Critical acclaim for Splintering Urbanism already includes:

Splintering Urbanism is the first analytical geography of the network society. It skilfully blends
up-to-date information on metropolitan development, theoretical insights, and a good
knowledge of debates in the field. It demonstrates that electronics-based networks segregate
as much as they connect, and that they do so selectively. It is required reading for students
of spatial transformation and is on the cutting edge of research in urban studies.
Manuel Castells, University of California at Berkeley,
author of The Information Age

Splintering Urbanism is an enormously important book. Graham and Marvin have a very
specific angle into questions of infrastructure and cities that makes them stand apart from many
other authors on the subject. The book’s contribution is its mixing of matters deeply urban
and material with the digital, its analysis of the particular type of fragmenting of urban space
this can engender, and its connecting of these new aspects with conventional infrastructural
conditions and challenges.
Saskia Sassen, University of Chicago and LSE, author of
Globalization and its Discontents and The Global City

Splintering Urbanism is a crucial text for architects and urban designers who are interested
in the roles of network infrastructure – particularly new digital telecommunications
infrastructure – in shaping the future of our cities. It synthesizes a vast amount of relevant
material, develops a range of critical perspectives on it, and provides some clear starting points
for exploring possible design interventions.
William Mitchell, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT,
author of City of Bits and E-topia

Splintering Urbanism is a truly path-breaking book and a tremendous achievement. In many

ways it is even more impressive than its predecessor, Telecommunications and the City. Graham
and Marvin have really brought the subject of urban infrastructure to life. Splintering
Urbanism’s great strengths are its global perspective, its wide range of material and case
studies, and the ways these are integrated to form a new way of looking at cities. This book
could do for networks what Doreen Massey’s Spatial Division of Labour did for industrial
geography back in the 1980s.
Steven Pinch, University of Southampton,
author of Worlds of Welfare

Splintering Urbanism will be one of the most widely read and cited books in urban studies
for some time. The book delivers an original, state-of-the-art and comprehensive analysis of
changing infrastructure networks – especially telecommunications – in contemporary urban
areas. It offers a fresh way of viewing and understanding city metamorphosis on a rapidly
urbanising planet. The book clearly shows how networked infrastructures are set in place and
how they help explain the economic, social and political power of urban areas. The book is
so innovative, interdisciplinary and contemporary that it is basically without competition.
James Wheeler, University of Georgia,
co-editor of Cities in the Telecommunications Age

Inspiring! Splintering Urbanism is the most comprehensive book to date on the socio-cultural
history of urban infrastructure. It includes impressive global coverage, historical foundations
and insightful analysis of the most recent urban-technology dynamics. A ‘must’ read for
scholars and practitioners in city planning, history of technologies and urban geography.
Yuko Aoyama, Clark University,
co-editor of Cities in the Telecommunications Age

Graham and Marvin, whose Telecommunications and the City became an instant classic, repeat
their earlier success by focusing on urban infrastructure in the digital age. In so doing they
bring to the fore a long neglected but critical foundation of cities that makes the ‘space of
flows’ possible, revealing lucidly its connections to urban planning, transportation and
telecommunications, and cyberspace. Rescuing infrastructure from simplistic metaphors
driven by technological determinism is one of the book’s finest contributions. In an age of
unchallenged neoliberalism the shape of cities is being powerfully reworked by private capital
with little regard for the social externalities urban development inevitably generates.
Splintering Urbanism shows powerfully how our notions of time and space reflect the ways
in which the geography of cities is periodically torn apart and reconstituted. At scales ranging
from the local to the global, including the frequently overlooked developing world, they
reveal the urban infrastructure as a contested field of class and gender relations, ideologies,
environmental movements, and community groups.
Barney Warf, Florida State University,
co-editor of Cities in the Telecommunications Age

Splintering Urbanism’s comprehensive analysis of the impact on cities of the privatization and
unbundling of infrastructure networks, especially telecommunications, is highly original,
timely, and deeply provocative. Urban designers, policy makers and architects will find
compelling evidence here of a new challenge to the role of cities. The authors document how
networked cities, far from equalizing opportunities, are increasingly fragmenting into cellular
clusters of globally connected high-service enclaves and network ghettoes. They locate this
discussion within a wide variety of contemporary theoretical discourse on cities, technology,
economic and social development, reminding us of just how fundamental infrastructure is to
the design, organization, and life of cities.
Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Architecture Program,
Georgia Institute of Technology
 SPLINTERING URBANISM

Splintering Urbanism presents a path-breaking analysis of the nature of the urban condition
at the start of the new millennium. Adopting a global and interdisciplinary perspective, it
reveals how new technologies and increasingly privatised systems of infrastructure provision
– telecommunications, highways, urban streets, energy and water – are supporting the
splintering of metropolitan areas across the world. The result is a new ‘sociotechnical’ way of
understanding contemporary urban change, which brings together discussions about:

• Globalisation and the city

• The urban and social effects of new technology
• Urban, architectural and social theory
• Social polarisation, marginalisation and democratisation
• Infrastructure, architecture and the built environment
• Developed, developing and post-communist cities

Splintering Urbanism brings together a broad range of international case studies, boxed
examples, over 100 illustrations and a comprehensive glossary. These take the reader on
global journeys encompassing finance districts in Tokyo and New York; e-commerce spaces
in Jamaica and northern England; new media enclaves in San Francisco and London; logistics
and airport cities in Asia and the United States; malls in Atlanta and Singapore; gated
communities in Istanbul, São Paulo, Mumbai and Johannesburg; new highway spaces in
Melbourne, Manila and Los Angeles; and network ghettoes in the United States, the United
Kingdom and the developing world. Splintering Urbanism will be essential reading for
urbanists, geographers, planners, architects, sociologists, researchers in science and technology
and communications studies, and all those seeking a definitive statement of the contemporary
urban condition.

Stephen Graham is Reader in the Centre for Urban Technology at Newcastle University’s
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. Simon Marvin is Professor of Sustainable
Urban and Regional Development and Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Urban and
Regional Futures, University of Salford.
 SPLINTERING URBANISM

networked infrastructures,
technological mobilities and the urban condition

STEPHEN GRAHAM and SIMON MARVIN

LONDON AND NEW YORK

 First published 2001
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

© 2001 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0–415–18964–0 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–18965–9 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-45220-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-76044-1 (Glassbook Format)
 FOR ANNETTE AND NICOLA

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF

RICHARD H. WILLIAMS (1945–2001)
 CONTENTS

Plate 1 New highway system in central Shanghai, China.

Photograph: Stephen Graham
List of plates xv
List of figures xvii
List of tables xxi
List of boxes xxiii
Acknowledgements xxv

PROLOGUE
Tales of the networked metropolis 1

1 INTRODUCTION
Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition 7
Transport, telecommunications, energy and water: the mediating networks of
contemporary urbanism 10
Networked paradoxes: global connections and local (dis)connections 13
The neglect of networked urban infrastructures and technological mobilities in
treatments of the city 16
Fleeting glimpses of networked fragility: experiences and fears of infrastructural
collapse 22
Ways forward: towards a critical networked urbanism 30
The aim of this book: constructing a parallel and cross-cutting perspective on
urban and infrastructural change 33
The structure of the book 35

PART ONE UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM 37

2 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY, 1850–1960 39

The long path towards (attempted) standardisation 40
The aims of this chapter 42
Believing in modernity: urban reform and the ‘technological sublime’ 43
Urban planning and development: the emergence of the unitary city ideal 49
Constructing networked urban consumption, 1920–60 66
Governing the integrated infrastructural ideal: cities, infrastructure and the nation
state, 1900–60 73
Exporting the modern ideal: the experience of developing cities, 1850–1960 81
Conclusions: networking multiple modernities 87

3 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL

The modern networked city in crisis 90
Processes undermining the modern infrastructural ideal 91
 CONTENTS / XII

The urban infrastructure ‘crisis’ 92

Changing political economies of urban infrastructure
development and governance 94
The collapse of the comprehensive ideal in urban planning 103
New urban landscapes: physical decentralisation, motorisation and the
polynucleated city 114
New ‘structures of feeling’: the challenge of social and cultural change and
social movements 123
Conclusions 135

4 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM 137

Unbundling infrastructure and the reconfiguration of cities 138
Practices of infrastructural unbundling 138
Unbundling infrastructure and urban transformations 166
Conclusions: urban infrastructure: towards new paradigms 175

5 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS

Theorising splintering urbanism 178
Opening ‘black boxes’: the destabilisation of large technical systems 180
Actor networks and cyborg urbanisation 184
Changing political economies of capitalist urban infrastructure 190
From ‘uniplex’ to ‘multiplex’ cities: relational theories of contemporary urbanism 202
Evaluating the four perspectives 206
Conclusions 214

PART TWO EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS 217

6 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM 219

Social dimensions of infrastructural unbundling and splintering urbanism 220
Urban landscapes in the ‘age of extremes’: secessionary networked spaces
and the wider metropolis 220
The withdrawal of network cross-subsidies and the construction of
infrastructural consumerism 233
Cyberspace divides: information and communications technologies as supports
for urban splintering 243
Spaces of seduction: the premium networked spaces of the splintering metropolis 249
Automotive secession: electronically tolled ‘superhighways’ and the ‘diversification’
of urban highway systems 249
Splintering the Internet: towards a commercial and socially selecting medium 251
Splintering streetscapes (I) Skywalk cities, plazas and atria 256
Splintering streetscapes (II) Business Improvement Districts, town centre
management and CCTV 261
Spaces of seduction: theme parks, shopping malls and urban resort complexes 264
 CONTENTS / XIII

Fortress spaces: master-planned, gated enclaves across the world 267

‘Smartening’ the home: domestic spaces of secession and control 284
Beyond spaces of secession: marginalised spaces, network ghettoes and the
‘poverty of connections’ 287
Conclusions: splintering urbanism and the spaces of democracy 301

7 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE SPLINTERING OF

URBAN ECONOMIES 304
Cities and the ‘archipelago economy’ 305
Economic players in the construction of ‘glocal’ urban infrastructure 309
Global connections, local disconnections: customising infrastructure for
global financial enclaves 313
Infrastructure and economic enclaves in developing cities 327
Constructing ‘home’ districts for cyberspace: new media enclaves in global cities 329
Technopoles and the construction of high-tech innovation clusters 333
Customising infrastructure for foreign direct investment in manufacturing 339
‘Back office’ spaces and data-processing enclaves in the global periphery 352
Logistics enclaves, export processing zones, ‘hub’ ports and e-commerce spaces 357
The worlds beyond glocal infrastructure 372
Conclusions 376

PART THREE PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM 379

8 CONCLUSION
The limits of splintering urbanism 381
The dangers of splintering urbanism 383
Placing splintering urbanism: the wider context 384
Challenging hegemonies: resistance and the limits of splintering urbanism 387

POSTSCRIPT
A manifesto for a progressive networked urbanism 404
Towards a spatial imagination for the splintered metropolis 405
The challenges of urban democratisation: association, difference and states 406
Building new conceptual understandings of contemporary urban life 410
Ways forward for urban planning and practice: beyond urban and technological
determinisms 413
Challenges to urban research 417
End note 420

Glossary 421
Bibliography 431
Index 463
 PLATES

1 New highway system in central Shanghai, China. Photograph: Stephen Graham ix

2 The Fashion Island mall, developed by the Jerde Partnership, in Los Angeles.
Source: Jerde Partnership, 1999, 82 1
3 Electric power lines near Durban, South Africa, which run through Umlazi township
without serving any of the people who live there. Photograph: Photo Oikoumene, World
Council of Churches 7
4 A skybridge walkway linking elements of the Prudential and Copley Square
‘bundled city’ complexes in central Boston, Massachusetts: a private, premium
pedestrian network which bypasses the traditional street system. Photograph:
Stephen Graham 37
5 What Lewis Mumford called the ‘invisible city’ – underground pipes and conduits
at the junction of Gay and Lombard Streets in Baltimore, Maryland, 1908.
Source: Melosi (2000), 134 39
6 Dedicated highways and transit routes linking the Sheraton Hotel and Paris Charles
De Gaulle airport. Photograph: Andreu (1997) 90
7 ‘Power up. Have you switched on to electricity competition?’ An advertisement
in Woman’s Journal, 1998, 89 137
8 The Pudong redevelopment area, Shanghai, China. Photograph: Stephen Graham 178
9 The World Financial Center at Battery Park City on the south-western tip of Manhattan,
New York. A classic ‘premium network space’, the Center is an enclave configured for
companies in global financial services and their employees. The development is
equipped with its own infrastructure: schools, services, shops, marina, park, freeway
connections, internal private winter garden and a skywalk link across the highway to
the World Trade Center. Photograph: Stephen Graham 217
10 Gated condominium complex in central São Paulo, Brazil.
Photograph: Stephen Graham 219
11 The interior of Montreal’s Underground City, an interconnected complex of plazas,
shopping centres, office complexes and civic buildings in the downtown core,
served directly by the metro system. Photograph: Stephen Graham 258
12 Deira City Center Mall, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which is virtually impossible
to access except by car or taxi. Pedestrian exits lead only to the car park and the
complex is entirely surrounded by multilane highways. Photograph: Stephen Graham 269
13 ‘Glocal’ transoceanic optic fibre networks connecting the major metropolitan
regions of Europe, the east coast of the Americas and Africa, 1997.
Source: Vedel (1997), 34 304
14 The ‘ring of steel’ in the City of London. Photograph: Stephen Graham 320
15 London Docklands: a classic defensive glocal enclave with police cordons,
digital CCTV surveillance, dedicated roads for goods access, defensive elite
housing spaces and customised rail, air, energy, water and satellite connections.
Photographs: Stephen Graham 326
 PLATES / XVI

16 The Sohonet under construction in the Soho district of London, a centre of

media activity. Source: Sohonet Web page www.sohonet.co.uk 334
17 The Doxford International Business Park, configured for call centres and back
offices, on the outskirts of Sunderland. Source: Twedco, 1999 355
18 Armed security personnel manning a gated checkpoint at the entrance to a
South African suburb, 1996. Source: Bremner (n.d.) 379
19 Defensive office complex in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Photograph: Stephen Graham 381
20 Michael Dear and Steven Flusty’s conceptualisation of the fragmented landscape
of postmodern urbanism, drawn from their work on US cities.
Source: Dear and Flusty (1998), 61 404
21 Defensive condominium complexes under construction beyond the traditional
streetscape in the Pudong district of Shanghai, China, 1999.
Photograph: Stephen Graham 421
22 The fast lane on the Massachusetts turnpike in Boston: a classic example of the
use of information technology to support local infrastructural bypass and
the construction of a premium network space. Cars equipped with transponders
enter the tolled highway without stopping. Tolls are electronically debited from
users’ bank accounts. Photograph: Stephen Graham 431
23 Looking north across Los Angeles to Bunker Hill. Photograph: Stephen Graham 463
 FIGURES

1.1 Satellite communication as saviour in the Developing World: an advertisement

for Inmarsat. Source: Inmarsat 24
1.2 Our deep cultural fear of the collapse of networked infrastructures: the ‘Y2K’
phenomenon, after the (non-)event. Source: Boston Globe, 6 January 2000, A13 25
1.3 An advertisement of the Sprint telecommunications firm, stressing the reliability
of its networks as a basis for e-commerce. Source: Sprint Corporation 27
1.4 Exploiting the destructive wake of the ‘Love bug’ virus: Xdrive’s advertisement for
Internet storage and backup services. Source: New York Times, 8 May 2000, YN2 29
2.1 The growth and integration of electricity transmission systems in urbanising
Pennsylvania, 1900–30. Source: Hughes (1983), 10–13 46
2.2 The modern idea of linear technological ‘progress’ via ever more elaborate and
capable scientific, technological and infrastructural systems. Source: Smith (1995),
from Compton (1952) 48
2.3 Electrical appliances and automobile tyres as harbingers of a dynamic, exciting
urban future: advertisements for General Electric refrigerators (1931) and
Goodrich tyres (1931). Source: Corn and Horrigan (1984), 42 49
2.4 The diffusion of AT&T telephony in the United States towards ubiquitous,
standardised access. Source: Abler (1977), 333 51
2.5 The continued influence of the modern infrastructural ideal on contemporary
urban communications: the planned development of Melbourne’s optic fibre
network. Source: Newton (1991) 51
2.6 A crucial influence on the modern infrastructural ideal: Haussmann’s ‘regularising’
strategy for Paris, 1853–1870, showing the system of boulevards that was
carved through the city. Source: Chaoy (1969), 50 54
2.7 The boulevard as the organising framework for laying out gas lighting, water
mains, drains and sewers in Haussmann’s regularisation plans for Paris.
Source: Kostof (1994b), 14 54
2.8 The water distribution network in Madrid, 1948: a fully integrated and ubiquitous
system according to the demands of the modern infrastructural ideal.
Source: Gavira (1995), 13 57
2.9 The ‘foggy geographies’ of urban water infrastructure: the example of Manhattan.
Source: Reiser et al. (1996), 73 58
2.10 The 1811 commissioners’ plan of Manhattan, which established the uniform,
and infinitely extendible, rectilinear grid. Source: Pope (1996), 34 61
2.11 The Chicago plan of 1909: a master plan to impose civic order on an expanding
metropolis. Source: Hall (1988), 177 63
2.12 Soria y Mata’s strategy for a linear city, 1882: an extreme form of using integrated
infrastructure networks to structure urban growth. Source: Barnett (1986), 176 65
2.13 The expansion of household access to urban infrastructures in the West.
Source: Dupuy (1991), 42 69
 FIGURES / XVIII

2.14 The starkly gendered construction of the telephone: An AT&T advertisement of 1910.
Source: AT&T archives; Fischer (1992), 158 70
2.15 ‘The telephone unites the nation’: the portrayal of AT&T’s nationwide telephone
system as supporting the construction of a powerful, homogeneous country.
Source: Bell Telephone Canada; Fischer (1992), 163 75
2.16 Keynesian regional infrastructure planning: North Eastern Electricity Board
advertisement, 1967. Source: NEEB 76
2.17 Electricity pylon as an icon of modernisation and collectivisation in postwar,
communist Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. Source: Gold (1997), 101 78
2.18 The national extension of the modern infrastructural ideal: the National
electricity grid in England and Wales, 1994. Source: Thrift (1996a), 307 80
2.19 A modernisation approach to the development of transport networks in developing
countries: the model of Taffe et al. (1963) 86
3.1 Telecommunications industry alliances, 1997. The map is already considerably out
of date, for example MCI severed relations with BT on being taken over by
WorldCom in 1998. Source: Winsbury (1997), 29 98
3.2 Defining urban location by topological connection: ‘first class’ hotels on French
highway networks. Source: Dupuy (1995), 27 120
4.1 Vertical segmentation of the UK electricity infrastructure. Source: Guy et al.
(1997), 200 142
4.2 Virtual segmentation of the US highway infrastructure. Source: Toll Roads
Newsletter, March 1999, 8, 14 143
4.3 Segmentation of the UK telecommunications infrastructure. Source: Guy et al.
(1997), 201 144
4.4 Infrastructure potential for competition. Source: Israel (1992), 52 146
4.5 Pathways to unbundled networks. Source: based on World Bank (1994), 56 152
4.6 Diagrammatic representation of the three types of infrastructural bypass 167
5.1 The logic of unbundled infrastructures: a schematic representation of
‘hub and spoke’ infrastructure networks which use ‘tunnel effects’ to traverse
non-valued territory. Source: Graham and Marvin (1996), 59 201
5.2 The shift in the United Kingdom from the uniplex metropolis to the multiplex
urban region, as envisaged by Patsy Healey (personal communication, 1999) 205
6.1 The rebundling of cities: how large, packaged developments under single ownership
combine residences, workplaces, malls, restaurants and hotels in a single complex.
Source: Dick and Rimmer (1998), 2313 226
6.2 The process of grid erosion, according to Albert Pope (1996, 60, 94), through
which open gridded streets give way to laddered streets where every destination
has an exclusive highway entrance/exit 229
6.3 Advertisement for the Visteon voice-operated Internet system for US luxury
cars, 1999. Source: New York Times, 14 February 2000 231
6.4 Geodemographic targeting: the Acorn system used by UK utilities.
Source: Winter (1995), 15 240
6.5 The segmentation of the Washington DC Metropolitan Area into nine discrete
‘lifestyle communities’ using a geodemographic profiling system.
Source: Knox (1993c), 215–17 241
 FIGURES / XIX

1 6.6 The correlation between high income and access to the Internet, 1998.
2 Source: Moss and Mitra (1998), 29 245
3 6.7 An unbundled highway, offering many types of lanes for specified classes of user.
4 Source: Toll Roads Newsletter, March 1998, 1 250
5 6.8 ‘Wormholing’ through the gridlock: the bypassing effect of electronically tolled
6 private highways. Source: Solomon (1996), 42 252
7 6.9 The social bias of the SR 91 highway, showing how it is used largely by wealthier
8 socioeconomic groups. Source: SR 91 Web site at http://airship.ardfa.calpoly.
9 edu/~jwhanson/sr91main.html 254
10 6.10 The 6.2 mile skywalk and tunnel system linking 26 million ft2 of office space in
11 downtown Houston, Texas. Source: Pope (1996), 114 258
12 6.11 A cross-section of John Portman’s Westin Peachtree Center in Atlanta, Georgia,
13 opened in 1976. Source: Pope (1996), 130 260
6.12 The gating of American residential developments: Luymes’ (1997) analysis of
14
the growing incidence of gating in advertised real estate developments in
15
selected US cities. Source: adapted from Luymes (1997), 193 272
16
6.13 Peripheral new towns, or rebundled cities, planned or under construction
17
around the edge of Jakarta, 1998. Source: Dick and Rimmer (1998), 2313 278
18
6.14 Advertisement for the Jestra Villas complex in Manila, the Philippines.
19
Source: Connell (1999), 426 280
20
6.15 The ‘smart home’ concept in the late 1990s. Source: Schoechle (1995), 443 285
21
6.16 IBM advertise a ‘smart home’ system, emphasising intelligence and security
22
for the mobile professional. Source: IBM Home Director 286
23
6.17 Contrasting configurations of more affluent utility users with smart meters and
24
poorer users with prepayment meters. Source: Marvin and Guy (1997), 126, 128 298
25
7.1 Glocal infrastructure requirements of global network firms, focusing on transport
26
and communications. Source: Rimmer (1998), 85 312
27 7.2 The Amsterdam CityRing® initiative. Source: PTT Telecom Netherlands
28 promotional brochure 314
29 7.3 The optic fibre network in central London run by City of London
30 Telecommunications. Source: COLT Web site at http://www.colttelecom.
31 com/english/corporate/mn_corp13.html 319
32 7.4 Artificial platform cities as envisaged for Tokyo: 1 km2 urban platforms imposed
33 on the cityscape to support new infrastructure and super-high-rise development.
34 Source: Obitsu and Nagase (1998), 327 324
35 7.5 The carefully configured ‘glocal’ infrastructure connections of the London
36 Docklands development. Source: adapted from Chevin (1991), 47 325
37 7.6 The four ‘new towns in town’ development: enclaves built on key infrastructure
38 nodes in Bangkok. Source: Kaothien et al. (1997), 6 328
39 7.7 Backlash against the colonisation of San Francisco neighbourhoods by affluent
40 Internet and multimedia companies and their employees: lobbying by the
41 San Francisco Bay Guardian 331
42 7.8 Advertisements for Internet-ready real estate in Manhattan, New York: the
43 ‘Plug ’n’ go’ workspace programme and the New York Telecom Exchange.
44 Sources: New York City Economic Development Corporation; New York
45 Telecom Exchange 333
 FIGURES / XX

7. 9 Mitsubishi Electric Corporation’s concept of a modular technopolis, complete

with customised infrastructural connections. Source: Rimmer (1991), 259 338
7.10 The Multimedia Super Corridor in Malaysia. Source: Allen (1999), 207 340
7.11 ‘Urban utopia?’ A critical reflection on the Multimedia Super Corridor from
Kuala Lumpur’s Star newspaper. Source: Tim Bunnell (personal communication) 342
7.12 The SiJoRi growth triangle. Source: Parsonage (1992), 308 346
7.13 The Pearl River Delta megalopolis. Source: Woo (1994), 332 348
7.14 Schematic representation of the emerging urban form in China’s networked
megacities on the eastern seaboard. Source: Gaubatz (1999), 265 351
7.15 Customised interchanges between networked infrastructures and transport
modes at the North Carolina Global Transpark. Source: Kasarda et al. (1996), 38 361
7.16 A typology of export-oriented trade spaces. Source: Chen (1995), 599 362
7.17 The Priority Pass programme: a fee-based system allowing access to luxury
airport lounges at every international airport in the world 366
7.18 ‘Bringing Heathrow to the centre of London’: the Heathrow Express link, an
excellent example of glocal bypass, planned to link directly with the
trans-European high-speed TGV rail network 368
7.19 The high-bandwidth access points of the US Internet trunk network run by
the GTE company. Source: http://www.bbn.com 370
7.20 The uneven ‘dot-com’ geography of central Boston, Massachusetts, 1999.
Source: courtesy of Matthew Zook, University of California at Berkeley (personal
communication); see http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~zook/pubs/acsp1998.html 376
8.1 The use of the Internet in global protest movements: Wasserman’s view in the
Boston Globe, 10 December 1999 402
 TABLES

2.1 Fordist spatial organisation, transport and communications 67

3.1 The programme of wholesale infrastructural privatisation in the United
Kingdom, 1984–91 95
3.2 Dual circuits of water provision 132
4.1 The marketability of infrastructure 150
4.2 Infrastructure: degree of public/private responsibility 151
4.3 Contractual arrangements for water supply 155
4.4 Value of infrastructure privatisations in developing countries, 1988–93
(a) by subsector (b) by region 157–8
4.5 Country infrastructure: coverage and performance 162
4.6 Infrastructure transitions in Africa 163
4.7 Pathways applicable to infrastructure networks 165
5.1 Understanding the embeddedness and time–space capacity of different
infrastructure networks 193
6.1 Urban megaprojects under development or planned in Pacific Rim cities, 1995 224
6.2 The alliances formed in the UK’s newly liberalised electricity market, 1998 238
7.1 Ranked scores of global cities by the competitiveness of their telecommunications
infrastructure, 1998 315
 BOXES

2.1 The telephone and the metropolis, 1880–1940 50

2.2 Development plans and integrated infrastructure 63
2.3 Integrated infrastructure and modern urban utopias 64
2.4 A modernisation approach to the development of transport networks in
developing countries 86
3.1 The obsolescence and physical decay of urban infrastructure: the example of
the United States 93
3.2 Paradigm challenges to infrastructure planning: the case of urban transport 105
3.3 The internal contradictions of comprehensive urban highway programmes:
urban ‘coherence’ versus urban ‘fragmentation’ 108
3.4 Feminist critiques of the modern networked household 126
3.5 Transport and the gendering of the modern city 127
3.6 The political economy of transport networks in developing countries 129
3.7 The social and geographic dualisation of urban infrastructure in developing
cities: the example of water 131
4.1 Examples of delegated infrastructure 154
4.2 Liberalised infrastructure in the United States 159
4.3 Liberalisation in the Ghana cellular telephone market 160
4.4 Community infrastructure: water supply 160
5.1 ‘Cyborg’ readings of contemporary urbanism 187
5.2 Relational urban theory (I) ‘Terminal architectures’ and ‘zero defect’ enclosures 207
5.3 Relational urban theory (II) Connection paradoxes in contemporary urban
landscapes 209
6.1 Infrastructure networks and enclave formation: ‘grid erosion’, ‘spatial inundation’
and the computerising automobile system in US cities 229
6.2 Electronically tolled private highways in North America and Australia 253
6.3 ‘Malls without walls’: Business Improvement Districts as secessionary
streetscapes 262
6.4 Strategies of secession: how malls, theme parks and urban resorts work to
withdraw from the wider urban fabric 268
6.5 Packaging advanced IT and telecommunications into real estate developments:
‘smart’ condominium complexes and ‘telecommunities’ in North America 274
6.6 Constructing affluent enclaves within the centre of Developing World ‘megacities’
(I) The case of São Paulo 282
6.7 Constructing affluent enclaves within the centre of Developing World
‘megacities’ (II) The case of Mumbai (Bombay) 284
6.8 ‘Zero tolerance’ and the ‘annihilation’ of the spaces of the homeless in US cities 292
6.9 Urban polarisation and the ‘unphoned’ 293
6.10 Bridging ‘digital divides’? Marginalised urban spaces and the Internet 294
 BOXES / XXIV

