infrastructure Archives

Urban Transformations in Sierra Leone

With a population over one million, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, faces serious challenges around provision of services, housing and infrastructure, all exacerbated by climate change. Already, a large share of the Freetown population lives in informal settlements and as many as 70 per cent of the city’s residents are employed on an informal basis.

In 2015, the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC) was established to engage with urban challenges in Sierra Leone through research, capacity building and advocacy activities in areas such as health, land, housing and mobility. SLURC has become a platform for dialogue among urban stakeholders to negotiate the future of the city.

Urban Transformations in Sierra Leone aims to share SLURC’s journey so far, articulating the key findings generated by its various research projects, while also reflecting on the partnerships it has enabled. By bringing together research from different sectors, the book makes a significant contribution to knowledge on Freetown, and demonstrates the potential of transdisciplinary work.

Invisible Reconstruction

What does it really mean to reconstruct a city after a natural, biological or man-made disaster? Is the repair and reinstatement of buildings and infrastructure sufficient without the mending of social fabric? The authors of this volume believe that the true measure of success should be societal. After all, a city without people is no city at all.
Invisible Reconstruction takes the view that effective disaster mitigation and recovery require interdisciplinary tactics. Historian Lucia Patrizio Gunning and urbanist Paola Rizzi expand beyond the confines of individual disciplines or disaster studies to bring together academics and practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines, comparing strategies and outcomes in different scenarios and cultures from South America, Europe and Asia.

From cultural heritage and public space to education and participation, contributors reflect on the interconnection of people, culture and environment and on constructive approaches to strengthening the intangible ties to increase resilience and reduce vulnerability.

By bringing practical examples of how communities and individuals have reacted to or prepared for disaster, the publication proposes a shift in public policy to ensure that essential physical reinforcement and rebuilding are matched by attention to societal needs. Invisible Reconstruction is essential reading for policymakers, academics and practitioners working to reduce the impact of natural, biological and man-made disaster or to improve post-disaster recovery.

Urban Childhoods

Growing up in English inner cities today is a distinctive experience: deprivation and poverty are intense, while social and cultural diversity enriches everyday life. Urban Childhoods puts children’s and families’ voices centre stage while investigating ways of bringing children’s wellbeing to the fore in planning for urban life today and tomorrow.

Children’s wellbeing starts from what children themselves find important: reliable relationships, plenty to do, especially outdoors, and having a say in their lives. Organised around three main themes of place, provisioning and infrastructure, the book brings together key concepts from critical childhood studies, urban studies and public health to argue that, used together, these approaches offer a dynamic framework for considering urban childhood. Chapters are linked to a major prevention programme that ran between 2019 and 2025 in the northern city of Bradford and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. They investigate spaces to play outdoors, reclaiming school streets, child poverty, economic support for child wellbeing via families, and provision for under threes. A number of strategies also feature, including support for mothers’ mental health, resolving overcrowding, involving children in making better school food, and increasing community participation in co-creating health and wellbeing. Each chapter has sections on inequality of experience, voices of children, families and professionals who work with them, and hopeful courses of action, including potential policy actions. The whole builds into a blueprint for an urgently needed thriving urban childhood.

Social Theory after the Internet

The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses.

Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role internet plays, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.

The book covers key contemporary debates in a clear and accessible way. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery introduces the system for planning and consenting Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in England (which has also applied for some schemes in Wales). These are the major projects involving power stations and large renewable energy schemes, motorways, railways and a range of other high profile, high impact and sometimes controversial development schemes, including some closely linked to the UK’s transition to net zero.

The book explains where this separate system for governing major infrastructure came from and how it operates in practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between planning, consent and delivery of these infrastructure projects. Detailed case studies of the A14 highway, Thames Tideway super sewer, Galloper offshore windfarm and Progress Power station, drawing on research by the authors, illustrate issues of the often overlooked continuing role of local government, the engagement of local communities and stakeholders, and the modification of schemes between consent and construction.

At a time of ongoing government planning reform, increased concern about climate change, and still unresolved consequences of Brexit, as well as timeless debates such as over national need versus local impact, this timely book offers rich detail on the particular approach to major infrastructure planning in England, but also speaks to wider issues around the governance of development and implementation of government policy under late capitalism.

Lahore in Motion

Lahore in Motion provides a portrait of the Pakistani metropolis by tracing the path of the city’s first metro rail corridor. Construction for this major piece of public infrastructure began in 2015 and, over subsequent years, the nascent ‘Orange Line’ rapidly reconfigured Lahore’s urban landscape – displacing residents and slicing through existing structures along its route, all while offering Lahoris the promise of ‘world-class’ public transportation. The volume collects stories from a series of walks along the metro’s 27-kilometre path, bringing together a wide variety of authors – including academics and activists, architects and artists – to reflect on the relationship between urban change and belonging in a historic city.

