such uneven and detrimental ways. Focusing on the US context, it centers the racialized kinopolitics of American history at the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the unmaking of splintered urbanism—or a dream of universal infrastructure—pandemic recovery requires mobility justice as a reweaving of fugitive planning represented by critical ideas such as commoning, Marronage, and the undercommons.
{"title":"Splintered Mobilities as Viral Vector: Mobility Justice and Racial Kinopolitics","authors":"M. Sheller","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2022.2026162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2022.2026162","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Covid-19 has made self-evident the insidious effects of infrastructural splintering, especially in the United States, which are the outcome of the very processes first identified by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin 20 years ago. Splintered infrastructures have left behind unequal access to safe streets, public transit, urban green space, social distancing, and remote work, revealing deep racial, ethnic, and class disparities in risk exposure and vulnerability. Inequitable mobilities within splintered infrastructural contexts are key contributing factors to the vast racial and ethnic disparities seen in SARS-CoV-2 exposure and death rates in the United States. This brief commentary on the intersection of infrastructure studies and critical mobility studies argues that a racial justice perspective offers an understanding of the materialities of injustice at multiple sites and scales that have shaped the pandemic in such uneven and detrimental ways. Focusing on the US context, it centers the racialized kinopolitics of American history at the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the unmaking of splintered urbanism—or a dream of universal infrastructure—pandemic recovery requires mobility justice as a reweaving of fugitive planning represented by critical ideas such as commoning, Marronage, and the undercommons.","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79381382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2009288
K. Saguin, María Álvarez
ABSTRACT Infrastructure and the spatial practices that coalesce around them come to matter in multiple ways. Building on the legacy of splintering urbanism and subsequent appraisals, we explore the paradoxes of infrastructural spaces in a Global South city. In Manila, urban infrastructure plays a central role in enabling evictions in city spaces marked as “danger zones,” and in inhabiting “death zones” in the peripheries where evictees are resettled. This piece employs a relational view of the tensions between the dispossessive and sustaining work of infrastructure to extend the spatial metaphors of urban infrastructure and to illuminate political possibilities built around connections.
{"title":"“Danger Zones,” “Death Zones,” and Paradoxes of Infrastructural Space-Making in Manila","authors":"K. Saguin, María Álvarez","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2021.2009288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2009288","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Infrastructure and the spatial practices that coalesce around them come to matter in multiple ways. Building on the legacy of splintering urbanism and subsequent appraisals, we explore the paradoxes of infrastructural spaces in a Global South city. In Manila, urban infrastructure plays a central role in enabling evictions in city spaces marked as “danger zones,” and in inhabiting “death zones” in the peripheries where evictees are resettled. This piece employs a relational view of the tensions between the dispossessive and sustaining work of infrastructure to extend the spatial metaphors of urban infrastructure and to illuminate political possibilities built around connections.","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80263841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2007203
Malini Ranganathan
ABSTRACT In this contribution, I reflect on the under-recognized role of caste and its allied notions of pollution and purity in the making of deeply inequitable, environmentally unjust, and splintered Indian cities. Published in 2001, Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism addressed the fragmented and unequal nature of infrastructure networks in the wake of globalization in cities of the Global South. Of particular interest to scholars since then has been to trouble the historicity of the book’s central thesis, demonstrating that postcolonial cities have always been splintered along the lines of race, class, and ethnicity via unequal infrastructural networks and segregated housing; as such, globalization is not the primary cause of inequality. Yet, the category of caste, intersecting with class, religion, and gender, still has not featured centrally in critical urban studies and urban political ecology. Drawing on long-term research on Bangalore (southern India), I sketch mutually reinforcing axes of a research agenda in urban political ecology, namely the interrogation of caste power in urban property, infrastructure, and labor regimes.
