Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities (Research Handbooks in Urban Studies series)

Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a thorough discussion of infrastructure as a social phenomenon. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Providing cutting-edge insights into the field, the Handbook explores the analytical category of infrastructure, clarifying and expanding upon the importance of an infrastructural perspective within academic and policy debates. An interdisciplinary range of contributors provides an ambitious examination of infrastructures and cities, with chapters covering the transformations of traditional networked infrastructure systems; novel understandings of how infrastructures matter; socio-technical processes of infrastructuring; forms of social violence involving infrastructural developments; and the role of infrastructures in human pressures on the biosphere. Ultimately, this Handbook proposes directions for further infrastructure research, highlighting its relevance in a shifting socio-political landscape.

The Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities provides valuable insight for scholars of urban studies, urban sociology, human geography, planning and regional studies. It will also prove to be a vital reference point for academics and policy-makers seeking to progress social equality and challenge current structural obstacles to the advent of more sustainable infrastructures.

Edited by Olivier Coutard, CNRS Researcher, Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires, Sociétés (LATTS), Ecole des Ponts and Université Gustave Eiffel and Daniel Florentin, Assistant Professor in Environment and Urban Studies, Mines Paris PSL (ISIGE, CSI), and Associate Researcher, LATTS, France