Jonathan Silver
Biographic Data
| ID | 108377 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Silver |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Silver |
| SIGNATURE | SILVER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4870-2226 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1053 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
“But we don't know, it could come back” temporalities and times of the Unbuilt Lamu Coal Power Plant
Global infrastructure projects promise to transform economies, territories, and societies at pace and scale. However, many remain unbuilt and in states of (un)realization; not completely canceled but abandoned, delayed, or facing ongoing challenges in being delivered. Our intention in this paper is to think more about the different kinds of time that swirl around these unbuilt projects. We propose approaching the unbuilt through a three-part anal…
The multipolarity and geo-politics of climate finance
This review critically engages with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber’s Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures . It contends that there are two unwritten themes that operate across the text that are important to the analytical framework and the operations of climate finance itself. Firstly, a dialectic of multiple forms of uncertainty around climate change (finance) and the attempts to contain, navigate and accumulate across these ge…
Everything Is Being Disturbed’: Unsettling the Spaces of Global Infrastructure along the Northern Corridor
Examining the ways through which global infrastructure projects proceed remains a challenging task given the scale, intensity and speed of these initiatives. This article argues for understanding these transformations through a research approach built around the idea of unsettlement . This is mobilized in three ways: first, to act as a conceptual orientation that is relational and plural in outlook when addressing transforming urban‐regional geog…
A dialogue on global infrastructure-led urbanization: Concepts and reorientations
The territorial and technological geographies of the planet are being rapidly and profoundly transformed and restructured in the 21st century. A massive surge of plans, visions, and investments is materializing through new connectivity infrastructure and operations of vast, extended transportation and logistical networks, with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative serving as a prominent example. To scrutinize this context, in this article, we advo…
The unending corridor: Critical approaches to the politics, logics and socio-technics of urban corridorisation
Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and…
When the Abu Dhabi United Group Came to Town: Constructing an Organisational Fix for State Capitalism through the Manchester Life Partnership
For many cities, the entry of financial actors into housing opens new geopolitical relations with overseas entities, including state‐backed investors such as sovereign wealth funds. These transformations raise the question of the extent to which real estate enables the urbanisation of state capitalism, understood as the expansion of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital. Our paper answers this question through an analysis…
Infrastructuring Urban Futures
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization. Considering the…
Infrastructuring Urban Futures: The Politics of Remaking Cities
Cities on the new silk road: The global urban geographies of China’s belt and road initiative
Over the last decade, scholarship on China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, has burgeoned. However, it is only recently that analysis has interrogated the BRI as a driver of global urban transformation. In this paper, we advance an in-depth review of literature generated since 2013 that has critically examined relations between the BRI and urban-scale processes. Based on a categorization of studies into three areas…
From homes to assets: Transcalar territorial networks and the financialization of build to rent in Greater Manchester
Over the last decade, Greater Manchester's city-regional centre has become an important site for build to rent (BTR) housing development in the UK. The growth of this new tenure raises important empirical and conceptual questions about how far and through what means BTR has extended in post-industrial cities like Manchester, as well as how to theorise the global-local relations involved in BTR development. Drawing on a self-built database of 155 …
In the Excess of Splintering Urbanism: The Racialized Political Economy of Infrastructure
This intervention discusses the relevance of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the study of splintering urbanism, as an uneven socio-spatial process that simultaneously produces dispossession and racial differentiation. Reflecting on our work in Palestine and South Africa we grapple with what leaks in processes of splintering urbanism and we propose “excess” as a provisional analytical space to focus on the racialized political economi…
Power, politics and a poo pump: Contestation over legitimacy, access and benefits of sanitation technology in Kampala
Most literature on sanitation largely follows a developmentalist approach, searching for the right combination of public education, appropriate technology, and partnerships across local and international institutions. Such works are useful, but also can be read as demonstrating the limitations of focusing on the modern infrastructural ideal of uniform, networked services. Studies of household experiences and practices of infrastructure in global …
Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis
Infrastructure is critical to the ways in which urban inequality is produced and experienced. Across US post-industrial contexts urban infrastructures are decaying, causing problems to the capacity of various systems to deliver essential resource flows for social reproduction. This paper examines the US pipeline crisis to understand why, how and with what effects infrastructure has undergone a process of physical decay, concentrated across inner-…
Florida in the Global South: How Eurocentrism Obscures Global Urban Challenges—and What We Can Do about It
According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes t…
Turbulent presents, precarious futures: Urbanization and the Deployment of Global Infrastructure
Understandings of global infrastructure within and between cities have primarily focused on two forms: the node and the corridor. Scholarship detailing the extensive growth of these infrastructures focus on standardization to account for the underlying networks configuring urbanization. However, standardization fails to account for the dynamic, contested and geographically uneven process of infrastructure deployment. Four generative concepts focu…
Suffocating cities
In this chapter I bring into the conversation urban political ecology with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the violence of colonization as “suffocation” when identity, ways of knowing, and ability to live at all was imprinted in the relation of colonizer and colonized. I examine the ways climate change and global policy operate as suffocation in three cities of Africa: sea-level rise in the coastal city of Saint-Louis, Senegal; disrupted electricity i…
Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (…
The Poolitical City: “Seeing Sanitation” and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town
In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understandin…
Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach
This paper develops a geographic understanding of urban energy transitions in sub-Saharan African towns and cities. In doing so this paper seeks to critically reflect on the value and limits of urban transitions analysis as a framework for understanding energy networks beyond the largely integrated systems across the Global North. We explore how these potentials and deficits can be addressed by examining promising developments across a series of …
Navigating the city: Dialectics of everyday urbanism
How might we conceptualise and research everyday urbanism? By examining the making of everyday life in a low‐income neighbourhood in Uganda, we argue that a dialectics of everyday urbanism is a useful approach for understanding urban poverty. This dialectical approach examines how marginalised urban dwellers navigate the city in the relative absence of formal infrastructure systems, service provision and state welfare, and in turn exceed those li…
The climate crisis, carbon capital and urbanisation: An urban political ecology of low-carbon restructuring in Mbale
The role of urban regions in action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has become increasingly central to global urban governance over the past 20 years and particularly after new promises and agreements made at COP21. Despite some attention across urban studies, the need to interrogate how new forms of urban carbon governance are transforming infrastructure space remains pressing. This paper examines the low-carbon restructuring of the waste s…
The urban laboratory and emerging sites of urban experimentation
This chapter examines the emerging forms of experimentation being undertaken across urban laboratories to consider the significance of these learning spaces in wider forms of technological and sustainability orientated urbanisation processes. It contributes to recent debates by examining the wider socio-technical landscapes and particular configurations of these experimental spaces to better understand the multiple ways in which they are reconfig…
Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric City
Cities within cities: Intra-urban comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town
Comparison is now taken as vital to the constitution of knowledge about cities and urbanism. However, debate on comparative urbanism has been far more attentive to the merits of comparisons between cities than it has been to the potential and challenges of comparisons within cities—to what we call “Intra-Urban Comparison” (IUC). We argue that a focus on the diverse forms of urbanism located within cities may generate critical knowledge for both i…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism
Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical-materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to prov…
Incremental infrastructures: Material improvisation and social collaboration across post-colonial Accra
Approaching the informal construction and extension of infrastructures through the terrain of what I term "the incremental" opens up new platforms of analysis for post-colonial urban systems. This refers to ad hoc actions on the part of slum dwellers to connect to energy networks or carve out informal living spaces. I argue that incrementalism is produced and subsequently secured and scaled through material configurations that seek to test and pr…
Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (…
Navigating the city: Dialectics of everyday urbanism
How might we conceptualise and research everyday urbanism? By examining the making of everyday life in a low‐income neighbourhood in Uganda, we argue that a dialectics of everyday urbanism is a useful approach for understanding urban poverty. This dialectical approach examines how marginalised urban dwellers navigate the city in the relative absence of formal infrastructure systems, service provision and state welfare, and in turn exceed those li…