6.11 The dual configuration of ‘smart’ energy consumption systems: the urban social
effects of prepayment metering in UK utilities 298
6.12 The ‘crashing down of technological systems’: post-communist restructuring
and the collapse of energy systems in Russia 300
7.1 Dedicated urban optic fibre grids and the competitive struggle between
‘global’ cities 314
7.2 Global connections and local disconnections in global city cores: the case of
the City of London 318
7.3 Interconnecting enclaves of new development in an extending megacity:
the case of Bangkok 328
7.4 Customising a new urban corridor to the needs of global information capital:
Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor 340
7.5 ‘Glocal’ infrastructure investment and the explosive urbanisation of the
Singapore–Johor–Riau growth triangle 346
7.6 Customising call centre enclaves in the north-east of England: Newcastle
Business Park and Doxford International Business Park 354
7.7 Back office enclaves in the Developing World: the Jamaica Digiport Initiative 356
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Between us, this book is the culmination of nearly thirty years’ fascination with the complex
intersections of cities and networked technologies. Splintering Urbanism has had an
exceptionally long, tortuous and sometimes extremely painful gestation over a period of
nearly a decade. It would not have been completed without the unstinting help, support and
kindness of a wide range of people and institutions.
First, and most important, we must offer our loving thanks to Annette Kearney and Nicola
Turner for their remarkable encouragement and support throughout the book’s lengthy, and
often intrusive, emergence. Without them we wouldn’t have moved past the first page.
Second, we have received on-going support and encouragement from many friends and
colleagues to develop and hone our thinking about cities, technology and infrastructure
networks over the period of the last decade or so. Thanks to everyone who has inspired,
helped and provided us with ideas and support.
At Newcastle University we owe a particular debt to Simon Guy, who provided key inputs
into early stages of Chapter 2, as well as broader intellectual inputs into the book. Both of us
would also particularly like to thank James Cornford, Alan Gillard, Andy Gillespie, John
Goddard, Patsy Healey, Mark Hepworth, Ranald Richardson, Elizabeth Storey, Geoff Vigar,
and John Wiltshire and all our colleagues for their support and encouragement over the past
decade.
Further afield, we could not have got started on this project without the long-term
encouragement of Manuel Castells, Olivier Coutard, Ken Ducatel, Peter Hall, Richard
Hanley, Patrick Le Galès, Doreen Massey, Margit Mayer, Jean-Marc Offner, Jane Summerton
and Erik Swyngedouw. More recently the book has benefited immensely from the feedback,
ideas and support of Yuko Aoyama, Ash Amin, Neil Brenner, Manuel Castells, Ellen Dunham-
Jones, Jenn Light, Bill Mitchell, Steven Pinch, Saskia Sassen, Barney Warf and James Wheeler.
Thanks to you all for your criticism, comments, endorsements, enthusiasm and suggestions!
At a more individual level, Stephen Graham would like to express his gratitude to the
following members of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, for their support and
kindness during his visiting professorship there in 1999–2000: Sue Delaney, Joe Ferreira,
Bernie Frieden, Duncan Kincaid, Malo Hutson, Ceasar McDowell, Turi McKinley, Bill
Mitchell, Bish Sanyal, Qing Shen, Mike Shiffer and Anthony Townsend. The support of
the School, and especially the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), con-
tributed much to the final completion and writing up of Splintering Urbanism. Thanks also
to colleagues at Newcastle for covering for my absence, and at Clarke University, King’s
College London, Hull University, Leeds Metropolitan University, New York University, the
New York Academy of Sciences, Brooklyn Technical College (CUNY) and the University of
California at Berkeley for constructive and helpful comments on presentations of various
parts of this book’s contents.
Simon Marvin would like to thank all his former colleagues at the Centre for Urban
Technology, the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape and other departments
and research centres at Newcastle University for ten happy and stimulating years of
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / XXVI

collaboration on cities and technology. Many thanks also to Peter Brandon, Ian Cooper,
Michael Goldsmith, Alan Harding, Michael Harloe and Tim May for creating an exciting new
context for interdisciplinary work on cities and technology at the research centre for
Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF) at Salford University. Simon would also like
to thank Steve Connor, Walter Menzies, Joe Ravetz and Simon Shackley for many interesting
discussions about the environment, cities and regions. Finally, he offers his gratitude to United
Utilities, and particularly the former research and development director, Roger Ford, for
supporting the endowment that allows him to spend time thinking about cities and
technologies.
This book, more than most, has been made possible only by drawing on and synthesising
a huge body of work by a wide range of scholars. The debts we have built up here are too
numerous to list in full. But our special thanks are due to the following for finding time for
friendship, illuminating discussion or for producing work of the very highest quality that has
helped us so much in the production of various parts of the book: Asu Aksoy and Kevin
Robins on restructuring Istanbul, Ash Amin on democratisation, Alessandro Aurigi on IT and
public space, Karen Baker on water networks, Hugh Barton on environmental neigh-
bourhoods, Eran Ben-Joseph on the modern ideal, Neil Brenner on scales and state theory,
Stann Brunn on defensive landscapes, Tim Bunnell on the Multimedia Super Corridor,
Manuel Castells on all aspects of the ‘network society’, Ken Corey on IT in Singapore, Olivier
Coutard on network regulation and airport links, Mike Crang on urban cyberspaces, Susan
Drucker and Gary Gumpert on communication and public space, Paul Drewe on networks
and planning, Ellen Dunham-Jones on post-industrial landscapes, Gabriel Dupuy for his
pioneering work on ‘network urbanism’, Robert Evans on the sociology of knowledge, Joe
Ferreira on Internet discrimination, Steven Flusty on postmodern urban theory, Matthew
Gandy on histories of the networked metropolis, Andy Gillespie on geography and networks,
Barbara Graham and David Holmes on Melbourne CityLink, Simon Guy on the
environmental sociologies of cities, Patsy Healey on planning, power and the ‘multiplex city’,
Graham Haughton on urban environmental issues, Thomas Hughes on urban sociotechnical
change, Malo Hutson on labour market exclusion and IT, Maria Kaika on water and urban
history, John Langdale on telecommunications and globalisation, Kent Larson on the ‘smart’
home, Jennifer Light on the history of home security, Kristen Little on ‘wiring the barrio’,
everyone involved in the CNRS Groupement de Recherche Réseaux at LATTS in Paris, for
paving the way, David Lyon on surveillance, Ceasar McDowell on IT and cultural politics,
Neill Marshall on cities and teleservices, Andy Merrifield on public space and resistance, Bill
Mitchell on infrastructure, fragmentation and rebundling, Pat Mokhtarian on telecoms and
transport, Mitchell Moss on the Internet and the city, Tim Moss, Morten Elle and Suzanne
Baslev on the restructuring of infrastructure, Clive Norris on cities and CCTV, Jean Marc
Offner on networks and territoriality, Susan Owens on energy and cities, Jorge Otero-Pailos
on architectural ‘bigness’, Joe Painter on urban democratisation, Marcus Power on the
City of London, Joe Ravetz on sustainable cities, Ranald Richardson on back offices, Peter
Rimmer on transport and telecom flows in the Pacific and restructuring in Jakarta, Jon
Rutherford on planning and telecommunications, Saskia Sassen on global cities and global
city networks, Sueli Ramos-Schiffer and Ricardo Toledo Silva on utility restructuring in Brazil,
Andres Rodriguez-Pose on inward investment in Brazil, Suzanne Speak on marginalised
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / XXVII

neighbourhoods, Jane Summerton on sociologies of technology, Gerry Sussman on global

information labour, Erik Swyngedouw on spatiality and water and social power in the ‘cyborg’
city, Joel Tarr on urban history, Anthony Townsend on cities and IT and the invaluable
telecom-cities listserve, Emy Tseng on broadband and Internet routing, Jo Twist on IT and
community, Mark Wilson on global back offices and Matt Zook on urban Internet
geographies. All faults in our reading of this body of work do, of course, rest with us!
Third, we owe a considerable debt to everyone who helped in the production side of the
book. We owe a special thank-you to Gwyneth Ashworth, Graphic Designer in the Repro-
graphic Unit at Salford University. Gwyneth did a fantastic job skilfully transforming the
often crumbled, damaged and blurred plates, tables and figures into the superb illustrations
presented here. We would also like to thank Pam Allen at SURF for help in tracing the
numerous permissions for the illustrations. At Routledge, Tristan Palmer was extremely
supportive during the early stages; Sarah Lloyd and Sarah Carty helped keep the project alive
during long dormant phases; Andrew Mould and Ann Michael have provided superb support
during what inevitably was a very complex production process.
Fourth, some paragraphs or passages from the following chapters of Splintering Urbanism
have appeared in slightly modified form in published journal articles. Chapter 1 – S. Graham
(2000), ‘Introduction: cities and infrastructure networks’, International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, 24 (1), 114–20; S. Marvin, S. Graham and S. Guy (1999), ‘Privatised
networks, cities and regions in the UK’, Progress in Planning, 51 (91–165). Chapter 3 – S.
Marvin and N. Laurie (1999), ‘An emerging logic of water management, Cochabamba,
Bolivia’, Urban Studies 36 (2), 341–57. Chapter 4 – S. Guy, S. Graham and S. Marvin (1997),
‘Splintering networks: cities and technical networks in 1990s Britain’, Urban Studies, 34 (2),
191–216. Chapter 5 – S. Graham (1998), ‘The end of geography or the explosion of place?
Conceptualising space, time and information technology’, Progress in Human Geography, 22
(2), 165–85. Chapter 6 – S. Graham (2000), ‘Constructing premium networked spaces:
reflections on infrastructure networks and contemporary urban development’, International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24 (1), 183–200; S. Marvin and S. Guy (1997),
‘Smart meters and privatised utilities’, Local Economy, 12 (2), 119–32; S. Graham and S.
Speak (2000), ‘Service not included: marginalised neighbourhoods, private service
disinvestment, and compound social exclusion’, Environment and Planning A, 1985–2001.
Chapter 7 – S. Graham (1999), ‘Global grids of glass: on global cities, telecommunications
and planetary urban networks’, Urban Studies, 36 (5–6), 929–49. Chapter 8 – S. Marvin and
S. Guy (1997), ‘Infrastructure provision, development processes and the coproduction of
environmental value’, Urban Studies, 34 (12), 2023–36; S. Marvin, H. Chappells and S. Guy
(1999), ‘Pathways of smart metering development: shaping environmental innovation’,
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 23, 109–26. Chapters 9–10 – S. Graham
(2000), ‘Constructing premium networked spaces: reflections on infrastructure networks
and contemporary urban development’, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 24 (1), 183–200; S. Graham and P. Healey (1999), ‘Relational concepts of space
and place: issues for planning theory and practice’, European Planning Studies, 7 (5), 623–46.
Finally, we would like to thank the following for permission to include plates, figures and
tables. Cover picture, National City SW, CA, Maptech, www.maptech.com. Plate 2, Jerde
Partnership International, Venice CA; Plate 5, the Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / XXVIII

MD; Plate 3, Photo Oikoumene, World Council of Churches; Plate 6, P. Andreu and MIT
Press, Cambridge MA; Plate 7, Woman’s Journal, IPC Media, London; Plate 13, Vedel
Thierry and CNRS–CEVIPOF, Paris; Plate 18, Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic (eds), Blank
– : Architecture, Apartheid and After, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam; Plate 20, Blackwell
Publishers, Oxford. Figure 1.1, Inmarsat, London; Figures 1.2 and 8.1, Boston Globe, Boston
MA; Figure 1.3, Sprint Corporation, Kansas City; Figure 1.4, Xdrive Inc, Santa Monica CA;
Figure 2.1, the Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD; Figures 2.2 and 2.4, MIT
Press, Cambridge MA; Figure 2.3, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Figures 2.5,
6.17 and 7.9, Longman Group, Harlow; Figure 2.6, George Braziller Inc, New York; Figure
2.7, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles; Figures 2.8 and 3.2, Flux,
CNRS Central IV, Paris; Figure 2.9, Queens Museum of Art, New York; Figures 2.10, 6.2
and 6.10–11, School of Architecture, Rice University, Houston TX; Figure 2.11, the Art
Institute of Chicago; Figure 2.12, Perseus Book Group, New York; Figure 2.13, Editions
Armand Colin, Paris; Figure 2.14, AT&T Archives and University of California Press; Figure
2.15, Bell Telephone Canada and University of California Press; Figure 2.16, Northern
Electric & Gas, Newcastle upon Tyne; Figure 2.17, E. F. & N. Spon, London; Figure 2.18,
Sage Publications, London; Figure 2.19, Geographical Review, American Geographical
Society, New York; Figure 3.1, Intermedia, International Institute of Communications,
London; Figures 4.1, 4.3, 6.1 and 6.13, Urban Studies, Carfax Publishing Co., Abingdon;
Figures 4.2 and 6.7, Toll Roads Newsletter, Frederick MD; Figures 4.4–5, International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development, Washington DC; Figures 5.1 and 7.10, Routledge/
Taylor & Francis, London; Figure 6.3, Visteon Automotive Systems, Dearborn MI, and New
York Times; Figure 6.4, Utility Week, Reed Information Services, East Grinstead; Figure 6.5,
Prentice Hall International, Hemel Hempstead; Figure 6.8, City, Next City, Canada; Figure
6.9, Ninety-one Express Lanes, Orange County CA; Figure 6.12, Landscape and Urban
Planning, Elsevier Science, Barking; Figure 6.14, Environment and Urban Planning A, Pion,
London; Figure 6.15, Telecommunications Policy, Pergamon Press, Oxford; Figure 6.16,
IBM Home Director, Morrisville NC; Figure 7.1, HarperCollins Publishers, London; Figure
7.2, Media Partners International, Amsterdam; Figure 7.3, COLT Telecom Group, London;
Figure 7.4, Pergamon Press, Oxford; Figure 7.5, Building, Building (Publishers), London;
Figure 7.6, Dr Utis Kaothien and the National Economic and Social Development Board of
Thailand, Bangkok; Figure 7.7, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco; Figure 7.8, New
York City Economic Development Corporation and New York Telecom Exchange; Figure
7.11, the Star, Kuala Lumpur; Figures 7.12 and 7.16, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford; Figure
7.13, the Chinese University Press, Hong Kong; Figure 7.14, Built Environment, Alexandrine
Press, Oxford; Figure 7.15, National Productivity Review, John Wiley & Sons, New York;
Figure 7.17, US Immigration and Naturalization Service; Figure 7.18, Heathrow Express,
London; Figure 7.19, GTE Interworking, Irving TX; Figure 7.20, Matthew Zook, University
of California, Berkeley. Table 2.1, Belhaven Press, London; Table 3.1, John Wiley & Sons,
New York; Table 3.2, Urban Studies, Carfax Publishing Co., Abingdon; Tables 4.1–7,
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Washington DC; Table 6.1,
Environment and Urban Planning A, Pion, London; Table 6.2, Utility Week, Reed
Information Services, East Grinstead; Table 7.1, Communications Week International, EMAP
Media, Peterborough.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / XXIX

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint
material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder
who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future
editions of this book.
Stephen Graham (s.d.n.graham@ncl.ac.uk)
Simon Marvin (s.marvin@salford.ac.uk)
Newcastle upon Tyne, September 2000
How is one to conceive of both the organization
of a city and the construction of a collective
infrastructure?
(Michel Foucault, 1984, 239) The town is the correlate of the road. The town
exists only as a function of circulation and of
circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which
create it and which it creates. It is defined by
entries and exits: something must enter it and exit
from it.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1997, 186)

I should tell you of the hidden [city of] Berenice,

the city of the just . . . linking a network of wires
and pipes and pulleys and pistons and counter-
weights that infiltrates like a climbing plant.
(Italo Calvino, 1974, 148) Cities are like electrical transformers: they increase
tension, accelerate exchanges, and are endlessly
churning human lives.
(Fernand Braudel, 1967,
cited in Paquout, 2000, 83)

Cities are the summation and densest expressions

of infrastructure, or more accurately a set of
infrastructures, working sometimes in harmony, Cities accumulate and retain wealth, control and
sometimes with frustrating discord, to provide us power because of what flows through them, rather
with shelter, contact, energy, water and means to than what they statically contain.
meet other human needs. The infrastructure is a (Beaverstock et al., 2000, 126)
reflection of our social and historical evolution. It
is a symbol of what we are collectively, and its
forms and functions sharpen our understanding of
the similarities and differences among regions,
groups and cultures. The physical infrastructure
consists of various structures, buildings, pipes,
roads, rail, bridges, tunnels and wires. Equally If the city is to survive, process must have the final
important and subject to change is the ‘software’ word. In the end the urban truth is in the flow.
for the physical infrastructure, all the formal and (Spiro Kostof, 1992, 305)
informal rules for the operation of the systems.
(Herman and Ausubel, 1988, 1)
 PROLOGUE

Tales of the networked metropolis

Plate 2 The Fashion Island mall, developed by the Jerde Partnership, in Los Angeles. Source: Jerde
Partnership (1999), 82
 PROLOGUE / 2

D O W N T O W N C O R E S O N G L O B A L G R I D S O F G L A S S

The US telecommunications firm WorldCom/MCI has built an optic fibre network covering
only the core of central London. Only 125 km long, it carries fully 20 per cent of the whole
of the United Kingdom’s international telecommunications traffic. This is only one of a
rapidly emerging global archipelago of urban optic fibre grids concentrated in the urban cores
of the world’s fifty financial capitals in Asia, Europe, Australasia, and North and South
America. Such networks serve no other places. A widening global web of transoceanic and
transcontinental fibre networks interconnects these high capacity urban grids, which are
carefully located to serve the most communications-intensive international firms. However,
whilst the cores of global financial centre spaces reach out to the globe with unprecedented
power, increasing efforts are being made to ‘filter’ their connections with their host cities. In
London, for example, the so-called ‘ring of steel’ supports electronic surveillance systems
and armed guards on every entry point into the financial district. Cars entering have their
number plates read automatically. Stolen cars are detected within three seconds. And the
potential for the facial recognition of drivers, by linking automatically with digitised
photographs on national licence records, exists in the system and has already been tested.

W A L K I N G O N W A T E R

In many developing cities the ideal of distributing drinkable water and sewerage services to
all has long been abandoned. Instead, highly dualistic systems are often in place. In the Indian
megacity of Mumbai (Bombay), for example, residents of informal settlements actually use
the water pipes which distribute drinkable water to affluent gated condominium complexes
as perilous footways for transportation. But they have no access whatever to the water supplies
within the pipe. Instead, such settlements are often forced to pay extremely high prices for
bottled water that is brought in by tanker and sold by private entrepreneurs at huge profit
margins.

C U S T O M I S I N G I N F R A S T R U C T U R E S F O R

I N V E S T M E N T E N C L A V E S

In the newly constructed tourist and manufacturing enclaves on Bintan island, Indonesia –
a few miles to the south of Singapore – a telephone call or data communication link across
the international boundary to Singapore is now counted as ‘local’. One across the enclave walls
to the surrounding Indonesian territory, however, is charged as ‘international’. In Rio Grande
do Sul, in southern Brazil, the state government has promised to build a new port, a dedicated
canal link and utilities, rail and road links, in order to lure in a US$600 million General
Motors car plant. All these expensive new infrastructures will be provided free of charge and
will be used exclusively by the company. Because of the expense involved to the state
government in this ‘bidding war’, basic water, energy and road infrastructures for people
living in poverty across the state are at risk of being undermined or even withdrawn.
 PROLOGUE / 3

C O L L A P S I N G T E C H N O L O G I C A L S Y S T E M S

The doomsday scenarios about the collapse of infrastructure and technological systems
due to the ‘Y2K’ bug were not, on the whole, matched by experience. But, almost without
comment, the late 1990s saw the very real and widespread collapse of electricity, power
and communications systems in Russia. One of the central modernisation efforts of the
communist state had centred on the development of extensive and accessible electricity,
telephone, water and heating systems within and between Russian towns and cities, initially
to support industrialisation. Since the collapse of communism, however, many of these systems
have decayed and collapsed. Sometimes this has been due to simple neglect and the lack
of resources, spares and skilled technicians. In the northern cities of Russia, for example, the
free municipal heating systems that made the climate bearable have sometimes ceased to
function, a process that has significantly accelerated out-migration. But the more worrying
trend is the large-scale theft of infrastructure networks, especially trunk electricity systems and
communications grids. Over 15,000 km of electrical trunk cable have been stolen in recent
years by criminal gangs and people in desperate poverty, to produce metals that can be sold
on the black market for export. In a striking process of ‘demodernisation’, large parts of
Russia now face power and electric outages for long periods of time as the tendrils that
connected them with modernity are literally carted off and melted down for a quick buck.
Not surprisingly, there have been devastating consequences for quality of life, economic
development and essential services. This process, needless to say, has forced the wealthy and
powerful to secure private and uninterruptible power and communications resources for the
enclaved spaces where they live. However, those outside such increasingly defensive enclaves
are not so fortunate.

B Y P A S S I N G T H E A I R P O R T C R O W D S

New technologies are widely being adopted to allow favoured, rich and highly mobile
travellers to pass seamlessly and quickly through ports, airports and rail terminals, whilst
other passengers face traditional, and in many cases intensifying, scrutiny. Through the US
Immigration and Naturalization Service Passenger Accelerated Service System (INSPASS),
for example, frequent business travellers and diplomats travelling between the United States,
Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and other advanced industrial nations can now obtain
a smart card that is programmed with the unique biometric signature of the geometry
of their hand. By swiping the card at Immigration and placing their hand on a scanner they
are allowed ‘fast track’ routes through airports. Over 70,000 people enrolled in the trial; the
Immigration and Naturalization Service are keen to make the system global. ‘Not so long ago
only strategic places under high surveillance, such as military intelligence agencies, were
guarded by such a mechanism’ (Mattelart, 1996, 305). Over 50,000 people were using the
system in 1999.
 PROLOGUE / 4

M Y P A C K E T S A R E M O R E V A L U A B L E T H A N Y O U R S !

Whilst enormous investment is going into new optic fibre ‘pipes’ for the Internet, exponential
increases in demand continually fill up any new space, creating Internet congestion. In
response, companies like Cisco, which make the ‘smart’ routers and switches that organise
flows on the Internet, are now devising ways of ‘sifting’ the most valued and important
‘packets’ of information from those that are deemed less important. The idea is that, in times
of Internet congestion, the most valued ‘packets’ from the most profitable customers will be
allowed to pass unhindered whilst the rest are blocked. Thus, beneath the rhetoric that the
Internet is some egalitarian and democratic space, profound inequalities are being subtly and
invisibly integrated into the very protocols that make it function.

F R O M O P E N G R I D S T O C L O S E D U R B A N S T R E E T S

Many urban streets in North America, Asia, Africa and Latin America are now privatised and
self-contained rather than open and interconnected. Such streets act as entry points to ‘gated’
or ‘master-planned’ communities. These are carefully segregated and ‘fortressed’ from the
rest of the city through walls, gates and high-technology surveillance systems, yet sustained
through guarded, dedicated highway gates, customised water and energy connections, and
telecommunications grids, that selectively connect them to the wider urban constellation and
the universe beyond. The private governments of such spaces are actively exploring the delivery
of their own water, transport and energy services to match their telecom networks, further
removing them from involvement in the broader metropolitan fabric and enhancing their
emergence as quasi-medieval city states. One gated community near Phoenix, Arizona, now
even operates its own fleet of electric vehicles which cannot be used outside its boundaries
on public highways (Kirby, 1998).

S K Y W A L K C I T I E S A N D G L O B A L C I T A D E L S

At the same time, in the downtown cores of North American cities like Houston, Toronto
and Minneapolis, the extending logic of ‘skywalk’ systems is bypassing the traditional street
system. Skywalks link extending webs of office and shopping complexes downtown with
carefully monitored, air-conditioned, and hermetically sealed pedestrian networks, what
Boddy (1992) terms the ‘analogous city’.
Airports, freight zones, retail malls, sports stadia and university, research, hospital, media
and technology campuses are similarly emerging as zones of intense regional and global
interchange whilst at the same time walls, ramparts and CCTV systems are constructed which
actively filter their relationships with the local urban fabric. In Baltimore, for example, David
Harvey notes the paradox that, whilst African American women cross these boundaries daily
to clean some of the world’s most famous hospitals (for example, Johns Hopkins), they are
unable to access health services when they are ill because of lack of health insurance.
Meanwhile ‘life expectancy in the immediate environs of these internationally renowned
 PROLOGUE / 5

1 hospital facilities is among the lowest in the nation and comparable to many of the poorer
2 countries of the world’ (2000, 136). Carlo Ezecieli (1998) calls these places ‘global citadels’.
3 Through such trends the physical fabric of many cities across the world is starting to fragment
4 into giant cellular clusters – packaged landscapes made up of customised and carefully
5 protected corporate, consumption, research, transit, exchange, domestic and even health-care
6 spaces. Each tends to orient towards highway grids, global telecommunications connections,
7 premium energy and water connections, whilst CCTV and security guard-protected ‘public
8 private spaces’ mediate their relationships with their immediate environments. Thus they
9 tend to turn their backs on traditional street fronts and the wider urban fabric, carefully
10 filtering those ‘undesirable’ users deemed not to warrant access for work, play, leisure,
11 residence or travel. The new American football stadium at Foxboro, Massachusetts, for
12 example, is being built with an access road that is solely dedicated to owners and users of
13 corporate boxes; all other fans must use the old public highway.
14 A tragic example of the starkness of such carefully designed local disconnections came on
15 14 December 1995 at the huge Walden Galleria Mall on the edge of Buffalo NY. An employee
16 of the mall, Cynthia Wiggens, was trying to cut across a seven-lane highway from the public
17 city bus stop when she was run down and killed by a ten-ton truck. City buses were not
18 allowed to enter the mall, every aspect of which had been designed to attract high-spending
19 middle- and upper-income consumers travelling exclusively by car (Gottdeiner, 1997, 132).
20
21
22 P R I V A T E ‘ S M A R T ’ H I G H W A Y C O R R I D O R S

23
24 In some cities, urban highways, too, are increasingly privatised, profit-oriented and customised
25 to the needs of affluent commuters on particular urban corridors. In cities like Toronto, San
26 Diego, Melbourne and Los Angeles new privately funded highways use completely automatic
27 electronic tolling technologies to create entirely new transport and development corridors that
28 are superimposed on old public highway grids. Land parcels are sold off by the highway
29 corporation to create integrated corridors designed to serve affluent motorists. In some
30 ‘electronic highways’ tariffs are electronically altered in ‘real time’ according to demand so
31 that they can guarantee free flow and tempt in frustrated commuters from gridlocked public
32 highway grids, allowing paying commuters to ‘wormhole’ through some of the most
33 congested public highways in North America. Drivers’ bank accounts are precisely debited
34 according to the times and distances of travel. In Los Angeles commuters enjoy a saving of
35 forty minutes compared with normal driving times along the ten-mile public highway.
36
37
38 T H E U L T I M A T E C O M M U T E

39
40 Driven by fear of car-jacking and the inexorable gridlocking of the city’s streets – a city with
41 8,500 murders a year, a rate ten times that of New York – the most privileged residents of
42 the Brazilian megacity of São Paulo have discovered the ultimate means to escape the
43 constraints of the highway, the street and even the terrestrial surface in their journeys around
44 the city: a personal helicopter. At over 400 and increasing rapidly, the New York Times reports,
 PROLOGUE / 6

São Paulo’s personal helicopter fleet is the fastest growing in the world, a powerful symbol
of the almost surreal extremes of wealth and poverty in the city (15 February 2000, p. 1). ‘Why
settle for an armoured BMW when you can afford a helicopter?’ asks Eric Wassen, a local
dealer. At the same time the 3.7 million daily users of the city’s 10,400 buses face heightening
delays, pollution and violence amidst a chaotic, collapsing public transport system and
heightening risks of violence.

