graham and martin, "splintering urbanism"

---prologue and introduction---

(2): potable water problem, a la karachi -- poor pay much more, per litre

(4): the gated community

(5): "through such trends the physical fabric of many cities across the world is starting to fragment into giant cellular clusters -- packaged landscapes mad up of customised and carefully protected corporate, consumption, research, transit, exchange, domestic, and even health-care spaces..." [the question, of course, is how new is all of this? the tone of the paragraph implies that it is all a recent development. but if we read engels on manchester, we're unlikely to come away with anything that, at this high level of generality (spatial inequality), is much different]

(5-6): helicopters in sao paulo

(8): important--"when our analytical focus centres on how the wires, ducts, tunnels... that interface and infuse cities are constructed and used, modern urbanism emerges as an extraordinarily complex and dynamic sociotechnical process."

(8): something like harvey/sassen, fixity amid mobility: "In this perspective, cities and urban regions become, in a sense, staging posts in the perpetual flux of infrastructurally mediated flow, movement and exchange... The constant flux of this urban process is constituted through many superimposed, contested and interconnecting infrastructural landscapes."

(9): noting the incongruity between the ideology of 'equality of access' to public infrastructure (post WWII), and the cases being documented of the immense inequality of current systems of access (this is where the historical sequence is important).

(9): six parts

1. complex interdependencies of infrastructure networks and urban societies;
2. how contemporary urban change involves trends toward uneven global connection, combined with reinforcement of local boundaries;
3. failure of urban studies in this regard
4. ibid
5. exploring crisis in contemporary urban life;
6. toward a critical urbanism

(10): important--"our starting point... is the assertion that infrastructure networks are the key physical and technological assets of modern cities."

(10): four critical connections between infrastructure networks and contemporary urbanism--"the starting points of this book"

1. the sociotechnical process of networked infrastructure coordinates much of what goes on in cities
2. "infrastructure networks... unevenbly bind spaces together across cities, regions, nations, and international boundaries... the configurations of infrasturcture networks are inevitably imbued with biased strugles for social, economic, ecological, and political power..."
3. as sunk capital, represent "long-term accumulations of finance, technology... organizational and geopolitical power..."
4. delineate "urban culture"; "what Raymond Williams (1973) termed the 'structures of feeling' of modern urban life"

(13): what's unique about this era and today's networked infrastructures:

1. intensity, power, speed and reach of connections
2. pervasiveness of reliance on urban life
3. scale of technologically mediated urban life
4. duplicating, extending variety, density of networked infrastructures
5. speed of sophistication of the more powerful and advanced infrastructrues

(13): "much of the material and technological fabric of citeis, then, is networked infrastructure."

(13): KEY--as evidenced by their prologue, they are discussing the privatization of networked infrastructures, too (earlier, remember, they used the term "internationalizing capitalism.")

(14): the de-coupling of function from place? ("...information technologies may also support the 'renucleation' of work, home, and neighborhood services... activities that were often separated into single-use zones during the development of the industrial, functional city..."

(15): at the very least, they're foregrounding the inequality of this "networked society" ("selectively connecting together the most favored users and places")--see also quote from Castells

(16): unnevenness and inequality, they're arguing, force us to rethink the notion of "internal coherence" (which the ideology of post-war public infrastructure would have thought absolutely necessary)

(17-20): invisibility of "infrastructure" to the disciplines that have tackled the city

(21-22): against "technological determinsm"--"the problem with such approaches is that they tend to reify technologies as having overwhelming power in ushering in simple and discrete societal shifts which seem to amount to some natural process of urban evolution... once again, the forms and processes of city life tend to be simply read off as the deterministic result of the intrinsic nature of the new generation of technology..."

(28): graphite crystal bomb -- dropped by US in Kosovo

(30): "the aim of this book is to reveal the subtle and powerful ways in which networked infrastructrues are helping to define, shape, and structure the very nature of citeis, and, indeed, of civilisation. To begin the process, we would point to four crucial starting points for our task of constructing a critical urbanism of contemporary networked societies."

1. "chains of related innovations bind infrastructrue networks closely to broader technological systems; these, in turn, are seamlessly woven into the fabric of social, economic, and cultural life."
2. "technologies and infrastructure networks must therefore be considered as sociotechnical assemblies... rather than individual causal agents..."
3. synergies between old and new infrastructure systems
4. architectural importance of infrastructure networks
   

(33): KEY, summary passage--"...The book constructs a new and broad framework for exploring the relations between contemporary cities, new technologies and networked infrastructures. It argues that a parallel set of processes are under way within which infrastucture networks are being 'unbundled' in ways that help sustain the fragmentation of the social and material fabric of citeis. Such a shift, which we label with the umbrella term splintering urbanisms, requires a reconceptualization of the relations between infrastructrue services and the contemporary development of cities."