Turbulent presents, precarious futures: Urbanization and the Deployment of Global Infrastructure
Understandings of global infrastructure within and between cities have primarily focused on two forms: the node and the corridor. Scholarship detailing the extensive growth of these infrastructures focus on standardization to account for the underlying networks configuring urbanization. However, standardization fails to account for the dynamic, contested and geographically uneven process of infrastructure deployment. Four generative concepts focu…
Cities within cities: Intra-urban comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town
Comparison is now taken as vital to the constitution of knowledge about cities and urbanism. However, debate on comparative urbanism has been far more attentive to the merits of comparisons between cities than it has been to the potential and challenges of comparisons within cities—to what we call “Intra-Urban Comparison” (IUC). We argue that a focus on the diverse forms of urbanism located within cities may generate critical knowledge for both i…
Disrupted Infrastructures: An Urban Political Ecology of Interrupted Electricity in Accra
Cities in the global South are often considered to be in the midst of infrastructural breakdown, and characterized as either lacking networked services or as suffering from ongoing disruption and sometimes failure. This article focuses on the electricity network of Accra to examine the series of socio-natural processes that produce this ongoing disruption and to explore the power relations of networked systems in the city. It focuses on the produ…
The Poolitical City: “Seeing Sanitation” and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town
In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understandin…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
Uncertainty and Urban Life
This essay examines the influence of uncertainty on how contemporary cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited. This influence is demonstrated through the analysis of various domains of urban planning and governance (disaster, security, energy, and transportation) across four cities of the global South (Bogotá, Karachi, Accra, and Johannesburg). In each city, uncertainty is produced by historical conditions and productive of future possi…
The climate crisis, carbon capital and urbanisation: An urban political ecology of low-carbon restructuring in Mbale
The role of urban regions in action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has become increasingly central to global urban governance over the past 20 years and particularly after new promises and agreements made at COP21. Despite some attention across urban studies, the need to interrogate how new forms of urban carbon governance are transforming infrastructure space remains pressing. This paper examines the low-carbon restructuring of the waste s…
Cities on the new silk road: The global urban geographies of China’s belt and road initiative
Over the last decade, scholarship on China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, has burgeoned. However, it is only recently that analysis has interrogated the BRI as a driver of global urban transformation. In this paper, we advance an in-depth review of literature generated since 2013 that has critically examined relations between the BRI and urban-scale processes. Based on a categorization of studies into three areas…
From homes to assets: Transcalar territorial networks and the financialization of build to rent in Greater Manchester
Over the last decade, Greater Manchester's city-regional centre has become an important site for build to rent (BTR) housing development in the UK. The growth of this new tenure raises important empirical and conceptual questions about how far and through what means BTR has extended in post-industrial cities like Manchester, as well as how to theorise the global-local relations involved in BTR development. Drawing on a self-built database of 155 …
Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis
Infrastructure is critical to the ways in which urban inequality is produced and experienced. Across US post-industrial contexts urban infrastructures are decaying, causing problems to the capacity of various systems to deliver essential resource flows for social reproduction. This paper examines the US pipeline crisis to understand why, how and with what effects infrastructure has undergone a process of physical decay, concentrated across inner-…
Housing and the (re)configuration of energy provision in Cape Town and São Paulo: Making space for a progressive urban climate politics
This paper takes as its starting point the argument that infrastructure networks cannot merely be thought of as the backdrop against which climate politics is played out in the city, but are instead fundamental to the ways in which this is conducted. Bringing infrastructure networks into view as a central tenet to the governing of climate change is not simply a matter of recognizing such spheres as critical sites for urban climate policy, but rat…
Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach
This paper develops a geographic understanding of urban energy transitions in sub-Saharan African towns and cities. In doing so this paper seeks to critically reflect on the value and limits of urban transitions analysis as a framework for understanding energy networks beyond the largely integrated systems across the Global North. We explore how these potentials and deficits can be addressed by examining promising developments across a series of …
