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Governance for Sustainable Development
Sustainable development stirs up debate about the capacities of political steering and governance. The complexity of the task expounds limits of steering in three dimensions: goals, knowledge, and power: Sustainability goals are subject to changing and controversial risk perceptions, values and interests. Moreover, knowledge of the coupled dynamics of society, technology and nature is limited. Finally, the power to shape structural change in society and technology is distributed across a multitude of actors and societal subsystems. Steering attempts therefore have to cope with conflict and ambivalence, with uncertainty, and with a lack of central control; and they have to face the necessity ...
Dividing Dar
How did a diversity of intermediaries shape not only the everyday divisions but also the dynamics and growth of the colonial city? This is the central question of Dividing Dar. Focusing on South Asian elites, Askari soldiers and police, and a minority of European settlers, the book illustrates how three continents converged to produce the colonial city in East Africa. Dividing Dar shows how negotiations, ranging from contestation to anti-colonial resistance, derailed German colonial plans to transform African "cosmopolitanism" into neatly divided races and city spaces. Dividing Dar offers a novel approach to colonial urban history. In contrast to the traditional focus on top-down urban planning, knowledge production, and municipal politics, the book builds on a growing body of literature on colonial intermediaries and urbanism "from the middle" to address questions of historical agency, the construction of sociocultural hierarchies, and the mutations of African urbanism under the forces of German colonial occupation.
Politics of the Periphery
New urban forms characterizing contemporary metropolises reflect a certain continuity with the patterns of the past. They also include unexpected forms of settlement and design that have emerged in response to social and economic needs and as a way of leveraging new technologies. Politics of the Periphery sets out to explore sub/urban governance in diverse contexts in order to better understand how materiality and space are shaped by the possibilities and constraints of confronting actors. This collection, edited by Pierre Hamel, examines the empirical aspects of collective action and planning in eight urban regions around the world – across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa – and ...
The Structure of Regulation
This timely and original book provides an exploration of the factors that combine to determine the form of regulatory problems and the overall success or failure of regulation. Using environmental regulation as a basis for analysis, this book puts forward a theoretical framework for the design of effective regulation and demonstrates how businesses’ compliance with environmental regulation, in particular, could be improved.
Beyond the Networked City
Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse,...
Shaping Urban Infrastructures
Cities can only exist because of the highly developed systems which underlie them, ensuring that energy, clean water, etc. are moved efficiently from producer to user, and that waste is removed. The urgent need to make the way that these services are provided more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable means that these systems are in a state of transition; from centralized to decentralized energy; from passive to smart infrastructure; from toll-free to road pricing. Such transitions are widely studied in the context of the influence of service providers, users, and regulators. Until now, however, relatively little attention has been given to the growing role of intermediaries...
Emergent Information
At the dawn of the information age, a proper understanding of information and how it relates to matter and energy is of utmost importance for the survival of civilisation. Yet, attempts to reconcile information concepts underlying science and technology with those en vogue in social science, humanities, and arts are rather rare. This book offers a new approach, departing from fragmented information concepts.Many academics refrain from undergoing unifications, as most undertakings are reductionistic. This book contends that it is the noble task of an as-yet-to-be-developed science of information to go one step in the direction of a unified theory of information without falling back into neith...
The Urbanism of Exception
This book argues that understanding global urbanism in the twenty-first century requires us to cast our gaze upon vast city-regions without an urban core.
Replumbing the City
Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos--including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents--are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. Sayd Randle's ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA's sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued.