M U L T I P L Y I N G U T I L I T Y G R I D S

In the privatised utility markets of the United Kingdom people can now choose from dozens
of gas suppliers, electricity companies and telecoms providers, and sometimes even water
firms – firms whose headquarters are scattered all over the developed word. Singaporean
cable. Dutch telecommunications. American energy. French water. In some cities ‘multi-
utilities’ are emerging offering energy, water and telecoms on a ‘one-stop shop’ basis. Citizens
can now back up their search for environmentally friendly food, transport and housing by
paying extra for ‘green’ electricity inputted to the network by specialised companies from
renewable sources. Housing tenants can similarly access ‘red’ electrons generated by socially
conscious companies. For privileged consumers, new information technologies open up a
virtual market place of different providers and value-added services. But for lower-income users
the same technologies tend to be configured differently, to help distance suppliers from
low-income people through the use of ‘top up’ smart and pre-payment cards. These involve
no direct contact between supplier and consumer. They require users – who tend to be among
the most immobile in society – to travel physically to ‘top them up’. And they often trap
people on higher tariffs and away from the benefits of competition.
 1 INTRODUCTION

Networked infrastructures, technological

mobilities and the urban condition

Plate 3 Electric power lines near Durban, South Africa, which run through Umlazi
township without serving any of the people who live there. Photograph: Photo
Oikoumene, World Council of Churches
 INTRODUCTION / 8

A critical focus on networked infrastructure – transport, telecommunications, energy,

water and streets – offers up a powerful and dynamic way of seeing contemporary cities
and urban regions (see Dupuy, 1991). When our analytical focus centres on how the wires,
ducts, tunnels, conduits, streets, highways and technical networks that interlace and infuse
cities are constructed and used, modern urbanism emerges as an extraordinarily complex
and dynamic sociotechnical process. Contemporary urban life is revealed as a ceaseless and
mobile interplay between many different scales, from the body to the globe. Such mobile
interactions across distances and between scales, mediated by telecommunications, transport,
energy and water networks, are the driving connective forces of much-debated processes
of ‘globalisation’.
In this perspective, cities and urban regions become, in a sense, staging posts in the
perpetual flux of infrastructurally mediated flow, movement and exchange. They emerge as
processes in the distant sourcing, movement and disposal of water reserves and the remote
dumping of sewage and waste. They are the hotbeds of demand and exchange within inter-
national flows of power and energy resources. They are the dominant sites of global circulation
and production within a burgeoning universe of electronic signals and digital signs. They
remain the primary centres of transnational exchange and the distribution of products
and commodities. And they are overwhelmingly important in articulating the corporeal
movements of people and their bodies (workers, migrants, refugees, tourists) via complex and
multiple systems of physical transportation.
The constant flux of this urban process is constituted through many superimposed,
contested and interconnecting infrastructural ‘landscapes’. These provide the mediators
between nature, culture and the production of the ‘city’. There is the ‘electropolis’ of energy
and power. There is the ‘hydropolis’ of water and waste. There is the ‘informational’
or ‘cybercity’ of electronic communication. There is the ‘autocity’ of motorised roadscapes
and associated technologies. And so on. Importantly, however, these infrastructural ‘scapes’
are not separated and autonomous; they rely on each other and co-evolve closely in their
interrelationships with urban development and with urban space.
How, then, can we imagine the massive technical systems that interlace, infuse and
underpin cities and urban life? In the Western world especially, a powerful ideology, built up
particularly since World War II, dominates the way we consider such urban infrastructure
networks. Here, street, power, water, waste or communications networks are usually imagined
to deliver broadly similar, essential, services to (virtually) everyone at similar cost across cities
and regions, most often on a monopolistic basis. Fundamentally, infrastructure networks are
thus widely assumed to be integrators of urban spaces. They are believed to bind cities, regions
and nations into functioning geographical or political wholes. Traditionally, they have been
seen to be systems that require public regulation so that they somehow add cohesion to
territory, often in the name of some ‘public interest’.
Infrastructure operators are assumed in this ideology to cover the territories of cities,
regions and nations contiguously, like so many jigsaw pieces. They help to define the identity
and development of their locality, region or nation in the process. The assumption, as Steven
Pinch argued in his classic book Cities and Services, is that utility supplies (and sometimes
public transport and telecommunications networks, too) are ‘public local goods which are,
generally speaking, freely available to all individuals at equal cost within particular local
 INTRODUCTION / 9

government or administrative areas’ (1985, 10). The implication is that, compared with other
‘point-specific’ urban services like shops, banks, education and housing, they are of relatively
little interest to urban researchers because, to all intents and purposes, they don’t really have
an urban geography in the conventional sense.
What, then, are we to make of the range of examples in the Prologue, which seem
so contradictory to such assumptions? What is happening to the previously sleepy and
often taken-for-granted world of networked urban infrastructure? How can we explain
the emergence of myriads of specialised, privatised and customised networks and spaces
evident in the above examples, even in nations where the ideal of integrated, singular infra-
structures – streets, transport networks, water grids, power networks, telephone infrastructures
– was so recently central to policy thinking and ideology? And what might these emerging
forms of infrastructure development mean for cities and urban life across an urbanising
planet?
To us, these stories, and the many other tales of networked infrastructure in this book,
raise a series of important questions. Are there common threads linking such a wide range of
cases? Are broadly common processes of change under way across so many places and such
a wide range of different infrastructure networks? How can we understand the emerging
infrastructure networks and urban landscapes of internationalising capitalism, especially when
the study of urban infrastructure has been so neglected and so dominated by technical,
technocratic or historical perspectives? How is the emergence of privatised, customised
infrastructure networks across transport, telecommunications, energy and water – like the ones
discussed above – interwoven with the changing material and socioeconomic and ecological
development of cities and urban regions? And, finally, what do these trends mean for urban
policy, governance and planning and for discussions about what a truly democratic city may
actually mean?
The rest of this book will address these questions through an international and trans-
disciplinary analysis of the changing relationship between infrastructure networks, the
technological mobilities they support, and cities and urban societies. In this first chapter we
set the scene for this discussion. We do so in six parts. First, we introduce the complex
interdependences of urban societies and infrastructure networks. Second, we explore how
contemporary urban change seems to involve trends towards uneven global connection
combined with an apparently paradoxical trend towards the reinforcement of local boundaries.
In the third and fourth parts we move on to analyse why Urban Studies and related disciplines
have largely failed to treat infrastructure networks as a systematic field of study. We point
out that, instead, it has widely been assumed that technologies and infrastructures simply
and deterministically shape both the forms and the worlds of the city, and wider constructions
of society and history. Fifth, we explore those moments and periods which starkly reveal the
ways in which contemporary urban life is fundamentally mediated by such networks: collapses
and failures. We close the chapter by drawing up some departure points for the task of the
remainder of the book: imagining what we call a critical urbanism of the contemporary
networked metropolis.
 INTRODUCTION / 10

T R A N S P O R T , T E L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S , E N E R G Y
A N D W A T E R : T H E M E D I A T I N G N E T W O R K S
O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y U R B A N I S M

Our starting point in this book is the assertion that infrastructure networks are the key physical
and technological assets of modern cities. As a ‘bundle’ of materially networked, mediating
infrastructures, transport, street, communications, energy and water systems constitute the
largest and most sophisticated technological artefacts ever devised by humans. In fact, the
fundamentally networked character of modern urbanism, as Gabriel Dupuy (1991) reminds
us, is perhaps its single dominant characteristic. Much of the history of modern urbanism can
be understood, at least in part, as a series of attempts to ‘roll out’ extending and multiplying
road, rail, airline, water, energy and telecommunications grids, both within and between
cities and metropolitan regions. These vast lattices of technological and material connections
have been necessary to sustain the ever-expanding demands of contemporary societies for
increasing levels of exchange, movement and transaction across distance. Such a perspective
leads us to highlight four critical connections between infrastructure networks and contem-
porary urbanism that together form the starting points of this book.

CITIES AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS

First, economic, social, geographical, environmental and cultural change in cities is closely
bound up with changing practices and potentials for mediating exchange over distance
through the construction and use of networked infrastructures. ‘Technological networks
(water, gas, electricity, information, etc.) are constitutive parts of the urban. They are
mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of Nature into City takes
place’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000, 1). As Hall and Preston put it, in modern society
‘much innovation proves to depend for its exploitation on the creation of an infrastructural
network (railways; telegraph and telephone; electricity grids; highways; airports and air traffic
control; telecommunications systems)’ (1988, 273).
In a sense, then, the life and flux of cities and urban life can be considered to be what we
might call a series of closely related ‘sociotechnical processes’. These are the very essence
of modernity: people and institutions enrol enormously complex technological systems (of
which they often know very little) to extend unevenly their actions in time and space (Giddens,
1990). Water and energy are drawn from distant sources over complex systems. Waste is
processed and invisibly shifted elsewhere. Communications media are enrolled into the
production of meaning and the flitting world of electronic signs. And people move their
bodies through and between the physical and social worlds of cities and systems of cities, either
voluntarily or for pleasure or, it must be remembered, through the trauma and displacement
of war, famine, disaster or repression.
 INTRODUCTION / 11

‘ONE PERSON’S INFRASTRUCTURE IS ANOTHER’S

DIFFICULTY’: URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS
AS ‘CONGEALED SOCIAL INTERESTS’

Second, and following on from this, infrastructure networks, with their complex network
architectures, work to bring heterogeneous places, people, buildings and urban elements into
dynamic relationships and exchanges which would not otherwise be possible. Infrastructure
networks provide the distribution grids and topological connections that link systems and
practices of production with systems and practices of consumption. They unevenly bind spaces
together across cities, regions, nations and international boundaries whilst helping also to
define the material and social dynamics, and divisions, within and between urban spaces.
Infrastructure networks interconnect (parts of) cities across global time zones and also mediate
the multiple connections and disconnections within and between contemporary cities (Amin
and Graham, 1998b). They dramatically, but highly unevenly, ‘warp’ and refashion the spaces
and times of all aspects of interaction – social, economic, cultural, physical, ecological.
Infrastructure networks are thus involved in sustaining what we might call ‘sociotechnical
geometries of power’ in very real – but often very complex – ways (see Massey, 1993). They
tend to embody ‘congealed social interests’ (Bijker, 1993). Through them people, organi-
sations, institutions and firms are able to extend their influence in time and space beyond the
‘here’ and ‘now’; they can, in effect, ‘always be in a wide range of places’ (Curry, 1998, 103).
This applies whether users are ‘visiting’ web sites across the planet, telephoning a far-off friend
or call centre, using distantly sourced energy or water resources, shifting their waste through
pipes to far-off places, or physically moving their bodies across space on highways, streets or
transport systems.
The construction of spaces of mobility and flow for some, however, always involves the
construction of barriers for others. Experiences of infrastructure are therefore highly
contingent. ‘For the person in the wheelchair, the stairs and door jamb in front of a building
are not seamless subtenders of use, but barriers. One person’s infrastructure is another’s
difficulty’ (Star, 1999, 380). Social biases have always been designed into urban infrastructure
systems, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In ancient Rome, for example, the city’s
sophisticated water network was organised to deliver first to public fountains, then to public
baths, and finally to individual dwellings, in the event of insufficient flow (Offner, 1999,
219).
We must therefore recognise how the configurations of infrastructure networks are
inevitably imbued with biased struggles for social, economic, ecological and political power
to benefit from connecting with (more or less) distant times and places. At the same time,
though, we need to be extremely wary of the dangers of assigning some simple causal or
deterministic power to technology or infrastructure networks per se (Woolgar, 1991).
Infrastructures and technologies do not have simple, definitive and universal urban ‘impacts’
in isolation. Rather, such large technological systems (Summerton, 1994a) or technical
networks (Offner, 1993) are closely bound up within wider sociotechnical, political and
cultural complexes which have contingent effects in different places and different times (see
Tarr and Dupuy, 1988; Joerges, 1999a).
 INTRODUCTION / 12

INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS AS EMBEDDED

GEOPOLITICS

Third, infrastructure networks make up considerable portions of the material, economic

and geopolitical fabric of contemporary cities and systems of cities. As capital that is literally
‘sunk’ and embedded within and between the fabric of cities, they represent long-term
accumulations of finance, technology, know-how, and organisational and geopolitical power.
New infrastructure networks ‘have to be immobilised in space, in order to facilitate greater
movement for the remainder’ (Harvey, 1985, 149). This means that they can ‘only liberate
activities from their embeddedness in space by producing new territorial configurations,
by harnessing the social process in a new geography of places and connecting flows’
(Swyngedouw, 1993, 306).
The ‘messy’ practices of embedding, building and maintaining infrastructure networks
beneath, through and above the fabric of cities thus infuses the politics of metropolitan areas.
They require complex regulatory articulations between markets, national and local states and,
increasingly, transnational bodies. Whilst there are global trends towards various types of
privatisation and liberalisation in the development of networked urban infrastructures, the
way in which the contested politics of network development are played out in each city, region
or nation is still closely related to the broader constructions of governance, the state, and the
market in each case (Lorrain and Stoker, 1997).

INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS AND CULTURES OF

URBAN MODERNITY AND MOBILITY

Finally, infrastructure networks, and the sociotechnical processes that surround them, are
strongly involved in structuring and delineating the experiences of urban culture and what
Raymond Williams (1973) termed the ‘structures of feeling’ of modern urban life. Networked
technologies of heat, power, water, light, speed and communications have thus been intrinsic
to all urban cultures of modernity and mobility (Thrift, 1995). They are invariably invoked
in images, representations and ideologies of urban ‘progress’ and the modern city by all sorts
of actors – developers, planners, state officials, politicians, regulators, operators, engineers,
real estate developers and appliance manufacturers, as well as artists, journalists, social
scientists, futurists and philosophers (see Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000).
Infrastructure networks have traditionally also tended to be central to the normative
aspirations of planners, reformers, modernisers and social activists to define their notions
of a desirable urban order: the good city (see Friedmann, 2000). Consider, for example,
Le Corbusier’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s utopias based on highways; the 1920s futurists’
obsession with air, rail, cruise liners and motor travel; Ebenezer Howard’s concern for
municipal rail connections; or the centrality of boulevards and sewers within Haussmann’s
nineteenth century ‘modernisation’ of Paris (see Dupuy, 1991, 105). Think, too, of the more
recent speculations about how the good city might finally be realised as a ‘cybercity’, a ‘city
of bits’ or an ‘e-topia’, laced with the latest digital media technologies and networks (Mitchell,
1995, 1999; see also Wheeler et al., 2000).
 INTRODUCTION / 13

N E T W O R K E D P A R A D O X E S : G L O B A L
C O N N E C T I O N S A N D L O C A L ( D I S ) C O N N E C T I O N S

Of course, cities, metropolitan life and infrastructural connections with (more or less) distant
elsewheres have been inextricably interwoven throughout the last 7,000 years of urban history
(Soja, 2000). What has changed in the past century, however, are:

• the intensity, power, speed and reach of those connections;

• the pervasiveness of reliance on urban life based on material and technological networks
and the mobilities they support;
• the scale of technologically mediated urban life;
• the duplicating, extending variety and density of networked infrastructures;
• the speed of sophistication of the more powerful and advanced infrastructures (see Urry,
2000b).

Today the majority of the population in the Western world, and an increasing proportion of
the developing, newly industrialising and post-communist worlds, live in cities that represent
the largest and most concentrated source of demand for water, energy and transport and
communications services. Much of the material and technological fabric of cities, then,
is networked infrastructure. At the same time, most of the infrastructural fabric is urban
‘landscape’ of various sorts. Almost every aspect of the functioning of infrastructure, the
retrofitting of new networks and the renewal of older networks is focused on the needs
of serving expanding urban areas, and the demands for communication of people, goods, raw
materials, services, information, energy and waste within and between cities.
Vast networks connect users in almost every building with more or less distant power
stations, sewage works, reservoirs, gasfields, transport grids and global communication
systems. Enormous regional, national and international networks and powerful institutions
have been constructed to suck resources into, and extract waste from, cities, and to exchange
communication between predominantly urban centres over the globe. Networked infra-
structure, in short, provides the technological links that make the very notion of a modern
city possible (Tarr and Dupuy, 1988).

CONTEMPORARY INFRASTRUCTURAL MOBILITIES:

GLOBALISATION AND LIBERALISATION

However, something quite profound is happening in the world of urban infrastructure.

Internationally, all the major urban infrastructure networks – water and waste, energy,
telecommunications and much of the transport infrastructure – are gradually being ‘opened
up’ to private sector participation in the management and provision of services. In many cases
public and private monopolies are being replaced by contested, profit-driven markets.
As a result, the infrastructure sector is now one of the most important sectors in inter-
national flows of finance, capital, technology and expertise as international infrastructure
 INTRODUCTION / 14

firms roam the world in search of healthy profits and high rates of return from lucrative niche
markets or franchises. Across the planet, the era of the monopolistic provision of standardised
services is being undermined as the World Trade Organisation, the Group of Eight, and
regional economic blocs like the European Union in Europe, NAFTA in North America,
ASEAN in South East Asia, and Mercosur in South America variously work, albeit at very
different rates and in very different contexts, to support shifts towards the liberalisation of
national and local infrastructure monopolies (McGowan, 1999).
As a result of such processes, acquisitions, mergers and strategic alliances between utility
and infrastructure corporations present some of the fastest-moving scenes on international
financial markets. Such events can dramatically change the infrastructural logics of cities and
regions almost overnight (Curwen, 1999; McGowan, 1999). This is creating new competitive
markets that complement or replace predictable and monolithic monopolies with highly
fragmented and differentiated styles of service provision with highly complex, and often
hidden, geometries and geographies.

URBAN FRAGMENTATION AND RECOMBINATION:

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AS
‘HEARTLAND’ TECHNOLOGIES

Information technologies are clearly developing as the crucial information infrastructures

mediating our increasingly information-intensive urban economies, societies and cultures
(Castells, 1996, 1998). But, as the ‘heartland’ technologies of contemporary economic,
technological and cultural change, they are also being applied to help reconstitute how more
‘traditional’ transport, energy and water networks operate. Consider, for example, the growth
of ‘smart’ highways, ‘virtual’ energy markets, access-controlled streets, CCTV-surveilled
downtown skywalks, and personalised multimedia and communications services (see Freeman,
1990).
The powers of new information technologies support the complex restructuring of urban
forms, lifestyles and landscapes. This is based on the parallel processes of fragmentation and
recombination of urban uses and functions, within and between cities and systems of cities
(Mitchell, 1999). Whilst some activities are scattering across geographical space to be
integrated electronically – ATMs, back offices, e-commerce vendors, corporate sites – infor-
mation technologies may also support the ‘renucleation’ of work, home and neighbourhood
services for certain people and places – activities that were often separated into single-use
zones during the development of the industrial, functional, city (ibid.).

PARADIGM CHALLENGES IN THE ‘NETWORK SOCIETY’

Above all, the increasingly ‘hybrid’ nature of contemporary cities, where powerful digital
connections elsewhere articulate every aspect of urban life, requires us continually to rethink
 INTRODUCTION / 15

the paradigms that we use when analysing cities. Such processes ‘challenge the long-held
privileged status of Cartesian geometry, the map, and the matrix or grid. Infrastructural links
and connectors, as well as information exchanges and thresholds, become the dominant
metaphors to examine the boundless extension of the regional city’ (Boyer, 2000, 75).
Increasingly, as Manuel Castells (1996, 1997a, 1998) suggests, these processes are directly
supporting the emergence of an internationally integrated and increasingly urbanised,
and yet highly fragmented, network society that straddles the planet. New, highly polarised
urban landscapes are emerging where ‘premium’ infrastructure networks – high-speed
telecommunications, ‘smart’ highways, global airline networks – selectively connect together
the most favoured users and places, both within and between cities. Valued spaces are thus
increasingly defined by their fast-track connections elsewhere, as any examination of the
intensifying transport, telecommunications and energy links between the dominant parts of
‘global’ cities reveals. At the same time, however, premium and high-capability networked
infrastructures often effectively bypass less favoured and intervening places and what Castells
calls ‘redundant’ users. Often such bypassing and disconnection are directly embedded into
the design of networks, both in terms of the geographies of the points they do and do not
connect, and in terms of the control placed on who or what can flow over the networks.
Through such processes, Castells predicts that:

The global economy will expand in the twenty-first century, using substantial increases in the power
of telecommunications and information processing. It will penetrate all countries, all territories, all
cultures, all communication flows, and all financial networks, relentlessly scanning the planet for new
opportunities of profit-making. But it will do so selectively, linking valuable segments and discarding
used up, or irrelevant, locales and people. The territorial unevenness of production will result in an
extraordinary geography of differential value making that will sharply contrast countries, regions, and
metropolitan areas. Valuable locales and people will be found everywhere, even in Sub-Saharan Africa.
But switched-off territories and people will also be found everywhere, albeit in different proportions.
The planet is being segmented into clearly distinct spaces, defined by different time regimes.
(1997b, 21)

BEYOND THE TERRITORIALLY COHESIVE CITY:

PROXIMITY ≠ MEANINGFUL RELATIONS!

Virtually all cities across the world are starting to display spaces and zones that are powerfully
connected to other ‘valued’ spaces across the urban landscape as well as across national,
international and even global distances. At the same time, though, there is often a palpable
and increasing sense of local disconnection in such places from physically close, but socially
and economically distant, places and people. Some have even interpreted this widespread
pattern of development as signifying some form of convergence between developed, newly
industrialised, post-communist and developing cities (Cohen, 1996).
Because of these dynamics, and the intensifying uneven development of infrastructures,
physically close spaces can, in effect, be relationally severed (Graham and Healey, 1999). At
 INTRODUCTION / 16

the same time, globally distant places can be relationally connected very intimately. This
undermines the notion of infrastructure networks as binding and connecting territorially
cohesive urban spaces. It erodes the notion that cities, regions and nations necessarily have
any degree of internal coherence at all. And it forces us to think about how space and scale
are being refashioned in new ways that we can literally see crystallising before us in the
changing configurations of infrastructure networks and the landscapes of urban spaces all
around us.
In short, emerging urban landscapes, and the relationships between infrastructure net-
works and urban spaces, seem to embody powerfully the changing dynamics of global
political economies and societies. As Carlo Ezecieli argues, from the point of view of US
cities:

while markets are establishing systems of planetary interdependence and metropolitan regions become
more and more directly related to a global dimension, there appears to be a paradoxical tendency toward
the reinforcement of local boundaries. In crime-ridden American neighborhoods buildings tend to be
fortified like military bases. In gated communities the protection of privileged circles through the
erection of physical boundaries is marketed as an attractive amenity. Primary urban facilities like large
hospitals, universities, and shopping malls, establish simulations of ‘public’ venues within physically
bounded and access-controlled environments.
(1998, 4)

T H E N E G L E C T O F N E T W O R K E D U R B A N
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E S A N D T E C H N O L O G I C A L
M O B I L I T I E S I N T R E A T M E N T S O F T H E C I T Y

Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of
distributional justice and planning power.
(Star, 1999, 379)

Unfortunately for us, a major investigation of the complex relations between infrastructure,
technology and contemporary cities such as this book is not well served by previous literature.
Outside a few specialised debates on urban transport (see Hanson, 1993), urban history
(see Tarr and Dupuy, 1988) and emerging information technologies (see Castells, 1989,
Graham and Marvin, 1996), urban infrastructure networks and the mobilities they support
have traditionally hardly been considered the most exciting focus of debate in urban studies
and policy making. ‘Because these systems include complex technological artifacts, they are
often viewed as “engineers’ stuff”, not worth the interest of the social sciences’ (Coutard,
1999, 1).
Why is this so? Why do disciplines which purport to understand the nature of the contem-
porary metropolis systematically neglect the networked infrastructures and technological
mobilities that are so important in defining its nature, form and process? Five reasons can be
identified.
 INTRODUCTION / 17

PARALLEL DISCIPLINARY FAILINGS

First, the inertia of disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries has severely hindered
understanding of a subject which intrinsically demands an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
starting point. When literatures on networked urban infrastructure have emerged in Planning,
Geography, Urban Studies, Engineering, Sociology and Architecture, they have often been
inward-looking, technical, and overly specialist.
By way of illustration, we can identify parallel failings across geography, sociology and
architecture which have contributed in different ways to these disciplinary failings to develop
critical, cross-cutting perspectives on urban infrastructures and technological networks as a
whole.

G E O G R A P H Y : A S S U M P T I O N S O F T E C H N O L O G I C A L

‘ N E U T R A L I T Y ’

Taking Geography first, Michael Curry (1998, 2) has suggested that, with a few notable
exceptions, geographers (especially English-speaking ones) have not embraced the study of
what he calls ‘geographic technologies’ like utilities and IT systems. This is for the simple
reason that ‘they have adopted the view, so widespread, that all technologies are natural
and neutral’ (ibid.). Nor has the obvious invisibility of most contemporary utilities and
communications systems fitted with Geography’s traditional emphasis on land use and the
visualities of urban life. Curry also wonders whether, deep down, ‘many geographers may not
harbor fears that in the end some critics are right, and that these new technologies will lead
to the death of space and place, and hence of their own discipline’ (ibid.).
One subdiscipline within geography, that specialising in transport, has managed to emerge,
but it has remained a fairly closed subdiscipline. Transport geography has only very limited
connections with broader constructions of contemporary urban geography. Hamilton and
Hoyle have lamented that broader debates about the city ‘rarely give transport the coverage
it deserves’ (1999, 1).

S O C I O L O G Y : T H E L I M I T A T I O N S O F C L A S S I C A L

F O R M U L A T I O N S

In Sociology the early efforts of writers like Lewis Mumford (1934) to create overarching and
historically informed treatments of the interplay of cities, mobilities and technologies have
not been built on. According to Armand Mattelart, the sociology of communication, in
particular, has largely failed in the necessary task, which is to ‘do away with the separations
between different areas and crossing the angles of vision of the disciplines in order to bring
out the manifold logics by which the multiple forms of technology have molded, and in turn
been molded by, the history of humankind, its mentalities, and its civilizations’ (1996, ix).
Recent work on the analysis of ‘large technical systems’ has, however, led to some progress
here (see Mayntz and Hughes, 1988; LaPorte, 1991; Summerton, 1994a; Coutard, 1999).
 INTRODUCTION / 18

As in Geography, the caprices of intellectual trends have continually rendered networked

infrastructures, and the technological mobilities they support, unfashionable in Sociology. For
example, despite the extraordinary motorisation of cities in the past thirty years or so, John
Urry noted recently that ‘sociology has barely noticed . . . automobility, or even the car more
generally’ in its preoccupation with the strolling and flânerie of the walking urbanite.
Sociology has been even more neglectful of other networked infrastructures (1999, 5).
In response, Urry urges sociologists to look beyond the classical and often rather static
twentieth century formulations centring on how class, gender, ethnicity and social mobility
were constructed within individual ‘societies’ bounded by nation states. Instead he suggests
the need to reformulate the discipline as a ‘sociology of mobilities’ (2000b). This would deal
centrally with the ‘postsocietal’ nature of the contemporary world, with its ‘diverse mobilities
of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes’ and its ‘complex interdependencies
between, and social consequences of, these diverse mobilities’ (2000a, 185). Urry’s is one of
the clarion calls to which we address this book.

A R C H I T E C T U R E A N D U R B A N I S M : B E Y O N D T H E B U I L D I N G

A S I S O L A T E D U N I V E R S E

In the last thirty years or so, urbanists and architects, too, have tended to neglect networked
infrastructures and the flows and mobilities that they support. They have tended to focus
overwhelmingly on the designed spaces within building envelopes, rather than the networked
infrastructures that knit buildings together, binding and configuring the broader spaces of
metropolitan life.
As Jon Jerde, a well known architect of theme parks and entertainment complexes, suggests,
‘architects rarely focus attention on the process that creates – and the conditions that surround
– the object or building’ that they are designing or deconstructing (Jerde Partnership, 1999,
203). Because architects ‘rarely define sites in multiples’, they tend not to see them ‘in a way
that will permit exploration of the organizational or network architecture’ of buildings that
combine closely with infrastructure or organisational networks across diverse spaces
(Easterling, 1999a, 2). In the 1970s, in particular, many architects largely turned their backs
on the problems of the wider metropolis (Wall, 1996, 158).

‘THE FORGOTTEN, THE BACKGROUND,

THE FROZEN IN PLACE’: INFRASTRUCTURE
NETWORKS AS THE ‘CINDERELLA’ OF
URBAN STUDIES

Second, and following from this discussion, it is clear to us that urban infrastructure networks
and the mobilities they support have very much been left as the ‘Cinderella’ of contemporary
urban studies and urbanism. Most social analyses of cities still address urban sociologies,
economic development, governance and politics, urban cultures and identities, and urban
 INTRODUCTION / 19

ecologies and environments, without seriously exploring the roles of networked infrastructures
in mediating all. As Susan Star argues, such networks tend still to be ‘the forgotten, the
background, the frozen in place’ (1999, 379).
Even discussions of the cultures, sociologies and geographies of urban ‘modernity’
often fail to assert the essential contribution of networked infrastructures of all types to the
processes and experience of modern urbanism (see, for example, Savage and Warde, 1993).
Urban studies, moreover, often tend towards static formulations of the nature of urban society
and urban life. Only rarely do discourses of the city ‘script the city as a process of flows’ – an
approach which tends to emphasise the roles of massive technological networks and
infrastructural mobilities in mediating urban life (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000, 2).
Consider, for example, the ways in which urban and regional studies have begun to address
consumption issues with considerable energy. Debates have sprung up surrounding the
restructuring of public services (Pinch, 1989, 1997), the links between private and public
consumption and quality of life (Rogerson et al., 1996; Miller, 1995), and the transformation
of many post-industrial city spaces into entertainment, leisure and consumption zones (see
Hannigan, 1998a). However, infrastructure networks again tend to remain largely ignored
in such debates, closed off within their inward-looking and technical subdisciplines. Very
little urban research has addressed the important shifts now under way in the consumption
and development of what we may call distributive network services that use technological
networks to distribute power, communication, water and mobility services across space and
time.

