Jonathan Rutherford
Biographic Data
| ID | 170876 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Rutherford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Rutherford |
| SIGNATURE | RUTHERFORD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | École nationale des ponts et chaussées |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5779-3185 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 300 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Snow as Urban Infrastructure: Engineering, Extending, and Eliminating Winter
Snow is often perceived as a fleeting meteorological phenomenon, yet in urban environments, it functions as a highly engineered, managed, and contested material. This article explores the infrastructural dimensions of snow, analyzing how urban authorities and private companies actively produce, manage, and erase winter through diverse technological and political interventions. The article introduces a new atmospheric metabolism of snow, conceptua…
Archipelagic technonatures: The urbanisation of the ‘global biodiversity hotspot’
This paper develops the concept of archipelagic technonatures to analyse how urban infrastructures are reshaping the geographies of global conservation. We focus on climate-controlled biomes in Paris and Zurich that simulate Madagascar's rainforest ecosystems. These enclosed environments function as infrastructural nodes in a trans-situ regime where endangered ecologies are displaced, reconstructed and managed across geographically discontinuous …
Enabling play streets in Leeds’ priority neighbourhoods: Questions of social, spatial and environmental justice
Infrastructural Extensions: Rethinking Infrastructure in Urban Studies
This essay explores how contemporary urban infrastructure is being conceptually and operationally extended into new domains. Across five key arenas—elemental, care, more‐than‐human, cyber‐physical and the neurotechnical—we trace how infrastructures are no longer confined to traditional networked systems but instead permeate and co‐compose atmospheres, bodies, ecologies and cognition. These extensions reconfigure what infrastructure is and does, o…
Urban infrastructures, metabolic resource flows and the contradictions of circular economy ‘solutions’ in Nantes and Gothenburg
Urban infrastructures, as socio-technical systems that transform metabolic flows, are a key focus for efforts at initiating a more circular economy of resource use and waste recovery. Beyond exemplar discourses and claims, an infrastructure-mediated understanding of and focus on actually existing circularity projects attends to the diverse array of components, sites and exchanges through which transformative socio-technical change is envisaged, e…
Infrastructures as urban solutions? Critical perspectives on transformative socio-technical change
This introduction to the special issue critically explores the pervasive logic of solutionism in infrastructure-led urban development and planning – a logic marked not only by the strong belief in the transformative power of infrastructures but also by a tendency to reframe how urban problems are prioritised and governed. Although infrastructures are increasingly positioned as key tools for urban decarbonisation, circularity, resilience or smartn…
The urbanisation of controlled environment agriculture: Why does it matter for urban studies
This paper critically examines why urban studies should be interested in the emergence of controlled environment agriculture. Over the last decade, there has been significant commercial and urban policy interest in controlled environment agriculture systems for producing food in enclosed environments. Furthermore, there has been a significant expansion in research publications on urban controlled environment agriculture, stressing the novel chara…
Climate‐controlled conservation: Remaking ‘the botanical metropolis of the world’
This paper examines the understudied relationship between nature conservation and climate control in botanic gardens. Drawing on research conducted at Kew Gardens in West London, we analyse how the relations between climate control, techniques that allow the creation of particular microclimatic conditions in volumetric enclosures, and ex‐situ—out of nature—botanical management have changed over time. The paper shows how climate‐controlled conserv…
From the Guest Editors Splintering Urbanism at 20: Mapping Trajectories of Research on Urban Infrastructures
Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (2001) brought the study of infrastructure to the core of urban studies and inspired the "infrastructural turn" in the social sciences more widely. The book catalyzed a rich trove of research on how technology and society are implicated in the production of contemporary cities. More than any other publication, it has animated the socio-technical systems of water, energy, …
Urban smart microgrids: A political technology of emergency-normalcy
Increasing threats to the electrical grid are generating responses that seek to secure selected “mission critical” assets essential to the functioning and continuity of life. Focusing on military and urban domains in the United States that use the smart microgrid as a technique for securing “always-on” power during grid failure, we explore the core rationales, socio-technical configurations and wider implications of these projects. The paper argu…
Understanding the socio‐technical hybridisation of indoor–outdoor relations: Emergent, merged, and stretched
Indoor and outdoor leisure environments are increasingly understood to be mutually constituted through merged relationships but there has been less focus on the actual forms that hybridisation can take. This paper provides an analysis of forms of hybridisation through time by focusing on the socio‐technical configurations through which three leisure environments are materially constituted. We analyse the key functional elements of these configura…
