1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design Global Perspectives from Architectural History
The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design explores the multifaceted nature of infrastructure through the global lens of architectural history. Infrastructure holds the world together. Yet even as it connects some people, it divides others, sorting access and connectivity through varied social categories such as class, race, gender, and citizenship. This collection examines themes across broad spans of time, raises questions of linkage and scale, investigates infrastructure as phenomenon and affect, and traces the interrelation of aesthetics, technology, and power.
With a diverse range of contributions from 33 scholars, this volume presents new research from regions including South and East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, North America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. This extraordinary group of authors bring close attention to the materials, functions, and aesthetics of infrastructure systems as these unfold within their cultural and political contexts. They provide not only new knowledge of specific artifacts, such as the Valens Aqueduct, the Hong Kong waterfront, and the Pan-American Highway, but also new ways of conceptualizing, studying, and understanding infrastructure as a worlding process.
The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design provides richly textured, thoroughly evidenced, and imaginatively drawn arguments that deepen our understanding of the role of infrastructure in creating the world in which we live. It is a must-read for academics and students.
Infrastructure Designs: Dreaming and Building Worlds
Joseph Heathcott
Part 1 Materialities
1 Kingship and the Rocks: Infrastructure and the Materiality of Empire
Braden Lee Scott
2 In Between Technology and Architecture: Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and the French Royal Saline
Carmelina Martinez
3 Cement as Weapon: Meta-Infrastructure in the "World’s Last Cement Frontier"
Robby Fivez and Monika Motylińska
4 Notes from the Underworld: Excavation as Architectural Counter-History
Stefano Corbo
Part 2 Embodiments
5 Virtual Gardens: Gendered Space in the History of Afghanistan’s Telecommunications
Hannah Ahlblad
6 Mobilizing Labor for Infrastructure in Northeast Brazil, 1915–1932
Laura Belik
7 Everyday Living in Cairo’s City of the Dead
Reem Saad Sardina, Sherif Elfiki, and Ahmed El Antably
Part 3 Natures
8 Dams, Lakes, and Water Sports: Building a Hybrid Landscape in Belgium’s Eau d’Heure Valley, 1933–1987
Marie Pirard
9 Pedagogic Landscapes: Recreation, Play, and Danish Infrastructure Design
Margaret Birney Vickery
10 A Vast Demographic Void: Infrastructure, Ecology, and the Amazon
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson
Part 4 Flows
11 Visualizing the Valens Aqueduct in Early Modern Istanbul
Fatma Sarıkaya Işık and Pelin Yoncacı Arslan
12 The Airport Terminal: Circulation and Soft Power
Menno Hubregtse
13 The Porous Infrastructures of Somali Malls in Cape Town
Huda Tayob
Part 5 City Making
14 Bridging the Bosporus: Mobility, Geopolitics, and Urban Imaginary in Istanbul, 1933–1973
Sibel Bozdoğan
15 Brasilia, a Story Seen from the Roadside: Narratives of Landscape Transformation and the Technological Sublime
Sued Ferreira da Silva
16 More than a "Circulation Machine": Recasting the Geographies of Infrastructure in Modernist Urbanism
Mejrema Zatrić
17 Infrastructure as a Political Tool of Regime Legitimization in Doha, Qatar
Peter Chomowicz
Part 6 The Long Road
18 The Global Spread of Street Pavement Materials and Technology, 1820–1920
Robin B. Williams
19 Parallel Lines: Urban Expressways in the United States
Romina Canna
20 Good Neighbors and Automovilistas: Imaginaries of Hemispheric Travel along the Pan-American Highway, 1936–1942
Dicle Taskin
Part 7 Power Fields
21 Nuclear Power Stations in Post-War Britain: Picturesque Landscapes for the Masses
Laura Coucill and Luca Csepely-Knorr
22 TVA in the Desert: U.S. Development Projects in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 1951–1961
Dalal Musaed Alsayer
23 Shaped from Above: Cartographic Domination and U.S. Military Infrastructure in 1950s Spain
José Vela Castillo
Part 8 Liquid Worlds
24 Water and Infrastructure in Late Colonial Guanajuato
Luis Gordo Peláez
25 Land Reclamation in the Making of Hong Kong
Charlie Qiuli Xue and Cong Sun
26 Bombay/Mumbai Waterfronts in the Hindi Film Deewaar [The Wall] (1975)
Vandana Baweja
Biography
Joseph Heathcott is Chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School in New York. He has held visiting positions at Princeton University School of Architecture, the London School of Economics, the University of Vienna, and Sciences Po, Paris. His most recent book is Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis (2016).
