Splintering Urbanism Research Articles

Of Flying Cars and Pandemic Urbanism: Splintering Urban Society in the Age of Covid-19

ABSTRACT Disappointingly to many who grew up at the time, promises of flying cars in the 1960s as a future form of urban transportation were not kept. That future never arrived. In this short commentary, I want to board the metaphorical flying car and steer it into a different direction. At the height of the first wave of Covid-19, a more widespread sentiment took hold that saw the anticipation of increased mobilities dashed by a general anticipation of disaster considered typical for our age today. We might conclude: We don't get the technologies we want because we have left the era of technological progress and entered the era of risk and anticipation of disaster. My commentary appreciates and discusses the lessons we can learn from Splintering Urbanism for our period of pandemic urbanism. How does the kind of networked urbanism that the book examines and critiques provide a framework in which we can understand the emergence, presence, and management of the pandemic as it affects our urban world today?

The Temporal Incompleteness of Infrastructure and the Urban

ABSTRACT This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also socio-material practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism.

Splintering, Specificity, Unsettlement: A Commentary on Splintering Urbanism

ABSTRACT This short commentary seeks to supplement the conceptualization of infrastructural splintering with the ways in which the agential functioning of infrastructure—infrastructure as a verb—not only articulates bodies, things, materials, and spaces in cascading relationality, but produces specificities incapable of definitive measure. Here, specific constellations of urban inhabitants refuse to be governed in terms of a calculus that seeks to make judgments about the efficacy of particular living spaces, and their relative sustainability or value. Such specificity is one component of the ways in which infrastructure engenders unsettlement, of both position and sensibility. Part of Splintering Urbanism’s enduring value is found in the multifaceted dimensions of detachment, materialized both in the production of urban operations that resist ready translation into the normative terms of efficacy and in the undermining of normative social relations.

Refracting Urbanism: The Multiple Histories (as well as Geographies) of the Networked City

ABSTRACT This piece explores the role of history in the splintering urbanism thesis, and infrastructure studies more generally, to make the case for a more nuanced understanding of the multiple histories underpinning the networked city. I reflect on the use of history as an argumentative ploy in Splintering Urbanism, criticize common framings of the past in infrastructure studies, and map out an agenda for future scholarship on urban infrastructure histories based on this critique. In doing so, I argue that the messiness of infrastructure history gets obscured when told through evolutionary or retrospective narratives.

Splintering Volumes: Architecture, Engineering, Finance, and Urban Form

ABSTRACT This commentary suggests that Splintering Urbanism provided the tools and metaphors for urbanists to understand how architectural, engineering, and financial knowledge has been brought together to remake urban infrastructure. It uses the concept of volumetric urbanism to illustrate how central cities are segregated, diced, and sliced within their internal structures, and discusses how this perspective opens up the materiality of major urban development projects. The commentary explains how Splintering Urbanism shaped the intellectual terrain for framing how these can be understood as volumetric interventions in the city, retheorizing urban spaces as being stacked and sectioned around reorganized public and private spaces.

In the Excess of Splintering Urbanism: The Racialized Political Economy of Infrastructure

ABSTRACT This intervention discusses the relevance of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the study of splintering urbanism, as an uneven socio-spatial process that simultaneously produces dispossession and racial differentiation. Reflecting on our work in Palestine and South Africa we grapple with what leaks in processes of splintering urbanism and we propose “excess” as a provisional analytical space to focus on the racialized political economies of infrastructure. We argue that excess is a generative concept: to render legible the often-silenced histories, geographies, and experiences produced and managed through infrastructure; to reflect on the way stratified social relations materialize in and through urban networks; and to speculate on liberating horizons. In doing so, we consider infrastructure as an archive, a lively ethnographic repository where modern histories of excess live, and where the contested material relations of racialized political economies unravel.

Splintering by Proxy: A Reflection on the Spatial Impacts and Distributed Agency of Platform Urbanism

ABSTRACT Insight into the socio-technical dynamics of infrastructure unbundling and the impact on urban space is perhaps one of the most enduring conceptual legacies of the Splintering Urbanism thesis. Expanding the analysis of urban infrastructure beyond the material has enabled a reconsideration of the socio-material dynamics contained therein and the actors represented. Two decades later, digital disruptive commercial enterprises such as Uber and Airbnb have broadened this playing field as Silicon Valley enters the local urban realm. This piece reflects on the extent to which this reconfiguration of urban services, media, and technology affect the market forces and range of choices available to urban dwellers. By considering the relationships between platforms and space and the infrastructural elements of such, the paper concludes on the notion of “splintering by proxy:” how the use of digital platforms enrolls the urban dweller as an active contributor in the continued shaping of urban space through distributed agency. This creates opportunities for emancipatory practices that could contribute to more inclusive cities.

Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City

ABSTRACT In this contribution, I reflect on the under-recognized role of caste and its allied notions of pollution and purity in the making of deeply inequitable, environmentally unjust, and splintered Indian cities. Published in 2001, Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism addressed the fragmented and unequal nature of infrastructure networks in the wake of globalization in cities of the Global South. Of particular interest to scholars since then has been to trouble the historicity of the book’s central thesis, demonstrating that postcolonial cities have always been splintered along the lines of race, class, and ethnicity via unequal infrastructural networks and segregated housing; as such, globalization is not the primary cause of inequality. Yet, the category of caste, intersecting with class, religion, and gender, still has not featured centrally in critical urban studies and urban political ecology. Drawing on long-term research on Bangalore (southern India), I sketch mutually reinforcing axes of a research agenda in urban political ecology, namely the interrogation of caste power in urban property, infrastructure, and labor regimes.

“Danger Zones,” “Death Zones,” and Paradoxes of Infrastructural Space-Making in Manila

ABSTRACT Infrastructure and the spatial practices that coalesce around them come to matter in multiple ways. Building on the legacy of splintering urbanism and subsequent appraisals, we explore the paradoxes of infrastructural spaces in a Global South city. In Manila, urban infrastructure plays a central role in enabling evictions in city spaces marked as “danger zones,” and in inhabiting “death zones” in the peripheries where evictees are resettled. This piece employs a relational view of the tensions between the dispossessive and sustaining work of infrastructure to extend the spatial metaphors of urban infrastructure and to illuminate political possibilities built around connections.

Exploring Urban Infrastructures from the Experience of Cities in the Global South: Urbanism Models, Policy Mobilities, and the Finances

ABSTRACT Sustainable and smart urbanism models have been guiding urban development in cities across the globe over the past two decades. Almost invariably, these urbanism models require the planning for and the construction of new urban infrastructure. In addition, new sustainable and smart urban projects also often involve private urban planning firms that actively promote proprietary technologies and financing schemes to fund the projects. These new developments have led to frequent three-way interactions between financing arrangements, the mobilities of the urbanism models, and the implementation of urban infrastructures. To better understand these dynamics, this commentary extends the Graham and Marvin splintering urbanism thesis and incorporates perspectives of policy mobilities and infrastructure finances to set up a research agenda that is more attentive to finance, business operations, and their associated power relations. This commentary aims to identify future research directions for advancing our understanding of contemporary urban infrastructure projects, especially through the lens of cities in the global South.

Splintering urbanism and nationalism in the “world-class city”: reflections on field work on stand-up comedy production in Mumbai

ABSTRACT This paper explores the contradictions I encountered during fieldwork in the city of Mumbai, India, studying stand-up comedy as a site of struggle over globalization and national identity. In this essay I will focus on my engagement with the theoretical framework of “splintering urbanism” (Graham and Marvin 2001)—which I adopted to situate the emergence of stand-up comedy in the context of the production of ‘global’, ‘world-class’ urban space in Mumbai. During my fieldwork, I observed that the processes of splintering urbanism in Mumbai had produced conditions that encouraged the rise of nationalism, which runs contrary to the assumption that splintering urbanism creates a “global urban archipelago”. This paper argues that producing Mumbai as a world-class city is equated with national advancement and cultural transformation. Specifically, Mumbai becomes India’s global city, and the mobilizing of resources and labor for the global city based economic growth is promoted through nationalist rhetoric. Mumbai’s stand-up comedy scene is a good site to study these transformations because it has been a site of controversy over national identity since the 2010’s and because its emergence is almost entirely dependent on the splintering of Mumbai’s infrastructure services.

