Jochen Monstadt
Biographic Data
| ID | 956381 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jochen Monstadt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jochen |
| FAMILY NAME | Monstadt |
| SIGNATURE | MONSTADT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9146-1571 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 248 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Governing infrastructure heterogeneity: An intraurban analysis of sewerage infrastructures in Cape Town
Heterogeneous infrastructures, combining networked and non-networked socio-technical arrangements, are increasingly legitimised as responses to service delivery challenges in Southern cities. However, their emergence in non-poor neighbourhoods and the challenges of governing them remain underexplored. Drawing on document review and 31 interviews across five neighbourhoods in Cape Town, this paper identifies three key governance challenges: 1) the…
Social media influence on collaborative planning: Framing strategies in online public participation
Collaborative planning requires aligning diverse stakeholder frames. Yet, few studies in collaborative planning literature examine framing strategies’ influence, especially how citizens in authoritarian contexts achieve frame success. Using Big Banyan Tree controversy in China, this study integrates framing and network theories through a mixed-method approach combining co-occurrence network analysis and BERT-based semantic clustering. Analysis of…
Decarbonizing urban heating systems in Europe: Navigating governance challenges in seven pioneering cities
City governments' transformative capacity in climate mitigation has been attracting increasing attention in academia and practice, but until recently the decarbonization of the heating sector has tended to be neglected in debates on urban energy and climate policy. Moreover, the literature on the transformation of heating systems has primarily focused on techno-economic dimensions, largely overlooking spatial complexities and urban government cap…
Power struggles: Urban heterogeneity and unruly electricity access in Dar es Salaam
Among the considerable challenges many African utility companies and governments face in universalising electricity access are the economic losses and technical problems resulting from irregular practices of electricity access. Despite its concerted efforts, TANESCO—the Tanzania Electric Supply Company—is no exception to this. Against this backdrop, this study empirically investigates the tensions between energy access and cost recovery goals and…
How Data Centers Have Come to Matter: Governing the Spatial and Environmental Footprint of the ‘Digital Gateway to Europe’
Data centers, the material backbone of smart cities, power the digital economy and advanced digital services. Metaphors of ‘the cloud’ and ‘cloud computing’ obscure the massive computing and storage infrastructures, the resource flows and the land uses they mediate. To date, smart city research and policies have been concerned less with the materiality of enabling data infrastructures than with the material effects of increased datafication and d…
Examining collaborative planning processes and outcomes in urban regeneration: A deliberative turn in China
Collaborative planning practices have recently emerged in China to deal with the complexity and conflicts of interest in urban regeneration. Building on the concept of authoritarian deliberation, this study develops a conceptual framework to examine the reasons for initiating collaborative planning, and its processes and outcomes. Through the case study of Guangzhou’s Enning Road micro-regeneration project, this research deepens understanding of …
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…
Towards the next generation of urban heating systems? Governing multi-infrastructural solutions in Amsterdam
Pressurised by commitments to climate targets and the volatility of fossil fuel prices, cities need to decarbonise their heating systems. However, promoting new ways of generating, recovering, storing and distributing heat from unconventional sources is a complex urban governance task that overarches several infrastructure domains. This article explores the governance challenges of transitioning urban heating towards increasingly hybrid systems b…
One water in Los Angeles? Contesting the circular city through infrastructural practices
The communicative turn in planning? Examining community planner's role as a third actor in Beijing, China
Business-as-unusual: Exploring port stakeholders' time tactics for mediating recent disruptions at the Port of Rotterdam
Seaports function as infrastructural nodes at which the disparate rhythms of global logistical flows are synchronized toward just-in-time management. Port disruptions challenge this regular time regime. This article explores the role of infrastructures and time tactics in mediating port disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Building on three interrelated notions of time-infrastructural time regimes, infrastruct…
Informal participation in digital planning: How can third parties use social media to shift power relations in planning
In recent years, social media has become an influential tool for engaging various participants and facilitating inclusivity in digital planning. While many studies highlight local governments' use of social media for formal participation, limited research assesses its impact on power dynamics in informal participation. This study aims to fill the gap by identifying key features of social media that facilitate informal participation and applying C…
