From networked to post-networked urbanism: new ... - ENPC

From networked to post-networked urbanism:
new infrastructure configurations and urban transitions
International roundtable workshop, Autun (France), 17-20 July 2012
Supported by the Chaire Ville (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech)
Olivier Coutard and Jonathan Rutherford (LATTS)
Rationale
“…to what extent [will] the cities of the future continue to depend on the infrastructure
technologies of the nineteenth century, and to what extent [will] they incorporate new
and more flexible technologies” (Tarr and Dupuy 1988: xvi)
“Tomorrow’s city will be networked” (Gérard Mestrallet, Chairman and CEO, GDF-SUEZ
2010)
“Of all the policies I have introduced as Mayor, I am certain that the recent steps we
have taken to introduce decentralised energy in London will turn out to be among the
most crucial to London’s long-term well-being.” (Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of
London, 2006)
Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes as they become bound up in
and recombined with interlinked processes of globalisation, economic financialisation, the
rise of knowledge economies and digital technologies, increasing social differentiations,
and discourses of environmentalism and sustainable development. A focus on
infrastructures is one of the main vantage points from/through which to critically observe
this widespread, but differentiated, urban and territorial change, and the ways in which it
induces persistent reconfigurations of the roles and capacities of varying actors to effect,
support and contest urban development. This vantage point is crucial for at least three
reasons. First, infrastructure transformations themselves help to shape the above
socioeconomic and socio-political processes. Second, infrastructures are a medium
through which these processes ‘work’ or are ‘implemented’ concretely at the urban scale
(whether for economic competition, socio-spatial redistribution, or the circulation and use
of natural resources and waste products). Third, infrastructures are an outcome of these
processes and their presence, functioning and accessibility constitute thus an ‘indicator’
of the economic, social and environmental ‘performance’ (or sustainability) of cities and
of urban quality of life.
The importance of centralized infrastructure networks in shaping urban environments has
been amply analysed in both historical and contemporary studies. Over the last thirty
years or so, urban infrastructure networks have thus gradually become a central object
of study in geography, planning, sociology, political science and associated disciplines.
From the pioneering work of Joel Tarr, Gabriel Dupuy, Josef Konvitz, Thomas Hughes et
al (see Tarr and Konvitz 1981, Tarr and Dupuy 1988, Dupuy 1991, Hughes 1983) to
recent critical perspectives on the diverse ways in which infrastructure provision and nonprovision
have become bound into wider logics and processes of globalisation, digitisation
and environmentalism, the crucial role of infrastructure in the production and
reproduction of the ‘modern’ city has been revealed. ‘Networked urbanism’ (Dupuy 1991)
has been conceptualised as at once the underlying context, the medium and the outcome
of the construction of cities as sites for economic production and expansion, as places of
increasing social inequalities, and as socio-natural spaces for environmental
transformation. To a large extent, therefore, networks have been central to urban
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transitions initiated in cities around the world (but particularly in the North: see below)
over the last one hundred and fifty years.
The last decade or so has been particularly fecund for both empirical and theoretical
social science studies on urban infrastructure networks highlighting their centrality to
urban questions (and vice versa). These studies have analysed the relationship between
the provision of network services, access to these services and the functioning of urban
spaces in a diversity of contexts in both the North and South.
Empirical observations from Southern cities (mainly on water) have indeed largely
contributed to advancing and rethinking urban infrastructure studies on a global level in
recent years (see, for example, Bakker 2003, Jaglin 2005, Swyngedouw 2004, the
contributions to Coutard 2008). They have in particular explored the widespread urban
implications of the absence or the dysfunctioning of large technical systems for access to
essential services, underscoring both how the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ has rarely
been achieved in cities of the South and indeed how this Northern ideal and construction
is problematic in its transposition to a very different set of diverse urban contexts in the
South.
At the same time, these recent studies on the technological fabric of the city in the North
and South have been underpinned by a wide variety of theoretical approaches: urban
political ecology (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006, Monstadt 2009), ‘cyborg
urbanisation’ (Gandy 2005, Mitchell 2003), STS (Coutard, Hanley and Zimmerman 2005,
Coutard and Guy 2007), the shifting boundaries of urban politics and governance (Lorrain
2005, Lorrain 2003, Offner 2000, McFarlane and Rutherford 2008), urban fragmentation
(Graham and Marvin 2001, Coutard 2008, Moss 2008), consumption (van Vliet, Chappells
and Shove 2005), environmental resilience (Hodson and Marvin 2009), postcolonialism
(Bond 2000, McFarlane 2008)…
Beyond a need to take stock of the multiplication of work around urban infrastructure,
the rationale for this workshop is based on two arguments about recent, ongoing
changes in infrastructure provision around the world and about the evolution of social
scientific studies of infrastructure over the last three decades, both of which point to an
urgent need to reflect anew on the forms, meanings and implications of urban
infrastructure and the studies produced thereof.