{"title":"Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City","authors":"Malini Ranganathan","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2021.2007203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2007203","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this contribution, I reflect on the under-recognized role of caste and its allied notions of pollution and purity in the making of deeply inequitable, environmentally unjust, and splintered Indian cities. Published in 2001, Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism addressed the fragmented and unequal nature of infrastructure networks in the wake of globalization in cities of the Global South. Of particular interest to scholars since then has been to trouble the historicity of the book’s central thesis, demonstrating that postcolonial cities have always been splintered along the lines of race, class, and ethnicity via unequal infrastructural networks and segregated housing; as such, globalization is not the primary cause of inequality. Yet, the category of caste, intersecting with class, religion, and gender, still has not featured centrally in critical urban studies and urban political ecology. Drawing on long-term research on Bangalore (southern India), I sketch mutually reinforcing axes of a research agenda in urban political ecology, namely the interrogation of caste power in urban property, infrastructure, and labor regimes.","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87551702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2021.2005930
Alan Wiig, A. Karvonen, Colin Mcfarlane, Jonathan Rutherford
Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’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 (Hughes, 1983; Mayntz and Hughes, 1988; Summerton, 1994), network urbanism and societies (Dupuy, 1991; Castells, 1996), socio-technical transformations (Winner, 1986; Bijker and Law, 1992), the role of infrastructure in histories of urban planning and government (Tarr and Dupuy, 1988; Aibar and Bijker, 1997), and research on the emergence of information and digital technologies in the city (including Graham and Marvin’s first opus Telecommunications and the City, in 1996). Indeed, Graham and Marvin (2001: xxvi, xxv) begin Splintering Urbanism by acknowledging that “this book, more than most, has been possible only by drawing on and synthesizing a huge body of work” that informed their “fascination with the complex intersections of cities and networked technologies.” The book was published amidst a rich stream of research already in train across urban and regional research in sociology, geography, and planning that centered on the production, politics and materialities of urban and regional infrastructure. This work examined infrastructure in and between cities, from the labor and significance of large infrastructural projects in the history of cities, regions, and nations, to the varied and highly uneven experience of access to and use of infrastructure services from water and sanitation, to electricity and transportation. Splintering Urbanism, however, triggered a significant perceptual shift by providing a means to read and apprehend the urban condition through infrastructure. Take, for instance, a fairly straightforward case of someone living in a peripheral neighborhood, with adequate public transport or a private car to utilize a freeway to access different locations, and someone else living nearby but blocked off by that freeway and
{"title":"From the Guest EditorsSplintering Urbanism at 20: Mapping Trajectories of Research on Urban Infrastructures","authors":"Alan Wiig, A. Karvonen, Colin Mcfarlane, Jonathan Rutherford","doi":"10.1080/10630732.2021.2005930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2021.2005930","url":null,"abstract":"Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’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 (Hughes, 1983; Mayntz and Hughes, 1988; Summerton, 1994), network urbanism and societies (Dupuy, 1991; Castells, 1996), socio-technical transformations (Winner, 1986; Bijker and Law, 1992), the role of infrastructure in histories of urban planning and government (Tarr and Dupuy, 1988; Aibar and Bijker, 1997), and research on the emergence of information and digital technologies in the city (including Graham and Marvin’s first opus Telecommunications and the City, in 1996). Indeed, Graham and Marvin (2001: xxvi, xxv) begin Splintering Urbanism by acknowledging that “this book, more than most, has been possible only by drawing on and synthesizing a huge body of work” that informed their “fascination with the complex intersections of cities and networked technologies.” The book was published amidst a rich stream of research already in train across urban and regional research in sociology, geography, and planning that centered on the production, politics and materialities of urban and regional infrastructure. This work examined infrastructure in and between cities, from the labor and significance of large infrastructural projects in the history of cities, regions, and nations, to the varied and highly uneven experience of access to and use of infrastructure services from water and sanitation, to electricity and transportation. Splintering Urbanism, however, triggered a significant perceptual shift by providing a means to read and apprehend the urban condition through infrastructure. Take, for instance, a fairly straightforward case of someone living in a peripheral neighborhood, with adequate public transport or a private car to utilize a freeway to access different locations, and someone else living nearby but blocked off by that freeway and ","PeriodicalId":47593,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90103969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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