Co-producing maintenance and repair: Hybrid labor relations in water supply in Accra, Ghana
Access to water supply is still a problem in African cities. This has sparked discussions about how small-scale private actors could collaborate with the state to improve water supply. However, scholarly discussions on water supply have hardly examined the role of such actors in maintenance and repair. This paper shows how water infrastructures are maintained and repaired through hybrid labor relations between private and public actors where form…
Hidden conflicts? Revealing power mechanisms in collaborative governance for redeveloping heritage districts: The case of Dashilar, Beijing, China
Measuring social network influence on power relations in collaborative planning: A case study of Beijing City, China
Social media has recently become a networked public sphere for social interactions and power struggles in planning practice. However, little research has been done to understand the impact of social media on power relations in collaborative planning. This study uses the Bell and Drum Tower planning practice in Beijing as a case study to elaborate on whether and how social media empowers citizens, experts, and third parties to influence decision-m…
Heritage conflict evolution: Changing framing strategies and opportunity structures in two heritage district redevelopment projects in China
Heritage district (re)development usually involves conflict, especially when the local community challenges existing preservation policy arrangements, and conflicts involve the framing of competing positions in the public sphere. While framing strategy aids in understanding conflict dynamics, further theoretical exploration is necessary. This paper emphasizes the role of contextual influence and how opportunity structures can enhance framing anal…
Urban electricity governance and the (re)production of heterogeneous electricity constellations in Dar es Salaam
Toward Urban Resilience? Coping with Blackouts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
The seamless and ubiquitous supply of infrastructure services such as electricity is usually seen as a critical backbone of modern urban societies. Yet electricity supply in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, like many other infrastructure services in cities in the Global South, is unreliable and unpredictable, with urban power cuts being everyday occurrences. Major challenges in electricity supply have resulted in severe crises leading to spatially uneven…
The politics of tied aid: Technology transfer and the maintenance and repair of water infrastructure
In many African countries, international donor funding schemes contribute significantly to financing water infrastructures, especially for constructing new networks and water plants and upgrading existing ones. However, little is known about how these financial arrangements shape infrastructure maintenance and repair. This article explores the politics of tied water aid to show how international donors’ technology transfer schemes and their assoc…
Infrastructuring Gardens: The Material Politics of Outdoor Water Conservation in Los Angeles
Historically, urban developers, politicians, and public water utilities have invented Los Angeles as a semitropical oasis in a dry climate. During the California drought of 2011 through 2016, however, the city’s residential gardens became a new frontier of water conservation policy. Water agencies started to subsidize the replacement of lushly irrigated lawns with California Friendly® landscapes, thereby endorsing a technology-centered “infrastru…
The material politics of integrated urban stormwater management in Los Angeles, California
Cities worldwide have embraced the idea of integrated stormwater management using more decentralised and green infrastructures to enhance urban sustainability. Los Angeles County has recently introduced a new stormwater tax that envisions achieving sustainable stormwater futures through far-reaching infrastructural change. While embracing such visions, however, different actors seek to use tax revenues for diverging infrastructure designs. Our pa…
Urban and Infrastructural Rhythms and the Politics of Temporal Alignment
To date, urban research has paid little attention to the role of urban infrastructures in shaping and ordering urban temporalities. I contend that the study of infrastructures offers a powerful lens for understanding the reciprocal relationship changing infrastructural and urban temporalities as well as the powerdriven processes of temporal alignment and realignment. Approaching time through the empirical study of infrastructures, I argue, reveal…
Post-, pre- and non-payment: Conflicting rationalities in the digitalisation of energy access in Kibera, Nairobi
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digitaltechnologi…
Enabling equitable energy access for Mozambique? Heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Maputo's growing urban periphery
