Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context

Description

Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies. An interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging urban researchers examine critical questions about urban infrastructure in different global contexts. The chapters address water, sanitation, and waste politics in Mumbai, Kampala and Tyneside, analyse the use of infrastructure in the dispossession of Palestinian communities, explore the pacification of Rio’s favelas in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, describe how people’s bodies and lives effectively operate as ‘infrastructure’ in many major cities, and also explores tentative experiments with low-carbon infrastructures. These diverse cases and perspectives are connected by a shared sense of infrastructure not just as a ‘thing’, a ‘system’, or an ‘output,’ but as a complex social and technological process that enables – or disables – particular kinds of action in the city. Infrastructural Lives is crucial reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners in urban studies globally. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Foreword Introduction Part I Knowing infrastructure 1 Relational infrastructures in postcolonial urban worlds 2 Infra-city: speculations on flux and history in infrastructure-making Part II Infrastructural violence and dispossession 3 Water wars in Mumbai 4 Waiting in the ruins: the aesthetics and politics of favela urbanization in “PACification” Rio de Janeiro 5 Road 443: cementing dispossession, normalizing segregation and disrupting everyday life in Palestine Part III Waste, process, infrastructure 6 The uncanny materialities of the everyday: domesticated nature as the invisible ‘other’ 7 Kampala’s sanitary regime: whose toilet is it anyway? 8 Cleaning up the streets: Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s night-time neighbourhood services team Part IV Adjustment and experimentation 9 Maintaining experiments and the material agency of the urban 10 Low carbon nation: making new market opportunities Index