Boring cities

The social connectivity of subsurface flows: Towards a better integration of the vertical dimension in socio‐hydrosystem studies

“…Such an interpretation has mainly been developed in the fields of geopolitics (e.g., rivalries, conflicts, and wars led through satellites, air‐space weapons, or underground tunnels) Graham, 2004; Massé, 2018; Veal, 2021) and urban studies (e.g., urban surveillance, high‐rise living, sewers network, transportation corridors). Both have taken up this proposal to account for verticality as both an empirical and analytical phenomenon (Adey, 2010; Connor & McNeill, 2022; Garrett et al, 2020; Harris, 2015).…”

Becoming WestConnex – Becoming Sydney: Object-oriented politics, contested storylines and the multi-scalar imaginaries of building a motorway network in Sydney, Australia

“…Finally, given the reality that many proposed motorways and other transport projects involve more than surface level infrastructure, thinking vertically is necessary. In recent years the importance of vertical urban geography has blossomed (see Garrett et al., 2020; Garrett and Anderson, 2018; Graham, 2018; Graham and Hewitt, 2013; Harris, 2015; Melo Zurita, 2020). This follows from the work of Elden (2013) who encouraged political geographers to look at spaces of geography not as areas, but as volumes involving height and depth.…”

“…The importance of vertical urbanism in relation to urban motorways might include bridges, flyovers, tunnels, underground interchanges and various segments of infrastructure that come together to form a transport system that traverses multiple levels. With more urban development taking place under the surface “urban spatial politics can no longer be stuck at street level” and “all the boring going on under our cities is far from boring” (Garrett et al., 2020: 277), creating new opportunities for politicising sub-surface developments (Melo Zurita, 2020). As Graham notes, the outcome may be a switch from “a mobility politics of extraordinarily expensive auto-dependence on the surface or raised onto flyovers, for one that lurks more surreptitiously below the surface within massive and extraordinarily expensive tunnel complexes” (Graham, 2018: 548).…”

Book review forum: Infrastructure

“…Valverde’s book is an important intervention in this respect given it is interested not in infrastructure’s form per se, but its transition from being conceived as a public good, borne out of civic traditions of ‘public-works’ and state legalities, to one that is increasingly associated with the private sector and a profit-motive. Providing a legal perspective on this is, Valverde argues, especially important in an era when the rise of public–private partnerships as providers of infrastructure appears to be eroding the democratic nature of cities (see also Adisson and Artioli, 2020; Brill, 2022; Garrett et al, 2020; Raco, 2013). But as Valverde notes, oftentimes critiques of privatisation lack sophistication, with those bemoaning the sale of public assets often failing to note exactly what is being privatised, and how, and often conflating the outsourcing of labour with the privatisation of state infrastructures.…”