This article concerns the relationship between uneven peri-urban growth and heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Metropolitan Maputo, Mozambique. Much research has documented how the diversity and overlap of different energy configurations define energy access in African cities. However, very little attention has been given to how urban growth dynamics shape heterogeneity and vice versa. A growing concern in African cities is highly uneven gro…
Practicing urban resilience to electricity service disruption in Accra, Ghana
Electricity is essential for the functioning of contemporary cities. However, despite its overarching criticality, residents of Southern cities like Accra are challenged by splintered access and limited reliability of electricity services. To maintain access, and creatively maneuver blackout situations, residents in Southern cities employ many alternative socio-technical configurations and adaptive strategies. Using the lenses of urban resilience…
Conceptualizing the Political Ecology of Urban Infrastructures: Insights from Technology and Urban Studies
The debate on urban sustainability has now been on the research agenda for a number of years. One element that has, however, been undertheorized and empirically understudied is the crucial importance of networked urban infrastructures for the ecological sustainability of cities. These infrastructures mediate resource flows and vitally shape environmental practices and sociotechnical innovation in cities. It is thus argued that we need adequate co…
Toward The Networked City? Translating Technological ideals and Planning Models in Water and Sanitation Systems in Dar es Salaam
One of the most influential ideals for constructing and managing cities and infrastructures worldwide is that of the 'networked city'. This ideal refers to the technological design and morphology of cities integrated and ordered by infrastructure networks and to a specific model in the operation, use and planning of infrastructures. Engineers, planners and public health officials have aspired to align with this circulating ideal of urban modernit…
Smart city making? The spread of ICT-driven plans and infrastructures in Nairobi
Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of emergent plans with ordinary realities of the African city. We demonstrate that while processes of sm…
Cities in an era of interfacing infrastructures: Politics and spatialities of the urban nexus
Over the last few years, nexus-thinking has become a buzzword in urban research and practice. This also applies to recent claims of greater integration or coordination of urban infrastructures that have traditionally been managed separately and have been unbundled. The idea is to better address their growing sociotechnical complexity, their externalities and their operation within an urban system of systems. This article introduces a collection o…
Urban Governance and the Transition of Energy Systems: Institutional Change and Shifting Energy and Climate Policies in Berlin
Energy systems in Germany and in all western OECD countries are currently undergoing transformations that have profound implications for their urban and regional governance, as well as for regional development in general. New technologies, regulatory regimes, management styles, marketing strategies and environmental priorities have emerged, dramatically reconfiguring patterns of governance within cities and regions. This is particularly obvious i…
Urban resilience in the making? The governance of critical infrastructures in German cities
Over the last decade, the protection of urban infrastructures has become a focus in German security policies. These point not solely to the multiple external infrastructural threats (e.g. natural disasters, terrorist and cyber-attacks), but also to the endogenous risks of cascading failures across geographical and functional borders that arise from interlocking and often mutually dependent infrastructures. As geographical nodes in infrastructural…
The Kenya Slum Electrification Program. Local politics of electricity networks in Kibera
Rethinking energy transitions in Southern cities: Urban and infrastructural heterogeneity in Dar es Salaam
Despite increasing attention to the complex geographies of energy supply and use in Southern cities, energy research is still largely focusing on energy transitions evolving either through homogeneous, networked electricity or heterogeneous constellations in poor neighborhoods. Central to this research are analytical concepts used to explain energy transitions in Northern cities, such as the notion of socio-technical regimes. In this paper, we ar…
Rethinking the governance of urban infrastructural transformations: A synthesis of emerging approaches
Recent urban debates on the governance of sustainability transformations have witnessed an 'infrastructural turn'. Previously blacked-boxed, the role of infrastructures in sustainability transformations has been foregrounded by both growing academic scholarship and major investments in new infrastructural programs. How these changes are, and could be, governed remains somewhat opaque however, with traditional forms of knowledge and practices in n…
From the Sanitary City to the Circular City? Technopolitics of Wastewater Restructuring in Los Angeles, California
This article follows the flow of wastewater in Los Angeles, California, from upstream treatment plants to the Pacific Ocean, to explore struggles over reconfigurations of urban wastewater flows for new policy ambitions in recycling and reuse. We show how ambitious infrastructure visions of circular urban resource management have gained force since California's most recent drought (2011−17) but clash with incumbent gravity-fed water and sewer syst…
