SPI_toolkit_UI_lecture2.ppt

1. Urban Infrastructure 2
TODAY:
• Overview of the history
of the Modern Networked
City
• Paris

2. ‘By considering the city
as an enormous artifact,
the size and distribution
of its streets, sidewalks,
buildings, squares, parks,
sewers, and so on can be
interpreted as remarkable
physical records of the
sociotechnical world in
which the city was
developed and
conceived.’
(Aibar and Bijker, 1997)

3. • 1850 to 1960 a
significant period
• Focus on infrastructural
investment
• Technological
advancement
• Western cities transition
from older compact
commercial city to new
industrial metropolis
• Joining up islands of
infrastructure
The multi-faceted
aspirations of
infrastructural
investment

4. Building infrastructure
has been constitutive of
the modern condition, in
almost every conceivable
sense. At the same time,
ideologies and
discourses of modernism
have helped define the
purposes, goals and
characteristics of those
infrastructures. In other
words, the co-
construction of
technology and modernity
can be seen with
exceptional clarity in the
case of infrastructure.
Paul Edwards, 2002

5. • The notion of the city as
autonomous entity, a
predictable system
• Standards and norms
• Application of the
enlightenment ideals of
universal rationality,
progress, justice,
emancipation and reason
‘…notions of ubiquity of
access, modernisation
and societal progress, all
within the rubric of
widening state power’
Graham and Marvin,
2002
Infrastructure,
Modernity, and
Urban Planning

6. Manipulating,
‘taming’ the city
• Space, in the form of the
physical city, was seen as
an object to be rationally
manipulated
• The discourses of
modern town planning
• Perpetual
transformation towards a
scientifically rational and
technologically intense
urbanism

7. The four pillars of
the modern
infrastructural
ideal
Ideologies of
science,
technology
and the city
Modern
urban
planning
Economic
relations
mediated by
utilities and
transport
The role of
the state

8. Ideologies of
science,
technology and the
city
• Urban reform from 1850
to 1920 – creating the
‘technological sublime’
• Creating modern urban
civilization
• The desire for
coherence
• The ideal of the single,
systemic urban
‘machine’
• The metropolis as
inorganic and fabricated
• Urban engineering as
rational and value-free

9. Modern Urban
Planning
• The urgent need for
comprehensive
intervention
• The ideal of urban
cohesion
• Construction of the
‘underground city’
• Urban planning as the
means to realise
technological progress
• Standards and norms

10. Haussmann’s
Paris
1853 - 1870
• Using streets as the
spines for binding the
metropolis
• Surgically inserting
boulevards
• Integrated street system
for the regularisation of
Paris
• The road network as the
city’s circulatory system
• Streets provide the
physical framework for
bundling of buried water,
sewerage neworks

11. Mass Production
and Consumption
1920 - 60
• Fordist systems of mass
production
• Automation enabled
through technology
• Standardising
• Technical Division of
Labour
• Growth in mass
consumption
• Technologies that
enabled production and
distribution:
containerization, long-
distance highway
networks, voice
communication, electrical

12. The Nation State
“Infrastructural networks,
now widely seen through
organic metaphors as the
very ‘connective’ tissue,
‘nervous systems’ or
‘circulation systems’ of the
nation….
Became an essential focus of
the power, legitimacy and
territorial definition of the
modern nation state”
The economic
logic of natural
monopolies
Infrastructure
as public
goods for
public
consumption
Regulating
externalities
through state
control

13. Developing
Countries
• Translation of the
modern ideal into
different social, economic
and cultural contexts
• The impact of unequal
power relations
• Relationships to
developmental agendas
of the colonial and post-
colonial states
• Colonial cities as part of
economic exchange
between centre and
periphery