The politics of domestic energy vulnerability in the Barcelona region, between deconfinement and reconfinement
What is Blue Labour: A response to Matt Bolton and Harry Pitts
Globalization and Antiglobalization: Dynamics of Change in the New World Order
A Critique of the Australian National Outlook Decoupling Strategy: A ‘Limits to Growth’ Perspective
Controlled environments: An urban research agenda on microclimatic enclosure
Controlled environments create specialist forms of microclimatic enclosure that are explicitly designed to transcend the emerging limitations and increasing turbulence in existing modes of urban climatic conditions. Across different urban contexts, anthropogenic change is creating urban conditions that are too hot, cold, humid, wet, windy, etc. to support the continued and reliable environments that are suitable for the reproduction of food, ecol…
Where Do We Go from Here
The left needs a fundamental rethinking of its politics for a new era. The first task is to understand the contemporary conjuncture: the dynamic combination of events and circumstances which structure a political settlement. Two such conjunctures have occurred in recent history. The first produced the postwar welfare settlement of 1945, which broke down in the economic crisis of the 1970s. The second took shape in the 1980s around the revival of …
Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South
The Vicissitudes of Energy and Climate Policy in Stockholm: Politics, Materiality and Transition
Through analysis of the orientations, conflicts and challenges of recent energy–climate policy in Stockholm, this paper interrogates how energy and climate become (translated as) a set of issues which come to matter in the local urban arena for different social and political interests. Drawing in particular on recent theoretical work on urban materiality, it is argued that ongoing, ‘everyday’ local struggles over the processes and practices of tr…
Urban Energy Transitions: Places, Processes and Politics of Socio-technical Change
On the second anniversary of the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, some of the focus fell on the abandoned, radioactive ghost towns in and around the disaster exclusion zone from which remaining residents have been forced to evacuate. A series of poignant images shows the empty streets, collapsed houses, unused drinks and rice vending machines, school bags hanging outside a class in an abandoned school (The Guardian…
The Future of European Social Democracy
European social democracy is in crisis. In the last decade it has ceased to be about either society or democracy. The authors explore its values, how it can be revived and what kind of political econo
Rethinking the Relational Socio-Technical Materialities of Cities and ICTs
International audience
Les réseaux transformés par leurs marges: Développement et ambivalence des techniques « décentralisées »
International audience
The culture of capitalism
Unbundling Stockholm: The networks, planning and social welfare nexus beyond the unitary city
Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City
There has been a profusion of work in recent years exploring the links between infrastructure and the city. This has entailed a conceptualization of cities and infrastructure that recognizes their mutual constitution and the inherently political nature of networked urban infrastructure. In introducing this symposium, we find that a comparative approach to infrastructure can reveal a diversity of ways in which the urban fabric is produced, managed…
Urban Energy Transitions: Places, Processes and Politics of Socio-technical Change
On the second anniversary of the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, some of the focus fell on the abandoned, radioactive ghost towns in and around the disaster exclusion zone from which remaining residents have been forced to evacuate. A series of poignant images shows the empty streets, collapsed houses, unused drinks and rice vending machines, school bags hanging outside a class in an abandoned school (The Guardian…
Cultural Studies in the Corporate University
This essay is about the fate of Cultural Studies in the new context of the market-based reform of Higher Education and the resurgence of liberal capitalism. As the global corporate demand for educational services increases, universities are becoming more like businesses. The trend toward a corporate style university can be seen in the way that its educational mission is being subordinated to the criteria of the flexible labour market. Neo-Liberal…
The Vicissitudes of Energy and Climate Policy in Stockholm: Politics, Materiality and Transition
Through analysis of the orientations, conflicts and challenges of recent energy–climate policy in Stockholm, this paper interrogates how energy and climate become (translated as) a set of issues which come to matter in the local urban arena for different social and political interests. Drawing in particular on recent theoretical work on urban materiality, it is argued that ongoing, ‘everyday’ local struggles over the processes and practices of tr…
Unbundling Stockholm: The networks, planning and social welfare nexus beyond the unitary city
Le tiers-espace
Au nom de l'hybridité et de la « différence culturelle », qu'il oppose à la « diversité culturelle », l'auteur avance une critique du « libéralisme relativiste » au fondement des politiques « multiculturalistes » mises en place en Grande-Bretagne, critique qui montre en quoi ces politiques ont partie liée avec un certain universalisme ethnocentré
Controlled environments: An urban research agenda on microclimatic enclosure
Controlled environments create specialist forms of microclimatic enclosure that are explicitly designed to transcend the emerging limitations and increasing turbulence in existing modes of urban climatic conditions. Across different urban contexts, anthropogenic change is creating urban conditions that are too hot, cold, humid, wet, windy, etc. to support the continued and reliable environments that are suitable for the reproduction of food, ecol…