(34): important--"networked infrastructrues," and their development, as a window to power ("...much of contemporary urban life is precisely about the widening and intesnifying use of networkd infrastructures to extend social power, the study of the configuration, management and use of such networks needs to be at the center... of our analysis")

(35): importance of a global system, given the interconnectedness (even if uneven) of the world-system. and thus, "we do this by arguing that practices of splintering urbanism are starting to emerge in virtually all cities across the globe, whether in the developed, developing, newly industrializing or post-communist worlds, as local histories, cultures and modernities are enrolled into internationalizing capitalist political economies in various ways..."

---chapter 2---

(40): from 1850-1960, "there was a general movement... from the piecemeal and fragmented provision of networked infrastructures to an emphasis on centralized and standardized systems... At the same time, WEster powers imposed adapted versions of the ideal of the standardised infrastructure network across Africa, Latin America... but only for the urban spaces of the colonisers and their associated socioeconomic elites..." Process, they gone to say, that created the "new industrial metropolis" in place of the "older compact commercial city."

(41): the new networked infrastructures were instrumental for "the widespread application after World War I of Fordist notions of scientific management, rational organisation and the mass production of standardized goods..."

(41): summary paragraph, of sorts--"over the period 1850-1960, single, integrated and standardised road, water, waste, energy, and communications grids covering municipalities, cities, regions, and even nations. These were legitimised through notions of ubiquity of access, modernization and societal progress, all within the rubric of widening state power." Based, also, on notions of "rational, comprehensive planning--progress toward 'unitary' cities.

(42): the rational turn is being read through the imprint of networked infrastructures (networked infrastructures as a site in which we can see this broader turn in action)--"networked-based modernity thus promised the joys of perpetual trasnformation towards a scientifically rational and technologically intense urbanism."

(42): important--acknowledging the falsities of the ideology of standardization--in actual fact, "modernizing cities were always about rupture, contradiction, and inequality" [again, we are going to have to ask about what exactly this move to 'splintering urbanisms' consists in]

(43): the four pillars of the "modern infrastructural ideal"

1. ideologies of science that dictated "standardized infrastructure monopolies" (44-49)
2. modern urban planning's aceptance of this ideal (49-66)
3. how modern ideal became implicated in home-based consumption (66-73)
4. how modern municipalities and nation-states became founded on providing modern infrastructure to a territory (73-
   

(44): i am finding it very difficult to embrace the anti-modern logic of this pillorying of the 'rational', modern infrastructural ideal [isn't there, also, a place for struggle? w-class fight for decent life? rather than the unfolding of an entirely objective philosophical ideal? but we cannot overstate our point, either -- think paris]

(44): all this, they are arguing, gave "urban engineering" a value-free, rational air

(45): triumphalism of modern infrastructural ideal (legibility of progress)--"a pervasive age of technological optimism became concretised in grand technological visions for cities realized through integrated infrastructural and urban planning."

(47): "...laden with lustrous promises of modernity..."

(47): important--"central to this period, then, was the emerging dominance of the notion of the city as an abstract object to be managed and controlled."

(50-51): the telephone

(52-53): the idea of "urban cohesion"--"in the face of the apparently chaotic urbanization in nineteenth century industrial cities, as well as the miseries faced by the working classes, health crises, and uncoordinated infrastructures, urban planning was widely seen in this period as the means to realize technological progress..." the novelty of modern urban planning (vs. planning in pre-modern times), they're arguing, consists in the notion that "comprehensive, integrated networks of streets could be laid across whole urban areas..." [Haussman's 'regularization' of Paris, from 1853-1870]

(56): sewers and the de-odorized city

(56): not till the interwar period that "access to quality water and sewerage networks, at standard tarriffs, became normalizeed as part of the modernizing social world."

(59): the upside of the 'public' ideal, however modernist--the "private, gated streets" in London were eventually incorporated into the "unitary public street system."

(60): in the US, the rectilinear grid "became the norm for organizing metropolitan expansion."

(60): also, "functional planning" -- separation of 'work', 'housing', 'leisure', 'transport'... ("in this way, the emerging political economy of industrial capitalism would be manifested in a planned built environment."

(62): important--one obvious, important fallacy of this modern infrastructural ideal is that envisions a harmonious resolution of the "contradictory tendencies of capitalist urban development..." (city as a machine, or organism)

(64-65): Corbusier and the "straight-line"

(66): infrastructure and consumption--reaches its greatest intensity in the first half of the twentieth century; "Fordism" as legible through the "integrated energy, transport, water and connumications grids so central to the modern planning ideals of the time." [all must have access]

(66): "Fordism," too, "imposed considerable requirements upon urban inrastructure systems" -- due to 'territorial segregation' and 'dispersed production' (here, discussed as MoProduction, primarily)--"requirements were met by massive national and local state investment in standardized and dependable infrastructure services."