Heterogeneous water provision in Dar es Salaam: The role of networked infrastructures and alternative systems in informal areas

Urban waterscapes in developing world cities are notoriously fragmented, resembling archipelagos rather than continuous networks. Graham and Marvin’s concept of splintering urbanism links the collapse of infrastructure networks to this fragmentation. Yet this idea has been criticized for suggesting the absence of these networks is a sign of failed modernity in Southern cities such as Dar es Salaam. Urban political ecology illustrates how social, historical, political, and ecological processes work together to create uneven and unjust landscapes and waterscapes. In Dar es Salaam, the colonial policy of segregation and unequal service provision helped to create the fragmented system seen today. As a result, many residents—especially those in informal and peripheral areas—rely on heterogeneous water provision systems. These systems provide innovative ways to deliver water but do so at a high cost. This paper uses case studies of two informal areas—Buguruni and Vingunguti—to illustrate the divergent trajectories of seemingly similar places. One is more connected to the piped water network while the other relies almost exclusively on informal water delivery providers. In explaining these differences, this paper offers an intra-urban comparison that highlights inequities at a smaller scale. It also acknowledges the role of networked infrastructure in these heterogeneous systems by giving voice to residents who consider the piped water network their ideal source.

Splintering disaster: relocating harm and remaking nature after the 2011 floods in Bangkok

In the wake of the costly 2011 floods, the city of Bangkok struggled to respond to the water inundating Thailand’s major hub. In response, Thai leaders primarily blamed the external forces of nature and climate change. Depoliticising disasters and absolving national leaders of responsibility, these discourses about nature and climate change as the main cause of flooding led policymakers to primarily build infrastructure to block and drain water. We argue that the location and patterns of flood protection infrastructure reflect flows of power and the circulation of capital. We build upon Graham and Marvin’s notion of ‘splintering urbanism’ to develop the concept of ‘splintering disaster’. We do so to make sense of the spatially dispersed, but ideologically unified strategy of flood protection adopted in Bangkok. We argue that the splintered nature of flood infrastructures demonstrates the varied and complex factors that produce new regimes of urban water control in the wake of disasters. As we demonstrate, flood mitigation projects do not foreclose future floodwater, but instead, redistribute nature, risk and injury. The city both shapes and is shaped by this spatially fragmented response to water. We aim to use this concept to develop a conceptual vocabulary for understanding post-disaster infrastructural politics.

Splintering (sub) urbanism and social differences: Gated communities as the driver for suburban change in Chacras de Coria (Mendoza, Argentina)

This article analyses the geographical, economic and spatial transformations in suburbia as a consequence of the arrival of gated communities. The latter are fostering splintering (sub) urbanism, changes in land use and increasing spatial and social inequalities. The article provides evidence supporting this argument through the examination of the transformations occurring in Chacras de Coria, a suburb in the Metropolitan Area of Mendoza (MAM), Argentina. The analysis is based on primary and secondary data.

Fragmented landscapes of water supply in suburban Hanoi

Facing the challenges of city planning in the frame of rapid urbanization in the Global South, this study addresses the relationship between the urban development of Hanoi, Vietnam, and water supply including users’ perception of water accessibility and satisfaction of coverage, quality, and cost. Because sociospatial disparities are particularly pronounced in suburban areas, these spaces epitomize unequal water access and uneven water quality. Based on the premise that (sub)urban water flows embody and mirror development dynamics and urbanization patterns, the objective is to analyze access to water splintered within the suburban typologies of Hanoi. We analyze the current state of domestic water availability and quality throughout suburban areas and specifically between a new urban area and a periurban village in Hanoi. Through the debates of splintering urbanism and periurban water supply, this paper discusses the differences in water service provision in suburban Hanoi. At the same time, the article considers suburban areas as spaces which reflect a broader spectrum of water supply solutions. Lastly, it informs on how to alleviate the pressure of the increasing demand of water in urbanizing areas by supporting sustainable urban water cycles to improve distributional justice and social equity.

