Full Description
Splintering Towers of Babel focuses on and redefines soft infrastructures and critical infrastructure projects. It explores key issues in contemporary urban studies including town planning histories, architecture, heritage, colonialism and postcolonialism, philosophy, and ethics.
The book combines transdisciplinary perspectives on the key historical, philosophical, and political issues associated with urban experiences, built forms, and infrastructure networks. It explores uneven dimensions in contemporary urbanisms and develops spatial phenomenological thinking with reference to the northern and southern hemispheres. This book connects the past and the present, in addition to Western and global South geographies, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Its main contribution is to broaden readers' understanding of infrastructure through the lens of the humanities and to engage with political, poetical, and ethical perspectives.
This book is tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban planning, urban geography, architectural history, urban design, infrastructure studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, African studies, and philosophy.
Contents
Foreword by Grey Gundaker
Preface
Introduction: splintering towers of Babel: paradoxical architectures and urban infrastructures
Ethical infrastructure: rethinking the relationship between the garden and the home
The dissemination of power infrastructure in Africa through visuals of small Babel towers
Babel as paradoxical superstructures: a photography exhibition
Agon - Ἀγών as the essence of urbanity
A Babylonia of heritage and destruction: gendered architecture and gender-based violence in Timbuktu
Between Be'er-Sheva and Bruegel's Babel: recollection as architectural indicator
The splendor and decline of socio-engineering projects: from Babel to colonial railways in Africa
Traversing towers: a spatial reading of Emmanuel Levinas
Revealing the polyvocality of street names: Babel as a parable
Conclusion: Urban and infrastructural experiences beyond the confusion of Babel
Bibliography