(67): important, Fordism goes to Europe/Japan ("interwar" in US)--"As the interwar practices of US Fordism diffused into Europe during postwar reconstruction, a twenty-five-year boom followed, based on the virtuous linkage of mass production techniques, mass consumption and advertising based on the nuclear family household, Taylorist work organization, collective wage bargaining, the hegemony of the large corporation, Keynesian demand management, the welfare staet and the mass production of standardized housing." [again, it is the unfolding of a rational, modernist ideal--rather than in any way the product of 'struggles on the ground']

(68): "urban rationalization" consolidated between the 1920s and 1960s -- "distance was less and less a barrier to interaction, mobility, and exchange..."

(68-69): tracing the impact of this development on gendered normative/cultural behavior (the nuclear family, the housewife as salesperson--linked, of course, to demand management)

(70): "gendered construction of the telephone"

(71): important--the decentralization that went hand-in-hand with the construction of the American suburban ideal was enabled by these technological revolutions in infrastructure provision (a technical condition of possibility, in other words)

(72): contemporary house as a 'machine for living' -- hooked up to the infrastructural network

(73): enter the State, and efforts to provide "near universal access" to infrastructure networks--and not simply sinister; this entailed a "fight against the vested interests of private capital."

(74): infrastructure networks as the 'connective tissue' of the new modern nation-state (here being dated to 1880-1950)--an attempted 'quantum leap to ubiquity', in the form of attempt to standardize access (here, example of "new Deal") [in sum, an important way in which the 'nation-state' congealed] (see also 77, where they cite also the Nazis and the autobahns)

(74): citing brenner to suggest, also, linkages between infrastructures and industrial policy--the former provide/enable the "general conditions of production."

(77-78): noting that, especially at the outset, owing to the high capital outlays and lumpy nature of investments involved, infrastructure provision was always considered the duty of 'natural monopolies.' little space for competition, commodification. furthermore, "the rationalization and the interconnection of local networks to create national 'grids' thus allowed economies of scale to be realized in all infrastructural domains." the nationally-regulated, large-scale, vertical enterprise was a must.

(80): considered also to be public goods, which carried with it three properties

1. 'joint supply', meaning supply to one person could be extended to others at little cost
2. 'non-excludability', meaning others could not be prevented from using the service (e.g., roads)
3. 'non-rejectability', meaning it must be equally consumed by all (e.g., traffic control system)
   

(80): State also needed to manage negative externalities

(81-87): the colonial question, which they divide into two phases:

1. formal colonialism (1820s-1930s) (82-84): "investments" designed to meet two objectives--first, export of primary materials; second, to create well serviced urban cores for political and administrative control/coordination
   
2. and neocolonialism (1940s-1980s) (84-87): for the most part, continuity (?)--nonetheless, the infrastructural networks were now taken as symbols of a country's having arrived ("the assertion of an embryonic national identity in the form of airports, four-lane highways..."). they're noting two approaches to infrastructural development, modernization theory (84-85) and ISI (85-87).
   

(82): spatial apartheid in the colonial city

(88): summary paragraph--"...variations of the modern infrastructural ideal were an essential component of the elaboration of modern nation states and urban planning movements. They were central to the construction of modern notions of time and space... the helped symbolically and materially to support the construction of national identies..."

---chapter 3---

(91): important--from the late 1960s, a series of critiques emerged that called the modern infrastructural ideal into question. they link this, immediately, to the end of "the long capitalist boom from the 1950s to 1970s." and ideologically, too. from the right: "in most contexts, it seems, politically neoliberal critiques of the 'inefficiencies' of centralized public control and ownership have fuelled a widespread wave of infrastructural liberalisation and privatisation which is still accelerating." from the 'left': "powerful social and cultural critiques have dramatically exposed its inadequacies... notions of urban planning and the city have also experienced radical overhaul..."

(92-136): five things that undermined the modern infrastructural ideal

1. the urban infrastructure 'crisis' (92-94)--speaking about actual physical crisis, which has been tied to the crisis of the 1970s, in general (physical deterioration of infrastructure, which was linked to the "widespread fiscal crisis at all levels of the US state.... expenditure was approaching the point at which it could barely maintain investment in net infrastructure" (94))
   
2. changing political economies of urban infrastructure development (94-103)--the internationalization of capitalism, coupled with widespread fiscal crisis of the State. "infrastructural privatization is a growing trend in all types of nation state..."as a result, seeing three features, mainly: a. retreat of state-backed provision / b. imperative of local competition / c. retreat of idea that networked services are 'public'. result, of course, is that "infrastructure provision" is prey to the whims of financial capital, which is interested only if"there are ways to guarantee certain rates of return" (97). they remind us, too, of the role of compulsion--debt repayment and the gutting of the public sector (99). all this, then, is obviously contributing to the process of splintering/unbundling, which assists Capital find steady, higher profits in providing for the Few (think, too, of the historical, political importance of cross-subsidizing and ideal of universal access, in the case of the 'modern infrastructural ideal'--see 103, the "position of the poor"). the city is being unwound; in its place are arising global-local linkages (100) amidst a sea of unevenness.
   
