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'The traditional analysis of infrastructure networks has provided the conceptual rationalization for centralized monopolies for a century. In recent years, liberalization has shown that much wider participation can be beneficial. Innovative development in decentralized networks can be driven from below if government policies permit it, as vividly demonstrated by the Internet. This book contributes to a much needed exploration into the characteristics and implications of decentralized networks being driven from below, introducing new perspectives on the conception and analysis of infrastructure networks.' William H. Melody, Aalborg University, Denmark and Delft University of Technology, The N...
The Connected City explores how thinking about networks helps make sense of modern cities: what they are, how they work, and where they are headed. Cities and urban life can be examined as networks, and these urban networks can be examined at many different levels. The book focuses on three levels of urban networks: micro, meso, and macro. These levels build upon one another, and require distinctive analytical approaches that make it possible to consider different types of questions. At one extreme, micro-urban networks focus on the networks that exist within cities, like the social relationships among neighbors that generate a sense of community and belonging. At the opposite extreme, macro...
The confluence of global climate change, growing levels of energy consumption and rapid urbanization has led the international policy community to regard urban responses to climate change as ‘an urgent agenda’ (World Bank 2010). The contribution of cities to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of urban places and communities to the impacts of climate change have led to a relatively recent and rapidly proliferating interest amongst both academic and policy communities in how cities might be able to respond to mitigation and adaptation. Attention has focused on the potential for municipal authorities to develop policy and plans that can a...
This book reviews the theory of the firm and the large modern corporation. Examining the process of entrepreneurial capitalism in which firms come into existence, then managerial capitalism and the changing motives of management in corporations - The Corporation is a thorough and thoughtful account. Of interest to students and academics in
For a long time agriculture and rural life were dismissed by many contemporaries as irrelevant or old-fashioned. Contrasted with cities as centers of intellectual debate and political decision-making, the countryside seemed to be becoming increasingly irrelevant. Today, politicians in many European countries are starting to understand that the neglect of the countryside has created grave problems. Similarly, historians are remembering that European history in the twentieth century was strongly influenced by problems connected to the production of food, access to natural resources, land rights, and the political representation and activism of rural populations. Hence, the handbook offers an o...
A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking ...
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This book gives an account of how the U.S. freight transportation system has been impacted and “globalized,” since the 1950s, by the presence of the shipping container. A globally standardized object, the container carries cargo moving in international trade, and it utilizes and fits within the existing transportation infrastructures of shipping, trucking and railroads. In this way it binds them together into a nearly seamless worldwide logistics network. This process occurs not only in ocean shipping and at ports, but also deep within national territories. In its dependence on existing infrastructural systems, though, the network of container movement as it pervades domestic space is sh...
This volume revisits one of the great challenges of our time - the global circulation of technology and the resulting technicisation. Together, the introductory essay and six case studies argue that while circulation inevitably leads to the global standardisation of some forms, successful technicisation depends on local appropriation that takes place in the interstitial zones of translation. These zones, characterised by their asymmetrical power relations, need to be constantly renegotiated, recreated, and maintained in order to sustain decolonial translations. The aim of this volume is to stimulate further experimental praxiographic studies of decolonial translation in processes of technicisation, and thereby ignite novel, forward-looking theoretical debates. Contributors are Sarah Biecker, Marc Boeckler, Jude Kagoro, Jochen Monstadt, Sung-Joon Park, Eva Riedke, Richard Rottenburg, Klaus Schlichte, Jannik Schritt, Alena Thiel, Christiane Tristl, Jonas van der Straeten.
Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.