1st Edition
Splintering Towers of Babel Paradoxical Architectures and Urban Infrastructures
Splintering Towers of Babel focuses on and redefines soft infrastructures and critical infrastructure projects. It explores key issues in contemporary urban studies including town planning histories, architecture, heritage, colonialism and postcolonialism, philosophy, and ethics.
The book combines transdisciplinary perspectives on the key historical, philosophical, and political issues associated with urban experiences, built forms, and infrastructure networks. It explores uneven dimensions in contemporary urbanisms and develops spatial phenomenological thinking with reference to the northern and southern hemispheres. This book connects the past and the present, in addition to Western and global South geographies, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Its main contribution is to broaden readers' understanding of infrastructure through the lens of the humanities and to engage with political, poetical, and ethical perspectives.
This book is tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban planning, urban geography, architectural history, urban design, infrastructure studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, African studies, and philosophy.
Foreword by Grey Gundaker
Preface
- Introduction: splintering towers of Babel: paradoxical architectures and urban infrastructures
- Ethical infrastructure: rethinking the relationship between the garden and the home
- The dissemination of power infrastructure in Africa through visuals of small Babel towers
- Babel as paradoxical superstructures: a photography exhibition
- Agon – Ἀγών as the essence of urbanity
- A Babylonia of heritage and destruction: gendered architecture and gender-based violence in Timbuktu
- Between Be'er-Sheva and Bruegel's Babel: recollection as architectural indicator
- The splendor and decline of socio-engineering projects: from Babel to colonial railways in Africa
- Traversing towers: a spatial reading of Emmanuel Levinas
- Revealing the polyvocality of street names: Babel as a parable
- Conclusion: Urban and infrastructural experiences beyond the confusion of Babel
Bibliography
Biography
Liora Bigon is an urban (planning) historian and an associate professor at Ariel University after a lengthily service at Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), also as the institutional responsible of the Accessibility of Higher Education Program for the Arab, Druze, and Circassian Society. She specializes in toponymy, (post-)colonial urban history, and planning cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on West Africa, and has published widely in these fields, including articles, encyclopedic entries, books, and edited collections. Among her books are Garden Cities and Colonial Planning in Africa and Palestine (2014, co-ed. with Y. Katz); French Colonial Dakar (2016); Place Names in Africa (2016); Grid Planning in the Urban Design Practices of Senegal (with Prof. E. Ross, 2020); and Street-Naming Cultures in Africa and Israel (with Dr. Arch. Michel Ben Arrous, Routledge, 2021) – the latest couple of books include extensive fieldwork in a variety of sub-Saharan Africa and Israeli cities.
Edna Langenthal is a chartered architect and a philosopher, a senior lecturer, and the Head of the School of Architecture at Ariel University where she teaches, the first-year studio and the final project in the fifth year. She is the co-chief editor of Architext, a peer-reviewed bilingual (Hebrew/English) architectural journal, with Arch. Itzik Alhadif. She is the author of numerous articles published in major periodicals. Her latest book, Question of place: Architecture between the poetic and the ethical (2021), offers a new understanding of the elements of architectural practice with exposure to phenomenological thought. Her areas of specialization are ethical and poetic architecture, especially Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Her research and her teaching combine philosophical and ethical questions, emphasizing the connection between the field of architecture and phenomenology.
‘Splintering Towers of Babel is a kaleidoscopic study of urbanism in different cultural settings and times. The book employs a wide array of theories, perspectives, and methods to provoke new thinking about what a city is, what it does, and what it means at different scales around the world. This multidisciplinary book promises to be a valuable compendium for anyone interested in the past and present of cities and their future.’
- Akin Ogundiran, Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology and History, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
‘With the Biblical story of Babel as a sound thematic backbone, and in a dazzling multidisciplinary exploration across time and space, this original book offers a plethora of insights to rethink the historical, phenomenological and sociotechnical complexities and paradoxes inherent in the urban condition.’
- Filip De Boeck, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leuven, and co-author of Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds.
