Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations, Transformations and Sustainability in the Global South

This book is about urban infrastructuring as the processes linking infrastructural configurations and their components with other social, ecological, political, or otherwise defined systems as part of urbanisation and globalisation in the Global South. It suggests that infrastructuring is essential to urbanisation and that it is entangled with socio-spatio-ecological transformations that often have negative outcomes over time. Furthermore, it argues that infrastructuring requires an ethical positioning in research and practice in order to enhance infrastructural sustainability in the face of intersecting environmental, social and economic crises.

“Urban Infrastructuring” is developed in three parts. First, it identifies infrastructural entanglements across various urban and urbanising settings in the Global South. Second, it highlights some of the damaging processes and outcomes of urban infrastructuring and argues that the absence, presence and transformation of infrastructure in the Global South (re-)produces socioecological injustice in the short- and long term. Third, the book argues for a shift of infrastructuring agendas towards more just and sustainable interventions. It suggests that an ethico-politics of care should be embedded in systems approaches to infrastructuring in both research and practice.

The edited volume contains contributions from authors with backgrounds in a variety of academic disciplines from the natural and social sciences, engineering and the humanities. It provides valuable insights for anyone concerned with the study, design, planning, implementation and maintenance of urban infrastructures to enhance human well-being and sustainability. It will be of interest to researchers and urban decision-makers alike.

Deljana Iossifova is Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Manchester. She is Chair of the Board of the Urban Studies Foundation and the principal investigator and international lead on a diverse portfolio of transdisciplinary research around urban transformation and urban infrastructural transitions. Her work has been funded by NERC, ESRC, Royal Society and the Daiwa Foundation, among others. Geographically, Dr Iossifova's main research focus is on the Global East and South, including China, Japan, Bulgaria, India and Brazil. Trained as an architect at ETH Zurich, she practiced in Germany, China, Japan and the USA. She is the author of Translocal Ageing in the Global East (Palgrave, 2020) and lead editor of Defining the Urban (Routledge, 2018).

Alexandros Gasparatos is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at the Institute for Future Initiatives (IFI), University of Tokyo. He is an ecological economist interested in the development, refinement and application of sustainability assessment and ecosystem services valuation tools. He has conducted research on food security, renewable energy, and urban metabolism in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. He is editor of Sustainability Science, People and Nature, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, and Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. He served as a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) for the Asia-Pacific Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Stylianos Zavos is Research Associate in Architecture at the University of Manchester, and part of the research team for the project SASSI (A Systems Approach to Sustainable Sanitation Challenges in Urbanising China). His research is situated at the intersection of Architecture, Human Geography and Material Culture. In particular, he is interested in how the sociomateriality of intimate everyday events becomes entangled with aspects of urban governance and the respective political - and ethical - implications such entanglements may pose. Before completing his PhD in Architecture at the University of Manchester, Stelios held industry positions as Design and Project Engineer in infrastructure and residential projects.

Yahya Gamal is a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester. His research interests broadly include Urban Economics, Planning and Simulation Methods. Particularly, he is interested in the underlying factors affecting economic decision making processes and how they shape land use change. He is specifically interested in analysing the informal contexts in the Global South through land use simulative methods including Agent Based Modelling. Before his PhD post, he held an Assistant Lecturer role in Cairo University. Trained as an Architect in Cairo University, Yahya also practiced Architecture in Egypt.

Yin Long is an Assistant Professor at the GraduateSchool of Engineering, University of Tokyo. She obtained a PhD from the Department of Environment System at the University of Tokyo. She has been awarded a Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad in 2019. Prior to joining the University of Tokyo, she was a Guest Researcher at the Centre for Low Carbon Society Strategy of Japan Science and Technology, Assistant Researcher at the National Institution of Environment Studies (NIES), and an Assistant Professor at the Tokyo University of Science.