The politics of domestic energy vulnerability in the Barcelona region, between deconfinement and reconfinement
Urban infrastructures, metabolic resource flows and the contradictions of circular economy ‘solutions’ in Nantes and Gothenburg
Urban infrastructures, as socio-technical systems that transform metabolic flows, are a key focus for efforts at initiating a more circular economy of resource use and waste recovery. Beyond exemplar discourses and claims, an infrastructure-mediated understanding of and focus on actually existing circularity projects attends to the diverse array of components, sites and exchanges through which transformative socio-technical change is envisaged, e…
Networks in Cities, Cities in Networks: Territory and Globalisation Intertwined in Telecommunications Infrastructure Development in Europe
There appears to be substantial convergence in the type and extent of telecommunications networks being deployed between and in major European cities to serve increasing numbers of corporate clients, thus forming one of the principal material elements in the development of a world city network. Through a broad theoretical discussion and an empirical exploration of the interurban and intraurban network development of one of the major telecommunica…
Climate‐controlled conservation: Remaking ‘the botanical metropolis of the world’
This paper examines the understudied relationship between nature conservation and climate control in botanic gardens. Drawing on research conducted at Kew Gardens in West London, we analyse how the relations between climate control, techniques that allow the creation of particular microclimatic conditions in volumetric enclosures, and ex‐situ—out of nature—botanical management have changed over time. The paper shows how climate‐controlled conserv…
At War
Technological supremacy means that the West can avoid getting up close and personal to kill. Our legacies of imperial power ensure that our wars are fought ‘over there’, and men in post-industrial societies are disassociated from the death embracing culture of the warrior. However, in the aftermath of September 11, we have entered a new era of global militarization – the shadowed world of the War on Terror. It confronts us with the historical cha…
The urbanisation of controlled environment agriculture: Why does it matter for urban studies
This paper critically examines why urban studies should be interested in the emergence of controlled environment agriculture. Over the last decade, there has been significant commercial and urban policy interest in controlled environment agriculture systems for producing food in enclosed environments. Furthermore, there has been a significant expansion in research publications on urban controlled environment agriculture, stressing the novel chara…
Urban smart microgrids: A political technology of emergency-normalcy
Increasing threats to the electrical grid are generating responses that seek to secure selected “mission critical” assets essential to the functioning and continuity of life. Focusing on military and urban domains in the United States that use the smart microgrid as a technique for securing “always-on” power during grid failure, we explore the core rationales, socio-technical configurations and wider implications of these projects. The paper argu…
What is Blue Labour: A response to Matt Bolton and Harry Pitts
After Identity
The theorizing of cultural difference and identity is highly sophisticated in its explanayion of the relational nature of identities. It has provided an effective demolition of Enlightenment humanism an dits claim to speak for an undifferentiated humanity. It exposed its operations of exclusion and opened up spaces for those identities that have been denied inclusion in it srealm. But to achieve this has required it to concentrate on the construc…
New Viewpoints in Economic Geography
New Viewpoints in Economic Geography: Case Studies from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, North America
New Viewpoints in Economic Geography
Young Britain: Politics, Pleasure and Predicaments
Young women and Islam, Noshin Ahmad youth unemployment, Ian Brinkley young people and unemployment, Balbir Chatrik and Paul Convery the politics of eco-protest, Peter Gartside young people and the new unionism, Frances O'Grady and Louise Chinnery Britpop and dance music, Rupa Huq the culture of ecstacy, Jonathan Keane Blairism and young people, Michael Kenny the cultural identities of the young British muslim, Bilkis Malek young black British wri…
After Seattle
On May Day 2000 I was at the demonstrations in Parliament Square, London. Reclaim the Streets had organized a Guerrilla Gardening spectacle: dig up the lawn in the center of the Square and plant in protest against capitalism
The territoriality of Pan-European telecommunications backbone networks
International audience
A Tale of Two Global Cities: Comparing the Territorialities of Telecommunications Developments in Paris and London
Over the past 15 or 20 years, telecommunications and information technologies (IT) have become more intensely bound up than ever before in the social, economic, political and cultural processes and transformations which are increasingly concentrated in and between key strategic urban places across the globe. By analyzing telecommunications developments in Paris and London, this book offers an explicit comparative and cross-national approach to th…
Networks in Cities, Cities in Networks: Territory and Globalisation Intertwined in Telecommunications Infrastructure Development in Europe
There appears to be substantial convergence in the type and extent of telecommunications networks being deployed between and in major European cities to serve increasing numbers of corporate clients, thus forming one of the principal material elements in the development of a world city network. Through a broad theoretical discussion and an empirical exploration of the interurban and intraurban network development of one of the major telecommunica…
