The city beyond the network

• Historically, the modern infrastructure ideal has dominated the imagination of urbanists. As a consequence, cities and their infrastructures of pipes, roads, wires and trams, have largely been built in the same way all over world. Or have they? Recent urban scholarship suggests that cities and their modes of service provision needs to be re-envisaged, especially in the global South, not just through the lens of the ’situated’ but through disentangling it from the modernist framing altogether. The multilayered challenges - including new types of vulnerabilities of technology and users - experienced by cityregions worldwide imply that a new thought-model is called for. This paper picks up the concept of ‘Heterogeneous Infrastructure Configuration’ (HIC) suggested by Lawhon, Nilsson, Silver, Erntson and Lwasa (2017). In somewhat speculative fashion we go on to hypothesise that Stockholm, Nairobi and Kampala are at interesting historical junctures in terms of conceiving infrastructures and how they distribute power and risk across user spectrums. Are urban infrastructures across the globe being re-engineered from below, but for different reasons? We sketch at a research agenda where grounded and diverse experiences of global North and South will generate new insights for sustainable transformation of cities globally.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

Keyword

water

sanitation

STS

urban infrastructure

history

global studies

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)