DIALECTICS OF INVISIBILITY AND

MONUMENTALISM

Third, the hidden nature of much of the contemporary physical fabric of infrastructure in many
cities has also contributed to their ‘Cinderella’ status (see Latour and Hermand, 1998). Many
urban networks in the contemporary city remain ‘largely opaque, invisible, disappearing
underground, locked into pipes, cables, conduits, tubes, passages and electronic waves’ (Kaika
and Swyngedouw, 2000, 2). They seem ‘by definition [to be] invisible, part of the background
for other kinds of work’ (Star, 1999, 380).
This invisibility has allowed the subterranean guide to emerge as a sub-genre of urban
guide and photographic books, allowing those who want to look beyond the urban myths
and legends that tend to surround the underground of cities to explore the full depth,
complexity and history of a city’s ‘root system’ (see, for example, Granick, 1947; Trench and
Hillman, 1984; Greenberg, 1998). Such books help us to visualise the hidden background
of urban networked infrastructures. Consider, for example, Robert Sullivan’s introduction to
Harry Granick’s classic book Underneath New York (1947):

Imagine grabbing Manhattan by the Empire State Building and pulling the entire island up by its roots.
Imagine shaking it. Imagine millions of wires and hundreds of thousands of cables freeing themselves
from the great hunks of rock and tons of musty and polluted dirt. Imagine a sewer system and a set of
 INTRODUCTION / 20

water lines three times as long as the Hudson River. Picture mysterious little vaults just beneath the
crust of the sidewalk, a sweaty grid of steam pipes 103 miles long, a turn-of-the-eighteeenth-century
merchant ship bureau under Front Street, rusty old gas lines that could be wrapped twenty-three times
around Manhattan, and huge, bomb-proof concrete tubes that descend almost eighty storeys into the
ground.
(iv)

The tendency to obscure the management and development of infrastructures within highly
technical and technocratic institutions, driven by the supposedly depoliticised, instrumental
rationalities of engineering cultures, has served further to obfuscate the worlds of networked
urban infrastructure. Transport, for example, is ‘usually confined to a separate, substantive
treatment which tends to leave to the transport experts the physical definition of its function
and its location in specialized zones’ (Solà-Morales, 1996, 14). Very often, infrastructure
networks remain politically contained by the widespread and powerful assumption that state
or private monopolies will simply provide services when, and where, they are needed, as public
or quasi-public services to sustain urban life. Reflecting this, the whole of infrastructure is
sometimes captured within catch-all terms like ‘public works’.
However, it is important to note that a reverse tendency to infrastructural invisibility and
political obfuscation does periodically emerge. Rather than being hidden, here infrastructure
networks are revealed, celebrated and constructed as iconic urban landmarks, as embodiments
of the ‘phantasmagoria’ of particular urban times and places (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000).
Such is the case, for example, with contemporary satellite ground stations (Rio, Cologne,
Tokyo, London Docklands, Roubaix, Bangalore), international airports (Hong Kong, Osaka,
Denver and many others), high-tech bridges (Boston, Newcastle, Istanbul), private highways
studded with ‘public art’ (Melbourne), fast train networks and stations (Europe’s TGVs), and
telecommunications towers (Barcelona). Such constructions are part of what Castells calls
‘a new monumentality [which is] able to provide symbolic meaning to spatial forms’ in times
of unprecedented metropolitan fluidity, sprawl and the spread of relatively similar and
indistinguishable ‘generic’ urban landscapes (1999c). Many such projects continue to embody
national and local ‘symbols of modernity and arrival’ (Vale, 1999, 391).
In the last two centuries the construction of infrastructure as symbolic marker characterised
the modernist highway networks of the post-World War II period, and the water towers, dams,
power stations, reservoirs and water treatment stations of nineteenth century West European
cities (see, for example, Trench and Hillman, 1984). In a curious process of recycling, many
of the latter are now being reconstructed as art galleries and leisure centres, celebrating
postmodern urban consumption whilst inadvertently also symbolising the metaphorical and
physical shift of much of the industrial and productive fabric of the networked city beneath
the urban scene (see Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000). London’s Tate Modern – an old
electricity generating station – is a classic example.
 INTRODUCTION / 21

THE BANALISATION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MOBILITIES:

TENDENCIES TO ‘BLACK-BOX’ URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE
NETWORKS

Fourth, and as a result of their general neglect, infrastructure networks have often remained
taken for granted. To use the parlance of social studies of technology, they have been ‘black-
boxed’. For many Western urbanites, certainly, using a phone, driving a car, taking an airline
or rail trip, turning a tap, flushing a toilet, or plugging in a power plug, is so woven into the
fabric of daily life, and so ‘normalised’ and banal that (whilst they function adequately) it
scarcely seems important.
Infrastructure services, and the huge technological networks that underpin them, seem
immanent, universal, unproblematic – ‘obvious’ even. People tend not to worry where the
electrons that power their electricity come from, what happens when they turn their car
ignitions, how their telephone conversations or fax and Internet messages are flitted across
the planet, where their wastes go to when they flush their toilets, or what distant gas and water
reserves they may be utilising in their homes.

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND THE

DOMINANCE OF EVOLUTIONIST TREATMENTS
OF INFRASTRUCTURAL HISTORY

A final problem is that, with the exception of some of the work of a group of conceptually
sophisticated French researchers (see Dupuy, 1991; Offner, 1993, 2000, and the French
journal Flux, 1991–99), and a growing corpus of writers in the Anglo-American Journal of
Urban Technology, critical research into urban infrastructure has recently tended to focus on
historical rather than contemporary contexts (see Chant and Goodman, 1998; Goodman
and Chant, 1999; Roberts and Steadman, 1999).
Like the mainstream of social research on technology, these historical analyses have
often adopted narrow versions of technological determinism. Here, new infrastructural
and technological innovations are seen to ‘impact’ linearly on cities and urban life (see, for
example, Garrison, 1990). ‘Infrastructural technology is often regarded as largely un-
problematic and even autonomous in shaping the life and form of urban areas’ (Aibar and
Bijker, 1997).
This view reflects the classic, deterministic view of the role of networks like transport and
telecommunications in which ‘changes in [infrastructure] technology lead inexorably
to changes in urban form’ (Hodge, 1990, 87). In this view, new networked infrastructures
like the Internet become little more than ‘progenitor[s] of new urban geometries’ (ibid.,
87). A simple, linear, cause-and-effect chain is assumed where the technology itself is seen as
the direct causal agent of urban change.
The subdiscipline of Urban History has made much more effort than most to explore the
relations between cities and urban infrastructure networks and technologies (see Johnson-
McGrath, 1997). But even here, Konvitz et al. argue that:
 INTRODUCTION / 22

historians asserting the importance of their area’s specialisation [in technology and infrastructure]
have often failed to win the recognition of their co-practitioners. Just as urban historians often
focused on one city, historians of urban technology often focused on one technology. Within this
framework, a growing corpus of work provided sophisticated accounts of streetcar systems, railroad
networks, and automobiles as distinctive subjects and as part of their individual relationships to urban
change.
(1990, 288)

Such approaches, in turn, relate to the wider dominance of technological determinism,

especially in Western culture. Even on the rare occasions when attention looks beyond
one network, the reliance on such determinism, with its ‘simple yet highly plausible before-
and-after narrative structure’ tends to prevail (Smith and Marx, 1995). Such a view often
combines with a one-dimensional perspective where attention focuses on one city, or one set
of supposedly homogeneous technological ‘impacts’ which are then posited for all cities
everywhere.
Commonly, this intellectual device is quickly translated into the broader use of
technological and infrastructural depictions of historical urban ‘ages’: from the ‘hydraulic
civilisations’ of the first urban centres in Mesopotamia (Soja, 2000, 51) to the ‘steam’,
‘electric’, ‘auto’, ‘nuclear’ and ‘information age’ metropolises of the past three centuries
(see, for example, Garrison, 1990). The problem with such approaches is that they tend to
reify technologies as having overwhelming power in ushering in simple and discrete societal
shifts which seem to amount to some natural process of urban evolution. The parallels between
historical periods tend to be underplayed; the tendency of newer networks to overlie and
combine with, rather than replace, earlier networks is often forgotten; and, once again, the
forms and processes of city life tend to be simply read off as the deterministic result of the
intrinsic nature of the new generation of technology. As Mattelart suggests:

only an evolutionist concept of history as cut up into successive, watertight stages might deceive us
into believing that the memory of centuries does not continue to condition the contemporary mode
of communication. As proof, one need only point out the kinship between the messianic discourses on
the networks of steam and electricity in the nineteenth century, and those that in the twentieth century
accompany the policies of economic and social recovery through information and high-tech.
(1996, xvi; see Marvin, 1988; Offner, 2000)

F L E E T I N G G L I M P S E S O F N E T W O R K E D
F R A G I L I T Y : E X P E R I E N C E S A N D F E A R S O F
I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L C O L L A P S E

The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server
is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.
(Star, 1999, 382)
 INTRODUCTION / 23

Clearly, then, when infrastructure networks ‘work best, they are noticed least of all’ (Perry,
1995, 2). Catastrophic failures, on the other hand, serve to reveal fleetingly the utter reliance
of contemporary urban life on networked infrastructures. This is especially so where the entire
economic system has been reconstructed around highly fragile networks of computers and
information technology devices (see Rochlin, 1997).
More than ever, the collapse of functioning infrastructure grids now brings panic and fears
of the breakdown of the functioning urban social order. ‘Fear of the dislocation of urban
services on a massive scale,’ writes Martin Pawley, is now ‘endemic in the populations of all
great cities,’ simply because contemporary urban life is so utterly dependent on a huge range
of subtly interdependent and extremely fragile computerised infrastructure networks (1997,
162).
In fact, in all parts of the world the fragility of infrastructure networks is becoming ever
more obvious, just as infrastructurally mediated connections across distance become more and
more intrinsic to contemporary urban life (see Suarez-Villa and Walrod, 1999; Barakat, 1998;
Rochlin, 1997). Natural disasters and famines, especially in developing nations, often
underline the particular fragility of infrastructural connections in such places (see Figure 1.1).
But in developed nations, too, ‘the earthquakes in Kobe or Los Angeles remind us how fragile
the ideology of progress can be’ (Allen, 1994b, 13).
It is worth exploring some examples of the fears and failures that surround contemporary
infrastructural collapse.

FEARS OF INFRASTRUCTURAL COLLAPSE AND THE

Y2K PHENOMENON

The remarkable global debate about the feared impacts of the ‘Y2K’ computer bug at the dawn
of the year 2000 was a particularly potent example of the fears of the comprehensive collapse
of systems of technological mobility and flow (see Figure 1.2). Stoked up by an entire
‘doomsday industry’ of self-interested IT consultants, John Gantz, from the International
Data Corporation, reckons that over US$70 billion of public and private money was actually
wasted, largely in developed nations, altering systems that would not have collapsed any way.
To some, it was little more than a complex and giant hoax based on exploiting the deep-seated
cultural fears of technical collapse and social panic that lie deep within our infrastructurally
mediated civilisation (James, 2000).

THE COMPLEX REALITIES OF TECHNICAL COLLAPSE

But the effects of infrastructure collapses, when they happen, are very real. Often, they are
catastrophic. Such effects have been all too apparent in the past thirty years. Most familiarly,
they have occurred through wars (Sarajevo 1984, Beirut 1978, Belgrade 1999), earthquakes
Figure 1.1 Satellite communication as saviour in the Developing World: an advertisement
for Inmarsat. Source: Inmarsat
 INTRODUCTION / 25

Figure 1.2 Our deep cultural fear of the collapse of networked infrastructures: the ‘Y2K’ phenomenon,
after the (non-)event. Source: Boston Globe, 6 January 2000, A13

(Los Angeles 1996, Kobe 1995, Turkey and Taiwan 1999), ice storms (Montreal 1997–98),
floods (Central America 1998), supply crises (oil in Western cities 1973) or societal revolutions
(Russia and Eastern Europe 1989– ).
Instances of technical malfunctioning also need to be considered. In developing cities
these are often common and periodic, even with new and ‘high-tech’ infrastructure networks.
In June 2000, for example, it was reported that the national optic fibre grid threaded within
and between India’s main ‘hi-tech’ cities was regularly collapsing owing to a bizarre culprit.
Rats, living inside the network ducts, had developed a taste for the PVC casing of the fibres.
They were even eating that hallowed symbol of the ‘information age’ – the glass optic fibres
themselves – regularly breaking the network in the process.
Technical failures occur in developed cities, too, but with less frequency and more
attention. For example, on 5 April 2000 the entire London stock exchange was forced to stop
for eight hours owing to a ‘software glitch’, seriously undermining its reputation. In early 1998
the electricity supply to the city of Auckland in New Zealand collapsed for nearly a month,
with devastating consequences, because the newly liberalised power market led to a lack of
back-up connections. And in February 1975 a fire left a 300 block stretch of Manhattan’s
Lower East Side without a phone system for twenty-three days. This collapse led to every-
thing from massive economic disruption to reports of increased isolation, alienation and
psychological stress (Wurtzel and Turner, 1977).
 INTRODUCTION / 26

SOCIETAL REVOLUTIONS AND INFRASTRUCTURAL

COLLAPSE: THE ‘DEMODERNISATION’ OF
POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES

In the cities of the post-communist world, the massive recent societal shifts show how
previously taken-for-granted infrastructure systems can quickly decay or be withdrawn on a
more or less permanent basis. In the cities of Siberia and the far north in Russia, for example,
the collapse of many heavily subsidised municipal heating systems, along with the wider
economic and social deterioration, has encouraged those who can to flee. Since 1989 over
100,000 people have left Murmansk alone.
In addition, major elements of Russia’s power transmission and telecommunications
systems are effectively being stolen by criminal gangs to be melted down and sold overseas
on the black market for metals. More than 15,000 miles of power lines were pulled down
between 1998 and 2000 alone, yielding 2,000 tons of high-quality aluminium, worth more
than US$40 million on the international black market. Not surprisingly, this widespread
collapse of Russia’s infrastructure systems has plunged large parts of Russia into power outages
for weeks or months at a time in what the mayor of the town of Kiselevsk called the ‘crashing
down of the whole technological system’ (quoted in Tyler, 2000, A10). In such circumstances
it is not surprising that the social and economic enclaves of the new capitalist and criminal
elites are starting to adopt strategies of securing their own private infrastructure services that
are more reliable.

WHEN TURNING OFF BECOMES SUICIDE: NETWORK

COLLAPSES IN THE ALWAYS-ON DIGITAL ECONOMY

In Western and advanced societies, and increasingly in fast-computerising developing ones

too, the pervasive importance of twenty-four-hour systems of electrically powered computer
networks, in supporting all other infrastructures, makes electrical power cuts and outages
particularly fearful. The explosive growth of electronic commerce, consumption, and distri-
bution and production systems – infrastructures that are mediated at every level by electrically
powered computers and telecommunications – means that these days we are all, in a sense,
‘hostages to electricity’ (Leslie, 1999, 175).
With the growing electronic mediation of society, the economy and culture, information
and communications systems, along with the electricity systems that support every aspect
of their operation, need to be as reliable and secure as possible twenty-four hours a day.
The consequences of collapse and outages can be extremely expensive and economically
catastrophic. ‘The always-on economy, by definition, depends upon continuous energy. For
a large business online, the cost of a power interruption can exceed $1 million per minute’
(Platt, 2000, 116–28). For stock markets and electronic financial services firms the costs can
be much greater still.
This point is not lost on the infrastructure firms themselves in their advertising, or in their
increasing investment in duplicate and back-up power systems to protect on-line service
 INTRODUCTION / 27

Figure 1.3 An advertisement of the Sprint telecommunications firm, stressing the reliability of its
networks as a basis for e-commerce. Source: Sprint Corporation

providers, Internet backbones, cable television and phone companies (see Figure 1.3). Nor
is it missed by leading IT and software entrepreneurs. Taking an unusually reflective and
critical stance for a software engineer, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, caused a
furore among readers of the bible of the high-tech elite, Wired. He suggested that the
mediation of human societies by astonishingly complex computerised infrastructure systems
will soon reach the stage when ‘people won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because
they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide’ (2000,
239).

UNLEASHING NETWORKED COLLAPSES:

INFRASTRUCTURAL WARFARE

Nor is the fragility of electronically and electrically mediated economies lost on those
who, for the last 10,000 years of urban history, have always driven the leading edge of
infrastructural and technological innovation: military strategists. In the burgeoning debates
on ‘cyberwar’ or ‘infowar’, stress falls on the ways in which the orchestrated and systematic
sabotage of an enemy’s societal infrastructure networks may now be a useful complement to,
or even replacement for, physical weapons of mass destruction (see Robins and Webster,
1999, chapter 7).
 INTRODUCTION / 28

Of course the Kosovo war was very much about the physical reality of blowing people into
small pieces. But the United States also deployed a new type of bomb which rains down
graphite crystals to disable comprehensively electrical power and distribution stations. It was,
the US military argued, a new method of disabling an enemy without the public relations
embarrassments of ‘collateral damage’ that often follow carpet bombing and the use of so-
called precision guided munitions (which still have a habit of killing civilians even when they
hit their target). In an adaptation of the tactics of medieval siege warfare to the networked
metropolis, freezing the elderly in their homes, disabling critical heath care systems and
destroying running water are the new weapons of choice in media-driven ‘cyber warfare’
(Ignatieff, 2000).

CATCHING THE LOVE BUG: SABOTAGE, HACKING AND

COMPUTER VIRUSES

One of the advantages of the new computerised economy was thought to be that it reduced
capitalism’s vulnerability to terrorism and theft. The use of computer viruses has removed this
illusion.
(Lawson, 2000, 11)

But perhaps the most culturally potent image of the fragility of our technically networked
civilisation comes from the phenomena of hacking, computer viruses and deliberate attempts
at sabotage. Here the simple pressing of an ‘enter’ key thousands of miles away can launch a
self-replicating virus across the Internet that can bring substantial parts of the international
technological economy to an extraordinarily expensive standstill, all within a matter of
hours.
A classic example was the ‘I love you’ or ‘Love bug’ virus, launched by a college student
in the Philippines on 3 May 2000. This virus moved to infect 45 million computers in at least
twenty nations across the world within three days, clogging and destroying corporate e-mail
systems in its wake. Overall damage was estimated at well over US$1 billion and many Fortune
500 companies were substantially affected (see Figure 1.4). The virus also exposed some of
the transnational tensions and inequalities that surround corporate IT. Some newspapers in
the Philippines, for example, expressed national pride that the country could spawn a hacker
who could bring the fragile computer communications systems of Northern corporations to
(albeit temporary) collapse.
Many other examples of viruses have emerged recently. Earlier in the year 2000, coordi-
nated attacks by computer hackers on major commercial Internet sites brought many
to expensive collapse. In a separate case, a fifteen-year-old boy from suburban Montreal
was arrested in April 2000 for bringing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Network e-mail and web
systems to near collapse at the end of 1999. The response to this particular case says a great
deal about how the punishment of individuals is unlikely to reduce such events when the
corporate communications and e-commerce systems exhibit such glaring fragility. ‘It is the
ultimate absurdity,’ writes Willson, ‘that, having brought the entire corporate world into
Figure 1.4 Exploiting the destructive wake of the ‘Love bug’ virus: Xdrive’s advertisement for Internet
storage and backup services. Source: New York Times, 8 May 2000, YN2.
 INTRODUCTION / 30

a system so unstable and vulnerable that a child can throw mighty commercial enterprises into
chaos, society believes the solution is to incarcerate the child’ (2000, 15).

W A Y S F O R W A R D : T O W A R D S A C R I T I C A L
N E T W O R K E D U R B A N I S M

Together, all these factors – disciplinary failings and the neglect of networked infrastructures,
their hidden and taken-for-granted nature, assumptions of technological determinism, and
the panic effects of networked collapses – mean that attention to infrastructure networks
tends to be reactive to crises or collapse, rather than sustained and systematic (Perry, 1995,
2). In such a context the failure to analyse systematically the complex linkages between
contemporary urban life and networked urban infrastructures as a whole is understandable.
The aim of this book is to reveal the subtle and powerful ways in which networked
infrastructures are helping to define, shape and structure the very nature of cities, and, indeed,
of civilisation. To begin the process, we would point to four crucial starting points for our
task of constructing a critical urbanism of contemporary networked societies.

ADDRESSING THE COMPLEX

INTERDEPENDENCES BETWEEN NETWORKED
INFRASTRUCTURES

With the notable exceptions of Dupuy (1991) and Tarr and Dupuy (1988), and the French
Journal Flux, the central question of how interlinked complexes of infrastructures are involved
in the social production and reconfiguration of urban space and experiences of urban life
tend to be ignored. But, as Thrift (1990) argues, transport, communications and other
networked grids, cannot be easily split apart; as ‘sociotechnical hybrids’ they rely on each
other and co-evolve in their interrelationships with urban development, urban life and with
urban space (Urry, 1999). Chains of related innovations bind infrastructure networks closely
to broader technological systems; these, in turn, are seamlessly woven into the fabric of social,
economic and cultural life.
Only very rarely do single infrastructure networks develop in isolation from changes in
others. By far the most common situation is where urban landscapes and processes become
remodelled and reconstituted on the basis of their complex articulations with a variety of
superimposed transport, communications, energy and water infrastructures (Gökalp, 1992).
As Easterling suggests, ‘many of the most interesting innovations and design inventions
appear on the cusp of change from one network to another, when one system is being
subsumed by another presumed to be more fit’ (1999b, 114). This is the case with today’s
massive investment in computer communications systems, characterised by ‘smart and flexible
patterns of switching between heterogeneous components and multiple scales of activity’
(ibid.), which are being overlaid upon older, electromechanical transport, street, energy,
communication and water networks.
 INTRODUCTION / 31

INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS AS SOCIOTECHNICAL

ASSEMBLIES OR ‘MACHINIC COMPLEXES’

Second, technologies and infrastructure networks must therefore be considered as sociotech-

nical assemblies or ‘machinic complexes’ rather than as individual causal agents with identifiable
‘impacts’ on cities and urban life (Thrift, 1995). For example, networked personal computers
are useless without modems, Internet servers, functioning software, phone and cable networks
or wired or wireless telephones or Internet channels. As we have just seen, all these, in turn,
rely on extensive, reliable electricity infrastructures which provide essential support for
a growing universe of electronic interactions and transaction systems. In the United States
the Internet consumed 8 per cent of all electricity in 1999; by 2020, some estimates suggest,
this will rise to a staggering 30 per cent!
Electronic generation and communications systems, in turn, interrelate closely with physical
movements of people, freight and raw materials over roads, railways, airline networks and
water and sewer systems. Automobiles and roads, similarly, now relate extremely closely to
the use of mobile phones, as well as to proliferating electronic and digital infrastructures
developed for managing, regulating and controlling highway use or enhancing drivers’
safety, social power or entertainment (Urry, 1999). In similar ways, water, energy and
communications networks are closely intertwined in supporting domestic and industrial life.
These interrelationships of infrastructures, moreover, are multidimensional and bidirectional,
making an open-minded, interdisciplinary position necessary before analytical progress can
be made.

PHYSICAL SYNERGIES BETWEEN INFRASTRUCTURE

SYSTEMS

Third, even the optic fibres within and between cities, which carry the bulk of the exploding
range of electronic communications, are being laid along rights of way and conduits that
tend closely to parallel infrastructural systems for physical movement (Graham and Marvin,
1994). This is not surprising when one considers that, typically, 80 per cent of the costs of
starting a telecom business come with the traditional, messy process of getting cables in the
ground to link up dispersed customers.
In central London, as in other so-called ‘global’ cities, dense webs of optic fibres are
now threaded along the beds of ‘industrial age’ canals and long-disused hydraulic power
systems, as well as through the underground subway system and water and energy conduits.
In New York the energy company Consolidated Edison offers direct fibre connections
to 2,000 buildings in Manhattan through its power conduits. And all across the world,
highway, power, water and rail companies are both offering their ducts and conduits and
rights of way to telecom companies and, in these times of liberalisation, starting to offer
telecom services themselves. ‘What makes a great railway franchise is what makes a great
telecom franchise,’ the chairman of one such company in Florida stated (quoted in Tanner,
2000, B3).
 INTRODUCTION / 32

INFRASTRUCTURE = LANDSCAPE = ARCHITECTURE!

TOWARDS ARCHITECTURES AND URBANISMS OF THE
NETWORKED CITY

Architecture has been pitilessly absorbed into the metropolis. . . . The metropolis has replaced
the city, and as a consequence architecture as a static enterprise has been displaced by architecture
as a form of software.
(Lerup, 2000, 22–3)

As a final departure point we can begin to draw on some work which has resulted from
a greater appreciation of urban networked infrastructures among architects and urbanists.
As Rem Koolhaas, one of the world’s most influential architectural critics, has suggested, for
architects infrastructure is ‘a relatively new subject . . . it allows architecture to be much less
isolated in its own territory and to find a connection with subjects dangerous and glamorous,
like demographics’ (1998a, 94).
Mobility, infrastructure networks and flows are thus emerging as major emphases of
contemporary architectural and urbanist theory and practice. This is being especially encour-
aged by the mass diffusion of information technologies and automobiles, along with the
simultaneous production and organisation, through franchises, mass production techniques,
modern logistics systems and corporate networks, of multiple and generic built spaces that
are intimately coordinated across vast distances. Such strategies are about the architectural
shaping of time as well as spaces. Through them ‘generic specifications for assembling offices,
airports, highways, and many different kinds of franchises are explicitly calibrated according
to protocols of timing and interactivity’, based on their seamless interlinkage through
infrastructure networks (Easterling, 1999a, 3).
Notable urbanists like Koolhaas (1998a, b), Easterling (1999a, b) and Martin Pawley
(1997) insist, in short, that in the contemporary city, more than ever, ‘infrastructure,
architecture, and landscape amalgamate to become one complex’ (Angélil and Klingmann,
1999, 18–20). The city must now be understood as a ‘continuous, topologically formed field
structure, its modulated surface covering vast extensions of urban regions’ (ibid.). Moreover,
‘despite its inherent discontinuities, breaks and fragmented orders, a specific form of cohesion
is attributed to the contemporary city, the urban landscape perceived as a connected tissue’
(ibid.).
The implication of such views is that the conventional divisions of contemporary urban
professions must be overcome if we are to understand an urban world where ‘architecture is
declared as landscape, infrastructure as architecture, and landscape as infrastructure’ (ibid.,
20). Architecture and urbanism thus now widely recognise, and even celebrate, the fact that:

the experience of the city is increasingly subject to the flows and interchange generated by the increased
circulation of people, vehicles, and information. The rhythm of these flows, which changes the character
and function of space over time, has come to have no less significance to the experience of the city than
the height of its buildings, the width of its streets, and the disposition of its monuments. The traffic of
people, vehicles, and information are also the environment and material of the city.
(Wall, 1996, 159)
 INTRODUCTION / 33

T H E A I M O F T H I S B O O K : C O N S T R U C T I N G
A P A R A L L E L A N D C R O S S - C U T T I N G
P E R S P E C T I V E O N U R B A N A N D
I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L C H A N G E

In this book we therefore seek to respond to what we feel is an urgent need: to develop a
more robust, cross-cutting, international, critical, dynamic and transdisciplinary approach to
understanding the changing relations between contemporary cities, infrastructure networks
and technological mobilities. The book constructs a new and broad framework for exploring
the relations between contemporary cities, new technologies and networked infrastructures.
It argues that a parallel set of processes are under way within which infrastructure networks
are being ‘unbundled’ in ways that help sustain the fragmentation of the social and material
fabric of cities. Such a shift, which we label with the umbrella term splintering urbanism,
requires a reconceptualisation of the relations between infrastructure services and the contem-
porary development of cities. This book attempts to develop such a reconceptualisation.
Our perspective is deliberately very broad, extremely international and highly inter-
disciplinary. It is only through such a perspective, we believe, that an understanding of the
parallel processes of infrastructural splintering and urban change may be achieved. We have
constructed this perspective to help start breaking down three sets of barriers which, we
believe, have tended strongly to inhibit sophisticated analyses of cities, technologies and
infrastructures over the past thirty years or so.

