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.
Table of 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
