Abstract
AbstractThis symposium opens up new critical insights and analytical perspectives into the relationships between power, politics, materiality and urban engineering. In so doing it demonstrates the central role of engineers in the production and negotiation of everyday life in the city. In contrast to the technocratic exercise engineering often professes to be, the contributors to this symposium argue that the assembling and choreography of cities through the myriad techniques, routines, standards and visions of engineers is inextricably bound up with broader socio‐cultural, material and political urban dynamics and processes. This necessitates investigating the multiple and competing social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise associated with urban engineering. The symposium's five articles, straddling disciplinary backgrounds in geography, anthropology, engineering and history, focus analytical and empirical attention on the figure of the engineer and on the work of engineering in the cities of Paris, Mumbai, Singapore and London. Engineering, we suggest, is a diagnostic for probing the shifting forms of mediation that animate and inhabit contemporary dynamics of urban change. The symposium thus opens up a new avenue for cross‐disciplinary and transregional research for urban studies while also suggesting innovative ways of conceptualizing urban transformation and contestation.
Highlights
Cities are made and unmade by engineers and engineering
While recognizing how ‘the operation of the idea of the engineer matters in the domination of space’ (Kirsch, 1995: 551), we suggest how the optic of engineering calls analytical, theoretical and methodological attention to material politics, to contingent and contextual practices, and to broader social and cultural imaginations
Engineering is embedded in particular institutional and cultural settings, but involves the continual negotiation of often conflicting scientific, technical, financial and political realms. This location of engineering across myriad contexts, knowledge regimes and experimental practices requires, as we argue engagement with urban scholarship that is attentive to the political significance of materials, forms of distributed expertise and the work of the social imagination
Summary
Telephone networks, transport infrastructure, internet systems, sewage disposal, acoustic environments, electrical provision and atmospheric comfort all depend on the specialized knowledge and everyday work of engineers. Far from the technocratic exercise it sometimes professes to be, the engineering of city life––through myriad techniques, routines, regimes of knowledge, material practices and social imaginings––is inextricably bound up with broader processes of spatial representation, political contestations and urban change.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
