Metropolitics

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

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

The digital city: challenges for the future

Serge Wachter & translated by Oliver Waine — 2012-05-16T05:44:23Z

What is the impact of digital technology on the city and its architecture? Serge Wachter analyses the way in which new information and communication technologies (NICTs) influence not so much the physical form of cities as the individual and social experiences of their inhabitants, and explores the different channels that are leading to a dematerialisation of public space and urbanity.
The digital city is in vogue and those local councils and other public bodies that have not launched

- Debates / architecture, public space, digital city, NICTs, information technology, infrastructures, infrastructure