At War
Technological supremacy means that the West can avoid getting up close and personal to kill. Our legacies of imperial power ensure that our wars are fought ‘over there’, and men in post-industrial societies are disassociated from the death embracing culture of the warrior. However, in the aftermath of September 11, we have entered a new era of global militarization – the shadowed world of the War on Terror. It confronts us with the historical cha…
Cultural Studies in the Corporate University
This essay is about the fate of Cultural Studies in the new context of the market-based reform of Higher Education and the resurgence of liberal capitalism. As the global corporate demand for educational services increases, universities are becoming more like businesses. The trend toward a corporate style university can be seen in the way that its educational mission is being subordinated to the criteria of the flexible labour market. Neo-Liberal…
Le tiers-espace
Au nom de l'hybridité et de la « différence culturelle », qu'il oppose à la « diversité culturelle », l'auteur avance une critique du « libéralisme relativiste » au fondement des politiques « multiculturalistes » mises en place en Grande-Bretagne, critique qui montre en quoi ces politiques ont partie liée avec un certain universalisme ethnocentré
After Identity
The theorizing of cultural difference and identity is highly sophisticated in its explanayion of the relational nature of identities. It has provided an effective demolition of Enlightenment humanism an dits claim to speak for an undifferentiated humanity. It exposed its operations of exclusion and opened up spaces for those identities that have been denied inclusion in it srealm. But to achieve this has required it to concentrate on the construc…
La démunicipalisation du service de l'énergie à Stockholm. Les effets sociaux d'un marché dérégulé
Frédérique Boucher-Hedenström, Jonathan Rutherford Removing the energy supply from municipal control in Stockholm The social effects of a de-regulated market. Sweden has already begun to create a competitive energy market. Consumers can choose between several suppliers whose prices change in line with climatic and economic factors that are difficult to control. Welfare support for low-income families is less likely to reach single people, many of…
The culture of capitalism
Unbundling Stockholm: The networks, planning and social welfare nexus beyond the unitary city
Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City
There has been a profusion of work in recent years exploring the links between infrastructure and the city. This has entailed a conceptualization of cities and infrastructure that recognizes their mutual constitution and the inherently political nature of networked urban infrastructure. In introducing this symposium, we find that a comparative approach to infrastructure can reveal a diversity of ways in which the urban fabric is produced, managed…
Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood
Ces dix dernières années, Neil Brenner a notablement contribué à éclairer les formes et les effets de la réorganisation territoriale qui a suivi la crise politico-économique des années 1970. Son ouvrage New State Spaces offre une synthèse de ce travail, le précise et en étend la portée. Résumons cette thèse, bien développée dans les trois premiers chapitres. Pour Neil Brenner, les politiques urbaines sont au principe d’une transformation institut…
Les réseaux transformés par leurs marges: Développement et ambivalence des techniques « décentralisées »
International audience
Rethinking the Relational Socio-Technical Materialities of Cities and ICTs
International audience
The Future of European Social Democracy
European social democracy is in crisis. In the last decade it has ceased to be about either society or democracy. The authors explore its values, how it can be revived and what kind of political econo
The Vicissitudes of Energy and Climate Policy in Stockholm: Politics, Materiality and Transition
Through analysis of the orientations, conflicts and challenges of recent energy–climate policy in Stockholm, this paper interrogates how energy and climate become (translated as) a set of issues which come to matter in the local urban arena for different social and political interests. Drawing in particular on recent theoretical work on urban materiality, it is argued that ongoing, ‘everyday’ local struggles over the processes and practices of tr…
Urban Energy Transitions: Places, Processes and Politics of Socio-technical Change
On the second anniversary of the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, some of the focus fell on the abandoned, radioactive ghost towns in and around the disaster exclusion zone from which remaining residents have been forced to evacuate. A series of poignant images shows the empty streets, collapsed houses, unused drinks and rice vending machines, school bags hanging outside a class in an abandoned school (The Guardian…
Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South
Where Do We Go from Here
The left needs a fundamental rethinking of its politics for a new era. The first task is to understand the contemporary conjuncture: the dynamic combination of events and circumstances which structure a political settlement. Two such conjunctures have occurred in recent history. The first produced the postwar welfare settlement of 1945, which broke down in the economic crisis of the 1970s. The second took shape in the 1980s around the revival of …
Globalization and Antiglobalization: Dynamics of Change in the New World Order
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Geography (19 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Economics (12 works) · Engineering (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Economic geography (11 works) · Law (10 works)