BREAKING DOWN INTERDISCIPLINARY BARRIERS

First, we want to start to break down barriers between a range of largely separated debates
about cities, technologies and infrastructure networks. We believe that such disciplinary
barriers have long inhibited sophisticated treatment of the interplay between cities and the
sociotechnical constructions of infrastructure networks and the diverse mobilities they
underpin. In this book we therefore try to draw together relevant discussions and debates in
Urban Studies, Geography, Planning, Sociology, Architecture, Urbanism, Urban History,
Science, Technology and Society (STS), Engineering, Social Theory and Communications
Studies into a single, integrating narrative.
One inspiration for this approach comes from the French pioneering communication
theorist Armand Mattelart. His integrated analyses of space, technology, infrastructure
networks and social power draw equally on many disciplines. He writes in the preface to his
book The Invention of Communication that:

just as it was hardly obvious in the 1930s [for Lewis Mumford in his book Technics and Civilization]
to make a link between the cannon and the telegraph as instruments of vanquishing space, it is still
difficult today to legitimate a transdisciplinary approach that, for example, does not hesitate to trace the
possible kinship between the first attempts by topographers of routes of waterways to control territories
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the normalisation and classification of individuals and
 INTRODUCTION / 34

regions by the pioneers of ‘moral statistics’ according to indices of social pathology during the nineteenth
century, and the targeting of ‘consumption communities’ by modern marketing in the twentieth century.
(1996, ix–x)

APPROACHING NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURES

AS A WHOLE

Second, we seek, through such a transdisciplinary perspective, to help shift the study of
networked urban infrastructures as a whole to the centre of contemporary debates and analyses
about cities and contemporary urban life. We want to help banish the partitioning off of
networked urban worlds into the dry, technocratic and closed professional discourses of the
‘technical’ bodies which tend to run and manage them. We want to help ‘open’ the worlds
of urban networked technologies to the gaze of critical urban research. And we want to assert
that, far from being ‘boring’, ‘dull’ or ‘banal’, analysing the ways in which social, economic,
cultural or environmental power becomes extended over the times and spaces of urban life –
through the construction and use of infrastructure networks – offers us an opportunity to
construct dynamic, sophisticated and synthesising appreciations of the nature of contemporary
urban development.
Indeed, we believe that such perspectives are desperately needed. Because much of
contemporary urban life is precisely about the widening and intensifying use of networked
infrastructures to extend social power, the study of the configuration, management and use
of such networks needs to be at the centre, not the periphery, of our theories and analyses of
the city and the metropolis.
We strive throughout the book to overcome the network specialism in virtually all writing
about urban infrastructure. Wherever possible, following writers like Dupuy (1991), Hall
and Preston (1988), Thrift (1996a), Mattelart (1996), Offner (1996, 1999), and Tarr and
Dupuy (1988), we try to treat telecommunications, transport, street, energy and water
networks together and in parallel.
This is not to imply that all these networks are by any means identical to each other. Rather,
it is to stress that broadly similar trends can be identified in each and to assert that insights
into how contemporary urbanism and infrastructure networks are intertwined can best be
achieved by exploring the bundle of modern urban infrastructures together.

TRANSCENDING DIVISIONS BETWEEN THE ANALYSIS

OF ‘DEVELOPED’ AND ‘DEVELOPING’ CITIES AND
BETWEEN ‘LOCAL’ AND ‘GLOBAL’ SCALES

Finally, we want to help transcend the still common divide between the study of so-called
‘developed’ cities and ‘developing’ cities. We believe, following Cohen (1996), Robinson
(1999), King (1996) and others, that it is no longer tenable (if it ever was) to divorce the
 INTRODUCTION / 35

study of Western and developed cities from those in the rest of the world. Just as in the era
of colonial urban systems, contemporary geographical divisions of power and labour on our
rapidly urbanising planet wrap cities and parts of cities into intensely interconnected, but
extremely uneven, systems. These demand an international, and multiscalar, perspective.
As Michael Peter Smith has argued, all urban places are now, in a sense, ‘translocalities’
with multifaceted and multiscaled links and connections elsewhere. This means that ‘there is
a need to expand the study of transnational urbanism to encompass the scope of transnational
processes, as well as to focus future urban research on the local and translocal specificities of
various transnational sociospatial practices’ (1999, 133). To him ‘future urban research ought
to focus considerable attention on comparatively analyzing diverse cases of transnational
network formation and translocality construction’ (ibid., 134, original emphasis).
In a similar vein, but from an infrastructural perspective, Olivier Coutard argues that
‘studies of supranational [infrastructure systems] (such as telecommunications, energy or air
transport systems) and of urban technical networks (water supply and sewerage systems, for
example) must be related, if only because of the unifying dynamics generated by regulatory
reform in these industries’ (1999, 13).
The final goal of the book is to address these two demands. We do this by arguing that
practices of splintering urbanism are starting to emerge in virtually all cities across the globe,
whether in the developed, developing, newly industrialising or post-communist worlds, as
local histories, cultures and modernities are enrolled into internationalising capitalist political
economies in various ways. Such practices, moreover, are closely related to the development
and reconfiguration of infrastructure networks between cities.
Of course, this is not to argue that cities and infrastructure networks do not retain powerful
differences and specificities. Far from it. But it is an assertion that cross-cutting analyses of
changes in infrastructure, technology and urban development can be profitably made across
these diverse ranges of urban contexts. As Michael Ogborn suggests, understanding the
‘spaces of modernity’ of contemporary and historical cities ‘is always about traversing the
ground that lies between totalisation and difference’ (1999, 238). It is this line that we
continually negotiate throughout the book.

T H E S T R U C T U R E O F T H E B O O K

In what follows we separate our discussion into three parts. The first brings together four
chapters which piece together an historical, practical and theoretical understanding of
processes of splintering urbanism. We begin our account in the next chapter, where we explore
the construction of the previous dominant paradigm of infrastructural development, which
we call the modern infrastructural ideal. Chapter 3 then explores the range of forces that are
comprehensively unravelling this ideal. In Chapter 4 we look in more detail at the parallel
practices through which infrastructure networks can be unbundled and urban landscapes
fragmented. We complete the first part of the book in the fifth chapter, which develops a
theoretical perspective to help explain the interlinked fragmentation of cities and splintering
of infrastructures.
 INTRODUCTION / 36

Part Two includes two thematic chapters which go on to explore processes of splintering
urbanism across the world’s cities in considerable empirical detail. Urban social landscapes
are addressed in Chapter 6; the relationships between urban economies and ‘glocal’
infrastructure are explored in Chapter 7.
In Part Three, which incorporates the final, concluding chapter and a postscript, we take
stock of the preceding discussions. We explore the ways in which the complex politics and
spatialities of contemporary cities inevitably limit the degree to which the network spaces of
cities can be totally segregated from each other. We analyse the limits and resistance which
practices of splintering urbanism face. Finally, we draw out the book’s implications for urban
research and practice.
PART ONE
UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING
URBANISM

Plate 4 A skybridge walkway linking elements of the Prudential and Copley

Square ‘bundled city’ complexes in central Boston, Massachusetts: a private,
premium pedestrian network which bypasses the traditional street system.
Photograph: Stephen Graham

2 Constructing the modern networked city, 1850–1960

3 The collapse of the integrated ideal: the modern networked city in crisis
4 Practices of splintering urbanism
5 The city as sociotechnical process: theorising splintering urbanism
By considering the city as an enormous artifact,
the size and distribution of its streets, sidewalks,
buildings, squares, parks, sewers and so on can
be interpreted as remarkable physical records of
the sociotechnical world in which the city was
developed and conceived.
(Aibar and Bijker, 1997, 23)

Twentieth-century urbanism is a complex story

of coming to terms with extensive mechanical
relations, in which investments for land and
infrastructure predominate. [It is] a story of
regions opened up at the periphery under the
auspices of state subsidies and far-flung highways,
sewers, and water-supply systems. The ensuing
geography became one of single-use enclaves
wherever institutionalized planning took over,
partitioning ways of life, productive activities, and
architecture into exclusion zones.
(Waterhouse, 1993, 300)

The end of our millennium is witnessing the

consummation of the crisis of the positivist idea of
a ‘necessary and continuous’ progress without
deviations, detours or retreats.
(Mattelart, 1996, 303)

The city is a gearbox full of speeds.

(Wark, 1998, 3)
 2 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED
CITY, 1850–1960

Plate 5 What Lewis Mumford called the ‘invisible city’ – underground pipes and conduits at the junction
of Gay and Lombard Streets in Baltimore, Maryland, 1908. Source: Melosi (2000), 134

A whole history remains to be written of spaces,

which would at the same time be the history of
powers – from the great strategies of geopolitics to
the little tactics of the habitat, . . . from the
classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via
economic and political installations.
(Foucault, 1980, 149, cited in
Joerges, 1999b, 283)
1 T H E L O N G P A T H T O W A R D S ( A T T E M P T E D )
2 S T A N D A R D I S A T I O N
3
4 During the period between about 1850 and 1960 there was a general movement, particularly
5 in Western cities, from the piecemeal and fragmented provision of networked infrastructures
6 to an emphasis on centralised and standardised systems. This occurred through a major
7 expansion in both public and private sector investment in infrastructure networks (Mattelart,
8 1996; Hughes, 1983). The growth of regulated network monopolies supported the rapid
9 diffusion of water and sewerage systems throughout cities and systems of cities, and the
10 improvement of transport networks to improve circulation. Initially, private sector accom-
11 plishments focused on the expansion of the telegraph network, the development of early gas
12 distribution systems (from the early 1820s onwards), the rapid expansion of the telephone
13 and electricity networks (from the 1880s onwards) and the deployment of electric streetcars
14 (trams), subways and elevated lines. At the same, Western powers imposed adapted versions
15 of the ideal of the standardised infrastructure network across Africa, Latin America, Asia and
16 Australasia, but only for the urban spaces of the colonisers and their associated socioeconomic
17 elites (a story we shall return to in the final part of this chapter).
18 During the period 1850–1960 much of urban politics was dominated by questions
19 of infrastructural and technological investment. Western cities, in particular, were in tran-
20 sition from the older compact commercial city to the new industrial metropolis with a
21 strong core and a ring of residential suburbs. Across the urban world, small, fragmented
22 islands of infrastructure were joined up, integrated and consolidated towards standardised,
23 regulated networks designed to deliver predictable, dependable services across (and,
24 increasingly, beyond) the metropolis (Tarr and Dupuy, 1988; see Cox and Jonas, 1993, for
25 a US example).
26 At the same time, the modern metropolis became a hotbed of innovation and a maelstrom
27 of social, cultural and economic change as new notions of speed, light, power and commu-
28 nications were constructed (Thrift, 1996a). Standardised, compartmentalised notions of
29 space and time were, in a sense, constructed through the rolling out of networks across
30 wider and wider spaces (first cities, then urban systems and then international territories).
31 Many commentators argued that the growth of regional and national railway and telegraph
32 networks, in particular, seemed to require single systems for the management of time and
33 space. ‘If we all manage, throughout the entire network, to be punctual to the second,’ wrote
34 the French commentator Audibert in the 1850s, ‘we will have endowed humanity with the
35 most effective instrument for building a new world’ (quoted in Gökalp, 1992; see also Kern,
36 1986).
37 Production, distribution and consumption thus became gradually reconstituted on mass,
38 industrial scales, on the basis of networked exchange, through widening nets of superimposed
39 and interconnecting pipes, tracks, roads, wires and conduits. As Pascal Preston suggests in
40 the case of Britain:
41
42 by the end of the nineteenth century the material achievements of the past century ensured that the
43 dreams and fantasies of the ‘system builders’ had shifted way beyond anything envisaged before and
44
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 41

certainly compared to the British systems of a century before; with the approach of the era of monopoly,
mass production and modernism, they had shifted to a much grander scope of operation.
(1990, 3–4)

The elaboration of standardised networked infrastructures thus allowed all aspects of industrial
urban life to be extended and intensified. The widespread application after World War I of
‘Fordist’ notions of scientific management, rational organisation and the mass production of
standardised goods was, in essence, also a paradigm based on fully exploiting the potential
of new networked infrastructures to support industrial societies based on mass production,
distribution and consumption. ‘The new era was articulating a new organisational philosophy
extolling the virtues of economies of scale in lowering unit costs and exploding mass consump-
tion (especially in Germany and the USA). These principles implied throughput, centralised
control, coordination and diversification’ (Preston, 1990, 4). This, in turn, required the
construction of national systems of interconnected highways, rail, communications and energy
infrastructure, bringing the urban infrastructural ‘islands’ into a radically new era of regulated
interconnection and extension.
Such transitions were also intrinsically bound up with changes in culture and philosophy.
Notions of space and time, speed and culture, subjects and objects, technology and society,
were gradually recomposed. Urban landscapes were transformed and modernised. ‘The
history of an ever-expanding landscape of light which we now take for granted cannot be
ignored,’ writes Nigel Thrift (1996a, 268). At the end of the nineteenth century electrically
lit arcades, in particular, emerged as the ‘dream spaces’ of the modern city, fantastical spaces
which so obsessed cultural theorists like Walter Benjamin (1969, 1979, 1999).
From the initial, general, picture of heterogeneous, partial networks, of poorly inter-
connected ‘islands’ of infrastructure and of extreme uneven development in the infrastructural
capacities of different urban spaces emerged, over the period 1850–1960, single, integrated
and standardised road, water, waste, energy and communications grids covering munici-
palities, cities, regions and even nations. These were legitimised through notions of ubiquity
of access, modernisation and societal progress, all within the rubric of widening state power.
By the 1940s in virtually all Western cities:

the technological networks promised by nineteenth century reformers were finally in place: sewers,
water systems, tracks and electrical and telephone wires criss-crossed the city, providing services at a level
that was inconceivable in the 1890s.
(Perry, 1995, 6)

Finally, such ideas were also closely woven into wider rationalities and ideals of the emerging
urban planning movement during this period, based on the idea of rational, comprehensive
planning, driving ‘progress’ towards unitary, coherent and emancipatory cities (Fischler,
1998). Both realms, in fact – infrastructure development and urban planning – were
constructed as key elements of the broader project of modernity, as Enlightenment ideals of
universal rationality, progress, justice, emancipation and reason were applied to all areas of
social life (see Heynen, 1999). As Nan Ellin suggests, such ideals:
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 42

sought to discover that which is universal and eternal through the scientific method and human creativity,
in order to dominate natural forces and thereby liberate people from the irrational and arbitrary
ways of religion, superstition, and our own human nature. It was through reason that Enlightenment,
the conceiving of infinite possibilities, would enable the emancipation of humanity to take place:
emancipation from ignorance, poverty, insecurity and violence.
(1996, 6)

The new technologies surrounding networked urban infrastructures were thus seen to be
mechanisms to control time through instigating waves of societal progress. Space, in the form
of the physical city, was seen as an object to be rationally manipulated. First, this was to occur
through the discourses of modern city planning. Second, the annihilating effects of space
and time-transcending sewer, gas, water, road, railway, telegraphy and telephone networks
were to allow the ‘tyranny of space’ to be overcome. Networked-based modernity thus
promised the joys of perpetual transformation towards a scientifically rational and techno-
logically intense urbanism. As Marshall Berman so tellingly described, to be modern was
to ‘find ourselves in an environment that promise[d] power, joy, growth, transformation of
ourselves and the world – and at the same time, that threaten[ed] to destroy everything we
ha[d], everything we kn[e]w, everything we [were]’ (1983, 89).
Of course, experiences of actual infrastructure development in real cities during this broad
period were much more diverse than this generalised portrait suggests. The symbolic
importance of the modern ideals of integration and cohesion was also radically different from
their effects in practice. Beneath the universalising rhetoric, modernising cities were always
about rupture, contradiction and inequality. Extending metro, sewer, water, highway, energy
and communications grids through the fabric of city spaces was always laden with social and
political biases, highly uneven power struggles and cultural and historical specificities.
Nevertheless, the modern networked city, dominated by notions of order, coherence and
rationality, through the harmonious planning of networked connections and urban space,
became the very embodiment of the modern project throughout much of the urban world
(Ellin, 1996; Gold, 1997). Images of mobility of speed, light and power, mediated by the
fantastical new water, waste, subway, streetcar, electricity, gas, telegraph and telephone
networks, were, as Raymond Williams (1973) and Nigel Thrift (1996a) have pointed out,
crucial in underpinning the changing ‘structures of feeling’ surrounding modern urban life.

T H E A I M S O F T H I S C H A P T E R

How did the ideals of ‘progress’ via planned, publicly regulated or monopolistic transport,
telecommunications, energy and water networks emerge in the first place? And how did
such notions become so closely wedded to the modern rationalities of urban planning,
the elaboration of modern states, and practices and principles of modern urban consumption?
This chapter explores these two questions. This is vital for the purposes of the book, for these
questions set the context against which the parallel processes of splintering infrastructure
networks and fragmenting cities are occurring.
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 43

In this chapter we piece together the construction of the modern ideal of the integrated,
networked city. Not surprisingly, given that we are addressing all networked infrastructures
in a wide variety of contexts, it is a huge and complex story. We can merely scratch its surface
in this chapter. Along the way we shall need to embrace many disciplines, subdisciplines and
subplots.
To make the story of the construction of the modern infrastructural ideal manageable we
will explore each of the four essential ‘pillars’ upon which the whole edifice was constructed.
First we focus on the ideologies of science, technology and the city that fed the belief that
‘progress’ and modernisation had to be achieved through standardised infrastructure
monopolies. Second, we explore how the emerging discipline of modern urban planning
developed to take the modern infrastructural ideal for granted as a central tenet. Third, we
look at the ways in which the modern ideal became implicated in wider practices of home-
based consumption, mediated by energy, water, transport and communications grids. Finally,
we briefly explore how modern municipalities and nation states became so founded on the
idea of providing public infrastructure monopolies within their respective territories. The
chapter finishes by considering how the four pillars of the modern ideal were exported to the
context of cities in the developing world.

B E L I E V I N G I N M O D E R N I T Y : U R B A N R E F O R M
A N D T H E ‘ T E C H N O L O G I C A L S U B L I M E ’

Good roads and canals will shorten the distances, facilitate commercial and personal intercourse,
and unite, by a still more intimate community of interests, the most remote quarters of the United
States. No other single operation, with the power of Government, can more effectively tend to
strengthen and perpetuate that Union which secures external independence, domestic peace and
internal liberty.
(Albert Gallatin, Secretary to the US Treasury, 1808, quoted in Perry, 1995, 1)

The first ‘pillar’ underpinning the construction of the modern infrastructural ideal was a
powerful set of ideological beliefs asserting the positive transformative powers of modern
science and networked technologies (Mattelart, 1994). In 1994 Herbert Muschamp, a
leading public official with the City of New York, captured perfectly the modern ideology
surrounding urban infrastructure. Infrastructure networks, he argued, were nothing less than
‘the connective tissue that knits people, places, social institutions and the natural environment
into coherent urban relations’. They were, in other words, little less than ‘the structural
underpinnings of the public realm’ (cited in Perry, 1995, 1).
Our first concern is to explore how such ideologies of networked infrastructure came to
be accepted as the basis of planning, policy, development and management. How, in other
words, did energy, water, transport, streets and communications grids become so closely
associated with modern ideologies, allocating them apparent power to bind and connect
cities, transforming them in the process? Here we shall stress only two of the most important
elements of the broader process.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 44

THE CITY AS AN ENGINEERED SYSTEM IN THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY

First, the idea that the city was a single, objective entity became a dominant basis of
engineering, planning and urban reform debates between 1850 and 1920. Not only this, but
the growing corps of urban engineers sought to understand the growing industrial city as a
systemic ‘machine’ that needed to be rationally organised as a unitary ‘thing’, using the latest
scientific and technological practices available. Increasingly ‘the metropolis was believed to
be an inorganic and fabricated environment, the product of mathematics and the creation of
the engineer’ (Boyer, 1994, 116).
Through this process urban ‘engineers became the paragons of the public works reform
culture – embodying all that was efficient, technologically superior, and devoid of political
corruption’ (Perry, 1995, 9). For example, in that icon of urban modernity, nineteenth
century Paris, ‘the idea of the engineer began to assert itself in the city’s arcades, buildings
and streets. In fact the practice of engineering geography through the application of a new
science and technology of space was elevated to a greater scale of operation at this time’
(Kirsch, 1995, 549; see Prendergast, 1992).
Fed first by concern among the urban bourgeoisies over disease, death rates, and the
poor health and potential unrest of working class populations, networked technologies, and
scientific practices, became imbued by reformers and urban engineers with the moral power
to bring sanitation, cleanliness, rationality and order to the troubled and apparently chaotic
industrial metropolis (Boyer, 1987; Chatzis, 1999). Infrastructure networks, particularly
water and sewerage, quickly became associated with curative powers able to ‘cleanse’ city
spaces, so emancipating ‘good’ working class people from the risks of immorality (Felbinger,
1996, 11).
Distributing access to these networks thus became the Leitmotif, not just of the ‘good’ city
but of modern urban civilisation itself. What Anthony Vidler terms a ‘technical ideology’ of
the metropolis developed and prevailed (quoted in Gandy, 1998, 4). The urban reform
movements of the eighteenth century, ‘led by sanitarians, engineers, urban planners, and the
growing urban middle class, equated the efficiency of infrastructural systems with the quality
of the entire civilisation’ (Felbinger, 1996, 11). The application of scientific and statistical
techniques to the design and routinised operation of these systems added further to the
mystique surrounding urban engineering as a ‘rational’ and ‘value-free’ movement (Chatzis,
1999). And the extending and deepening construction of ducts, wires, dams, water treatment
plants, power stations, gas installations, railways, subways and sewers in the city became
celebrated icons of modernity. Such constructions were highly visible foci of media and
touristic attention – an ‘urban dowry’ of ‘iconic landmarks that were prominently visual and
present’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000).
At the same time, however, such landmarks increasingly disrupted and fragmented many
urban landscapes as modern urban identity became constructed around the full range of
mechanical and electromechanical infrastructure networks. Along with the rolling out of gas
and electric light, this brought ‘the great period of what one might call urban visibility’, in
the sense that ‘the modern metropolis was increasingly cut open, laid bare and illuminated’
(Whiteman, 1990, 26). From the point of view of Berlin, Neumeyer (1990, 17) recalls that:
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 45

Like blades, the engineers’ iron structures chopped up the body of the city, fragmenting the urban
tissue. . . . Bridges, elevated railroad structures, gasometers, and other modern objects of unfamiliar
shape became significant new elements in the traditional cityscape, taking on a disturbingly powerful
and threatening presence. . . . The image of a metropolis was laid bare in the multilayered movement
and omnipresent bridges that were a response to the need for connections between the isolated objects
of the cut-open city.

ELECTRIFICATION AND THE URBAN ‘TECHNOLOGICAL

SUBLIME’, 1880–1940

Networked infrastructures were not only a central focus of moral debates about urban reform
and iconic constructions of urban modernity; they were also, second, essential supports for
the wider application of systems-based engineering techniques to the whole modernisation
of metropolitan life. As Rose puts it, from the point of view of the United States, ‘beginning
around 1880, gas, electricity, light, and heat comprised only one portion of a much larger
picture of technological innovation and systems-building thinking taking place in virtually
every city’ (1995, 190–1).
In parallel, the industrial factory system most famously associated with Henry Ford started
to replace small workshops. Trolley systems and track-based rail complemented then replaced
horse-drawn transport. Industrial cities mushroomed in population and physical scale
to unprecedented dimensions. In this frenzy of growth ‘politicians, business executives, and
experts in finance, engineering, and administration competed with one another for the
opportunity to shape the landscapes and to govern these technological systems and the
metropolis’ (Rose, 1995, 190–1).
Ever wider and larger infrastructure networks, thus, came to symbolise the emerging
technological ‘sublime’ of the modern industrial city, especially in the most dynamic industrial
culture of all: the United States (Nye, 1994). As many small private and municipal networks
grew, spread and became interlinked into standardised urban and regional systems (see, for
example, Figure 2.1) these networks became the basis of blossoming discourses celebrating
the excitement of electrification, electric communications and water and transport systems in
the modern city (see Marvin, 1988). ‘By the middle of the nineteenth century mechanical
systems had become the central subject for some narratives and a part of the ideological
underpinning for many others’ (Nye, 1997, 181).
Bridges, electricity grids, telephone poles, subways and port constructions thus became
imbued with cultures of the technological sublime – triumphal testaments to the socio-
technical ‘progress’ at work across urban life (Nye, 1994). A pervasive age of technological
optimism became concretised in grand technological visions for cities realised through
integrated infrastructural and urban planning.
The many uses of electricity, in particular, ‘seemed to ensure a brilliant future for
civilisation’ (Nye, 1994, 66). The largest industrial cities, where electricity generation and
consumption were concentrated, were widely labelled ‘electropolises’ (Thrift, 1996a, 275).
Competition to have the largest, most powerful and most extensive electricity infrastructure,
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 46

Figure 2.1 The growth and integration of electricity transmission systems in urbanising Pennsylvania,
1900–30. Source: Hughes (1983), 10–13

along with the brightest night-time cityscapes and streets, was intense. Ambitious
municipalities wanted their cities to be a ‘blaze of light’, ‘rearing out of the darkness of the
surrounding, non-electrified regions. The coming of electric lighting . . . became the new
status symbol of the elite. . . . Glittering city lights reinforced the magnetic appeal of America’s
urban centers’ (Platt, 1988, 251). Standardising, extending and rolling out single, integrated
electricity grids, from the uneven patchworks inherited from initial processes of entre-
preneurialism, became a very metaphor for everything modern, exciting and transformative
(Platt, 1988; Hall, 1998, 382).
Major industrial cities dominated all aspects of electrical innovation, technology and
infrastructure construction (Hughes, 1983). Perhaps the most famous ‘electropolis’ of all,
Berlin, for example, had over half of all German electrical employment between 1895 and
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 47

1925 (Hall, 1998, 382). Electrification straddled the dazzling cityscapes of consumption, the
networked homes of affluent (and, increasingly, less affluent) consumers, and the emergence
of an electrified urban economy (Rose, 1988).
City governments competed to develop the most awesome infrastructure networks.
Showpiece projects, and the showmen ‘system builders’ (and they were virtually always men),
were glorified through technologically trumphalist narratives (Hughes, 1983). Systems, and
the men who built them, became harbingers of some naturalistic progress based on an essential
and technologically determinist notion of how infrastructures related to cities. Highways,
telephony and modern water systems were also often heralded as the very deliverers of benefits
for all, promising an emancipatory future of linear, absolute progress (Figure 2.2). Modern
appliances, and the vehicles to be used through these new networks, moreover, became laden
with lustrous promises of modernity, and were increasingly portrayed by advertisers as being
harbingers of a future of untold wealth and mobility (see Figure 2.3).
Based on the supportive notions of perspective vision and grand technological strategies,
such discourses portrayed technologies as ‘natural’, inexorable and ‘autonomous’. City-
scapes, conversely, were increasingly portrayed as ‘empty’ Cartesian spaces – raw material
for reworking through the new technological sublime as the systems ‘blasted through
topography’ (Nye, 1997, 181).
Central to this period, then, was the emerging dominance of the notion of the city
as an abstract object to be managed and controlled. The emerging perspectives of
aerial photography and the perspective views of cities increasingly available from rising
buildings, in turn, further contributed to the view that the spreading industrial city-
region was a recognisable entity that needed to be managed as a unitary whole. In the United
States, panoramic, electrically lit views from skyscrapers, writes David Nye, served to
‘miniaturis[e] the city, making it into a pattern’. Thus ‘the vast region visible from the top
of the skyscraper appears intelligible, offering itself for decipherment like a huge hieroglyph’
(1994, 105). According to him, ‘attention was displaced from human beings and the apparent
pettiness of their lives. Lifted up into the sky, the visitor was invited to see the city as a vast
map and to call into existence a new relationship between the self and this concrete
abstraction’.
As Box 2.1 demonstrates, a similar process of technological ‘roll-out’ and standardisation
towards ubiquity accompanied the shift of that other great harbinger of modernity
and progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth century city: the telephone. During this
period the telephone shifted from the preserve of the social elite to become the essential
interpersonal communications medium of the growing metropolis, operated as a standardised
monopoly and integrated network geared to universal social and spatial access within the
metropolis.
Figure 2.2 The modern idea of linear technological ‘progress’ via ever more elaborate and capable
scientific, technological and infrastructural systems. Source: Smith (1995), from Compton (1952)
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 49

Figure 2.3 Electrical appliances and automobile tyres as harbingers of a dynamic, exciting urban future:
advertisements for General Electric refrigerators (1931) and Goodrich tyres (1931). Source: Corn and
Horrigan (1984), 42

U R B A N P L A N N I N G A N D D E V E L O P M E N T : T H E
E M E R G E N C E O F T H E U N I T A R Y
C I T Y I D E A L

The modern city, like the modern nation, was imagined as a space that should be unitary, coherent
and ordered.
(Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins, 1997, 26)

The second key ‘pillar’ supporting the elaboration of the modern infrastructural ideal was
another important part of the broader project of modernity: theories and practices of modern
urban planning. As Entrikin suggests, in most Western countries, between the mid nineteenth
and mid twentieth centuries, state-backed urban planning was essential to maintain ‘the
integrity of the modernist project’ (1989, 34). Its practices and associated architectural
theories supported the ‘rationalisation’ of whole urban landscapes, backed by notions of
rationality, science, technology, the celebration of machines, and ideas of ‘modern’ aesthetics
(see Banham, 1980; McCarter, 1987). Urban planning helped to define the ‘vision of the
progressive force of modernity’ through its attempts to impose systematically an ‘abstract
space’ upon the complex social and lived spaces of the industrial metropolis (Entrikin, 1989,
34). It attempted to apply what Henri Lefebvre called ‘the simple, regulated and methodical
principle of coherent stability’ to the spatial form and temporal rhythms of the massive, chaotic
metropolis (Lefebvre, 1984, 238).
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 50

B O X 2 . 1 T H E T E L E P H O N E A N D T H E
M E T R O P O L I S , 1 8 8 0 – 1 9 4 0

It is important to stress the often ignored invented, phone provision moved from
importance of the telephone in the develop- a situation where there were 174 different
ment of the modern metropolis (Fischer, 1992). telephone tariffs around 1900 to a standard
The elaboration of standard telephone grids, grid operated by the Bell company and closely
from the small local systems that emerged interconnected across national and interna-
in the nineteenth century, provided important tional space by 1930.
infrastructural support to the booming indus- As ‘natural monopolies’ the operators of
trial metropolis of the late nineteenth and early the consolidated systems emerged as giant
twentieth centuries (Abler, 1977; Gottman, industrial powerhouses which were closely
1977). regulated at the national and municipal levels to
As with electricity, water and gas networks, ensure spatial and social equality of tariffs and
the story of the telephone from the late 1880s access. Moreover the definition of ‘local call
to the mid twentieth century is one of the areas’ around cities was crucial in emphasising
interconnection of small networks to allow the the idea of the city as an integrated territory
roll-out towards universal spatial coverage of within which exchange and communication
the metropolis and urban system. Moyer were to be maximised – in contrast to the
(1977) recounts how in Boston, Massachu- higher tariffs inhibiting interaction with far-off
setts, the city where the telephone was first spaces, especially those in other countries.

