Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context

Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies. An interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging urban researchers examine critical questions about urban infrastructure in different global contexts.

The chapters address water, sanitation, and waste politics in Mumbai, Kampala and Tyneside, analyse the use of infrastructure in the dispossession of Palestinian communities, explore the pacification of Rio’s favelas in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, describe how people’s bodies and lives effectively operate as ‘infrastructure’ in many major cities, and also explores tentative experiments with low-carbon infrastructures.

These diverse cases and perspectives are connected by a shared sense of infrastructure not just as a ‘thing’, a ‘system’, or an ‘output,’ but as a complex social and technological process that enables – or disables – particular kinds of action in the city. Infrastructural Lives is crucial reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners in urban studies globally.

Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, UK. His research addresses the complex links between urban places and mobilities, infrastructures, militarization, surveillance, security and war. His books include Telecommunications and the City, Splintering Urbanism (both with Simon Marvin), Disrupted Cities: When infrastructures fail and Cities Under Siege: The new military urbanism. His next book, Vertical: The politics of up and down, is currently in preparation.

Colin McFarlane is Reader in Urban Geography at Durham University, UK. His research focusss on the experience and politics of urban infrastructure, especially in relation to informal settlements. His recent research has focused on the politics of sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. His books include Learning the City: Knowledge and translocal assemblage, Urban Navigations: Politics, space and the city in South Asia (with Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria) and Urban Informalities: Reflections on the formal and informal (with Michael Waibel).