Category: Infrastructural Theory
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The secret theft of private experience
All these images are illusions of progress or spaces where progress can be hosted. Just as suburbs were sold to postwar America as an idea of living, the smart city is a vehicle to sell a focus-grouped future. But these marketing images aren’t selling smart cities to you and me—they’re made to demonstrate that the…
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Resistance to the colonising present
While I was in Hebden Bridge, I looked out of the window of a coffee shop one Friday at lunchtime, and saw a small crowd of schoolchildren on a climate protest. Sensitized by being in England, it dawned on me that what I was seeing was a rebellion of the natives against the colonizers –…
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Qui autem temperet moderatores?
… [UK] consumers have overpaid for the natural monopolies and other networks underpinning many of these markets for at least the past 15 years. Because of patchy reporting from regulators, it’s impossible to document the full extent of these overpayments. However, this research finds that regulators have systematically set prices too high, leading to consumers…
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“The very parameters of global urbanism”: Easterling (2014), Extrastatecraft
Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso Books. This book is basically a condensation of all Easterling’s work preceding it – which isn’t entirely surprising, but worth noting nonetheless. In the context of the task at hand at time of taking these notes, the main point to be made is that the…
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Sadowski & Bendor (2019), Selling smartness: Corporate narratives and the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary
Sadowski, J., & Bendor, R. (2019). Selling smartness: Corporate narratives and the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(3), 540-563. This one’s a doozy; does exactly what it says on the tin, on the basis of a deep and comparative dive into “smart city” documentation from IBM and Cisco. A…