Cities in an era of interfacing infrastructures: Politics and spatialities of the urban nexus
Résumé
Over the last few years, nexus-thinking has become a buzzword in urban research and practice. This also applies to recent claims of greater integration or coordination of urban infrastructures that have traditionally been managed separately and have been unbundled. The idea is to better address their growing sociotechnical complexity, their externalities and their operation within an urban system of systems. This article introduces a collection of case studies aimed at critically appraising how concepts of nexus and infrastructure integration have become guiding visions for the development of green, resilient or smart cities. It assesses how concepts of nexus and calls for higher interconnectivity and ‘co-management’ within and across infrastructure domains often forestall more politically informed discussions and downplay potential risks and institutional restrictions. Based on an urban political and sociotechnical approach, the introduction to this special issue centres around four major research gaps: 1) the tensions between calls for infrastructure re-bundling and the urban trends and realities driven by infrastructure restructuring since the 1990s; 2) the existing boundary work in cities and urban stakeholders’ practices in bringing fragmented urban infrastructures together; 3) the politics involved in infrastructural and urban change and in aligning urban infrastructures that often defy managerial rhetoric of resource efficiency, smartness and resilience; and 4) the spatialities at play in infrastructural reconfigurations that selectively promote specific spaces and scales of metabolic autonomy, system operation (and failure), networked interconnectivities and system regulation. We conclude by outlining directions for future research.
在过去的几年里，关系（nexus）思维已成为城市研究和实践的流行语。这也适用于最近提出的、实现城市基础设施进一步一体化或协调的主张，这些基础设施传统上是分开治理的，而且未被捆绑。这个概念是为了更好地解决各类基础设施不断增长的社会技术复杂性、外部性和在由各城市系统构成的总体系统中的运营。本文介绍了一系列案例研究，旨在批判性地评估关联和基础设施整合的概念如何成为了绿色、复原性或智能城市发展的指导愿景。本文评估了关系的概念（以及在各基础设施领域内部和相互之间实现更高的互联性和“共同治理”的倡导）为何通常会阻止更多的政治知情讨论，并低估潜在的风险和制度限制。基于城市政治和社会技术方法，本期特刊的介绍围绕四个主要的研究空白领域：1）基础设施重新打捆的呼吁、与自20世纪90年代以来基础设施重组所造成的城市趋势和现实之间的张力；2）在整合零散的城市基础设施方面，城市现有的边界工作和城市利益相关者的做法；3）基础设施和城市变革以及协调城市基础设施方面的政治，这种政治往往违反资源效率、智能和复原力方面的管理学理论；4）基础设施重构方面的空间性，这会导致有选择地促进代谢自治的特定空间和规模、系统运行（和故障）、网络互连和系统调节。最后，我们概述了未来研究的方向。