Infrastructures and Social Complexity
Infrastructures and Social Complexity

Author: Penelope Harvey

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1317224353

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Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.

Infrastructures and Social Complexity
Infrastructures and Social Complexity

Author: Penelope Harvey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 1317224345

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Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.

Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Author: Brett M. Frischmann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0199333750

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Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time. Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy. Economics has become the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The author explores a set of questions that, once asked, seem obvious: what drives the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.

Managing the Complexity of Critical Infrastructures
Managing the Complexity of Critical Infrastructures

Author: Roberto Setola

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-10

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 3319510436

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This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book summarizes work being pursued in the context of the CIPRNet (Critical Infrastructure Preparedness and Resilience Research Network) research project, co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project is intended to provide concrete and on-going support to the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) research communities, enhancing their preparedness for CI-related emergencies, while also providing expertise and technologies for other stakeholders to promote their understanding and mitigation of the consequences of CI disruptions, leading to enhanced resilience. The book collects the tutorial material developed by the authors for several courses on the modelling, simulation and analysis of CIs, representing extensive and integrated CIP expertise. It will help CI stakeholders, CI operators and civil protection authorities understand the complex system of CIs, and help them adapt to these changes and threats in order to be as prepared as possible for mitigating emergencies and crises affecting or arising from CIs.

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities
Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

Author: Olivier Coutard

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2024-04-12

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1800889151

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Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Political Hegemony and Social Complexity
Political Hegemony and Social Complexity

Author: Alex Williams

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 3030197956

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How can we understand power in a world of ever-growing complexity? This book proposes that we can do so by rethinking the theory and practice of political hegemony through the resources of complexity theory. Taking Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as its starting point, the book argues that the intricacies of contemporary power can be mapped by applying concepts drawn from complexity theory, such as emergence, self-organisation, metastability, and generative entrenchment. It develops an original account of social complexity, drawing upon critical realist sociology, analytic philosophy of science, Marxist and continental philosophies, and neoliberal and anarchist thought. It then draws out the elements of Gramscian hegemony that already align with complexity concepts, such as the balance of forces, common sense, and the historic bloc. On this basis, the book sets out the different dimensions of complex hegemonic power before using this theory to interpret the nature of the power of neoliberalism since 2008.

Critical Space Infrastructures
Critical Space Infrastructures

Author: Alexandru Georgescu

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-03-25

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 3030126048

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This book introduces readers to the topical area of CSI: critical space infrastructure, which is defined as an emerging domain of systems-of-systems encompassing hardware, workforce, environment, facilities, business and organizational entities. Further, it includes unmanned air systems, satellites, rockets, space probes, and orbital stations, and involves multi-directional interactions essential for maintenance of vital societal functions (i.e., health, safety, economic and social well-being), the loss or disruption of which would have significant impact on virtually any nation. The topics covered include the main elements of CSI, CSI taxonomy, effects of CSI on other infrastructure systems, establishing quantitative and qualitative parameters, global and national effects of CSI failure, cascading disruptive phenomena, chilling effects in various fields, CSI protection, deliberate threats to space systems (e.g., electromagnetic pulse attacks), space governance, and a path forward for CSI research. Modern society is highly dependent on the continuous operation of critical infrastructure systems for the supply of crucial goods and services including, among others, the power supply, drinking water supply, and transportation systems; yet space systems – which are critical enablers for several commercial, scientific and military applications – are rarely discussed. This book addresses this gap.

Infrastructural Lives
Infrastructural Lives

Author: Stephen Graham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-10

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 131768639X

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Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies. An interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging urban researchers examine critical questions about urban infrastructure in different global contexts. The chapters address water, sanitation, and waste politics in Mumbai, Kampala and Tyneside, analyse the use of infrastructure in the dispossession of Palestinian communities, explore the pacification of Rio’s favelas in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, describe how people’s bodies and lives effectively operate as ‘infrastructure’ in many major cities, and also explores tentative experiments with low-carbon infrastructures. These diverse cases and perspectives are connected by a shared sense of infrastructure not just as a ‘thing’, a ‘system’, or an ‘output,’ but as a complex social and technological process that enables – or disables – particular kinds of action in the city. Infrastructural Lives is crucial reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners in urban studies globally.

Sustainable and Resilient Critical Infrastructure Systems
Sustainable and Resilient Critical Infrastructure Systems

Author: Kasthurirangan Gopalakrishnan

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-04-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 3642114059

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Sustainable and resilient critical infrastructure systems is an emerging paradigm in an evolving era of depleting assets in the midst of natural and man-made threats to provide a sustainable and high quality of life with optimized resources from social, economic, societal and environmental considerations. The increasing complexity and interconnectedness of civil and other interdependent infrastructure systems (electric power, energy, cyber-infrastructures, etc.) require inter- and multidisciplinary expertise required to engineer, monitor, and sustain these distributed large-scale complex adaptive infrastructure systems. This edited book is motivated by recent advances in simulation, modeling, sensing, communications/information, and intelligent and sustainable technologies that have resulted in the development of sophisticated methodologies and instruments to design, characterize, optimize, and evaluate critical infrastructure systems, their resilience, and their condition and the factors that cause their deterioration. Specific topics discussed in this book include, but are not limited to: optimal infrastructure investment allocation for sustainability, framework for manifestation of tacit critical infrastructure knowledge, interdependencies between energy and transportation systems for national long term planning, intelligent transportation infrastructure technologies, emergent research issues in infrastructure interdependence research, framework for assessing the resilience of infrastructure and economic systems, maintenance optimization for heterogeneous infrastructure systems, optimal emergency infrastructure inspection scheduling, and sustainable rehabilitation of deteriorated transportation infrastructure systems.

Audible Infrastructures
Audible Infrastructures

Author: Kyle Devine

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-01-11

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0190932651

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Our day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. Songs instantly emanate from our computers and phones, at any time of day. The tools for playing and making music, such as records and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase and use. And when we no longer need them, we can leave them at the curb, where they disappear effortlessly and without a trace. These casual engagements often conceal the complex infrastructures that make our musical cultures possible. Audible Infrastructures takes readers to the sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles that seem peripheral to musical culture and shows that they are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Organized into three parts dedicated to the main phases in the social life and death of musical commodities resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste this book provides a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures. As contributors reveal the material-environmental realities and political-economic conditions of music and listening, they open our eyes to the hidden dimensions of how music is made, delivered, and disposed of. In rethinking our responsibilities as musicians and listeners, this book calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of how music comes to sound.