Beyond the Networked City

Infrastructure reconfigurations and urban change in the North and South

Olivier Coutard, Jonathan Rutherford, Olivier Coutard, Jonathan Rutherford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138308374
• eBook ISBN: 9781317633693
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Beyond the networked city: an introduction
• 2 Changing sanitation infrastructure in Hanoi: hybrid topologies and the networked city
• 3 Beyond the networked city, the hyper-networked city? Decline and renaissance of the Parisian non-potable water system (1820–2020)
• 4 District heating comes to Ecotown: zero carbon housing and the rescaling of UK energy provision
• 5 Rethinking universality and disrepair: seeking infrastructure coexistence in Quibdó, Colombia
• 6 De-networking the poor: revanchist urbanism and hydrological apartheid in Mumbai
• 7 Another urban infrastructure is possible: contesting energy and water networks in Berlin
• 8 A political economy of urban solid waste management in emerging countries: learning from Vitória (Brazil) and Coimbatore (India)
• 9 Is the network challenged by the pragmatic turn in African cities? Urban transition and hybrid delivery configurations
• 10 Enabling urban energy: governance of innovation in two UK cities
• 11 Volumetric urbanism: artificial “outsides” reassembled “insides”
• 12 Infrastructures and practices: networks beyond the city
• 13 Coda
• Index