Transport, urban development and the peripheral poor in Colombia — Placing splintering urbanism in the context of transport networks

In rapidly growing cities the evolution of utility and communication infrastructures has enabled the creation of ‘premium networked spaces’ exclusively for wealthier groups thus deepening already large social inequalities. By the same token, in a context of spatially concentrated income-earning opportunities and other urban functions, as well as limited purchasing power, accessibility to adequate means of connectivity with the rest of the urban fabric can be a determining factor in overcoming conditions of poverty for residents in physically marginal areas.Within the framework of the splintering urbanism thesis, and using the case study of Soacha, a municipality adjacent to Bogotá, Colombia's capital city, we examine the apparent mismatch between the growth of low-income informal settlements in peripheral locations and the development of transport networks in the period 2000–2010. Our aim is to identify the effects on social and spatial marginalisation of an uneven provision of material infrastructures and services for mobility. We identify central elements in the structure of the networks of connectivity between Bogotá and Soacha, highlighting the main gaps that lead to a fragmented set of connections. We develop a set of criteria for planners and policy makers searching for a more informed analysis of transport supply and policy development practice for poor peripheral populations in similar regions and contexts.

Making of high‐tech Hyderabad: Mapping neoliberal networks and splintering effects

Over the past few decades, cities and city regions have become the core of the global economy. Regional governments are increasingly drafting city development policies and implementing them through various visioning documents with the aim of making cities more global, networked and competitive. Welfarist governments especially in the global South are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, and in the process poor citizens are getting pushed to the margins, evicted from their land and relocated to city fringes. Hyderabad in India provides an interesting illustration of neoliberal development trends in which poor local farmers are forced off their land to make way for a ‘world‐class’ knowledge enclave, popularly known as Cyberabad. This paper examines the policies and processes by which the regional government has sought to brand Hyderabad as a world‐class information technology destination and to restructure and reimagine it as a key node in a network of ‘globally connected cities’ of the world. It also considers the making of Cyberabad in terms of splintering urbanism, which is often understood as a defining feature of contemporary neoliberal urban processes.

A Splintered Heartland: Russia, Europe, and the Geopolitics of Networked Energy Infrastructure

Much has been made about a revival of Mackinderian geopolitics in Eurasia, largely centred on struggles over access to energy resources and rooted in a territorial understanding of space. This paper proposes that the conceptual political cartography of Eurasia is indeed largely being rewritten, but conventional understandings of space, territory, and resources are insufficient in providing insight into a changing geopolitics. We interrogate the geographical logics of Russia's role as energy provider to Europe by focusing specifically on the provision of gas to Europe via Nord Stream, a new underwater pipeline that is scheduled to go online by late 2011. Drawing on debates in human geography on relational/topological views of space, and on the “splintering urbanism” thesis, the paper describes a rapidly evolving networked space that effectively “splinters” the territorial integrity of the region and thereby complicates notions of Eurasian geopolitics that emphasise proximity, territorial hegemony, and state-centric international relations.

Can humanitarian responses in urban areas reinforce underlying causes of vulnerability? Tweaking a livelihoods analysis of inequality and infrastructure in splintering cities

International humanitarian agencies are often mandated to target the most vulnerable. This, combined with short funding cycles, encourages extractive assessments of individualized vulnerability; responses based on delivering individual packages of household assets; and only superficial consideration of power relationships. By analogy with urban infrastructure provision, this paper argues that narrow interpretation of the sustainable livelihoods framework applied to urban analysis gives only limited insights into the systemic risks faced by urban dwellers. Using an analysis of infrastructure that draws on the idea of splintering urbanism, a process by which urban infrastructure tends to privilege some and bypass others, the paper develops a visual framework for considering the interdependence of urban livelihoods, physical infrastructure and the organizing tendencies of powerful service providers. The paper concludes that in the cases where it is not possible to identify the most vulnerable (e.g. in dense, heterogeneous cities) or where it is possible only to identify the most vulnerable but not to deliver asset packages to them (e.g. transitional shelter kits that cannot be received by people without access to a plot), humanitarian activities risk reinforcing the systemic, underlying causes of vulnerability.

Megastructures. What is really the point?

- The article explores megastructures in relation to their impact on local transport networks and nodes. The area examined is Portugal, where the recent construction of giant shopping malls, industrial estates and logistics centres has in turn led to large-scale infrastructures that have been superimposed on a settlement pattern consisting, in many cases, of urban agglomerations serviced by rural roads. The resulting landscape reveals a juxtaposition of completely different elements in terms of both scale and impact, often the outcome of urban zoning projects intruding on fragmented urbanisation. The resulting image is one of scattered settlement patterns. Behind these phenomena one can see the effects of splintering urbanism. The difficulty in coordinating, in time and space, the decisions made and actions taken by a wide variety of individuals and institutions is becoming increasingly more complex.