3. collapse of modern notion of comprehensive urban planning (103-114)--"the technocratic... styles of urban planning most closely allied with the rolling out of the modern infrastructural ideal have also found it difficult to survive the shift to an increasingly globalized political economy driven by liberalized flows of capital... it has also lost much of its legitimacy in Western nations as a result of... powerful 'postmodern' social and cultural critiques" (103); a shift to "projects," rather than "comprehensive plans." flux/change is putting the homogeneous, 'fixed' city to bed. and as far as the challenge from the left goes, "the instruments of modern planning, ostensibly developed to support coherence and urban egalitarianism, have often been appropriated to support fragmentation and social exclusion" (111).
   
4. physical growth of metropolitan regions (114-123)--shift from "core-dominated cities to polycentric and extended urban regions." the increasing importance of the urban periphery, and marginality. a 'single urban soup'. "the spectacular growth of urban peripheries tends geographically to eclipse or even isolate the networked cores that were the legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal" (116).
   
5. challenge of social movements (123-)--"the shift from the modern to the postmodern urban condition" -- "the ways in which a wide range of new social movements have brought resistance to bear on the technical and ideological assumptions that underpinned the establishment and propagation of the modern infrastructural ideal." the welfare state 'consensus', in other words, was not a 'consensus' at all. [but again, here we are going to try and be sensible--for all critiques are not equal, and we must move forward.]
   

(95): # of TNC's = 37,000 in 1990

(101): 're-infrastructuring' in the form of trade zones, export-processing areas, etc.

(102): "collective consumption" as a 'historically-specific phenomenon' -- though this raises, of course, the question of the conjunctural nature of neo-liberalism (what are we going to do with the swathes of humanity excluded from the mkt?)

(104): technocratic ideal was rocked by the "turmoil of social, economic, and cultural change between the 1960s and 1980s."

(108): referencing Jane Jacobs as progressive critique of the modern ideal

(108-109): robert moses and his "utopian new city of unified flow whose lifeblood was the automobile"--the purpose, of course, was "maximizing regional markets, productivity, and ease of circulation."

(110): i will just register that you don't, at all, need 'postmodernism' to critique the technocratic ideal -- the democratic ideal will do just fine (see 111).

(113-114): key, the 'city' as site of infrastructural development is being called into question--"...with the growing emphasis on global-local rather than intra-urban connections, the notion that the level of the city per se is the most appropriate scale at which to manage and articulate infrastructure is transcended..." [echoes of sassen's point about the global city as a subset of the conventional urban]--however, cities as "increasingly powerful actors" at the same time? "cities remain as places where significant and potent power exists to plan and act to address complex and ambivalent position of place within globalizing vectors of flow..."

(117-121): the role of the car in fracturing the urban landscape, even as it began as a key innovation of the 'modern infrastructural ideal': "a central paradox of processes of splintering urbanism is that the extension of standardised highways and roads across and beyond the metropolitan region -- ostensibly to support metropolitan ingegration -- has tended in practice to support the partitioning and fragmentation of urban space..." (118, see also 121) the car has supported the notion that personal enclosure is private freedom (119). it stretches the 'urban space', creating distances that can no longer be crossed by those without a car.

(121-122): the prospects of the 'infinite city' [but this needs interrogation; can we speak of unevenness and exclusion, yet also be prepared to accept that everyone is going to be 'urbanized' in the same way?]

(122): now, "position and centrality are configured less by geographical location with respect to 'downtown' than by the conditions of buildings and places with respect to global-local networked infrastructrues like international airports, high-speed rail and port terminals..."

(124-128): the feminist critique -- profoundly gendered sense in which the construction of urban infrastructure networks unfolded.

(126): despite technological innovations, time spent on housework changed very little from the 1920s to the 1960s

(128-129): failure of modernization or ISI in developing cities, as well. no 'trickle down'

(130): relevant, the 'fixity' of 'infrastuctural networks'--"at independence, colonial states faced massive problems as they inherited infrastructure networks designed to serve metropolitan rather than local needs... physically-embedded networks could not simply be rerouted to link bypassed regions... virtually all railways built in Africa since independence have replicated the colonial pattern of linking enclaves with the nearest port..."

(131-132): water systems as a site of "negative redistribution of income."

(133-135): the environmental movement -- advancing environmental standards, an attack on the 'large-scale centralized technologies surrounding the modern infrastructural ideal'

(135): pushing back, too, against "standardization."

