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.

Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation. As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research—transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision. Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.

Cities are the next frontier for artificial intelligence to permeate. As smart urban environments become possible, probable, and even preferred, artificial intelligence offers the chance for even further advancement through infrastructure and industry boosting. Opportunity overflows, but without thorough research to guide a complicated development and implementation process, urban environments can become disorganized and outright dangerous for citizens. AI-Based Services for Smart Cities and Urban Infrastructure is a collection of innovative research that explores artificial intelligence (AI) applications in urban planning. In addition, the book looks at how the internet of things and AI can work together to enable a real smart city and discusses state-of-the-art techniques in urban infrastructure design, construction, operation, maintenance, and management. While highlighting a broad range of topics including construction management, public transportation, and smart agriculture, this book is ideally designed for engineers, entrepreneurs, urban planners, architects, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students.

A comprehensive overview of the governance of urban infrastructures, this Companion combines illustrative cases with conceptual approaches to offer an innovative perspective on the governance of large urban infrastructure systems. Chapters examine the challenges facing urban infrastructure systems, including financial, economic, technological, social, ecological, jurisdictional and demand.

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.

The central role of infrastructure to cities, and in particular their sustainability, is essential for proper planning and design since most energy and materials are themselves consumed by or through infrastructures. Moreover, infrastructures of all types affect matters of economic and social equity, due to access that they provide or prevent. Sustainable Infrastructure for Cities and Societies shows how fundamental planning, design, finance, and governance principles can be adapted for sustainable infrastructure to provide solutions to make cities significantly more sustainable. By providing a contemporary overview on infrastructure, cities, planning, economies, and sustainability, the book addresses how to plan, design, finance, and manage infrastructure in ways that reduce consumption and harmful impacts while maintaining and improving life quality. It considers the interrelationships between the economic, political, societal, and institutional frameworks, providing an integrative approach including livability and sustainability, principles and practice, and planning and design. It further translates these approaches that professionals, policymakers, and leaders can use. This approach gives the book wide appeal for students, researchers, and practitioners hoping to build a more sustainable world.

This book reviews contemporary research on urban infrastructure in 76 Ethiopian cities. It examines urban infrastructure issues in these cities and covers a wide range of topics from sustainability and smart cities to research methods employed by urban infrastructure investigators with regard to Ethiopian cities. Research on urban infrastructure legitimacies and modalities has established its value worldwide in recent years, though it is still fairly young in the Ethiopian context. The first chapter outlines ongoing issues of debate concerning urban infrastructures, including but not limited to discourses on sustainability, smart cities, innovative financing methods, and potential partnerships. Urban infrastructure issues in Ethiopian cities are examined in the second chapter, while the third chapter presents a review of the most relevant literature for researchers. Findings show that the citations in the research reports are mainly from the materials available over the internet, including WHO, UN-Habitat and unpublished local materials. The fourth chapter identifies patterns in the findings and recommendations of the research reports discussed. The results reveal that there is a wider gap between supply and demand with regard to urban infrastructure in Ethiopian cities, a situation that is further aggravated because of the growing urban population and already existing backlogs. The fifth chapter reviews the essential methods employed by urban infrastructure investigators in Ethiopian cities. In this regard, the cross-sectional study method with the use of survey method has been broadly adopted among investigators. Lastly, the book presents a summary and recommendations. It was observed that the urban infrastructure boom in Ethiopia is primarily concentrated in the key cities, and the current pattern of urban infrastructure provision does not incorporate the notion of sustainability. Hence, the book calls for setting the agenda of future research on urban infrastructure and services in Ethiopian cities together with the universities, private sector and government, who should ideally collaborate to produce the knowledge needed to improve quality of life, welfare, productivity, and economic growth.

Cities can only exist because of the highly developed systems which underlie them, ensuring that energy, clean water, etc. are moved efficiently from producer to user, and that waste is removed. The urgent need to make the way that these services are provided more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable means that these systems are in a state of transition; from centralized to decentralized energy; from passive to smart infrastructure; from toll-free to road pricing. Such transitions are widely studied in the context of the influence of service providers, users, and regulators. Until now, however, relatively little attention has been given to the growing role of intermediaries in these systems. These consist of institutions and organizations acting in-between production and consumption, for example; NGOs who develop green energy labelling schemes in collaboration with producers and regulators to guide the user; consultants who advise businesses on how to save resources; and travel agents who match users with providers. Such intermediaries are in a position to shape the direction that technological transitions take, and ultimately the sustainability of urban networks. This book presents the first authoritative collection of research and analysis of the intermediaries that underpin the transitions that are taking place within urban infrastructures, showing how intermediaries emerge, the role that they play in key sectors - including energy, water, waste and building - and what impact they have on the governance of urban socio-technical networks.

Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse, fluid and unstable landscapes emerging beyond the networked city, this book identifies dynamics through which a ‘break’ with previous configurations has been operated, and new brittle zones of socio-technical controversy through which urban infrastructure (and its wider meaning) are being negotiated and fought over. It uncovers, across a diverse set of urban contexts, new ways in which processes of urbanization and infrastructure production are being combined with crucial sociopolitical implications: through shifting political economies of infrastructure which rework resource distribution and value creation; through new infrastructural spaces and territorialities which rebundle socio-technical systems for particular interests and claims; and through changing offsets between individual and collective appropriation, experience and mobilization of infrastructure. With contributions from leading authorities in the field and drawing on theoretical advances and original empirical material, this book is a major contribution to an ongoing infrastructural turn in urban studies, and will be of interest to all those concerned by the diverse forms and contested outcomes of contemporary urban change across North and South.

While many of its traditional elements, such as roads and utilities, do not change, urban infrastructure is undergoing a fascinating and necessary transformation in the wake of new information and communication technologies. This volume brings together many of the most important new voices in the fields impacting modern urban infrastructure to explore this revolutionary change in the city. Increasingly, it is connective systems rather than built forms that bind a city together. Intelligent infrastructure confers upon a city previously unimagined levels of adaptability, with mobile telephony serving to organize people and events on the move and in real time. Beginning with a consideration of invisible networks—the sociohistorical systems that contribute to and constitute urbanity—the essays collected here examine a variety of actual tools, from handheld devices to autonomous vehicles, within a fully networked built environment: the smart city. This book argues that knowledge of both the visible and invisible components--information, energy, sustainability, transportation, housing, and social practices--are critical to understanding the urban environment. The dynamic and diverse cast of contributors includes Mitchell Schwarzer, Frederic Stout, Anthony Townsend, Carlo Ratti of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, Mitchell Joachim of Terreform ONE, and many other innovators who are changing the urban landscape.