The potentials of carbon markets for infrastructure investment in sub-Saharan urban Africa
A dialogue on global infrastructure-led urbanization: Concepts and reorientations
The territorial and technological geographies of the planet are being rapidly and profoundly transformed and restructured in the 21st century. A massive surge of plans, visions, and investments is materializing through new connectivity infrastructure and operations of vast, extended transportation and logistical networks, with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative serving as a prominent example. To scrutinize this context, in this article, we advo…
The unending corridor: Critical approaches to the politics, logics and socio-technics of urban corridorisation
Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and…
When the Abu Dhabi United Group Came to Town: Constructing an Organisational Fix for State Capitalism through the Manchester Life Partnership
For many cities, the entry of financial actors into housing opens new geopolitical relations with overseas entities, including state‐backed investors such as sovereign wealth funds. These transformations raise the question of the extent to which real estate enables the urbanisation of state capitalism, understood as the expansion of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital. Our paper answers this question through an analysis…
Florida in the Global South: How Eurocentrism Obscures Global Urban Challenges—and What We Can Do about It
According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes t…
Dissent without Opinion
Dissent Without Opinion: The Behavior of Justice William O. Douglas in Federal Tax Cases
Journal Article Dissent Without Opinion: The Behavior of Justice William O. Douglas in Federal Tax Cases. By Bernard Wolfman, Jonathan L. F. Silver, and Marjorie A. Silver. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. xvii + 204 pp. Tables, appendix, notes, and selected bibliography. $9.50.) Get access Richard M. Abrams Richard M. Abrams University of California, Berkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google …
Go East, Young Man
Go East, Young Man, The Judicial Record of Justice William O. Douglas and Dissent Without Opinion: The Behavior of Justice William O. Douglas in Federal Tax Cases Get access Douglas William O., Go East, Young Man. New York, Random House, Inc., [ 1974]. xv, 493 pp. $10.00.Countryman Vern, The Judicial Record of Justice William O. Douglas. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press, 1974. viii, 418 pp. $15.00.Wolfman Bernard Silver Jonathan…
Guide to Neuropsychiatric Therapeutics
Written primarily by Fellows of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, this handbook offers practical, explicit, evidence-based guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Concise, clinically oriented chapters cover all psychiatric and behavioral disorders associated with brain dysfunction. Each chapter describes the syndrome and its pathophysiology and provides evidence-based recommendations for assessment and biops…
Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism
Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical-materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to prov…
Housing and the (re)configuration of energy provision in Cape Town and São Paulo: Making space for a progressive urban climate politics
This paper takes as its starting point the argument that infrastructure networks cannot merely be thought of as the backdrop against which climate politics is played out in the city, but are instead fundamental to the ways in which this is conducted. Bringing infrastructure networks into view as a central tenet to the governing of climate change is not simply a matter of recognizing such spheres as critical sites for urban climate policy, but rat…
Incremental infrastructures: Material improvisation and social collaboration across post-colonial Accra
Approaching the informal construction and extension of infrastructures through the terrain of what I term "the incremental" opens up new platforms of analysis for post-colonial urban systems. This refers to ad hoc actions on the part of slum dwellers to connect to energy networks or carve out informal living spaces. I argue that incrementalism is produced and subsequently secured and scaled through material configurations that seek to test and pr…
The potentials of carbon markets for infrastructure investment in sub-Saharan urban Africa
Disrupted Infrastructures: An Urban Political Ecology of Interrupted Electricity in Accra
Cities in the global South are often considered to be in the midst of infrastructural breakdown, and characterized as either lacking networked services or as suffering from ongoing disruption and sometimes failure. This article focuses on the electricity network of Accra to examine the series of socio-natural processes that produce this ongoing disruption and to explore the power relations of networked systems in the city. It focuses on the produ…
Uncertainty and Urban Life
This essay examines the influence of uncertainty on how contemporary cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited. This influence is demonstrated through the analysis of various domains of urban planning and governance (disaster, security, energy, and transportation) across four cities of the global South (Bogotá, Karachi, Accra, and Johannesburg). In each city, uncertainty is produced by historical conditions and productive of future possi…
The urban laboratory and emerging sites of urban experimentation