(136): KEY PAGE--the 'profound ambivalence' with which they greet the collapse of the modern ideal. this is deeply disapponting--encapsulates the tension obvious in their treatment thus far. they lament the collapse of 'universal access,' but make a gesture towards the possibly liberatory aspects of this new attentiveness to "urban diversity". the poor and the dispossed may win out in these new markets tailored to their needs? what the fuck? clear that here we are seeing the possibly scary start of shared libertarian proclivities?

---chapter 4---

(138): framing of infrastructural unbundling--two tasks: (1) how it works in practice; (2) how it reshapes social and spatial relations in cities.

(140-141): "new technical capabilities"--tracing different, small-scale alternatives to the infrastructural ideal, most of which have come around as a result of technological and demand changes, it seems (but the idea that these will 'provide to the poor' is not really disputed very fundamentally, here? something odd is going on...).

(141): three forms of network unbundling:

1. virtual segmentation: "division of vertically integrated infrastructure networks"
2. horizontal segmentation: division into regional monopolies
3. virtual segmentation: layered divisions onto existing infrastructure (differential lanes on the highways, for example)

(145): four characteristics that influence marketability of infrastructure

1. character of the service (public good, private good)
2. conditions of production (extent to which its production is contestable)
3. environmental externalities
4. character of users' demand

(146): public goods (air traffic control) --> common pool goods (rural water systems) --> toll goods (toll highways) --> private goods (electricity generation/distribution)

(147): (1) "main deterrent to competition in infrastructure provision is the magnitude of sunk costs in the event of exit from the market. the costs are sunk to the extent that they cannot be recovered for other uses..." (2) related restriction is need for co-ordination. and (3), of course, "high economies of scale."

(149): opposed to conceiving of this transition as "privatization" or "deregulation" -- "the process is actually much more complex and 'messy'" (see 150-151 for their typology)

(152-161): in place of public/private, seven possible pathways:

1. the status quo--increasing untenable, as pressure is put on developing countries to reform public infrastructure
2. commercialised infrastructure--still run by gov't, but objective is that it runs on its revenues.
   
3. delegated infrastructure--suppliers competing for the right to supply a market (governments creating market conditions)
4. privatized infrastructure (ownership and operation)
5. privatized infrastructure (private competitors)--here, a "combination of technological and regulatory change is making competition possible..."
6. community infrastructure--"devolution of infrastructure planning and management, with a higher degree of user and community involvement."
   

(154): example of Guinea and the water sector -- is this book really becoming an apologists' guide to privatization? "the benefits of privatization are ambiguous... many studies show short-term benefits to producers, consumers, and employees(!), but longer-term effects have not been demonstrated..." (156)

(156): "between 1988 and 1993, the global value of infrastructure privatization was over US$ 30 billion... over 60 per cent of all infrastructure privatization by value has taken place in Latin America... "

(159): "evidence from the united states points to substantial economic gains from deregulation"!!! what is happening to this book?

(166): "imaginative ways are being developed to facilitate competition in different elements of the networks [of water/waste] or for the right to supply the market." [the tone is neutral at best] "public regulation is necessary to ensure access for low-income customers..."

(166): summary passage, these six pathways lead to two main conclusions:

1. only a limited number of options require unbundling; only two create competition.
   
2. a huge degree of diversity in the pathways away from integrated networks...

(167): important--"we believe that the key to developing an understanding of complex connections between unbundling and urban restrucuring is to explore the uneven nature of three forms of what we call 'infrastructural bypass'" (1. local bypass (168-171), which connects valued users and places; 2. 'glocal' bypass (171-173), which connects valued locals to global circuits; 3. virtual network bypass (173-175), use of new information/communication technologies to distribute competitive infrastructure services over a single physically integrated network(?))

(168): under heading of 'local bypass', noting (1) the creation of parallel infrastructure networks which arise to provide for "valued zones and users"; (2) segmentation of existing infrastructure networks; (3) coping strategies of the "least valued" users--inadequate treatment, i should think. here their own value-freeness is to be indicted.

(171): "glocal bypass often coexists with major physical planning schemes that link the customisation of places targeted at meeting the needs of global capital and foreign direct investment"

(174): certainly not benign--innovations towards the virtual network bypass can "be used to plan the construction of new physical networks and support the development of strategies used to effect disengagement from the least valued users."

(176-178): five conclusions from these preliminary discussions of "splintering urbanism"

1. "process of inrastructural unbundling analyzed above are likely to reshape dramatically relations between cities and their networked infrastructures... This is a multiscalar process... generally, it involves intensifying the connections between most valued users and places while simultaneously weakening the connections with least valued users and places."
2. infrastructural unbundling is not a simple process, but can take many different forms
3. not easy to characterize the trajectories of individual cities along pathways of unbundling...
   
4. "crucial to stress that changing infrastructural landscapes of cities are more complex than the displacement of the old by the new..."
5. "all infrastructures have not been unbundled... they lack the private sector interest in providing services..."
   