THE TELEPHONE AND THE ‘SPIRALLING MASS

OF BITS OF INFORMATION’

Widening access to the telephone beyond country, became an essential component of

business cores and socioeconomic elites the modern networked infrastructural ideal
allowed it to emerge as the taken-for-granted (Mattelart, 1994). As Jean Gottman suggested
means of mediating all aspects of big-city life in 1977, ‘the telephone has helped to make
(see Figure 2.4). Jean Gottman called this the the city better, bigger, more efficient, more
‘spiralling mass of bits of information’ that is exciting, providing, when needed, “quasi-
characteristic of the modern metropolis. Thus immediate verbal communication” between all
the idea of the standardised telephone net- elements of expanding metropolis at minimum
work, organised as a monopoly and planned cost’ (1977, 312).
in an integrated way to cover a city, region or

TELEPHONES AND URBAN CHANGE

The mediation of widening portions of urban structural changes in urban form, enhancing
life by the telephone facilitated many complex the centrality of dominant business cores
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 51

affluent users were used to cross-subsidise

loss-making networks in poorer and rural
areas. Such principles effectively drove the
development of urban telephone networks
in most Western countries from the 1920s
and 1930s to the late 1970s. The ideal of a
coherent, planned, unitary network, laid out to
integrate the metropolis, sometimes still drives
the development of state-of-the-art optic
fibre infrastructures in areas which have been
slow to open up to the recent global wave of
liberalisation, as the example of Melbourne
(Figure 2.5) demonstrates.

Figure 2.4 The diffusion of AT&T telephony

in the United States towards ubiquitous,
standardised access. Source: Abler (1977),
333

(which could now act at a distance with greater

immediacy and power) whilst also supporting
urban decentralisation through suburbs and
exurbs. As Ron Abler suggests from the point
of view of the United States, ‘the nation’s
telephone services evolved with the nation’s
metropolitan regions in a highly complex and
circular causal relationship in which cause
and effect are impossible to discern ‘ (1977,
339).
As with other modern urban infrastruc-
tures, then, urban telephone networks were
to be planned as singular, coherent wholes, Figure 2.5 The continued influence of the
modern infrastructural ideal on contemporary
delivering access to all spaces and users on a
urban communications: the planned development
universal basis (usually under specific regula- of Melbourne’s optic fibre network. Source:
tory obligations). Profits from trunk routes and Newton (1991)
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 52

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the crystallisation of planning
movements in all Western countries, driven by a post-Enlightenment perspective which saw
the city as ‘a territory to be bounded, mapped, occupied and exploited [and] a population to
be managed and perfected’ (Donald, 1997, 182). The rationale of the movement was to
‘design away the opacities, the confusions as well as the litter and detritus of a complex
social world’ (Robins, 1999, 46). Through its reliance on the perspectival and disciplinary
gaze of the (usually male) urban planner, modern, and later modernist, planning sought ‘the
ideal of transparency where every functioning element of the city [was] supposedly open to
inspection, the structure revealing itself to the inquisitive eye’ (Wigley, 1996, 138; see Jay,
1988). In many cases the disdain of leading architects and planners for the inherited cityscape,
especially during the modernist period, was such that the tabula rasa was ‘the point of
departure for the modernist city’ – a strategy aimed at the complete elimination of the
pre-modern cityscape (Gandelsonas, 1999, 27).
The practices through which the modern planning ideal of the unitary city was constructed,
and how such approaches became predicated on the modern infrastructural ideal, were
enormous and diverse. We can only highlight a series of five illustrative vignettes here.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN IDEAL OF URBAN

COHESION, 1880–1940

First, we need to highlight the emergence of the very ideal of urban cohesion. In the face of
apparently chaotic urbanisation in nineteenth century industrial cities, as well as the miseries
faced by the working classes, health crises and uncoordinated infrastructures, urban planning
was widely seen in this period as the means to realise technological progress. Social elites, in
particular, increasingly saw modern urban planning as the mechanism to bring rational, expert-
driven practices to the comprehensive reshaping of metropolitan life. Planning was to bring
a whole new ‘sociotechnical environment’ to the city. It was to mould cities into the model
of some ‘new, efficient industrial apparatus’ (Rabinow, 1994, 407).
An essential aspect of the drive for cohesion was the construction of the ‘underground city’
through the ‘knitting together of necessary underground utilities’ as well as above-ground
street networks and transport and communication grids (Mumford, 1961, 478). Gradually,
in keeping with broader prevailing ideologies of science and technology, urban planning
doctrines built up universalising norms of access to gas, electricity, water, transport and
communications. These became intrinsic to the new urban vision, as did standard practices
for laying out and managing streets (Celik et al., 1994).
All spaces of the modern city were thus to be integrated by ubiquitous, democratically
accessible and homogeneous infrastructure grids, usually under public ownership or control
(Chaoy, 1969). Such interventions, it was widely believed, would, in turn, help realise the
social, economic and environmental benefits of mass production, distribution and consump-
tion, integrated through the mediating powers of new infrastructure networks (Fillion, 1996).
Above all, planning was seen as necessary to support a ‘sense of cohesion’ (ibid., 1939); it
was an exercise to bring ‘order to the fragmented form’ of the industrial metropolis
(Beauregard, 1989, 382).
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 53

STREETS AND SEWERS: HAUSSMANN’S

‘REGULARISATION’ PLANS FOR PARIS, 1853–1870

The straight, wide street with smooth traffic flow seems to lessen the distance and, as it were, put
two points which before had seemed leagues apart to us in touch with each other.
(Paris-Guide, 1867, cited in Offner, 1999, 224)

Second, we need to explore Haussmann’s Paris to understand the archaeology of the modern
notion of comprehensive and integrated street and sewer systems. ‘Streets,’ write Celik et al.,
have always provided ‘the primary ingredient of urban existence. They provide a structure on
which to weave the complex interactions of the architectural fabric and human organization’
(1994, 1). As long as cities had existed, special metropolitan streets had been planned and
laid out as sites of ritual, imperial symbolism, as conduits of communication, commerce and
exchange, and as meeting spaces between more or less privileged citizens (Kostof, 1992). But
the aqueducts, sewers and streets laid out between the times of Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt
and imperial Rome and those of the mid nineteenth century industrial metropolis had tended
to have only partial urban coverage (usually for rich users or districts) (see Hall, 1998, chapter
22; Soja, 2000).
What doctrines of modern urban planning added, however – starting in the nineteenth
century – was the idea that comprehensive, integrated networks of streets could be laid across
whole urban areas in a technocratic way, to bind the metropolis into a functioning ‘machine’
or ‘organism’. This process saw a changing conceptualisation of the street which, by the end
of the nineteenth century, started to tie in closely with growing motorisation and expanding
demands for mobility and circulation. As Nann Ellin suggests, ‘the street had been for walking
to work or shops or for socialising. Now they were primarily for movement’ (1997, 13). Such
ideas of comprehensive, integrated provision of urban road systems, usually under the auspices
of state bodies, remained a dominant doctrine of urban planning, even through to the efforts
to surgically insert integrated urban highways through urban areas in the 1950s and
1960s.
One of the first and most celebrated total conceptions of the need to ‘bind’ a city through
a comprehensive and integrated street system came with Haussmann’s plans for the
‘regularisation’ of Paris between 1853 and 1870. It is the totality of Haussmann’s scheme
for the construction of massive highways and sewer networks through Paris that makes it
nothing less than the archetype of the modern urban infrastructural ideal (see Figures 2.6 and
2.7). Haussmann’s Paris was the cradle of the notion of ‘regularising’ the industrial city
through combined land use planning and the construction of integrated infrastructure
networks that were explicitly designed to foster free circulation both within and between
cities (Offner, 1999). To Spiro Kostof:

Haussmann’s treatment of Paris was in fact the first total conceptualisation of what we understand as
the ‘modern’ city. It heralded a technocratically minded, comprehensive approach to town planning
in which a rationalised circulatory network would once and for all sweep away [what was seen by the
planners as] the dross of the community’s promiscuous life through time.
(1994a, 11)
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 54

Figure 2.6 A crucial influence on the modern infrastructural ideal: Haussmann’s ‘regularising’ strategy for
Paris, 1853–70, showing the system of boulevards that was carved through the city. Source: Chaoy
(1969), 50

Figure 2.7 The boulevard as the organising framework for laying out gas lighting, water mains, drains and
sewers in Haussmann’s regularisation plans for Paris. Source: Kostof (1994b), 14
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 55

Haussmann specified his aims as to ‘regularise the disordered city, to disclose its new order
by means of a pure, schematic layout which [would] disentangle it from its dross, the sediment
of past and present failures’ (Haussmann, quoted in Chaoy, 1969, 16). The celebrated new
networks, ploughed ruthlessly and with unerring accuracy through the social and physical
fabric of the city, were designed ‘to give unity to and transform the operative whole’ of Paris
(Haussmann, quoted in Chaoy 1969, 16).
Here, then, we have the social construction of the very idea that coordinated infrastructure
networks and urban plans might meaningfully connect the dispersed parts of the modern
industrial city into an ‘organic’ whole, thereby supporting its wider role as a dominant national
and international metropolis (see Figure 2.6). To Haussmann the road network was the city’s
circulatory system; the rationally engineered sewer and cemetery systems were the waste
disposal ‘organs’ of the metropolis; and green spaces were the city’s ‘respiratory’ system. The
street system, in fact, was the physical framework for the ‘bundling’ of buried water networks,
lighting, drains and sewers – a situation so familiar today that we take it for granted (Figure
2.7; see Moss, 2000). In every sense, then, the networks were seen as coordinated allies in
the effort to rationalise, systematise and control metropolitan space as a whole.
Haussmann dreamed of ‘Paris as a whole [city which] could one day become a single
organism quickened with a unique life’ (Chaoy, 1969, 16). He aimed to ‘cut a cross, north
to south and east to west, through the centre of Paris, bringing the city’s cardinal points into
direct communication’ (ibid., 26). The road and sewer networks were planned as a ‘general
circulatory system’ with hierarchical tributaries linking the new plaza nodes (ibid., 16). Both
sets of channels were celebrated as symbols of progress. His legacy was to ‘open . . . up the
whole of the city, for the first time in history, to all its inhabitants’ who could experience Paris
as ‘a unified physical and human space’ (Berman, 1983, 153; see Picon and Robert, 1999).

SEWERS, WATER AND THE ‘DOMESTICATION’

OF THE URBAN BODY, 1880–1940

Hygiene is the modern project’s supreme act.

(Lahiji and Friedman, 1997, 7)

Surely the state is the sewer. Not just because it spews divine law from its ravenous mouth, but
because it reigns as the law of cleanliness above its sewers.
(Laporte, 2000, 57)

In the past [waste] water simply flowed over the street. Then engineers brought water under-
ground.
(Dieter Jacobi, cited in Moss, 2000, 63)

Which leads us neatly to our third vignette: the construction by nineteenth century reformers
and social elites of the notion that comprehensive underground urban water and sewerage
systems served to ‘domesticate’ and cleanse the unruly ‘body’ of the modern city (Kaika and
Swyngedouw, 2000; Laporte, 2000).
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 56

‘The city,’ writes Erik Swyngedouw, ‘cannot survive without capturing, transforming and
transporting nature’s water. The “metabolism of the city” depends on the incessant flow of
water through its veins’ (1995b, 390). The construction of systems to deliver such water
supplies, however, is fraught with difficulties. Urban water systems necessarily ‘demand some
form of central control and a coordinated, combined and detailed division of labour’ over long
periods of time (Swyngedouw, 1995b, 390).
Again, Haussmann’s regularisation plans, which also extended to water and sewerage, laid
the foundations of the modern infrastructural ideal’s treatment of the burgeoning water
demands of the modern metropolis. With Haussmann’s new Paris sewer system, as Matthew
Gandy contends, the city’s ‘new boulevards and shopping arcades now had their subterranean
counterpart beneath the city’s streets. The transformation of Paris made urban space com-
prehensible and visible to the public, thereby dispelling much of the opacity and heterogeneity
of the pre-modern city’ (1998, 8). In an attempt to undermine the stench that characterised
nineteenth century Paris, Haussmann, and other reformers, set in place many hygiene reforms
with the central aim of the ‘comprehensive “deodorization” of the urban environment. . . .
Deodorization was to be applied to all areas of public and private space. . . . Thus emerged
the fantasy of the odourless city, ideally sanitized to a zero degree of olfactory disturbance’
(Prendergast, 1992, 79). From the experience of Paris, and many other modernising cities,
‘the lessons of modern urbanism were clear. Water and sewer systems were a city’s lifelines.
As such they were too vital to be left to either the good intentions or the caprices of private
enterprise alone’ (Schultz and McShane, 1973, 395).
Thus we can also view Haussmann’s schemes as the beginning of the broader project to
‘domesticate’ water as an agent in cleansing the city’s ‘circulatory’ system (Swyngedouw,
1995b). The elaboration of extensive sewer and water systems, and the scientific discovery
of bacteria, paved the way to a dramatic increase in the consumption of water which supported,
in turn, the permanent washing of the urban ‘body’ and the privatisation of bodily hygiene
(see Melosi, 2000; Lupton and Miller, 1992). On the eve of the twentieth century the
Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, famously implored that ‘increasing water usage is one of the
most pressing tasks of culture’ (cited in Lahiji and Friedman, 1997, 7).
Water thus became urbanised and commodified as another component in the infra-
structural ‘binding’ of the city through standardised infrastructure services, accessible through
single systems, access to which was initially limited to urban bourgeoisies (Melosi, 2000).
Standardised water services allowed the emergence of a sanitised and deodorised public realm
within the city
In France, for example, Guillerme recounts how, in the late nineteenth century, private
water firms and municipalities struggled to find the finances and technologies to develop
qualitatively new water systems to meet social demand (1988). Whilst still ridden with social
inequality and bias, such networks eventually extended over whole urban areas as access to
quality water and sewerage networks, at standard tariffs, became normalised as part of the
modernising social world during the interwar period.
As with other urban infrastructure networks, then, the ideals of modern urban engineering
stipulated that water networks needed to be rationally planned, systematically rolled out
through the urban fabric and coherently integrated into an integrated and relatively standard-
ised functioning whole. In Europe this transition was smoother than in the United States,
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 57

Figure 2.8 The water distribution network in Madrid, 1948: a fully integrated and ubiquitous system
according to the demands of the modern infrastructural ideal. Source: Gavira (1995), 13

where the privatised provision of individual boreholes and cesspits persisted as the dominant
model until the 1870s, despite many efforts to build systematic, public, modern water and
sewer systems (Ogle, 1999; Melosi, 2000). Gavira (1995), discussing how the construction
of a single monopolistic network occurred in Madrid, stresses the power of the idea of
developing and mapping a systematic water and sewer network with maximum ‘homogeneity
and isotropy’ (see Figure 2.8).

THE ‘FOGGY GEOGRAPHIES’ OF URBAN

WATER SYSTEMS

Through such processes ‘the urbanisation process itself [became] predicated on the mastering
and engineering of nature’s water’ (Swyngedouw, 1995b, 21). But the enormous systems of
reservoirs, channels, chambers and shafts through which metropolitan life was watered
maintained a curiously invisible presence in the city, embedded, as they were, in deep
subterranean passages, excavations and culverts. Theirs was a world of ‘foggy geographies’;
the ‘extent of [these] nearly invisible system[s] was difficult to comprehend, extending to
wider and wider fields and depths for sourcing increasingly scarce fresh water’ (Reiser et al.,
Figure 2.9 The ‘foggy geographies’ of urban water infrastructure: the example of Manhattan.
Source: Reiser et al. (1996), 73
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 59

1996; see Figure 2.9). Such linkages between water and the growing urban industrial
metropolis remained complex and contested. The modern city relied on:

capturing and controlling ever-larger watersheds, water flows, water territories and an ever-changing,
but immensely contested and socially significant (in terms of access and exclusion empowerment/
disempowerment), choreography of national laws, rules and engineering projects. Local, regional and
national socio-natures are combined with engineering narratives, and speculation and global water and
money flows.
(Swyngedouw, 1995b, 22)

INFRASTRUCTURE CRISES IN THE EXPANDING CITY:

URBAN GRIDS, FUNCTIONAL ZONING AND URBAN
INFRASTRUCTURE

Our fourth vignette concerns the ways in which Haussmann’s idea of the ‘regularisation’ of
the city through standardised, integrated networked infrastructures linked seamlessly with
wider ideals then developing in the fast-emerging urban planning movement of the period.
For Haussmann’s ideas laid the essential foundations for the wider framework of unitary
urban planning and urban beautification. They were quickly applied elsewhere, from Berlin,
Cologne and Dresden to Barcelona, London and Chicago. Drawing from Haussmannian
notions of the modern city, infrastructure planning was thus much more important to the
development of the modern urban planning project than is generally realised (Fischler, 1992,
98). ‘Planners grasped early on that different capitalists pursue different spatial investment
strategies in an uncoordinated fashion’ – including the rivalry between competing ‘patch-
works’ of infrastructure networks (Beauregard, 1989, 382).
Efforts at technological standardisation and regulation were not new, however. As long
ago as 1761 cities like London had been attempting to regularise the design and paving of
street spaces and to systematise the delivery of street lighting and the naming of streets
(Ogborn, 1999; Kostof, 1994a, 262). Standardised, paved, centrally managed and unitary
street systems gradually started to emerge as the central, integrating network of the modern,
public city (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 1997). Street names in Stockholm, for example,
were entirely changed and reorganised by the city government, ‘in order to nominalize and
control the city’ (Whiteman, 1990, 28). A century later, Victorian London’s extensive
collective of private, gated streets came under public attack as symbols of elitist power.
Intensive lobbying eventually led to their incorporation into the unitary public street system
(Atkins, 1993).
But, even by the start of the twentieth century, much remained to be done to develop
universal, standardised street and infrastructure networks. Often, peripheral areas had no
access to the new technology services like sewers, potable water, telephones, gas and electricity
networks, because private and municipal infrastructure providers targeted the more lucrative
spaces at the centre. Christine Boyer shows how, after the turn of the century, dramatic
urbanisation meant that ‘the great needs of older and larger US cities were for the extension
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 60

of gas, electricity, water, and sewer lines; the establishment of cheap and efficient streetcar
systems, subways, bridges, and tunnels; and the construction of pubic buildings and private
dwellings’ (1994, 7). Of course, the laying out of integrated and open street systems provided
the physical frameworks for the extension of these other services, as well as setting the legal
and territorial boundaries of further urban growth, often on a speculative basis.
In much of North America the rectilinear grid became the norm for organising metro-
politan expansion. The effort to use extensible grid patterns to define urban growth in a
systematic and integrated way is best illustrated by the map used in 1811 in New York by the
City Commissioners to lay the framework for expanding the city. The plan laid the foundations
for a fivefold increase in the city’s area, transforming 11,000 acres into 2,000 of the block
patterns that still characterise Manhattan (Figure 2.10; see Pope, 1996).
For all their faults of repetitiveness and predictability, such grids forced openness on the
urban form, overcoming the closure characteristic of premodern cities. ‘The nineteenth
century gridiron city [of North America can] be defined as an inherently open city,’ suggests
Albert Pope, because such open grids ‘cut through and unite a sequence of scales connecting
discrete urban artifacts to limitless space’ (1996, 17). As gridded plans shaped development
in North America, the bye-law streets of London and Cerda’s extensions in Barcelona, Pope
argues that ‘every device of physical closure – the very idea of the closed urban system itself –
was overwritten by subtle yet radical transformation of the urban grid’ (Pope, 1996, 32; see
Dupuy, 1991, 93). Many cities thus became more open and less bounded, their integrated
street systems supporting the exploding demands for exchange, production and distribution
that came with capitalist urban industrial development.
Functional zoning and the public development and planning of infrastructure networks
were often developed together around the framework of the urban grid or street pattern.
Clean, well maintained streets and functioning electricity, gas and water and sewer systems
were thus an essential element in the strivings of early city planning for the rational, orderly
and disciplined metropolis. In North America, for example, ‘side by side with the creation
of a disciplinary order and ceremonial harmony to the American City . . . , improvers gave
heed to the creation of an infrastructural framework and regulatory land order’ (Boyer,
1994, 7).
Indeed, without considering the infrastructure networks to connect the planned urban
spaces, the wider trend in early twentieth century modern planning towards the functional
separation of ‘work’, ‘housing’, ‘leisure’, ‘transport’ and ‘administration’ that was such an
intrinsic element of all modern city plans could not have been sustained (Rabinow, 1994).
The modern urban planning ideal, from the early 1900s to the 1960s and 1970s, was thus
to integrate, either explicitly or implicitly, coherent networks of transport, energy, water and
communications grids with the public spaces, and industrial zones, of the functionally planned
physical city (see Lefebvre, 1984). This was epitomised by the modern functional urban
planning principles drawn up by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne
(CIAM) group in the 1920s and 1930s. ‘In this way, the emerging political economy of
industrial capitalism would be manifested in a planned built environment’ (Beauregard, 1989,
382). As Matthew Gandy suggests, from the point of view of US city planning:
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 61

Figure 2.10 The 1811 commissioners’ plan of Manhattan, which established the uniform, and infinitely
extendible, rectilinear grid. Source: Pope (1996), 34

in the early decades of the twentieth century American modernism became closely bound up with newly
emerging conceptions of urban planning within which there was to be a progressive move towards
greater degrees of spatial rationalisation to accommodate new urban technologies and changing social
and cultural aspirations.
(1998, 2)
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 62

BRINGING THE STRANDS TOGETHER: THE MODERN

UNITARY CITY IDEAL, 1880–1960

Finally, we need to explore how these four strands came together to support the broader
notion of the ordered, unitary city, mediated by standard, ubiquitous infrastructure networks.
Between the mid nineteenth century and the mid 1960s a dominant rhetoric of modern
planning existed in the West which idealised the notion of the orderly, unitary city, tied
together by a visible and non-visible web of standardised infrastructure grids. Through reason
and democracy modern urban planning purported to ‘produce a coordinated and functional
urban form organised around collective goals’ (Entrikin, 1989, 381).
Such an emphasis on integration and coordination led to stress on comprehensive city
plans and standardised street standards enforced through the growing power of traffic
engineering (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 1997). These were ‘the culmination of the
modernist project’, seeing the city as a ‘synthetic whole. Henceforth, it was believed, all the
contradictory tendencies of capitalist urban development could be resolved, into a unitary
vision which stressed order and coherence’ (Goodchild, 1990, 128).
Following Haussmann, cities were often seen metaphorically to be either ‘machines’ or
‘organisms’ whose functioning or metabolism rested on the appropriate connective systems.
Rational plans ‘would treat the city like a machine, to be planned as an engineer plans an
industrial process, breaking it down into its essential functions (housing, work, recreation and
traffic), Taylorizing and standardising them (in a Master Plan) as a totality’ (King, 1998, 23).
Urban space was seen to be ‘an infinitely malleable matter, susceptible to the deigns of those
who set themselves to reshape it’ (Olalquiaga, 1994, 48).
In the process, of course, normative ideas of the appropriate uses of urban spaces
became embodied into networks and spaces: the (male) public space of circulation, work
and production separated functionally from the (female) domestic and suburban spaces of
social reproduction and family rearing (Sandercock, 1998a). Fully elaborated energy, water,
transport, street, highway and communications grids provided the ‘connective tissue’ of such
a geometric vision.
As Mel Webber argued, ‘In both the urban sciences and urban planning, the dominant
conception of the metropolitan area sees each as a unitary place’ (1964, 81). This he defined
as a:
physically urbanized segment of land on which building and other physical equipment are closely spaced,
and where people conduct activities that are typically more closely related to and dependent upon each
other than they are to activities in other settlements.
(ibid.)

Innovations in infrastructure would help tie the ‘“synthetic” city, that is, the city of singular
form invariant over time’ together (Beauregard, 1989, 385).
Two key further developments were critical in taking the notion of the unitary, networked
city to an unassailable, axiomatic position at the heart of modern urban planning practice. The
first was the close linkage between integrated networked infrastructure and the idea of the
comprehensive urban development plan (Box 2.2). The second was the close linkage between
the modern infrastructural ideal and an influential range of utopian urban schemes that
emerged during the first half of the twentieth century (see Box 2.3).
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 63

B O X 2 . 2 D E V E L O P M E N T P L A N S A N D
I N T E G R A T E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

A key to the realisation of the unitary city

ideal was the notion of the urban development
plan which, when backed by sufficient weight
of political and economic power, was cast
as a means to steer the development of
the land parcels and infrastructure networks,
so that the whole city could emerge as a
unitary, modern metropolis. ‘For a century
the plan was the centrepiece of modern
city planning’ (Neuman, 1998, 208). Zoning,
together with the adoption of plans, was seen
to be a means to rationalise and systematise
the ways in which infrastructures related to the
Figure 2.11 The Chicago plan of 1909: a master
city.
plan to impose civic order on an expanding
One of the first comprehensive plans in metropolis. Source: Hall (1988), 177
North America, for example, the 1916 New
York ordinance, was a ‘vision for promoting the and human-scale decentralisation. At the
planned, controlled, orderly, sustained growth same time he sought to humanise the ‘mega-
of the metropolitan region’ through a ‘vast, technics’ of city life by developing a more
coordinated program of public improvements balanced urban system through coherent
for the city’s harbor, dock, streets, street regional planning (Mumford, 1934, 1961; Corn
railway, and raid transit facilities’ (Hammack, and Horrigan, 1984). His vision helped inspire
1982 ,188, quoted in Fischler, 1998, 179). Other postwar efforts at extending the modern
North American master plans, notably those infrastructural ideal to the regional scale,
of the City Beautiful movement, epitomised notably with Patrick Abercrombie’s well known
the search for regular, geometric order, using strategy for Greater London.
the standardised, integrated street, water, As markets became increasingly national
sewerage, telephone and energy networks as and international, corporations, too, lobbied
integrated ‘bundles’ of networks for laying for the regional integration of phone, electricity
out and regularising the growing metropolis and water infrastructures. As Christine Boyer
(see Figure 2.11). suggests, the issue arose: ‘were these cor-
In the interwar period Lewis Mumford porations to bargain with each fragmented
wanted to extend such planning to the governmental unit for adequate highway sys-
regional scale, using new infrastructures to tems and sufficient land, water and electricity
support broad mechanisation, electrification to parallel production needs?’ (1994, 182).
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 64

B O X 2 . 3 I N T E G R A T E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E
A N D M O D E R N U R B A N U T O P I A S

The final source of urban planning’s stress on suggested a radical decentralisation of the
integrated infrastructures came from a long industrial metropolis, it was to be a planned
line of influential modern urban utopianists, and ordered dispersal, using the new medi-
from Ebenezer Howard to Le Corbusier ating capabilities of singular infrastructure
and Frank Lloyd Wright. All such visionaries networks to sustain the coherence of the
were fascinated by the potential of the new extended city. Tying into the prevailing
new network technologies to sustain radical ideologies of science, technology and the
shifts in the social order, embodied in the city, all utopianist urban visionaries of the
transformed physical landscapes of their first half of the twentieth century painted
preferred urban utopia. ‘Modern technology,’ a picture whereby emancipatory progress
they believed, ‘had outstripped the anti- for all could be achieved through combining
quated social order, and the result was the new powers of mediating urban life by
chaos and strife. In their ideal cities, how- the latest energy, water, transport and com-
ever, technology would fulfil its proper role,’ munications systems, integrated through a
namely, integrating the planned metropolis planned, modern urban landscape. All ‘based
into a functioning, efficient, harmonious and their ideas on the technological innovations
modern city designed according to their that inspired their age: the express train,
personal blueprints (Fishman, 1982, 13). the automobile, the telephone and radio’
Thus, whilst nearly all utopian urbanists (Fishman, 1992, 13).

