Urban Infrastructure, Imagination and Politics: from the Networked Metropolis to the Smart City

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of social imagination in the understanding of urban infrastructures, especially those designed and built by engineers. It begins by defining social imagination as image‐based systems of representation and values that are shared by various collective stakeholders concerned with infrastructure, such as engineers, but also politicians, administrators, operators, maintenance technicians and indeed users, and then introduces a tripartite model of infrastructure. Infrastructure is interpreted as the result of the interactions between a material basis, professional organizations and stabilized socio‐technical practices, and social imagination. The notion of network is interpreted from such a perspective. Its dependence on imagination is outlined. Through two case studies, the nineteenth‐century networked metropolis, epitomized by Haussmann's Paris, and the rise of the contemporary smart city perspective, the role of social imagination in the conception of urban infrastructure is analyzed further. What seems at stake in the transition towards the smart city is the increased importance given to occurrences, events and scenarios as the basis for urban infrastructure regulation.

Real-Time Pedestrian Flow Analysis Using Networked Sensors for a Smart Subway System

“…This concept creates a third space by fusing the electronic space and physical space using ICT such as sensors and networks. In doing so, the smart city creates new services by combining ICT with traditional services such as those provided by the medical, logistics, construction, and manufacturing industries [30]. The objective of the smart city has been defined in various ways by scholars.…”

Engineering Cities: Mediating Materialities, Infrastructural Imaginaries and Shifting Regimes of Urban Expertise

“…As an infrastructurally integrated, fully networked urban fantasy of the modern engineering imagination became central to understandings of progress ( cf . Picon, , this issue), ambitious and spectacular feats of extended urban engineering––large dams enabling water supply to Athens, for instance (see Kaika, ), or the ‘improvement’ projects of British India (Dossal, ; Chandavarkar, )––became key markers and symbols of urban modernity.…”

The Engineer and The Plumber: Mediating Mumbai's Conflicting Infrastructural Imaginaries

“…The institutionalization of plumbing in the 1888 BMC Act relates to the broader ‘transnational municipal moment’ (Saunier and Ewen, cited in Anjaria, : 22) of nineteenth‐century colonial history, when new ideas of ‘public’ and ‘private’ were articulated through novel forms of urban spatial regulation: ‘intimate, embodied activities’ (Valentine, cited in Anjaria, : 21) like eating, bathing or urinating––activities that had previously been common in streets and open grounds of both colonial and European cities––were increasingly relegated to the ‘private’, domestic space of the house and home; for ‘the private person’, Walter Benjamin noted, the ‘drawing room is a box in the world theatre’ (Benjamin, : 154). Meanwhile, open and unbuilt urban space––reimagined as ‘public’––increasingly became envisioned through biological‐metabolic metaphors as the province of ‘flows, movements and circulation’ (Joyce, cited in Anjaria, : 66; see also Gandy, ; Picon, , this issue).…”