---chapter 5---

(179): to understand why we are seeing what we're seeing, we will need to engage "four strands of theory"

1. theories of large technical systems (180-184)--marked by growth, stabilization and then decline; "the large technical perspective therefore helps demonstrate how systemic changes appear in the whole technological fabric of society..." "instead of being static material artefacts to be relied on without much thought, they are, in effect, processes that have to be worked towards..." "precarious achievements" (182)
   
2. actor network theory (184-190)--"contemporary life is seen to be made up of complext and heterogeneous assemblies of both social and technological actors..." "so--and this is of crucial importance--unbundled infrastructure networks and fragmented cities emerge as two sides of the same overarching societal process." [ok, so what--i could have told you that, already; why the hell do we need bruno latour?]
   
3. political economy of capitalist infrastructure (190-202)--[see below]
   
4. relational theories of contemporary cities (202-)--first, reject idea that space, place, and time have any essential, predefined, or fixed meaning--worked out through social action, in dynamic ways (203). second, they lack any essential order or coherence (204).
   

(179): important, ontology of city/infrastructure-- "we aim to do this in a parallel way which does not overprivilege cities over infrastructure, or infrastructure over cities. in fact, we want to avoid the problem that has beset so much literature in the field, that of separating the ontological status of 'infrastructure' or 'technology' from the 'urban' or the 'city', as though they stand in a state of simple distinction."--"seamlessly coproduced"

(187): "city as cyborg"(!)

(190-): seven key arguments of spatial political economy

1. "infrastructure as fixed supports for the space-time mobilities of capitalism" (190)--"production of infrastructure networks to transcend time and space barriers simultaneously requires those infrastructure networks to be geographically fixed in space."
2. "the differing time-space capabilities of infrastructure networks" (193)
3. "as locally dependent capital (193)--"materially embedded in territory," require capital to be sunk--making it expensive, uncertain and risky investment.
   
4. "time-space compression," which is very uneven and partial (194)
5. "strategic localism" (197)--"changing geometries of infrastructural power tend to be bound up with internationalization, liberalization... such transformations mean that the modern nation state... is tending to leak its power..." spatial scale itself, as a historical product. with brenner, noting, in particular, the ascendancy of the 'glocal' scale.
6. "the pay per revolution" (199)--"redistributive role of infrastructure networks in modern welfare states is under severe strain." commodification.
7. towards hubs and spokes and tunnel effects (200)--increasing punctures and ruptures, in place of "homogenizing infrastructures"

(204): the move from a 'uniplex' to a 'multiplex' city

(208): "terminal architectures"

(209-210): Castells' dystopic 'network society' -- high value, glocal connections; whole swathes becoming redundant [but this is so obviously overstated, even if it gets at some truth, unintentionally]

(210): mike davis, and LA

(210-211): the 'figured' and 'disfigured' city

(214-216): four key conclusions

1. the seamless interdependence of the city and infrastructure networks
2. urban infrastructure networks are only ever temporarily stabilized, and always involve constant effort (in flux, never fixed)
3. the appearance of the 'glcoal', and the '"reduction of emphasis on standardized connective fabrics within cities"--unevenness
4. the need to work through social structures in action, rather than assuming fixity

[YAWN]

--chapter 6--

(220): three key aspects of 'infrastructural unbundling': 1. "wider trends toward social polarization" / 2. withdrawal of cross-subsidies / 3. socially polarizing effects of information and communication technologies.

(221): supporting trends: broader shift towards social and geographic polarization (estimate that roughly 30-40 percent of the population in the core is effectively 'tenured' within the global economy; less in developing countries--otherwised a chunk of casualized workers and about half who are structurally excluded).

(222): 'secessionary networked spaces' (malls, business parks, highways, gated communities) [what they are also calling 'rebundling']

(226): 'air-conditioning'

(227): "clear production-side forces are shaping the packaging of urban landscapes and the rebundling of cities. in all the above cases, local and international real estate interests seem to be intent on packaging together larger and larger luxury spaces...; at the same time, they work harder to secure such spaces from incursion... from the new urban poor" [here, interestingly, citing Logan 1993--is this a place to ground, historically, the "urban growth machine"?]

(228): key, networked infrastructures have molded to the secessionary space--"the logic of unbundled infrastructure networks helps such spaces to connect very closely with the highly capable.. infrastructure networks necessary to support and sustain their operation."

(232): important, the death of "public space" and the escalation of "public control"--the "other" side of the narrative--the degree to which splintering urbanism has been matched by the intensifying attempt to exercise social control over a given 'public' space (what they call 'normative ecologies' of who belongs).

