Metropolitics

On a Road to Nowhere? Military Urbanism and the Architecture of Segregation

Tim Cunningham — 2024-05-03T05:00:00Z

Comparing the experiences of Belfast, Northern Ireland, with the United States, Tim Cunningham shows how physical barriers, especially roads, can precipitate the dismembering of targeted communities from the wider city ecosystem, in turn accentuating patterns of spatial inequality and deprivation.
By the late 1960s, Belfast was experiencing many of the secular challenges that afflicted industrial cities across western Europe and the US at that time (Bryan 2012). Economic crises precipitated

- Essays / Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ireland, United Kingdom, United States, infrastructure, segregation, urban planning, urbanism, military urbanism, socio-spatial inequalities, barriers

Episodes from the Social Life of the Delhi Metro

Sneha Mandhan — 2023-01-20T06:00:00Z

What is the impact of a new metro on a large and growing city? As new metros are cropping up across Asia, Rashmi Sadana documents the changes brought to the city of Delhi by a sprawling new transportation system. She shows that the Delhi metro is both similar to other subways of the world and unique in its inscription in a distinctive cultural landscape.
Infrastructures straddle the line between large, shiny artefacts imposed on urban landscapes marking modernity, and the backdrop for scenes

- Reviews / India, Delhi, transport, public transportation, mass transit, rapid transit, metro, subway, infrastructure, ethnography, vignettes, public space

Underground Berlin: Where Infrastructure Meets Politics

Clarence Hatton-Proulx & translated by Oliver Waine — 2022-12-02T06:00:00Z

Water, electricity, gas: in Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss presents a history of Berlin's infrastructure networks from 1920 to 2020, and shows how their operation has varied with successive political regimes.
For anyone interested in the history of cities, the case of Berlin is particularly rich. In less than a century, the German capital lived through a succession of different political regimes: the Weimar Republic, Nazi rule, the division of the city between two concomitant republics (one

- Reviews / Berlin, infrastructure, Germany, energy, history, networks, urban technical networks, utilities

Disposability in the City: A Review of Waste Worlds

Lily Baum Pollans — 2022-07-05T05:00:00Z

Lily Pollans reviews Jacob Doherty's Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability, which shows how the way in which societies define and manage waste can shed light on political, social, and economic power.
---- Series: Urban Wastes, Present and Future In 1966, anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that defining and managing dirt is an essential act of worldmaking. It is through the categorization of what is pure and what is contaminated that societies make meaning and

- Reviews / waste, waste management, Africa, Uganda, Kampala, Global South, infrastructure

Infrastructure Financing and the Bonds of Inequality

Rachel Weber — 2021-10-19T05:00:00Z

Rachel Weber reviews historian Destin Jenkins' new book, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, which shows how decisions about infrastructure financing reinforce preexisting racial inequalities and hierarchies.
As the United States awaits a massive federal stimulus in the depths of the 2021 pandemic, it is easy to become spellbound by the possibilities of infrastructure. We think that public things—sewers, schools, roads, public housing—will save us, that they

- Reviews / infrastructure, inequalities, debt, United States, finance, local finance

“Land Is the New Sugar”: A Review of Sai Balakrishnan's Shareholder Cities

Thomas Crowley — 2020-12-15T06:00:00Z

Shareholder Cities argues that India's urban corridors are driven by complex negotiations, transformations, and power struggles, often led by the class and caste groups who control agrarian capital in urbanizing regions.
At the start of her book Shareholder Cities, Sai Balakrishnan quickly and convincingly dismisses popular conceptions of present-day India as a collision of superhighways and bullock carts, “modern, urban, Westernized India, and the primitive, rural, superstitious India” (p.

- Reviews / India, real estate, infrastructure, urbanization, Mumbai, power play, rural, agriculture, farming, Global South

Sale of the Century: Chicago's Infrastructure Deals and the Privatization State

Philip Ashton & Marc Doussard & Rachel Weber — 2020-11-24T06:00:00Z

Since 2004, the City of Chicago has been engaged in a new wave of infrastructure privatizations, selling concessions to financial institutions. Philip Ashton, Marc Doussard and Rachel Weber analyze the consequences of these transfers in detail, in terms of both public action and the impact on users, and identify lessons to be learned from this new way of doing things, whereby firms mine the city for potential revenue streams.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization When the City

- From the Field / financialization, privatization, infrastructure, infrastructures, urban services, Chicago, United States

Unlikely Inter-Class Cooperation in Urbanizing Rural Colombia

Sebastián F. Villamizar Santamaría — 2020-02-25T06:00:00Z

Sebastián F. Villamizar Santamaría examines a case of rural gentrification outside of Bogotá, Colombia, and shows how long-time peasants and former factory workers and upper-middle-class newcomers collaborate across class lines to manage fundamental resources, such as water, and pressure the state to provide necessary infrastructure and services.
“A new neighbor welcomes you; your neighbor, nature,” claims a billboard on the road between La Calera, a small town, and Bogotá, the Colombian

- From the Field / Colombia, Latin America, Global South, South America, rural, Bogotá, gentrification, rural gentrification, urbanization, suburbanization, rururbanization, water, urban public service, urban services, urban technical networks, utilities, infrastructure, social class, networks, water access

Bypassing the city: divisions and divergences in Antananarivo

Catherine Fournet-Guérin & translated by Oliver Waine — 2014-12-04T05:50:00Z

In a context of global competition, major projects are the order of the day, including in the global South. The new bypass road recently built in the Malagasy capital Antananarivo fits into this vision of modernity and aspiration to international standards. But this bypass has become more than just a road; it has been transformed into a recreational space – and consequently a source of conflict.
In the major cities of less-developed countries, highway projects aimed at easing traffic

- From the Field / public space, infrastructures, conflict, Africa, Global South, use of space, Madagascar, Antananarivo, social practices, infrastructure

For cities of a different nature

Jérémy Grangé & Sylvain Petitet & translated by Oliver Waine — 2014-03-26T05:50:00Z

City-dwellers want to see more of their metropolitan areas turned over to nature and urban public spaces; however, our cities today are still structured by a network of roads that were primarily built to manage motor traffic flows. Sylvain Petitet and Jérémy Grangé show how implementing sustainable urban infrastructure could provide city-dwellers with easy and convenient access to the places that generate most of their journeys, revealing a new form of network-based public space.
The 20th

- Essays / public space, public transportation, sustainable development, nature, well-being, bicycles, infrastructures, pedestrian, infrastructure, cycling