The Infrastructural Imagination

Abstract

Throughout Splintering Urbanism, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin draw attention to the inadequacy of conventional representational paradigms for capturing the vast networked systems comprising contemporary urban space. In their postscript, they make this claim explicit, writing that a new “spatial imaginary” is required “to support the challenges of addressing and researching splintering cities.” In this commentary, I explore this provocation, asking who and what imagines infrastructure? Of what does a progressive infrastructural imaginary consist? And how might such an imaginary be brought about?

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