(233): the end of cross-subsidies, which were so crucial to the goals of the "modern infrastructural ideal" -- replaced by a project-by-project logic, and the notion of 'fiscal equivalence' (234)

(234): "infrastructures and services start to be developed on the basis of the price of delivery and the desire for maximum profits: explicit social redistribution tends to be withdrawn from the equation." (aka, the 'rebalancing of tarriffs')

(236): important, the 'end' of the formal citizen: "there has been a notable shift from treating the user population as a largely homogeneous group of citizens, with notional or formal rights, to a heterogeneous group of consumers, carefully differentiated according to how lucrative they are to serve." [an interesting point to raise the question of the affinity between left- and right- libertarianism]

(236): at&t making 80 percent of their profits from 20 percent of their customers

(240): the ACORN classification(!)

(243): again, advances in technology enable this "unbundling"--the possibility, then, of a "new biology of control" (biometric scanning in san francisco, in gaza)

(244-246): the internet as 'global ghetto'; UNDP's figures are 2% of global population (the figures are outdated, but the principle is certainly not--latest figures say 24.7%, though UNDP may want to measure a subset of this population)

(246): yes--the "public" gets reduced to a cosmpolitan, resolutely bourgeois 'public' sphere.

(249): the seven (six?) spaces of seduction: 1. privatized highways (249)--social bias of the private highway (254) /2. remodeling of the internet into a corporately dominated communications medium (251) / 3. splintering streetscapes (256)--the private, air-conditioned walkway / 4. theme park/business improvement district, "malls without walls" (261) / 5. the gated community (267), which rely on replicating high-quality public services through private means ('privatopia') / 6. at the level of the home (284), secession from "immediate urban environments."

(264): the concept of a normative 'space-time' ecology

(266): "themed places" as 'large-scale urban control zones'

(269): widespread absence of pedestrian sidewalks in suburban malls

(271): disney and a "private political structure."

(275): "...of all secessionary network spaces, the risk of common interest developments prompting the collapse of the overarching municipal tax system is perhaps strongest..."

(281): gated communities and secession in johannesburg, after the breaking down of the pass-law system

(288): wacquant and "advanced marginality" -- "we need to recognize that marginalization from the ability to use and configure networked infrastructures and technologies is as central to the experience of poverty as lack of food, money or formal employment."

(289): important-- "marginalized groups often remain heavily dependent on whatever public, welfare and social services exist... but, under the influence of wider shifts away from universal, Keynesian welfare regimes to neoliberal, individualist ones, these, in turn, may be 'reconverted into instruments of surveillance and policing of a surplus population..." [here, parenti's argument about the prison system is very appropriate]

(290): four cases of exclusion: 1. transport in splintered metropolis (290)--"for many low-income people the social experience of life in marginalized places is one of being tightly confined by time and space barriers rather than being liberated from them." / 2. exclusion from IT networks (291) / 3. water provision in the"Developing World" [why caps?] (296), where "prospects for major extension seem weak" / 4. + 5. fuel and power resources (297)

(292): homelessness and the "sanitization" of the urban space in the US ('out of sight', 'out of mind')

(296): here, an interesting, telling aside -- that "even" the modern infrastructural ideal was better than neoliberalism at dealing with informal settlements [might tell you a thing or so about the common system that undergirds the two, no?]

(297): "in jakarta... over half the population still obtain their water from vendors, at as much as thirteen times the cost of the piped water used to irrigate the golf courses and landscaped gardens of the extending new town complexes..." [goodness.]

(298): pre-payment reduces the public image costs of "disconnection"

(302): SUMMARY--"these new urban forms have major implications for the democratic possibilities of the city. they seem to signal the collapse of the coordinated public nterprise of interlinked infrastructural monopolies and comprehensive public city planning. they mean the effective abandomnet of the (always problematic) ideal of the cohesive, integrated and open city that can be characterized as having some organic unity. we are clearly losing the 'ideal of the city as a special place: the center of democratic exchange...' highly uneven commodified competition of the production of both networks and spaces becomes the single dominant ethos of the city; increasingly you are what the market dictates for you."

---chapter 7---


(305): the 'archipelago' economy -- "glocalization"

(306): ash amin and nigel thrift "argue, however, that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to generate 'artificially ' such self-sustaining international economic nodes..."

(307): neil brenner and "de-linking"

(307): important--"the key result of these trends is that all cities, whether they be 'global cities... [or other cities]... seem to be facing variations of the same broad logics of development." [this, though, is not true--last week's conversation about shenzen, case-in-point -- but they have a framework which can assimilate this -- seen next page "we suggest that the intersections between globalization, liberalization, new technologies and infrastructural practices have crucial iplications for the development of urban economies in [all places] alike..." we just need to make explicit the correct way to deploy this.]