Each chapter is organised around a particular station on the metro, but the volume moves far beyond the neighbourhoods shadowed by the train’s elevated track. Contributors navigate the friction generated by the Orange Line’s construction and reflect on how this project of connection both responds to and produces fragmentation in the urban environment. The book brings together critical insights on the politics of infrastructure in South Asia and the desires and dispossessions fuelling projects of development in the Global South, assessing how they unevenly inflect the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world’s most populous cities.

Informational Peripheries

Urbanisation and urban life in a digital age needs to be examined through a lens of information – encompassing both its politics and its geographies. The periphery in an information age is located simultaneously across the geographic centre and edge, across social, material and digital worlds. Moving beyond current scholarship in urban and regional studies, this book presents a case for ‘informational peripheries’ as an analytical lens to understand the uneven, fragmented and disconnected geographies of urban peripheries in the Global South.

While ‘unplanned urbanisation’ has been a key discourse in the production of urban periphery in the Global South, Informational Peripheries argues that the coming of an informational age destabilises the geographic location of the urban periphery. Informational peripheries capture the complexities of digital, material and social dispersal and fragmentation that emerge from informational extraction, redlining, manipulation and bypassing. Exclusions are marked by both geographic and informational distance from the state. It includes subjects who are uncountable, as well as territories that are digitally, socially and materially unmappable. This approach provides an important vantage point for interrogating the political and technological apparatuses that are reconfiguring the notion of the urban in a digital age.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions

Solar energy is emerging as the world’s largest growing source of power. In recent years, its rollout and growth have produced effects far beyond electricity generation, including a series of cognate challenges and conflicts in diverse geographies of energy transition.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions focuses on how solar energy governance (both state-based regulations and more market-driven modes of governance) is evolving to address these conflicts in diverse empirical settings. Chapters and case studies by leading energy scholars explore various issues such as formulating new place-specific solar energy visions and strategies, financing specific deployment scales, expanding or replacing electricity infrastructure, accessing land, resolving conflicts surrounding competing land uses, incorporating charging technologies for transport and storage, adopting flexible energy production/consumption relationships, displacing fossil fuel energy production with renewables, enabling new energy ownership models, and addressing the many environmental and social injustices across the value chain of solar expansion including upstream extractivism and downstream waste.

Scholarship typically frames these challenges as tangential to the governance of solar energy transitions. By placing them front and centre, the book draws necessary attention to the many wider changes in society that are continuously developing due to the worldwide adoption of solar power.

Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain

A study of the conditions of being a citizen, belonging and democracy in suburban Britain, this book focuses on understanding how a community takes on the social responsibility and pressures of being a good citizen through what they call ‘stupid’ events, festivals and parades. Building a community is perceived to be an important and necessary act to enable resilience against the perceived threats of neoliberal socio-economic life such as isolation, selfishness and loss of community. Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain{::}** explores how authoritative knowledge is developed, maintained and deployed by this group as they encounter other ‘social projects’, such as the local council planning committee or academic projects researching participation in urban planning.The activists, who call themselves the ‘Seething Villagers’, model their community activity on the mythical ancient village of Seething where moral tales of how to work together, love others and be a community are laid out in the Seething Tales. These tales include Seething ‘facts’ such as the fact that the ancient Mountain of Seething was destroyed by a giant. The assertion of fact is central to the mechanisms of play and the refusal of expertise at the heart of the Seething community. The book also stands as a reflexive critique on anthropological practice, as the author examines their role in mobilising knowledge and speaking on behalf of others

Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain is of interest to anthropologists, urban studies scholars, geographers and those interested in the notions of democracy, inclusion, citizenship and anthropological practice.

Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland

There are not many books about how people get younger. It doesn’t happen very often. But Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland documents a radical change in the experience of ageing.

Based on two ethnographies, one within Dublin and the other from the Dublin region, the book shows that people, rather than seeing themselves as old, focus on crafting a new life in retirement. Our research participants apply new ideals of sustainability both to themselves and to their environment. They go for long walks, play bridge, do yoga and keep as healthy as possible. As part of Ireland’s mainstream middle class, they may have more time than the young to embrace green ideals and more money to move to energy-efficient homes, throw out household detritus and protect their environment.

The smartphone has become integral to this new trajectory. For some it is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has brought back the extended family and old friends, and helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though facilitating new forms of grandparenting. It has also become central to health issues, whether by Googling information or looking after frail parents. The smartphone enables this sense of getting younger as people download the music of their youth and develop new interests.

This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland. How do older people in Ireland experience life today?