First, the focus on ‘the rise of networked cities’ in the 1980s (cf. Tarr and Dupuy 1988)
has steadily given way to research on the limits or indeed the regressive effects of
infrastructure (cf. 'splintering urbanism': Graham and Marvin 2001, 'the purgatory of
networks': Dupuy 2011), and recently to work on the need for resilience and security to
protect urban infrastructures (cf. Hodson and Marvin 2009) or ‘when infrastructures fail’
(cf. Graham 2009). Faced with this evolution (from reticularity to splintering to
disruption), we argue from a practical and pragmatic standpoint that we now need to
discuss where urban infrastructure studies goes from here. If infrastructure serves only
to fragment and to produce crisis in differing contexts, in what sense and in what ways
can we talk about its ‘urban’ dimensions Can we (and indeed should we) critically
explore whether and how analysis of urban infrastructure can ‘put the city back together’
(in an analytical sense)
Second, urban infrastructure is itself in constant flux. In northern urban contexts, the
‘traditional’ model of the large technical system rolled out efficiently and harmoniously
between and within cities for water and energy supply and wastewater removal is
contested on the grounds of its incompatibility or unsustainability with regard to new
financial arrangements, political and institutional functioning, individualised lifestyles and
increasing concern for environmental resource use and impact. In southern urban
contexts, it is far from clear that the ‘network’ model based on the North is feasible
and/or even always () desirable for extending access to basic services to urban
populations. New (and/or old) forms of technological service provision are emerging at
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the margins of, in the interstices of, or simply in place of existing (or absent) centralised
infrastructure networks. The resulting hybrid socio-technical systems have tremendous
implications for urban development, urban functioning and everyday life in cities in
general (on this point: cf. Coutard and Rutherford 2011).
It is the intersection of these two points – renewing infrastructure, renewing studies of
infrastructure – that we wish to focus on in this workshop. We therefore propose an open
and constructive discussion around post-networked urbanism in its dual sense: (a) as a
set of evolving urban configurations and practices which demand analysis of new forms
of ‘decentralised’ infrastructure systems and their articulation and recombination with
traditional large centralised systems, and (b) as a richly evolving sub-discipline which
demands exploration of the state and the future for urban infrastructure studies in the
wake of the ongoing dominance of analytical frameworks of ‘splintering’, ‘disruption’,
‘failure’, ‘security’, etc.
Questions, issues
We suggest below an indicative list of issues of interest for the workshop:
‣ How are current urban infrastructure configurations and policies historically
founded or shaped
‣ What can we learn from past configurations (and reconfigurations...) for
contemporary or prospective processes
‣ In what ways and to what extent do common, global infrastructure models and
regimes ‘touch down’ differently in different kinds of cities (North and South,
‘global’ cities and smaller cities, central and periurban…) What distinctions can be
identified between these cities in terms of their available capacities, responses,
policies, repercussions, etc Do cities continue to be differently positioned in
relation to infrastructure and infrastructure issues by their specificities, contexts,
political arrangements, etc How can we theorise across different cases and in
different urban contexts
‣ How are infrastructures being mobilized as tools/mechanisms/instruments for
urban policies with broader objectives and remits What types of (financial,
economic, political…) tools/mechanisms/instruments are combined in urban
infrastructure development to promote and contest the roll-out, superposition and
maintenance of technical networks
‣ How are alternative, ‘decentralised’ technology and service provision being
developed in cities How are they being combined into existing network systems
What are the rationales and factors underpinning these infrastructure transitions
Who initiates, controls and shapes these transitions, and for whose benefit
‣ How are environmental and ecological discourses being used to create
opportunities for new forms of infrastructure
‣ What are the financial/economic, socio-spatial, political/institutional and
environmental implications of shifts in urban infrastructure provision How do
these differing implications relate and produce new tensions and conflicts
‣ Who are the winners and losers of urban infrastructure change, and how might we
work towards more socially just and politically inclusive infrastructure
configurations
‣ What are the urban policy ramifications of infrastructure change
‣ What do new infrastructure configurations or processes of infrastructure change
imply for theories of ‘the city’, ‘the urban’ and territorial systems (in North and
South)
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