From the Guest EditorsSplintering Urbanism at 20: Mapping Trajectories of Research on Urban Infrastructures

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 lacking any viable transport