Decarbonising Rotterdam: Energy transitions and the alignment of urban and infrastructural temporalities
Low carbon transitions of urban energy systems have been on urban research and policy agendas for several years now. While the spatialities of infrastructure transitions have been widely discussed, their temporalities have attracted much less attention. This is surprising, since the transition of urban infrastructures in the course of system integration and decarbonisation reveal strong temporal dynamics: new temporalities or temporal requirement…
Heritage conflict evolution: Changing framing strategies and opportunity structures in two heritage district redevelopment projects in China
Heritage district (re)development usually involves conflict, especially when the local community challenges existing preservation policy arrangements, and conflicts involve the framing of competing positions in the public sphere. While framing strategy aids in understanding conflict dynamics, further theoretical exploration is necessary. This paper emphasizes the role of contextual influence and how opportunity structures can enhance framing anal…
Post-, pre- and non-payment: Conflicting rationalities in the digitalisation of energy access in Kibera, Nairobi
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digitaltechnologi…
How Data Centers Have Come to Matter: Governing the Spatial and Environmental Footprint of the ‘Digital Gateway to Europe’
Data centers, the material backbone of smart cities, power the digital economy and advanced digital services. Metaphors of ‘the cloud’ and ‘cloud computing’ obscure the massive computing and storage infrastructures, the resource flows and the land uses they mediate. To date, smart city research and policies have been concerned less with the materiality of enabling data infrastructures than with the material effects of increased datafication and d…
One water in Los Angeles? Contesting the circular city through infrastructural practices
Rethinking the governance and planning of a new generation of greenbelts
In recent decades, a new generation of greenbelts has developed that are embedded within dynamic regionalism processes. Governance of these greenbelts is increasingly being challenged by institutional arrangements requiring coordination across multiple policy fields, territorial jurisdictions and policy levels – complexities that are not yet reflected within the literature. The paper explores how vertical, horizontal and territorial coordination …
Mainstreaming resilience in urban policy making? Insights from Christchurch and Rotterdam
Examining collaborative planning processes and outcomes in urban regeneration: A deliberative turn in China
Collaborative planning practices have recently emerged in China to deal with the complexity and conflicts of interest in urban regeneration. Building on the concept of authoritarian deliberation, this study develops a conceptual framework to examine the reasons for initiating collaborative planning, and its processes and outcomes. Through the case study of Guangzhou’s Enning Road micro-regeneration project, this research deepens understanding of …
The communicative turn in planning? Examining community planner's role as a third actor in Beijing, China
Translating the sustainable development goals in national development planning: The case of Mozambique’s energy for all programme
The international community has emphasised the importance of governments adapting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to national policy priorities. Whilst sustainability assessment frameworks and indicators are meant to facilitate adaptation, their assumption of high institutional capacity based on Global North contexts is a shorthand for Global South contexts. In particular, limited institutional capacity means that electric…
Governing Suburbia through regionalized land-use planning? Experiences from the Greater Frankfurt region
Building urban and infrastructure resilience through connectivity: An institutional perspective on disaster risk management in Christchurch, New Zealand
Urban and infrastructure resilience: Diverging concepts and the need for cross-boundary learning
Towards the next generation of urban heating systems? Governing multi-infrastructural solutions in Amsterdam
Pressurised by commitments to climate targets and the volatility of fossil fuel prices, cities need to decarbonise their heating systems. However, promoting new ways of generating, recovering, storing and distributing heat from unconventional sources is a complex urban governance task that overarches several infrastructure domains. This article explores the governance challenges of transitioning urban heating towards increasingly hybrid systems b…
Business-as-unusual: Exploring port stakeholders' time tactics for mediating recent disruptions at the Port of Rotterdam
Seaports function as infrastructural nodes at which the disparate rhythms of global logistical flows are synchronized toward just-in-time management. Port disruptions challenge this regular time regime. This article explores the role of infrastructures and time tactics in mediating port disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Building on three interrelated notions of time-infrastructural time regimes, infrastruct…