NETWORKED TECHNOLOGIES AND URBAN UTOPIAS:

EBENEZER HOWARD, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
AND LE CORBUSIER

The three most famous urban visionaries Wright saw universal car ownership and an
were Ebenezer Howard (with his garden ever-extending grid of public highways as
cities), Frank Lloyd Wright (with his decen- supporting a shift towards decentralised,
tralised Broadacre City model), and Le self-sufficient living and the progressive
Corbusier (with his Ville Contemporaine). All abandonment of the ‘obsolete’ big cities.
assumed that new networked infrastructures In Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine the
could be laid out to support an inherently old chaotic and disorderly city was to be
harmonious urban and social order (Fishman, swept away in the wake of rationalised urban
1992, 13). Time and space were to be landscapes with clean, modern intercon-
mastered by these new networks, allowing nections. A utopian city of 3 million, it was
perfectly ordered and coherent urban land- inspired by the clean modernity of aero-
scapes to be engineered. planes and ocean liners. A testament to what
In the late nineteenth century Howard he called the emerging ‘machinery society’ it
wanted to set out integrated systems of was, in essence, a ‘colossal and well ordered
suburban railways to sustain the planned mechanism’ (Corn and Horrigan, 1984, 38).
decentralisation of older cities and the Le Corbusier demanded that the integrative
development of garden cities. In the 1920s network architecture of the city had to
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 65

function through new straight-line systems. tous (although invisible) energy, communi-
‘The modern city,’ he wrote, ‘lives by the cations and water systems – providing
straight line, inevitably; for the construction limitless opportunities for exchange and inte-
of buildings, sewers and tunnels, highways, gration (King, 1996, 49). Within the massive
pavements, the circulation of traffic demands skyscrapers of the geometrically laid out
the straight line’ (1929, 10). central business districts was concen-
La Ville Contemporaine, and other ‘new trated the ‘apparatus for abolishing time
city’ plans like it, were predicated on seam- and space, telephones, cables and wireless’
less, rapid and futuristic infrastructure net- (Le Corbusier, quoted in King, 1996, 51).
works – ‘multilevel circulation’ systems based Pedestrian flows, as in nearly all modernist
on massive integrated highways, airports schemes, were to be entirely separated from
atop railway stations, airship hangars, ubiqui- traffic within their own walkway systems.

LINEAR CITY UTOPIAS

The most extreme notions of the integrative

power of new networked infrastructures,
however, came from linear city ideas theo-
rists, whose concepts of idealised cities
involved strung-out linear corridors of hous-
ing and facilities that were closely bound
together by integral infrastructure networks.
One example was Edgar Chambers’ (1910)
‘Roadtown’ – an endless corridor of housing
laced by three levels of underground trams
and rooftop roads (Hayden, 1981, 246).
Another example was the ‘linear city’
(La Ciudad Lineal) proposed by the Spanish
Republican, Arturo Soria y Mata (1844–1920).
As a theorist of communication Soria y Mata’s
ideal city is one of the best early examples of
the use of high-quality, integrated networked Figure 2.12 Soria y Mata’s strategy for a
infrastructures to reformulate the whole linear city, 1882: an extreme form of using
notion of the modern city (see Figure 2.12). integrated infrastructure networks to
structure urban growth. Source: Barnett
‘The form of the city is, or must be, derived
(1986), 176
from the necessities of locomotion,’ he wrote
(quoted in Choay, 1969, 100). With a single
all-encompassing 500 m wide strip housing and electricity, reservoirs, gardens and, at
integrative infrastructures of all kinds, Soria intervals, buildings for different municipal
y Mata concluded that the imperative services – and there would be resolved at
was to: once almost all the complex problems
that are produced by the massive
put in the center of this immense belt populations of our urban life.
trains and trams, conduits for water, gas (Quoted in Chaoy, 1969, 100)
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 66

C O N S T R U C T I N G N E T W O R K E D U R B A N
C O N S U M P T I O N , 1 9 2 0 – 6 0

For our third ‘pillar’ supporting the construction of the modern networked ideal we need to
look at how the above ideologies of technology and planning practices broadly came together
to support new types of mass production and consumption between 1920 and 1960, mediated
by standard infrastructure networks in the city.
Whilst the emergence of modern forms of household-based consumption mediated by
infrastructure networks can be traced back to the nineteenth century, it is in the first half of
the twentieth century that such developments reached their greatest intensity. For, between
the early 1900s and World War II, ‘Fordist’ systems of mass production, distribution and
consumption were elaborated in most Western nations. Stressing automation, standardisation,
economies of scale and a technical division of labour, the ‘heartlands’ of Fordism were the
major metropolitan regions (Giannopoulos and Gillespie, 1993). Most important from our
point of view, all aspects of Fordist social and economic life became predicated on access to
the integrated energy, transport, water and communications grids so central to the modern
planning ideals of the time.

NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURE, FORDIST

PRODUCTION AND THE CITY, 1920–60

[In Fordism] it was incumbent upon communication to ensure the welding together of serial
production and mass consumption, work and entertainment.
(Mattelart, 1986, xiv)

The complex and territorially dispersed production systems of Fordism imposed considerable
requirements upon urban infrastructure systems (see Table 2.1). With their high degree of
territorial segregation and dispersed production, the variants of Fordist production developed
would not have been possible without significant innovations in communication, transport
and energy networks, organised as standardised monopolies across space (Warf, 1995).
Differences between spaces needed to be ironed out in terms of the infrastructure available
and technological standards. Standardised infrastructure grids needed to match the broader
moves towards standardisation in production, consumption and, later, mass public housing
within cities and national systems of cities (for the French case see Lucan, 1992). And central
and local states needed to ensure that modern, integrated infrastructure networks were
provided to underpin virtuous cycles of production and consumption within the Fordist
model.
Fordist development was thus predicated upon a set of technologies which together
rendered ‘industrial location and the management of production itself largely independent
of geographical distance’ (Frobel et al., 1980, 36). Their requirements were met by massive
national and local state investment in standardised and dependable infrastructure services.
Containerisation and the long-distance highway network facilitated freight movement.
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 67

Table 2.1 Fordist spatial organisation, transport and communications

Industrial Spatial Transport and Infrastructure

organisation organisation communication requirements
patterns

• Economies of • Spatial division of • Long-distance • Reliable

scale labour product movement long-distance
to assembly lines goods transport
• Vertical integration • Corporate control
and markets
linked to urban • Reliable air and rail
• Hierarchical
hierarchy • Long-distance travel to maintain
control
movement of national corporate
• Metropolitan
• Mass production people to maintain control
labour markets
corporate control
• Large • Reliable national
• National and
firm-dominated • Vertical and international
international
information flows telephone and
• Mass consumption production
telex
of standardised systems • Commuting to
goods large urban and • Urban and
• Linkages
suburban suburban mass
maintained over
production sites transit for labour
long distances
force
• Goods and
information
networks
predominantly
national and
international to
connect core with
periphery
• Little need for local
communication
networks

Source: Capello and Gillespie (1993), 37.

Reliable voice communication permitted the long-distance control of spatially dispersed

production. Transport, telecommunications and the roll-out of electricity networks meant
that locations in peripheral regions and cities became economically feasible (Gillespie and
Giannopoulos, 1993).
Increasing international connections between cities helped to meld an increasingly
international urban system, further freeing up location choices for growing international
corporations. As the interwar practices of US Fordism diffused into Europe during postwar
reconstruction, a twenty-five-year boom followed, based on the virtuous linkage of mass
production techniques, mass consumption and advertising based on the nuclear family
household, Taylorist work organisation, collective wage bargaining, the hegemony of the
large corporation, Keynesian demand management, the welfare state and the mass production
of standardised housing (Giannopoulos and Gillespie, 1993, 36). Underpinning all, of course,
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 68

was the elaboration of often taken-for-granted and increasingly standardised infrastructure

grids to bind Fordist space economies, and the city-regions that made them up, into
functioning entities.
As cities integrated more closely into national urban systems, so planning doctrines in
turn contributed to the virtuous circles of growing mass consumption and production.
As Fillion suggests, ‘new infrastructures, zoning regulations favouring low density develop-
ment, and financial support for single family housing transformed time–space relations
in a way that was particularly propitious to the mass consumption of durable goods’ (1996,
1939).

DOMESTIC CONSUMPTION AND MODERN

NETWORKED URBANISM

In most Western cities between the 1920s and 1960s the above ideologies of technological
progress, of the need for bright, modern, technologically advanced cities, wove together
powerfully with planning debates about urban rationalisation. The result was to shape a
remarkable growth of domestic mass consumption, mediated by the increasingly ubiquitous
electricity, gas, telephony, broadcasting and transport grids. Both the transforming urban
landscapes of the modern city and the fast-developing highway, telephone, television, energy
and water networks underpinned new cultures of domestic mass consumption of a vast range
of goods and services over unprecedented distances.
Distance was less and less a barrier to interaction, mobility and exchange as networked cities
merged into networked urban systems. Consumers could live at ever-increasing distances
from power stations, and highways, water grids, phone networks, television and radio
broadcasting networks maintained the illusion of proximity. Electricity, for example, was now
pushed down high-voltage cables across regions, nations and cities, to enter the networked
home invisibly, giving ‘the impression that [it] was a sourceless source, an absent presence’
(Thrift, 1996a, 271).
Such mediated, dispersed consumption, in turn, fuelled the demand that sustained
extending domains of Fordist mass production. As Figure 2.13 shows, we can, in fact, interpret
the period from 1900 to 1960 as one in which household access to the ‘bundle’ of modern
infrastructure networks diffused towards near ubiquity – an essential foundation of all aspects
of economic, social and cultural life during the period (see Figure 2.13).
It is important, therefore, as our third pillar of the modern infrastructural ideal, to explore
how this ‘bundle’ of integrated networked infrastructures served not only to underpin the
elaboration of mass consumption in the modern city, but also to sustain normative
conceptions of social and cultural behaviour. Most particularly, we need to understand how
modern networked consumption was constructed to underpin starkly gendered divisions of
urban work and space. Three particular aspects of this shift deserve closer scrutiny.
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 69

Figure 2.13 The expansion of household access to urban infrastructures in the West. Source: Dupuy
(1991), 42

THE GENDERED CONSTRUCTION OF MASS,

NETWORKED CONSUMPTION

We have learned that the way to break the vicious deadlock of low standard of living is to spend
freely and waste creatively.
(US ‘consumer engineer’ Christine Frederick, 1929, cited in Lupton and Miller, 1992, 7)

First, there was the (profoundly gendered) construction of mass, home-based consumption.
In the United States, and elsewhere, this was constructed as the modern urban ideal of
‘cleanliness, comfort, convenience and economy of effort’ and became closely linked with the
efforts of infrastructure operators to generate domestic demand (Rose, 1995, 200). Such
efforts, in turn, linked with wider strategies of national and federal governments to maximise
the impacts of their widening infrastructure grids on mass production and consumption. In
US cities like Kansas, for example, utility companies worked closely with consumer appliance
manufacturers to target directly female ‘housewives’ to sell all sorts of appliances. They were
‘most effective in selling irons or gas water heaters, especially in presentations to women.
Public policy had encouraged [utility executives in Kansas] to set in motion a program of mass
production and mass consumption of light and heat that placed gender at the center of the
sale pitch’ (Rose, 1995).
In this and many other cases a whole range of advertisers and advocates worked to build
up consumers’ demands for emerging integrated urban infrastructures, standing ‘between
generalized desire for comfort and convenience, on the one hand, and complex and little
understood infrastructural systems, on the other’ (ibid., 200).
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 70

Figure 2.14 The starkly gendered construction of the telephone: An AT&T advertisement of 1910.
Source: AT&T archives; Fischer (1992), 158

At this time a whole range of supporting practices – advertising, market research and
‘consumer engineering’ – emerged aimed at orchestrating the construction, surveillance and
stimulation of networked household consumption and ‘housekeeping’ (Lupton and Miller,
1992; Hayden, 1981). As we can see in Figure 2.14, which shows one of AT&T’s adverts
for the telephone from 1910, the starkly gendered representations used resonated strongly
with the dualistic distinction between the (female) domestic private space and (male) public
space that was so strongly embedded in modern planning doctrines about urban streets and
landscapes (Weisman, 1994). Thus paternalistic and patriarchal images were often used,
configuring ‘housewives’ as grateful recipients of new networks and appliances, supporting
their responsibility for maintaining comfortable, modern family homes. ‘The obligation of
men’, meanwhile, was seen to be to ‘protect women from the hazards of industrializing cities’
(Rose, 1995, 200).
This applied to gendered notions of telephony, television use, automobile access and use,
water, bodily hygiene and the widening range of appliances linked with gas and electricity.
In each case the social and cultural meanings of vast, extending, engineered systems became
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 71

constructed within an endless plurality of domestic spaces in profoundly gendered ways. But
householders were not just victims of broader social norms: they actively appropriated and
shaped domestic appliances and their uses ‘in a fashion that specifies the significance of a
particular machine for the gender, income, habits, popular ideas, and contemporary ideologies
of buyers during a specific time period’ (Rose, 1995, 196). This was especially so in the
construction of American suburban households as sites of intense consumption, disciplined
bodily and kitchen hygiene, and the systematised and profligate disposal of wastes (see Lupton
and Miller, 1992).

DECENTRALISATION, SUBURBANISATION AND

MEGALOPOLITAN URBAN FORM

Second, there were dramatic transformations in the physical forms and landscapes of cities.
As the American suburban ideal grew to dominate representations of mass consumption, so
European and American cities themselves were decentralising physically. Such decentralisation
was essentially underpinned by the achievements of the modern infrastructural ideal: reliable
access across the metropolitan region to electricity, telecommunications, road and highway
links, and water and sewerage networks to allow social, economic and cultural participation
over ever greater geographical areas (Fishman, 1990).
The bundle of networked infrastructures that underpinned such changes supported
the growth, particularly in North America, of whole urban landscapes made up of networks
of controlled and interconnected environments: malls, offices, cars and homes. As we shall
see in the rest of this book, such decentralised metropolitan forms in turn provide the perfect
landscapes to later sustain parallel processes of infrastructural splintering and urban
fragmentation.
In supporting processes of decentralisation, ideologies, planning practices and state policies
interlaced with changing consumer behaviour to create immense megalopolitan urban
landscapes. As Mark Rose suggests, from the point of view of the United States, the:

Federal and state government built highway networks that allowed Americans to live far from central
cities. Government also financed construction of water and sewer systems extending into distant suburbs,
all the while guaranteeing the mortgages of the residents. At the same time, electric and gas rates declined;
engineers built larger and more efficient plants; regulators kept energy prices low, particularly for natural
gas; and lengthy pipelines and electrical interchanges carried that energy throughout the continent.
(1995, 201)

THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN NETWORKED HOME

Finally, of course, the notion of the modern urban networked home quickly became
reconstructed to support the wider dynamics of mass consumption mediated by bundles of
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 72

integrated infrastructure networks (Lucan, 1992). As Lewis Mumford describes, the new
networked household meant that the ‘cost of a whole room was buried in the street, in the
various mechanical utilities necessary for the house’s functioning’ (1961, 48). Rybczynski
notes further that:

The main difference between, say, the house of one hundred years ago and one of today is that the
latter contains a great deal of machinery. The contemporary house, as the French architect Le Corbusier
remarked, has become a ‘machine for living’, that is, it has become an environment that is conditioned
primarily by technology. Electricity, power pumps, motors, furnaces, air conditioners, toasters, and
hair dryers. There are technologies for providing hot and cold water, and for getting rid of it. There are
telephone systems and cable television systems; unseen waves carry radio and television signals. The
house is also full of automated devices – relays and thermostats – which turn these machines on and off,
regulate the heat and cold, or simply open the garage door. Remove technologies from the modern
home and most would consider it uninhabitable. Cut off the power that fuels the machine for long
enough and the dwelling must be evacuated.
(1983, 22–3)

Such trends were supported by the modern prophets’ idealisation of technologically advanced
homes. Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’, for example – the basic element of his utopian
vision of the modern city – was to be a space where ‘drudgery [was] eliminated by machines’
(Corn and Horrigan, 1984, 69). Buckminster Fuller, another architectural utopian, spoke of
the home as a ‘modular unit’. But the application to housing construction of the assembly
line techniques of the Fordist factory, in both the private and the state sectors, allowed the
fastest possible diffusion of the attainable notion of the house as a multiply networked space
‘filled with durable consumer goods’ (Corn and Horrigan, 1984, 79).
The mass diffusion of multiply networked homes, especially through expanding Western
cities, and the spin-offs in construction and consumer goods industries, acted as a kind of
‘super multiplier effect’. It did much to sustain the whole long boom of Fordist–Keynesian
economic growth between 1950 and the end of the 1960s. Gershuny notes how an extending
national electricity grid in Britain after World War II provided such a ‘super multiplier’ to
all aspects of consumption, particularly stimulating mass consumption of vast ranges of
‘specific new products for innovative household electrical products’ in a remarkably short
time (1983, 196). Consumer durables, linked with networked infrastructures, thus, in effect,
became normalised, as essential supports to all aspects of ‘normal’ domestic life, sustaining
an ever-extending web of ‘commodity futurism’ (Corn and Horrigan, 1984), often based on
the idealisation of US styles of suburban life.
In the process, urban cultures stressing privatism, enclosure and self-sufficiency have
become dominant in many cities across the world (Kostof, 1994a). As Nan Ellin suggests,
while ‘private transit (the automobile) had served to accelerate privatization during the first
half of the twentieth century, widespread access to communications technologies – particularly
television, VCRs, the mobile phone, the Internet and personal computer, cast new dimensions
on it’ (1996, 108). The withdrawal of consumption politics into the networked spaces of
individualised households is thus a common trend driving developments in modern urban
infrastructure.
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 73

G O V E R N I N G T H E I N T E G R A T E D
I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L I D E A L : C I T I E S ,
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A N D T H E N A T I O N S T A T E ,
1 9 0 0 – 6 0

From the eighteenth century on, every discussion of politics as the art of government of men
[sic] necessarily involved a chapter or a series of chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on
hygiene, and on private architecture.
(Foucault, 1984, 240)

The final ‘pillar’ supporting the construction and elaboration of the modern urban infra-
structural ideal was provided by efforts by governments and states to support the shift to
regulated, near universal access to infrastructure networks across cities, regions and nations.
Reviewing the development of infrastructure networks, it is clear that broad agreement was
reached between the end of the nineteenth century and the late 1960s, especially across the
Western world, about the need to roll out rapidly a relatively standardised set of technologies
to the city and the wider, urbanising nation. The general view was that infrastructure networks
needed to be delivered by social institutions based on private or public monopoly control
(McGowan, 1999). Roads, utilities, water systems and telephony were generally seen to
connect and mediate all aspects of modern production, distribution and consumption.
Without public control of these grids, local operators would, as the National Civic Federation
of US Utilities argued in 1907, ‘be left to do as they please’ (Simon, 1993, 35). From the
initial private and public local utilities in the late eighteenth century, in fact, many efforts had
been made by municipalities and states in the United States to fight against the vested interests
of private capital in developing the single integrated public water, sewer and later energy
systems for cities that were able to match the enormous pace of urbanisation at the time
(Tarr, 1984).
In France the agents of the nation state ultimately began to consider the country’s ‘territory
on the model of the city’ – a space to be ordered, regulated and configured through managing
the interplay of territory and infrastructure networks (Foucault, 1984, 241). The essential idea
was that ‘a state will be well organized when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that
of the cities extends over the entire territory . . . What was discovered at that time was the
idea of society’ (ibid., 241–2, original emphasis).

THE ‘QUANTUM LEAP TOWARDS UBIQUITY’:

INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS AND THE CONSTRUCTION
OF THE MODERN NATION STATE AS A TERRITORIAL
‘CONTAINER’

It is important, though, to locate the shift to nationally regulated, and often owned,
infrastructure networks during this period. Between 1880 and 1950 modern nation states
emerged as great territorial ‘containers’ with growing powers over many domains. First they
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 74

‘captur[ed] politics, then economics, followed by cultural identity and finally the idea of
society itself’ (Taylor, 1994, 157).
The nation state emerged to treat ‘the people of a state as a society, a cohesive social
grouping that constituted a moral and practical social system’ (Taylor, 1994, 156; see Urry,
2000b). Infrastructure networks, now widely seen through organic metaphors as the very
‘connective tissue’, ‘nervous systems’ or ‘circulation systems’ of the nation, became an essential
focus of the power, legitimacy and territorial definition of the modern nation state. The laying
out of contiguous, monopolistic infrastructure networks, starting with the legacies of the
more localised and internationalised networks constructed up to the 1930s, was, in fact, tied
very closely not just to the modern view of the state but to much deeper views of territorial
scale and space (Jessop, 2000). As Neil Brenner suggests, during this period, ‘scales were
viewed as relatively stable, nested, geographical arenas inside which the production of space
occurred’ (1998c, 460).
Most important, though, the broader elaboration during this period of Keynesian models
of state policy and demand management, to balance Fordist production and consumption
practices, seemed predicated on a ‘quantum leap towards ubiquity’ in access to publicly
regulated or controlled infrastructure networks (Sawnhey, 1992, 539). Fragmented ‘islands’
of incompatible and uneven infrastructure within and between cities became a source of much
concern throughout the Western world.
Strategies such as the New Deal initiative in the United States, which did much to support
extension towards national phone, electricity and highway grids, sought to use integrated
public works programmes to ‘bind’ cities, regions and the nation whilst bringing social
‘harmony’, utilising new technologies and also creating much-needed employment (Gandy,
1998; Easterling, 1999a). Figure 2.15, which shows an advertisement from AT&T in 1915,
captures perfectly the spirit of extending infrastructure networks universally to ‘unite’ the
United States. State-led regional development initiatives in the United Kingdom, similarly,
worked closely with public utilities to ensure infrastructure capacity was built in advance of
demand to ensure ‘national prosperity’ (see Figure 2.16).
Taking control over the supply of networked infrastructure supplies to production,
the territorial roll-out of networks over space, and the application of new services to modern
consumption, were therefore essential components of the growth of the modern nation state
itself. The shift towards near-ubiquitous access to infrastructures across the territory of a
nation, in fact, had much to do, as Thrift (1990) found with transport and communications
in Britain between 1730 and 1914, with ‘the gradual melding of the country economically,
socially and culturally’ .
The democratisation and diffusion of infrastructure were therefore critical to the emergence
of a national sense of ‘cohesion’. As Neil Brenner suggests, infrastructure policies were the
central way in which national states engaged in shaping capitalist territorial organisation,
especially between 1890 and the 1930s (1998c, 469). Later, between the 1950s and 1970s,
infrastructure strategies helped entrench the national approach to the production of scale
that most suited Fordist industrial policies. In fact, as Brenner argues, ‘throughout the
twentieth century, the state has operated as a form of territorialization for capital, above all
through the planning, production and regulation of large-scale infrastructural configurations
that serve as “general conditions of production” . . . on differential geographic scales’ (ibid.).
Figure 2.15 ‘The telephone unites the nation’: the portrayal of AT&T’s nationwide telephone system as
supporting the construction of a powerful, homogeneous country. Source: Bell Telephone Canada;
Fischer (1992), 163
 THE CHANGING NORTH-EAST

Progress doesn’t really need In the last 5 years alone, NEEB have invested around
plugging. Most people are for it. £60 millions to meet ever-growing demand, and in
But progress depends on resources, the years to come their plans will ensure that as more
power. And power means and more power is needed it will be readily available.
Electricity. NEEB and North East industry advance Remember, highly skilled Industrial Development
hand-in-hand because industry can expand, develop, Engineers are always ready to help industrialists
reach the level of sophistication required for national make the most of electricity – the power for
prosperity by the use of the modern power – electricity. progress at the press of a switch.

A
POWERFUL
PLUG
FOR
PROGRESS

Industrial Development Service

Tyne Area: 235 Stamfordham Road,
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE5 2SF.
Wear Area: Manor House, Station Road,
New Penshaw, Houghton-le-Spring, Co. Durham.
Tees Area: Trenchard Avenue, The North Eastern Electricity Board
Thornaby, Stockton-on-Tees, Teeside.

Figure 2.16 Keynesian regional infrastructure planning: North Eastern Electricity Board advertisement,
1967. Source: NEEB
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 77

Such state-organised investments in the productive basis of the territorial organisation of

capitalism involved:

The construction of transportation systems such as highways, canals, ports, tunnels, bridges, railroads,
airports and public transportation systems; the management of public utilities and energy resources
such as gasoline, electricity and nuclear power, as well as water, sewerage, and waste disposal systems;
. . . the maintenance of communications networks such as postal, telephone, and telecommunications
systems; and the planning and construction of ‘grands ensembles’ and other infrastructural configurations
on urban–regional scales to coordinate the reproduction both of labour power and of capital.
(ibid.)

Ensuring nationally integrated infrastructure thus allowed the state to impose its own
rationality on to the territorial scales, and social processes, within it. Large-scale Keynesian
infrastructure projects allowed the nation state, in particular, to figure to an unprecedented
degree ‘in the promotion and spread of technological change’ (Waites et al., 1989, 27). The
US nation state, for example, ‘built roads, extended railways, organized electricity grids, put
municipal sewerage systems into place’ (ibid.). It also supported the emergence of the massive
national Bell/AT&T telephone monopoly.
The rolling out of infrastructure networks, thus, helped to define the modernity and
ideology of nation states in very direct ways. Consider the Nazis’ Autobahn network, the
electrification of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union (Figure 2.17), the New Deal regional
projects of the Tennessee Valley and the national highway programme in the United States.
Aimed directly to help pull the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1920s and
1930s, the New Deal allowed the federal government to construct ‘a huge range of projects
including roads, sewers, waterworks, multi-purpose dams, bridges, parks, docks, airports,
hospitals, and other public buildings’ (Tarr, 1984).
Later, following the Great Depression and World War II, the large-scale infrastructure
projects of Fordist/Keynesian nation states further cemented their roles as geographical
‘containers’, supporting a tight ‘fit’ between urban development and planning and systems
of national economic subsidies, grants, loans and public ownership. At this time, regional and
local policies towards infrastructure were often little more than ‘transmission belts’ for national
policies (Brenner, 1998c, 475).

