Full Description
This book explores urban futures in the making, as seen through the lens of urban infrastructure. The book describes how socio-technical arrangements of energy and water provision are being recast in continuing efforts towards realising 'sustainable' transformation of cities. It critically investigates how infrastructure comes to matter by analyzing the shifting capacities and entanglements of diverse actors with these systems, the various means they use to envision, enact and contest changes, and the wide-ranging social and political implications of emerging infrastructure transitions. Drawing on original research into urban infrastructure debates and projects in Stockholm and Paris, the author develops a novel conceptual framework for studying and acknowledging the active, vital role of infrastructure in constituting a material politics of urban transformation. Straddling the latest theoretical insights and empirical investigation of urban planning practice and socio-technical engineering of systems and flows, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure forges new, timely reflections and perspectives which will be of interest to the growing multidisciplinary community of scholars investigating infrastructure and to academics and practitioners with a concern for understanding the wider politics of urban futures.
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction - redeploying urban infrastructure.- Chapter 2: Water infrastructures, suburban living spaces and remaking socio-technical configurations in outer Stockholm.- Chapter 3: Engaging urban materialities of low carbon transformation in the green capital of Europe.- Chapter 4: Active infrastructures and the spirit of energy transition in Paris.- Chapter 5: Infrastructure integration and eco-city futures: permeability and politics of the closed loop of Hammarby Sjöstad.- Chapter 6: Smart grids and enhancing urban systems: reflections on ordering and disordering the city.- Chapter 7: Conclusion - infrastructure futures.