Die Modernisierung der Stromversorgung: Regionale Energie- und Klimapolitik Im Liberalisierungs- und Privatisierungsprozess
Urban Governance and the Transition of Energy Systems: Institutional Change and Shifting Energy and Climate Policies in Berlin
Energy systems in Germany and in all western OECD countries are currently undergoing transformations that have profound implications for their urban and regional governance, as well as for regional development in general. New technologies, regulatory regimes, management styles, marketing strategies and environmental priorities have emerged, dramatically reconfiguring patterns of governance within cities and regions. This is particularly obvious i…
Conceptualizing the Political Ecology of Urban Infrastructures: Insights from Technology and Urban Studies
The debate on urban sustainability has now been on the research agenda for a number of years. One element that has, however, been undertheorized and empirically understudied is the crucial importance of networked urban infrastructures for the ecological sustainability of cities. These infrastructures mediate resource flows and vitally shape environmental practices and sociotechnical innovation in cities. It is thus argued that we need adequate co…
Toward The Networked City? Translating Technological ideals and Planning Models in Water and Sanitation Systems in Dar es Salaam
One of the most influential ideals for constructing and managing cities and infrastructures worldwide is that of the 'networked city'. This ideal refers to the technological design and morphology of cities integrated and ordered by infrastructure networks and to a specific model in the operation, use and planning of infrastructures. Engineers, planners and public health officials have aspired to align with this circulating ideal of urban modernit…
The Kenya Slum Electrification Program. Local politics of electricity networks in Kibera
Urban and infrastructure resilience: Diverging concepts and the need for cross-boundary learning
Decarbonising Rotterdam: Energy transitions and the alignment of urban and infrastructural temporalities
Low carbon transitions of urban energy systems have been on urban research and policy agendas for several years now. While the spatialities of infrastructure transitions have been widely discussed, their temporalities have attracted much less attention. This is surprising, since the transition of urban infrastructures in the course of system integration and decarbonisation reveal strong temporal dynamics: new temporalities or temporal requirement…
Urban resilience in the making? The governance of critical infrastructures in German cities
Over the last decade, the protection of urban infrastructures has become a focus in German security policies. These point not solely to the multiple external infrastructural threats (e.g. natural disasters, terrorist and cyber-attacks), but also to the endogenous risks of cascading failures across geographical and functional borders that arise from interlocking and often mutually dependent infrastructures. As geographical nodes in infrastructural…
Cities in an era of interfacing infrastructures: Politics and spatialities of the urban nexus
Over the last few years, nexus-thinking has become a buzzword in urban research and practice. This also applies to recent claims of greater integration or coordination of urban infrastructures that have traditionally been managed separately and have been unbundled. The idea is to better address their growing sociotechnical complexity, their externalities and their operation within an urban system of systems. This article introduces a collection o…
Smart city making? The spread of ICT-driven plans and infrastructures in Nairobi
Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of emergent plans with ordinary realities of the African city. We demonstrate that while processes of sm…
Governing Suburbia through regionalized land-use planning? Experiences from the Greater Frankfurt region
Building urban and infrastructure resilience through connectivity: An institutional perspective on disaster risk management in Christchurch, New Zealand
Rethinking the governance and planning of a new generation of greenbelts
In recent decades, a new generation of greenbelts has developed that are embedded within dynamic regionalism processes. Governance of these greenbelts is increasingly being challenged by institutional arrangements requiring coordination across multiple policy fields, territorial jurisdictions and policy levels – complexities that are not yet reflected within the literature. The paper explores how vertical, horizontal and territorial coordination …
Mainstreaming resilience in urban policy making? Insights from Christchurch and Rotterdam
From the Frankfurt greenbelt to the Regionalpark RheinMain: An institutional perspective on regional greenbelt governance
Legally protected by its own constitution since 1991, the greenbelt (or ‘GrünGürtel’) forms a ring of greenspace around Frankfurt, Germany and has been considered an effective reaction to municipal development pressures. As a response to Frankfurt’s embeddedness within a highly interconnected suburbanized region under extensive growth pressures, the Regionalpark RheinMain was established to upscale the greenbelt to the regional level. In this art…