This chapter examines the emerging forms of experimentation being undertaken across urban laboratories to consider the significance of these learning spaces in wider forms of technological and sustainability orientated urbanisation processes. It contributes to recent debates by examining the wider socio-technical landscapes and particular configurations of these experimental spaces to better understand the multiple ways in which they are reconfig…
Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric City
Cities within cities: Intra-urban comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town
Comparison is now taken as vital to the constitution of knowledge about cities and urbanism. However, debate on comparative urbanism has been far more attentive to the merits of comparisons between cities than it has been to the potential and challenges of comparisons within cities—to what we call “Intra-Urban Comparison” (IUC). We argue that a focus on the diverse forms of urbanism located within cities may generate critical knowledge for both i…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
The Poolitical City: “Seeing Sanitation” and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town
In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understandin…
Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach
This paper develops a geographic understanding of urban energy transitions in sub-Saharan African towns and cities. In doing so this paper seeks to critically reflect on the value and limits of urban transitions analysis as a framework for understanding energy networks beyond the largely integrated systems across the Global North. We explore how these potentials and deficits can be addressed by examining promising developments across a series of …
Navigating the city: Dialectics of everyday urbanism
How might we conceptualise and research everyday urbanism? By examining the making of everyday life in a low‐income neighbourhood in Uganda, we argue that a dialectics of everyday urbanism is a useful approach for understanding urban poverty. This dialectical approach examines how marginalised urban dwellers navigate the city in the relative absence of formal infrastructure systems, service provision and state welfare, and in turn exceed those li…
The climate crisis, carbon capital and urbanisation: An urban political ecology of low-carbon restructuring in Mbale
The role of urban regions in action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has become increasingly central to global urban governance over the past 20 years and particularly after new promises and agreements made at COP21. Despite some attention across urban studies, the need to interrogate how new forms of urban carbon governance are transforming infrastructure space remains pressing. This paper examines the low-carbon restructuring of the waste s…
Suffocating cities
In this chapter I bring into the conversation urban political ecology with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the violence of colonization as “suffocation” when identity, ways of knowing, and ability to live at all was imprinted in the relation of colonizer and colonized. I examine the ways climate change and global policy operate as suffocation in three cities of Africa: sea-level rise in the coastal city of Saint-Louis, Senegal; disrupted electricity i…
Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (…
Florida in the Global South: How Eurocentrism Obscures Global Urban Challenges—and What We Can Do about It
According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes t…
Turbulent presents, precarious futures: Urbanization and the Deployment of Global Infrastructure
Understandings of global infrastructure within and between cities have primarily focused on two forms: the node and the corridor. Scholarship detailing the extensive growth of these infrastructures focus on standardization to account for the underlying networks configuring urbanization. However, standardization fails to account for the dynamic, contested and geographically uneven process of infrastructure deployment. Four generative concepts focu…
Power, politics and a poo pump: Contestation over legitimacy, access and benefits of sanitation technology in Kampala
Most literature on sanitation largely follows a developmentalist approach, searching for the right combination of public education, appropriate technology, and partnerships across local and international institutions. Such works are useful, but also can be read as demonstrating the limitations of focusing on the modern infrastructural ideal of uniform, networked services. Studies of household experiences and practices of infrastructure in global …
Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis
Infrastructure is critical to the ways in which urban inequality is produced and experienced. Across US post-industrial contexts urban infrastructures are decaying, causing problems to the capacity of various systems to deliver essential resource flows for social reproduction. This paper examines the US pipeline crisis to understand why, how and with what effects infrastructure has undergone a process of physical decay, concentrated across inner-…
In the Excess of Splintering Urbanism: The Racialized Political Economy of Infrastructure
This intervention discusses the relevance of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the study of splintering urbanism, as an uneven socio-spatial process that simultaneously produces dispossession and racial differentiation. Reflecting on our work in Palestine and South Africa we grapple with what leaks in processes of splintering urbanism and we propose “excess” as a provisional analytical space to focus on the racialized political economi…
Water Governance and Infrastructure (20 works) · Political science (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (17 works) · Geography (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Economic growth (10 works)