(308): the seven types of places that are emerging: 1. global financial service cities (new york, london) /2. development enclaves in 'megacities' / 3. emerging enclaves of innovation / 4. industrial spaces for innovation and production /5. spaces configured for inward investment in manufacturing... / 6. 'back office' enclaves for data processing / 7. spaces configured as 'logistics zones'. [this is key, actually -- demonstrates, really, that glocalization's unit is no longer the 'city', but, more, a kind of 'space' that is not 'local']

(309): moreover, they want to highlight four key supports for the economic changes being documented in this book: 1. changing role of states, "increasingly entrepreneurial" (309--citing brenner) /2. urban municipalities (310), pursuing 'glocal' strategies /3. infrastructure capital (311) /4. corporate capital

(327): aspiring "global cities" in the third world

(344-345): utilities advertised to foreign investors ("glocal infrastructure provision")

(348-349): pearl river delta as case in-point--"such spaces are specifically built for foreign capital..."

(363): interesting, export processing zones--"emblematic of the use of corporate networks to exploit spatial separation and geographical division.. 'we make computes, but we don't know how to operate computers'..." "export processing zones are therefore logistics enclaves whose high levels of infrastructural servicing, and connectivity elsewhere, tend to contrast sharply with their disconnection from their surrounding city or region and its poor infrastructure..."

(372): two choices, re: what lies beyond the 'glocalized' world: 1. accept the deteriorating world of the modern infrastructural ideal / 2. "to take action to splinter oneself and one's space away from the modern, monopolistic infrastructure network, in the hope of achieving more suitable higher-quality or more reliable connections that way"[???] [and a very poor discussion, here]

(377): BUT--"as we shall see in Part Three, cities continue to be mixed economic and social spaces... attempts at economic and technological secession are ambivalent, contradictory practices that are open to resistance and challenge. as we shall see then, such continued mixity and ambivalence offer a key hop.e to any attempt at working towards the economic democratization of the twenty-first century splintering metropolis."

---conclusion/epilogue---

(384): calling for a "series of caveats" in their analysis; themselves recognizing that they don't want to overstate their points. two tasks: 1. wider, historical context / 2. the necessary limits of 'splintering urbanism'.

(385): recognizing the risk of "overgeneralization" -- there is no simple, 'function' fit between the city and the needs of global capitalism.

(386): important, they recognize also that "the dialectic of privacy and closure versus openness and mixing has been played out since the very beginning of urban life." .. "the modern infrastuctural ideal was never materially achieved in practice. it was always as much a symbolic and discursive construction as a technological reality. it was closely bound up with the wider legitimation of modern national and local states... unevenness and bias... remained in all cities..."

(387): noam chomsky citation, out of nowhere!

(387): important, "we should be cautious not to fall into the trap of romanticizing the modern infrastructural idea... the normative concept of the networked city that was at the root of the modern idea was totalizing and centralized..." [again, the critiques were raised earlier--isn't this far too totalizing? even criticizing re-distribution as "paternalistic". we don't need to rehabilitate the welfare state to avoid this trap. to the ramparts!]

(388): secession, similar to the modern infrastructural ideal, as a "dream" - "just as unrealisable as the fantasies of clearn, functional, and perfectly geometric order promulgated by modernist visionaries... we therefore need to be wary of assuming the easy emergence of utterly separated premium network spaces..."

(388): six reasons why this is more messier than they'd like: 1. always 'open' and 'porous', in practice / 2. must maintain connectivity with wider public networks (like labor, for example) /3. sheer diversity cannot be parcelled out so easily, multiple spillover effects. / 4. spaces continue to exist where resistance can be constructed. spaces of 'public mixing' (392) still exist.

(393): merrifield's response to davis' dystopia.

(394): we cannot forget the creativity and sheer inventiveness of urban inhabitants [a bit hokey, all this]

( 395): "most practices of resistance are more prosaic and quotidian...", transgression and rebellion [uh-oh; this is not promising, in the least... skateboarders as the new vanguard]

(396): struggles against the 'representations' of the periphery. [PLEASE!]

(397): the very cursory mention of actual movements is refreshing.

(397): kaliski and the prospect of finding 'public' in the privatized.

(400): NGO's in nepal and colombia; Orangi Pilot Project [uh-oh.]

(405): interesting, the conjuncture: "we would therefore expect social and political tensiosn within many cities to increase. A central theme of urban politics... in the first decades of the new millenium will therefore centre on the struggle between the 'glocal' forces... versus the imperatives of infrastructrual, urban, and technological democratization and the need for more egalitarian and democratized practices and principles of development."

(406): towards a 'spatial imaginary', which can bridge the multiple heterogeneities without suppressing difference (here they cite harvey)

(407): "urban democratization" -- "heterogeneous interaction and continued mixing"

(408): an urban politics of difference that is not an urban politics of segregation, which is willing/ready to come to terms with "the common experience of the contemporary, capitalist urban condition." [recalls Lefebvre]

(409): and YES -- they bring the State back. "new forms of intervention by state and public institutions... are required directly to encourage democratic practices..."

(411): the "tyranny of spatial scale" -- "the assumption that the urban scale must, necessarily, be the dominant scale of action and organization... we must recognize that real democratization must be pursued [at different levels]"

(417-419): questions for further urban research.