Infrastructure
Infrastructure is the set of networks that make the city work and are only seen when they fail: water, sewers, electricity, data, roads, transport, waste. It decides who gets service and who does not, and in many cities of the world the infrastructure map is the inequality map.
Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin described in Splintering Urbanism (2001) how the networks that once integrated the city fragment into premium services for some and precarious ones for others. Infrastructure is frozen politics: every pipe is a decision about who deserves the service.
Videos on this term (79)
- Urban geopolitics
How do cities intertwine in a globalized world?
A bus stop brings together strangers, a screen, cables, vehicles, noise and expectations for a few minutes. None of…
3 min read - Urban AI
Michael Batty: How Models Reveal the Hidden Essence of Cities
Michael Batty explains the city as a complex system emerging from millions of decisions: fractals, scaling laws,…
Michael Batty 3 min read - Infrastructure
Brian Berry: Cities as an Invisible System of Connections
Brian J. L. Berry showed that cities form systems ranked by flows of goods, people and information: central places,…
Brian Berry 3 min read - Urban economy
Castells: From Collective Consumption to the Space of Flows
Manuel Castells's urban thought moved from collective consumption and urban social movements to the network society…
Manuel Castells 3 min read - Housing
Mike Davis: Risk Is Not Natural but a Construct of Power
Mike Davis argued that urban disasters are built before the emergency through segregation, speculation and unequal…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Urban ecology
Matthew Gandy: Urban Nature Reveals Power in the City
Matthew Gandy shows that water, waste, parks and expressways are nature produced by political decisions: urban…
Matthew Gandy 3 min read - Urban ecology
Unequal Connection: Stephen Graham and Technology in the City
Stephen Graham shows that transport, energy and data networks are a geography of power: fragmentation, bypass,…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Housing
Natalie Jeremijenko: The City as a Participatory Ecology Lab
Natalie Jeremijenko's devices make pollution and urban biodiversity visible so citizens can investigate and act.…
Natalie Jeremijenko 3 min read - Urban economy
Who Wins When the City Becomes a Business: Molotch's Growth Machine
Harvey Molotch's growth machine explains who really wins when the city becomes a business: developers, politicians.…
3 min read - Urban economy
AbdouMaliq Simone: People as the Infrastructure of the City
AbdouMaliq Simone shows that informal networks sustain urban life in the Global South: people as infrastructure,…
AbdouMaliq Simone 3 min read - Urban economy
Why Some Cities Innovate and Others Do Not: Michael Storper
Michael Storper explains why some cities innovate and others do not: organisations, technologies and territories,…
Michael Storper 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Fulong Wu: The Chinese State Still Leads Urban Transformation
Fulong Wu explains how China's shift to a market economy changed urban production without removing the state: land,…
Fulong Wu 3 min read - Urban economy
Closed Shutters Close Businesses and Communities: The Ground Floor
Why a street full of homes can feel empty: Jacobs's eyes on the street, Klinenberg's Chicago heatwave, thousands of…
3 min read - Mobility
The Bike Improves Your Health and Enhances Your Neighbourhood
Cycling cuts mortality risk, frees street space, lowers noise and pollution and keeps local shops alive.
3 min read - Urban economy
Who Benefits from Luxury Built with Public Funds?
How a luxury district is manufactured in four steps, rezoning, public investment, brand and phased sales, and who…
3 min read - Urban economy
Who Pays When a Mega-Project Fails? Public Risk and Private Gain
Mega-projects are built on public decisions and public money, yet gains go private and losses stay public.
3 min read - Climate change
Shade in Extreme Heat: A Divisive Privilege and an Urban Right
Shade is survival infrastructure distributed unequally: redlined neighbourhoods are hotter, awnings are cut as…
3 min read - Urban economy
The House With a Yard That Is Quietly Bankrupting Your City
Dispersed detached housing gives municipalities fast revenue and leaves an unpayable maintenance debt: Charles…
3 min read - Urban economy
Siliconized Cities: Who Is Running Your City Now?
How tech platforms became the operating system of the city: San Francisco's tech gentrification, Airbnb, dark…
3 min read - Urban economy
Neoliberalism from Below: Verónica Gago's Popular Economies
Verónica Gago's neoliberalism from below explains how popular economies, such as La Salada in Buenos Aires,…
2 min read - Public space
Raúl Zibechi: Urban Social Movements and Territories in Resistance
Raúl Zibechi argues that Latin America's urban movements build non-state powers in their neighbourhoods. His ideas…
Raúl Zibechi 3 min read - Climate change
David Simon and Resilient Cities in the Global South
David Simon studies how Global South cities adapt to climate change with informality and few resources.
David Simon 3 min read - Urban form
Michael Hibbard: Regional Planning for Social Justice
Michael Hibbard defends a regional and community planning that shares development between city and countryside.…
Michael Hibbard 3 min read - Surveillance / data
Stephen Graham: Militarisation and Surveillance in the City
Stephen Graham describes in Cities Under Siege the new military urbanism: how techniques of war, surveillance and…
Stephen Graham 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Bob Jessop: The State and Neoliberal Urban Restructuring
Bob Jessop explains how the state moved from Keynesian welfare to competitive workfare and what it means for…
Bob Jessop 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
David Theo Goldberg: Race, Space and Power in Cities
David Theo Goldberg shows that racism organises urban space: ghettos, peripheries and zoning manufacture race.
David Theo Goldberg 3 min read - Urban form
Vertical by Stephen Graham: The City from Satellites to Bunkers
Stephen Graham shows in Vertical that the city is a volume: skyscrapers and drones above, tunnels and bunkers…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Climate change
Vale and Campanella: Who Returns to the City After Disaster
The Resilient City by Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella shows that cities almost always rebuild, but resilience…
Lawrence Vale 3 min read - Shrinking cities
China's Ghost Cities: Failure or Strategy According to Wade Shepard
Ghost Cities of China (2015) by Wade Shepard explains why China built empty districts, what became of Ordos or…
3 min read - Climate change
Thomas Campanella: Urban Resilience in Times of Crisis
Thomas Campanella argues that a city's resilience is that of its citizens: New Orleans after Katrina, the green dot…
Thomas Campanella 3 min read - Urban economy
Tania Murray Li: Development, Exclusion and the Will to Improve
Tania Murray Li explains why development programmes produce exclusion by rendering political problems technical.
Tania Murray Li 3 min read - Public space
Henri Lefebvre: urban space as a social product
Henri Lefebvre showed that urban space is not a neutral setting: it is socially produced, and whoever produces it…
Henri Lefebvre 3 min read - Urban ecology
Karen Bakker: Why Water Privatisation Failed in Cities
Karen Bakker showed that water is an uncooperative commodity and that neither privatisation nor bureaucracy solves…
Karen Bakker 3 min read - Urban economy
Urban Change and Social Conflict: Roger Lee's Perspective
Urban change redistributes advantages and losses and therefore produces conflict. What the volume Urban Change and…
Roger Lee 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Cities: Reimagining the Urban by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift proposes thinking the city as flows, rhythms and…
Ash Amin 3 min read - Public space
Participatory democracy: Arnstein, Forester, Porto Alegre
What participatory democracy means in cities: Arnstein's ladder (1969), Forester's deliberative planning and…
2 min read
