Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities: (Research Handbooks in Urban Studies series)

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.

Table of 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

About the Author :
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

Review :
‘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.’ ‘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.’ ‘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.”’