Rethinking energy transitions in Southern cities: Urban and infrastructural heterogeneity in Dar es Salaam
Despite increasing attention to the complex geographies of energy supply and use in Southern cities, energy research is still largely focusing on energy transitions evolving either through homogeneous, networked electricity or heterogeneous constellations in poor neighborhoods. Central to this research are analytical concepts used to explain energy transitions in Northern cities, such as the notion of socio-technical regimes. In this paper, we ar…
Towards smart regional growth: Institutional complexities and the regional governance of Southern Ontario’s Greenbelt
The task of developing regional greenbelts poses multidimensional challenges to policymakers. Unlike their early 20th-century predecessors, these greenspaces incorporate multiple functions including growth management, farmland and environmental protection, and increasing economic competitiveness. This regional and multifunctional approach to greenbelt management involves considerable governance complexities, as an increasing number of policy fiel…
Translating the sustainable development goals in national development planning: The case of Mozambique’s energy for all programme
The international community has emphasised the importance of governments adapting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to national policy priorities. Whilst sustainability assessment frameworks and indicators are meant to facilitate adaptation, their assumption of high institutional capacity based on Global North contexts is a shorthand for Global South contexts. In particular, limited institutional capacity means that electric…
The material politics of integrated urban stormwater management in Los Angeles, California
Cities worldwide have embraced the idea of integrated stormwater management using more decentralised and green infrastructures to enhance urban sustainability. Los Angeles County has recently introduced a new stormwater tax that envisions achieving sustainable stormwater futures through far-reaching infrastructural change. While embracing such visions, however, different actors seek to use tax revenues for diverging infrastructure designs. Our pa…
Urban and Infrastructural Rhythms and the Politics of Temporal Alignment
To date, urban research has paid little attention to the role of urban infrastructures in shaping and ordering urban temporalities. I contend that the study of infrastructures offers a powerful lens for understanding the reciprocal relationship changing infrastructural and urban temporalities as well as the powerdriven processes of temporal alignment and realignment. Approaching time through the empirical study of infrastructures, I argue, reveal…
Post-, pre- and non-payment: Conflicting rationalities in the digitalisation of energy access in Kibera, Nairobi
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digitaltechnologi…
Enabling equitable energy access for Mozambique? Heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Maputo's growing urban periphery
This article concerns the relationship between uneven peri-urban growth and heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Metropolitan Maputo, Mozambique. Much research has documented how the diversity and overlap of different energy configurations define energy access in African cities. However, very little attention has been given to how urban growth dynamics shape heterogeneity and vice versa. A growing concern in African cities is highly uneven gro…
Practicing urban resilience to electricity service disruption in Accra, Ghana
Electricity is essential for the functioning of contemporary cities. However, despite its overarching criticality, residents of Southern cities like Accra are challenged by splintered access and limited reliability of electricity services. To maintain access, and creatively maneuver blackout situations, residents in Southern cities employ many alternative socio-technical configurations and adaptive strategies. Using the lenses of urban resilience…
Rethinking the governance of urban infrastructural transformations: A synthesis of emerging approaches
Recent urban debates on the governance of sustainability transformations have witnessed an 'infrastructural turn'. Previously blacked-boxed, the role of infrastructures in sustainability transformations has been foregrounded by both growing academic scholarship and major investments in new infrastructural programs. How these changes are, and could be, governed remains somewhat opaque however, with traditional forms of knowledge and practices in n…
From the Sanitary City to the Circular City? Technopolitics of Wastewater Restructuring in Los Angeles, California
This article follows the flow of wastewater in Los Angeles, California, from upstream treatment plants to the Pacific Ocean, to explore struggles over reconfigurations of urban wastewater flows for new policy ambitions in recycling and reuse. We show how ambitious infrastructure visions of circular urban resource management have gained force since California's most recent drought (2011−17) but clash with incumbent gravity-fed water and sewer syst…
Political science (34 works) · Geography (30 works) · Business (21 works) · Environmental planning (20 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (20 works) · Economics (19 works) · Engineering (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Corporate governance (14 works)