4609367: CF_Understanding Infrastructure: everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructure

Description

In this course, students will approach current infrastructural problems from a social science point of view. We understand infrastructure as an assemblage of installations, operating procedures and usages, involving supply, storage, transport and evacuation of goods, people and data. The course offers a reflexion on contemporary urban transition in the western world: to address contemporary challenges, such as demographic pressure, climate change or energy shortage, one major issue is to adapt, optimise and revalorise systems and practices that surround infrastructures today.

Learning Outcomes

Students undertaking this course will:

• Acquire introductory understanding of how infrastructures are linked to the material and technical order of contemporary urbanisation
• Discuss relevant concepts to provide for an analysis of the relationship between infrastructure and urban transition
• Describe the relationship between infrastructure, usage and urban experience
• Generate hypotheses on real infrastructures from observations and readings of relevant texts and visualisations
• Discuss possible strategies on how to requalify infrastructure for sustainable urban transformation

Lectures Method

The course proposes to apprehend urbanisation through a form of 'infrastructural knowing'. We will put into conversation infrastructural properties presented in class with concrete examples of infrastructures observed in the field. The infrastructures we will be visiting are not innovative, spectacular or contested as such. Rather, we will take a closer look at mundane infrastructures, which we use in our everyday life, often without taking note (such as, for example, a bus stop, a bicycle sharing-system, a data centre or long-distance heating system). We will select such infrastructure on purpose. The work that we will do on such infrastructures will help us to reconsider (specify, complete, adapt and if necessary replace) the concepts presented in the course. Thus, the course's goal is to generate a matrix which will be of use for future research on the link between infrastructure and urbanisation.

Literature

Compulsory reading of one of the five books in the list and written summarization of two selected chapters (max. 3 pages). The summarization will be evaluated (30% of course assessment):

BELANGER Paul, 2016, Landscape as Infrastructure, London, Routledge.
AMIN Ash et THRIFT Nigel, 2017, Seeing Like a City, Cambridge, Polity Press.
EASTERLING Keller, 2014, Extrastatecraft. The Power of Infrastructure Space, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
GRAHAM Stephen et MARVIN Simon, 2001, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition, London, New York, Routledge.
HARVEY Penny et KNOX Hannah, 2015, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise, New York, Cornell University Press.

Comments

Cross-faculty elective subject:
Notice the special Multi-stage allocation process.