LEGITIMISING INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS AS

STANDARDISED MONOPOLIES

There were, of course, substantial national and local variations in the specific technological
and social organisation of infrastructure providers. But these worked within a general and
powerful consensus that networked infrastructures were characterised by three particular
features that required a high degree of public involvement in the roll-out of the networks.
First, there was a broad consensus that the networks through which services were
distributed were most effectively managed through ‘natural monopolies’. Infrastructure
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 78

Figure 2.17 Electricity pylon as an icon of modernisation and collectivisation in postwar, communist
Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. Source: Gold (1997), 101

networks, especially in the early stages of development, were seen to require significant capital
outlay, recouped over a long period of time. Networks represented a form of ‘embedded’ or
‘sunk’ capital that realistically could not be dismantled or moved. Investments were often very
‘lumpy’ because new capacity must be created in large increments. There was therefore little
scope for infrastructure to be a ‘contestable’ activity because of the high sunk costs involved
in establishing a competitive network.
To Sleeman, a typical commentator on state utility policy in the United Kingdom in the
early postwar period, public utilities were therefore not normal commodities to be bought
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 79

and traded in markets. They were now considered ‘essential to a civilised life’ (1953, 3).
The supply of services was unusual in that ‘reliability and regularity are all-important’
(ibid.). And, despite the efforts of some entrepreneurs to develop competing networks
in some places, the huge physical costs of infrastructure networks meant that services
were not generally competitive or ‘transferable from the point of view of users’ without the
user moving physically to a new location. Utilities, roads and rail services (as well as crucial
communications services such as the post), therefore, stood ‘in a special relation to the State,
and need[ed] to be publicly regulated to ensure reasonable charges and adequate services’
(ibid.).
Taken together, these features usually meant that networks were treated as natural monop-
olies because infrastructure was an area of activity where several suppliers were less efficient
than a single one. To Sleeman and many others, the natural monopoly status of infrastructure
networks was ‘usually an essential condition of efficient operation, that one undertaking
should have a monopoly of the supply of service in any particular area’ (1953, 13). A publicly
regulated monopoly was able to benefit from economies of scale by developing one network
whereas a fragmented industry was likely to lead to duplication of costs.
Rationalisation and the interconnection of local networks to create national ‘grids’ thus
allowed economies of scale to be realised in all infrastructural domains. In electricity, for
example, ‘diversity of demand in an interconnected network can save a great deal of generating
capacity for a given aggregate power of appliances’ (Byatt, 1979, 96). Indeed, Britain’s slow
economic progress in the 1920s in integrating its many electricity suppliers meant that it
still suffered from many incompatible local power suppliers. As Byatt notes, as a result, Britain
was seen to suffer from a debilitating ‘electrical backwardness’; ‘electricity was already so well
established as a symbol of progress and modernity, that the identification of Britain’s industrial
future with it was compelling’ (1979, 93). Thomas Hughes (1983) notes that ‘London
was a backward metropolis’ at this time, compared with its great rivals, the ‘electropolis’ cities
of Berlin and New York. London had sixty-five electricity companies, forty-nine systems,
thirty-two different voltages and seventy different pricing systems, all of which led to low
consumption, poor levels of innovation and reliability, and few economies of scale and scope.
Rationalising these, and many other local systems, into the national grid in the 1930s thus
‘both brought down the price of electricity and gave an enormous boost to British industry’
(Thrift, 1996a, 276) (see Figure 2.18).
In all networks, then, nation states thus faced a technological, economic and territorial
imperative to meld standardised, efficient national or subnational networks from the myriad
network patchworks that they inherited. And as Hall and Preston argued:

this, by definition, ha[d] to be achieved comprehensively and in a relatively short time; it require[d]
large scale organization and massive capitalization; it also require[d] technical standardization (railway
gauges; standard times; voltage; communication protocols; rules of the road; speed limits; driving tests;
motor insurance; international air traffic control; computer reservation systems). We invariably find,
therefore, that the infrastructural consequences of major innovations involve[d] the creation of very
large-scale, vertically integrated enterprises, often the largest seen down to their day . . . requiring state
provision, or at least, major state concessions.
(1988, 273)
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 80

Figure 2.18 The national extension of the modern infrastructural ideal: the National electricity grid in
England and Wales, 1994. Source: Thrift (1996a), 307

Second, infrastructure networks were largely considered to be ‘public goods’. Public

consumption goods were defined as having features that made them difficult for distribution
within private markets. Three basic criteria defined ‘pure’ public goods (see Pinch, 1985).
There was, first, the concept of ‘joint supply’ (or non-rivalrousness), meaning that if a service,
such as the national defence or legal system, was supplied to one person it could also be
supplied to all other persons at no extra cost.
The second concept, ‘non-excludability’, meant that once a supply had been built a user
could not be prevented from consuming the service, including infrastructure such as rural
roads. Third, there was the notion of ‘non-rejectability’. This meant that once a service was
supplied it must be equally consumed by all, even by those who do not wish to consume it.
An example would be traffic control systems.
Finally, infrastructure services were seen to produce ‘spillovers’ or ‘externality’ effects that
might negatively affect the environment or particular social groups. These were usually
unpriced effects – such as the negative externality of fossil fuel emissions which contribute to
global warming or the health impacts of not having access to clean water supplies and
endangering health in other parts of the city. For this reason it was accepted that state
regulation was needed to manage the negative externalities associated with infrastructure to
ensure that wider economic, social and environmental objectives were met.
Because the development of infrastructure during this period was driven by the notion of
trying to ‘bind’ the nation together socially and spatially, a set of practices were developed to
ensure the rapid roll-out of standardised infrastructure at equal prices across national economic
space. The institutions responsible for infrastructure provision, whether public or private,
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 81

were given considerable autonomy and powers to ensure the rapid roll-out and integration
of the national space economy through networks, especially into domestic and rural areas.
Cross-subsidies from large to small users, and universal service obligations to ensure a
minimum cost of connection, were developed to ensure rapid roll-out, standardisation and
equalisation.
As nation states drove the integration of networked infrastructures, extremely powerful
supply-oriented logics of network development emerged. Expansion of utility and infra-
structure networks became intimately connected with the drive to improve national economic
performance and the quality of life. Levels of energy consumption, connection to water and
waste networks and levels of telephone ownership became surrogate indicators of levels of
national economic performance. In the search for greater economies of scale the electricity
industry built larger power stations and upgraded the national electricity transmission
network. In the United Kingdom, in the space of twenty years, following the Second World
War, electricity generating capacity multiplied seventeenfold (Reid and Allen, 1970, 9).
Driven by the basic assumption that economic growth would generate new demands for
utility and infrastructure services, network providers became locked into a logic of network
management that focused on the supply of networked services. Major investments in national
transport, energy and telecommunications services were made during this period in order to
develop standardised systems of network supply.

E X P O R T I N G T H E M O D E R N I D E A L : T H E
E X P E R I E N C E O F D E V E L O P I N G C I T I E S ,
1 8 5 0 – 1 9 6 0

The modern infrastructural ideal evident in the cities of advanced Western economies had
important implications for the style of infrastructure provision adopted in developing
and colonial cities. It is important to understand how the modern integrated ideal was
adapted and exported from cities in the dominant economies of the North to the colonial cities
of Africa, South America and Asia (King, 1990). Several key questions emerge here. How
successfully did the modern ideal translate into quite different social, economic and cultural
contexts? How did unequal power relations between the colonial powers and colonial urban
peripheries shape the style of urban infrastructure provision? And how was infrastructure
linked with the developmental agendas of the colonial and postcolonial states in developing
nations?
There are powerful resonances between the four main pillars of the integrated infra-
structural ideal and the colonialist policies shaping the attempted roll-out of infrastructure
networks in developing cities. To explore these, we would identify two broad phases of
development in the style of infrastructure provision for developing cities: formal colonialism
(1820s–1930s) and neocolonialism (1940s–1980s). Within each period there were enough
parallels to enable us to talk meaningfully about the emergence of ‘styles’ of infrastructure
provision in developing cities.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 82

EXPORTING CUSTOMISED INFRASTRUCTURE: FORMAL

COLONIALISM, 1820 S –1930 S

First, during the period of formal and direct control by core countries over their colonial
‘dependencies’, infrastructure was developed along a highly selective trajectory (see Yeoh,
1996). Investments in infrastructure were designed to meet two broad objectives. The first
was to ‘rationalise’ the economies of colonies to create an ‘open’ structure heavily dependent
on the export of primary products to the metropolitan core. Colonial economies also became
increasingly important as a market for consumer, and later producer, goods from the core
economies. The second objective was the creation of well serviced urban cores for colonial
and local elites to organise production, exert political and administrative control, and mediate
relations with the metropolitan core in the global North. During this period, infrastructure
investment was explicitly geared to the needs of colonial interests. Networks were designed
to minimise the risks and obligations of metropolitan power. Two forms of infrastructure
development were related to these two broad objectives.

M E T R O P O L I T A N I N F R A S T R U C T U R E , ‘ S P A T I A L A P A R T H E I D ’
A N D T H E A S S E R T I O N O F M O R A L S U P E R I O R I T Y

The first focused on the provision of networked infrastructures for the colonial metropolis.
Here, urban infrastructure systems were a key part of the local creation of variants of the
unitary city ideal. However, in colonial cities networks and plans largely focused on the needs
of metropolitan and local elites (with the later, often unrealised, promise of later network
extensions to the majority population). The Western ideal of a unitary, orderly city, laced by
networked infrastructure, was thus effectively remodelled as a system of spatial apartheid
(Balbo, 1993). Modern networks were laid out for the population; the ‘natives’ remained
confined to premodern, non-networked and informal settlements beyond cordons sanitaires
of walls and major boulevards.
In French colonial cities in North Africa like Fez and Algiers, for example, garden
suburbs were laid out according to best practice but only for European settlers. The native
towns – the Muslim-dominated medinas – were mostly left intact and generally neglected
in terms of improvement in sanitation and services (Robinson, 1999, 161). As Balbo
argues, this partial completion of modern infrastructure was a very deliberate attempt to
symbolise the superiority of colonial power holders over colonised civilisations. The large
avenues of the European city, he writes, with ‘its modern services and infrastructures were
to show very clearly on which side progress, wealth and power were situated’ (1993, 25).
Thus Western infrastructural and disciplinary concepts and practices were adapted and
imposed in order to ‘make non-western societies legible, ordered, and controllable’ (Crang
and Thrift, 2000, 10).
Along with the construction of ‘colonial medicine’ and ‘sanitary science’ to support the
networked infrastructures of the colonisers, the existing infrastructural practices of indigenous
populations tended to be denigrated as ‘backward’, ‘disease-ridden’ and full of ‘latent poisons’
(Yeoh, 1996, chapter 3). In Singapore, for example, ‘the colonial medical and sanitary
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 83

campaign’ of constructing Western-style water and sewer systems, first for the colonial core
of the city, ‘not only served to legitimize imperial rule and to impart to it a gloss of
munificence, an illusion of permanence, but was in itself an exercise of disciplinary power
which penetrated the smallest details of everyday life’ (Yeoh, 1996, 28; for a discussion of
similar practices in South Africa see Minkley, n.d.).
Those ‘majority’ populations beyond the very limited reach of modern infrastructure
networks, in traditional and informal settlements, were therefore rarely acknowledged as
urban citizens within the discourse of urban planning, modernisation and colonialism. At best
they were ignored; at worst they were labelled illegal and their settlements were torn down
in the name of modernisation (still a widespread practice today) (Bhabha, 1994). To Balbo
then:

the network city is the concretisation of the master planning approach to the idea of the unitarian city.
Those who cannot afford to have their own w.c. or water tap and adopt other types of solution for their
needs (oil lamps, street water vendors, foot travelling, pit latrines) are not acknowledged as citizens of
the network city, even if they are the majority of the population.
(1993, 29)

C O L O N I A L H E A D L I N K S : I N F R A S T R U C T U R E N E T W O R K S

A N D E C O N O M I C E X P L O I T A T I O N

The second form of development was marked by the emergence of economic enclaves
serviced with infrastructure. Colonial powers provided infrastructure networks, particularly
communication systems such as rail and seaports, and international and regional telegraph
and telephone cables, to incorporate selected areas of their dependencies into the world
market, but on highly unequal terms. Usually this was done to support mineral exploitation,
mines and plantations. Infrastructure was often explicitly designed to support the extraction
of resources from productive enclaves whilst servicing the metropolitan elites in cities who
organised production and maintained political control. Technically, local urban infrastructure
tended to follow the same design and specifications as those of colonial powers – voltages,
pressures, gauges, etc. – locking peripheries into particular trajectories of development and
dependence on metropolitan powers for spares, maintenance and the capital equipment for
major network extensions.
The creation of ‘enclaves’ either took place through direct external control or through a
relationship with local elites (Cardosa and Faletto, 1979, 60). The objective was to incorporate
local production processes, resources and labour into an economic system under strong
external influence. The key economic function of this form of development was the growth
of a node – a port or city – to serve as an infrastructural point of connection between local
resources and international flows of raw materials and manufactured goods, a node through
which metropolitan and colonial goods could flow. ‘Colonial cities were hence planted as
“headlinks” and designed to facilitate European capitalist penetration’ (Yeoh, 1996, 18).
Highly specialised infrastructures were developed with a powerful external orientation towards
the export of resources to the Northern metropolitan core.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 84

Take, for example, British railway construction in Africa. In this case the overarching
rationale was to focus on what could be profitably exploited. As a result, the system reinforced
a dendritic pattern of exchange. ‘Communications were designed mainly to evacuate exports.
There were few lateral or intercolonial links, and little attempt was made to use railways and
roads as a stimulus to internal exchange’ (Hopkins, 1973, 198). The routing of externally
imposed infrastructure systems often seemed entirely arbitrary, for the links often bypassed
important indigenous cities and trading centres.

MODERNISATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE:

NEOCOLONIALISM, 1940 S –1960 S

In the period following World War II, increasing numbers of colonised territories obtained
formal independence from the metropolitan nations of the North. This did not, however,
signal a dramatic change in the style of infrastructure provision. Former colonies were usually
locked into particular pathways of development through the technologies employed and
powerful social and political links that maintained a high degree of continuity in infrastructural
development.

T H E E M E R G E N C E O F M O D E R N I S A T I O N A N D

I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L ‘ T R I C K L E D O W N ’

However, what did change dramatically was the perceived role of infrastructure in urban and
national development. Modernisation theory became the dominant development paradigm.
It had important implications for infrastructural policy. Accepting that networks were already
highly unevenly developed, the objective of policy became the acceleration of the Western
pathway of urban infrastructural development. Modernisation theory suggested a model of
infrastructural development initially focused on key cities and users. The assumption was that
the benefits would ‘trickle down’ through the urban hierarchy and into rural areas, and that
more marginal users would eventually be connected to the networks. The expansion of
infrastructure networks began to be seen as the material representation of modernisation and
the assertion of an embryonic national identity in the form of airports, four-lane highways
and power stations that would sweep away the divisions of colonialism and the barriers of
traditionalism (Bhabha, 1994).
It is interesting to review the relationship between cities and infrastructure implied within
the paradigm of modernisation theory. The best-known exposition of modernisation theory
was popularised by Walt Rostow (1960), who put forward a model of economic development
comprising four successive stages from pre-industrial to post-industrial through which
developing countries should pass. Rostow presented a limited conception of a single linear
path to attain ‘lift-off to self-sustaining growth’. This idea was universalising, technologically
historicised, and oversimplistic but it became a powerful rhetorical device and was translated
into spatial models of urban and regional development. John Friedmann (1966), for example,
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 85

developed a four-stage model in which a single dynamic and modernising urban core
expanded through the urban hierarchy and across the rural periphery, reducing urban–rural
disparities and producing a homogeneous, fully integrated and modern development space.
Many social scientists and policy makers assumed that the urbanisation process in less
developed countries would pass through a progression of stages approximating the phases of
city growth in Western urban history. This approach emphasised the similarities between
urban growth in the Developing World and urbanisation in the advanced Western economies,
implying that urbanisation was tied to economic growth and industrialisation.
According to modernisation theory the prime objective of policy was the modernisation
of a region’s economy through a form of industrialisation that closely followed the Western
model of development. Former neocolonial powers ‘sought to establish some of the essential
infrastructure and facilities that the new independent states would require, and which had
been ignored or neglected during colonial rule’ (Simon, 1996, 36). The intention was
to accelerate the newly independent Developing World through an industrial transition
of rapid modernisation that would become evident in improved living conditions and
standards. Clearly the role of water and energy infrastructure and reliable transport in ensuring
the movement of energy, goods and people was central to this model of development.
For instance, ‘the infrastructure and public services utility industry in Brazil, during the
developmentalist rule, evolved upon a model of huge networks, with growing territorial
encompassment and functional complexity’ (Schiffer, 1997).
Although initially concentrated in one or two urban centres for reasons of ‘economic
efficiency’, these investments, it was widely hoped, would ‘trickle down’ through the urban
hierarchy and rural areas of developing nations, replacing traditional lifestyles, modes of
production and poverty in the process. In the early stages, massive infrastructural investment
in the urban cores, usually capital cities, actually tended to drain the periphery, concentrating
resources and skills in cities. But, it was argued that, once the diseconomies of urban growth
outweighed the agglomeration benefits, the balance would shift in favour of trickle-down and
the diffusion of modernity in all its infrastructural and cultural forms. These processes were
seen as positive and beneficial and the spatial, economic and social inequalities as a necessary
price to pay in the course of development. In any case inequalities were believed to be of
limited duration, since industrialised development, when completed, would be characterised
by a high degree of spatial homogeneity, therefore eliminating poverty in the periphery (see
Box 2.4). It was perceived that Western models of infrastructural provision could be translated
unproblematically into developing contexts.

I M P O R T S U B S T I T U T I O N I N D U S T R I A L I S A T I O N

The second approach to infrastructure development – import substitution industrialisation

(ISI) – was closely linked with modernisation theory. The development of import-substituting
industrialisation in many developing countries was designed to decrease dependence on
foreign imports and help improve the balance of payments. But this required the availability
of a small, highly trained, disciplined labour force and the existence of a highly concentrated
consumer market. In this context cities were viewed as generative catalysts of development,
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 86

B O X 2 . 4 A M O D E R N I S A T I O N A P P R O A C H
T O T H E D E V E L O P M E N T O F T R A N S P O R T
N E T W O R K S I N D E V E L O P I N G C O U N T R I E S

The model by Taffe et al., published in 1963,

provides a good example of the modernisation
approach to the development of transport
networks in a Developing World context (see
Figure 2.19). Based on historical research in
West Africa, it built a six-stage approach to the
development of transport networks. Although
this echoed Rostow’s stages of growth
Taffe et al. (1963) argued that not all countries
would experience all the stages in a sequential
form.
In stage one of the model a series of trading
posts and ports are separately established
along the coast to serve as points of exchange
for exports and imports. In the second
stage, trading routes are extended into the
interior from the coast to make contact
with new people and resources. Stage three
is characterised by the development of
extensions of the hinterlands through the
construction of lateral feeders from the trunk
links, but each port has its own distinct net-
work and regional system. In the fourth stage
these local and regional systems become
interconnected.
As new economic resources – minerals and
plantations – are exploited, new administrative
and transport interchanges develop as inter- Figure 2.19 A modernisation approach to the
mediate urban centres. However, in stage five development of transport networks in
developing countries: the model of Taffe
the creation of an increasingly integrated
et al. (1963)
network reduces the need for so many ports.
Trade is therefore increasingly concentrated
in one or two large ports connected either branch and low-volume lines in favour of the
with the largest cities or with the most favour- enhancement of a limited number of high-
able locations and facilities. Most of the small volume and priority links between the principal
local ports decline and the level of connectivity centres.
with others increases rapidly. The final, sixth, The modernisation approach, however,
stage echoes the recent development of rail presents the development of networks in
networks in the North, with the closure of an unproblematic and neutral manner that
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 87

assumes this style of development is positive for the indigenous population. Traditional
for the host country. No account is taken of modes of transport were often undermined by
the fundamentally unequal power relations new rail and road networks, substantially
between colonists and colonised. Colonial disadvantaging many important indigenous
infrastructure also reflected the priorities of towns that were economically and adminis-
the metropolitan power, often with little regard tratively bypassed.

‘the foci of modernisation and dynamism because they served as conduits for information to
developing societies and as loci for innovation, opportunity, and political transformation’
(Smith, 1996, 5). The shift towards capital-intensive export substitution had important
implications for urbanisation and infrastructure development. As Robbers suggested:

The concentration of middle and high-income populations in a few urban entrées makes investments
in capital-intensive consumer goods attractive. These industries are located in, or close to, centres of
population and contribute to the attraction of large cities for rural migrants. Improvements in urban
infrastructure such as roads, lighting, sanitation and housing are part of the dynamic of this
industrialisation.

(1978, 81)

ISI required an internal market of consumers clustered together in urban areas who were
wealthy enough to purchase final products. Consequently, urban infrastructure policies in this
context reflected ‘strategies for facilitating and subsidising the profit-making activities of the
administrative elite and their partners, particularly transnational enterprises’ (Smith, 1996,
67). Nation states therefore developed policies, including patterns of urbanisation and
infrastructure development, that promoted the interests of this alliance by concentrating
infrastructure in the capital cities or ports, providing for the material needs of the local elites
but also subsidising the lifestyles of employees of transnational corporations. Like
modernisation theory, ISI tended to downplay poverty and unemployment problems, seeing
them as largely transitional. Problems such as massive rural to urban migration were seen
largely in demographic terms that could be muted and controlled by planning designed to
‘re-equilibrate the system’. However, there was insufficient institutional capacity to manage
and plan cities while the problem of low quality and even non-connection to infrastructure
services became an increasing issue for poor and marginal users.

C O N C L U S I O N S : N E T W O R K I N G M U L T I P L E
M O D E R N I T I E S

We can see from the wide (but necessary) breadth of the above discussion, and the
complex range of aspects covered by its four ‘pillars’, that the modern urban infrastructural
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 88

ideal was a complex and multifaceted construction. More properly, it was a complex and
multifaceted, yet diverse, set of constructions. The ideal embraced many intersections between
ideology, technology, geography and culture; between politics, history, philosophy and
society.
Discussion above has been able to give only a small number of examples of how the modern
infrastructural ideal was elaborated in different places in different ways. We have found,
nevertheless, that variations of the modern infrastructural ideal were an essential component
of the elaboration of modern nation states and urban planning movements. They were central
to the construction of modern notions of time and space and of gendered and racialised
constructions of the ‘urban’. They were invoked in the wider extension of modern
consumption and the development of space economies. They helped symbolically and
materially to support the construction of national identities, welfare states, and technocratic
urban and infrastructural professions. And they were adapted to the very different contexts
of developing cities, where infrastructural configurations were central in structuring power
relations between colonised and colonisers.
Inevitably, then, exploring the archaeology and origins of the modern ideal of urban
infrastructures has forced us to be unusually, even athletically, interdisciplinary. We have had
to bring together many usually separate debates: from Geography, Planning, Architecture,
Urban Studies and Cultural Theory, from Science and Technology Studies, and from debates
about consumption, culture, governance and the state. We have also had to draw on the
stories of a wide range of cities: developed and developing, colonial and postcolonial.
So intrinsic are infrastructures and urbanity to ‘modernity’ that such stories are inevitably
a good part of the story of modern society itself. Indeed, so woven are the (unusually
implicit and unspoken) tenets and axioms of modern ideals of integrated infrastructure into
the fabric of modern civilisation that commentators across many disciplines have been
extremely reluctant to recognise their current demise. As Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000)
argue, once they were completed within the framework of the modern infrastructural ideal,
‘the networks became buried underground, invisible, banalised, and relegated to an apparently
marginal, subterranean urban world’. It is only now, through processes of splintering
urbanism, that infrastructure networks are being reproblematised and (unevenly) brought
back into view as major foci of debate, renegotiation and reconstruction within contemporary
cities.
This is not to imply, however, that the modern infrastructural ideal was ever perfectly
‘realised’ or that it was a universal and uniform ‘thing’. Always heterogeneous and dynamic,
efforts materially or discursively to construct ubiquitous, normalised and standardised
infrastructure networks emerged in a myriad of different ways covering different networks,
spaces, cities and times. What we have explored here, then, is not some overarching story but
the complex interplay and emergence of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000). Whilst the
range of stories and experiences in these domains was broad, we can see from this chapter
that there was a notable ‘fit’ between the diverse resonances and constituent forces of the
modern ideal such as to allow us scope to generalise in the way that we have.
Having pieced together some of the stories surrounding the emergence of the modern
infrastructural ideal, we are now in a position to begin to understand the significance of the
contemporary shift towards the wholesale and widespread unravelling of that ideal. The rest
 CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN NETWORKED CITY / 89

of this book will be concerned with exploring in detail how the parallel and interdependent
dynamics of infrastructural splintering and urban fragmentation are becoming manifest in a
wide range of contexts across the world. One immediate challenge arises at this point,
however. We need to understand exactly why the modern integrated ideal is unravelling. It
is to this question that we turn in the next chapter.
3 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL

The modern networked city in crisis

Plate 6 Dedicated highways and transit routes linking the Sheraton Hotel and Paris Charles De
Gaulle airport. Photograph: Andreu (1997)
 P R O C E S S E S U N D E R M I N I N G T H E M O D E R N
I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L I D E A L

We know nothing of vast multiplicity – we cannot come to grips with it – not as architects,
planners, or anybody else.
(Aldo van Eyck, quoted in Holston, 1998, 27)

From the late 1960s a series of powerful critiques of the assumptions underlying the modern
urban infrastructural ideal, and its results in practice, emerged. Most of the central tenets of
the ideal – the need for public or private infrastructure monopolies, for singular and
standardised technological grids across territories, for the ‘binding’ of cities into supposedly
‘coherent’ entities – became deeply problematic and difficult to defend. Twenty years later,
as privatisation, liberalisation, globalisation and the application of new technologies weave
across the planet, fewer and fewer networks, in fewer and fewer cities, regions and countries,
continue to develop in isolation from these critiques, along the ‘pure’ lines of the modern
integrated ideal.
A set of wider societal and technical shifts has created the context for this rapid
transformation in the logics underpinning urban infrastructure. The long capitalist boom
from the 1950s to 1970s – the period where the modern infrastructural ideal reached virtually
hegemonic dominance in most Western cities – has collapsed through complex processes of
economic and technological restructuring. Profound economic, political and cultural shifts
have surrounded the emergence of an intensively, but unevenly, interconnected global
capitalist economy, society and culture (whether one captures such trends with phrases such
as ‘post-Fordism’, ‘postmodernism’ or the emergence of a new Kondratiev ‘long wave’ of
economic development – see Amin, 1994; Leonard, 1997).
The Keynesian welfare states that were so central to applying the modern ideal in Western
nations in its latter stages have everywhere experienced deep fiscal and legitimacy crises. In
the Developing World, meanwhile, notions of publicly building modern infrastructure to
stimulate economic modernisation have been under severe strain, with many states and cities
selling off their infrastructural assets to private transnational firms. In addition, Soviet and East
European communism has collapsed, opening up its territories – with their standardised,
centralised and often obsolescent infrastructure networks – to be incorporated unevenly into
global capitalist divisions of labour and flows of capital, information and technology. In most
contexts, it seems, politically neoliberal critiques of the ‘inefficiencies’ of centralised public
control and ownership have fuelled a widespread wave of infrastructural liberalisation and
privatisation which is still accelerating.
Above all, we have seen a dramatic, ‘global assertion of the moral superiority of individual
choice compared to the “tyranny” of collective decision making’ (Leonard, 1997, 4). ‘Market
forces’ and liberalised models of infrastructural competition are widely attested to deserve
hegemonic status as modes of distributing many types of goods and services previously
considered to be ‘public’. To a considerable degree, this is being driven by the hugely
influential lobbying of private transnational firms. On the one hand, such firms are keen to
(re)commodify public goods for profit. On the other, they are keen to benefit from the global
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 92

archipelagoes of high-quality infrastructural investment that are necessary to sustain their

own internationalising divisions of labour, production and consumption.
However, the shift away from the modern infrastructural ideal has been about much more
than geopolitical and economic shifts. Powerful social and cultural critiques have also exposed
its inadequacies. In particular, feminist, anti-racist, postcolonialist and environmentalist
critiques have dramatically exposed the social, gender and environmental biases inherent
within the various elaborations of the modern infrastructural ideal. Finally, notions of urban
planning and the city have also experienced radical overhaul, with the demise of the idea that
it is either possible or desirable comprehensively and rigidly to plan ‘order’ and ‘rationality’
into the form, structure and life of cities.
These changes are, in turn, embedded within wider transitions. Within the current contexts
of economic volatility, a proliferation of boundary-transcending environmental risks, cultural
and ethic migrations, and the decay of the notion that capitalist or communist states can steer
social change, ‘the very idea of controllability, certainty or security collapses’ (Beck, 1999, 2).
Addressing these complex and diverse shifts in detail would require a whole library
rather than one relatively brief chapter. Moreover, attempting to explore shifts away from the
modern ideal, across the full range of urban infrastructures, and right across the planet, is
clearly an impossible task. In this chapter we seek, rather, to present a sweeping, but selective,
perspective. To do this, we explore the interlocking critiques and challenges that, we argue,
have so effectively undermined the modern infrastructural ideal – in the process demolishing
the four ‘pillars’ upon which it was constructed.
We identify, in particular, five interrelated shifts that have worked together to render the
modern infrastructural ideal severely problematic. These we label: the urban infrastructure
‘crisis’; changing political economies of urban infrastructure development; the collapse of
the modern notion of comprehensive urban planning; the physical growth and extension of
metropolitan regions; and the challenge of social movements and critiques.

T H E U R B A N I N F R A S T R U C T U R E ‘ C R I S I S ’

The first broad force undermining the modern infrastructural ideal has been a perceived
‘crisis’ in the infrastructural underpinnings of urban life across the developed, developing
and post-communist worlds, especially since the late 1960s.
In the period since the late 1960s debates about the deterioration of infrastructure services,
and their implications for the economic and environmental development of cities, have
periodically lifted networked infrastructures out of the domain of the technical engineers. This
occurred especially at the end of the 1970s, when the promised delights of urban modernity
that surrounded the modern infrastructural ideal started to seem decidedly ironic, given the
widespread physical collapse of urban infrastructure networks.
In older industrial cities of the North, especially, urban residents became much more
‘aware of visible signs of decay, notably in the form of potholes, breaks in water mains, and
bridge closings. The media have picked up on these visible signs and dramatised the worst
cases in articles and news stories’ (Petersen, 1984, 180). Central to these debates is the
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 93

concern that the physical deterioration of infrastructure, the lack of spending on new facilities,
and a huge backlog in maintenance and rehabilitation, actually threaten to slow and even
reverse economic growth in cities. As we see in Box 3.1, the infrastructure crisis in US cities
is particularly emblematic of this wider deterioration.
In developing countries, meanwhile, the debate is focusing on the lack of any networked
infrastructure across wide swathes of cities, and the inability of providers even to keep pace
with rapid demographic growth and urbanisation that are creating huge unmet demand for
services (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998).

B O X 3 . 1 T H E O B S O L E S C E N C E A N D P H Y S I C A L
D E C A Y O F U R B A N I N F R A S T R U C T U R E :
T H E E X A M P L E O F T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S

The most emblematic and widely publicised of Thus, almost as soon as the modern urban
urban infrastructure crises occurred in US cities infrastructural ideal had become hegemonic
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the in shaping policies for urban infrastructure in
experience is specific to one particular context, US cities, the very urban infrastructure net-
it did broadly mirror a developing discourse works that had been developed under the
around cities with declining infrastructural ideal appeared to be in a state of crisis. There
assets in advanced Western economies. It is was increasing evidence that much of the
useful for our purposes, therefore, to explore infrastructure in older cities had reached
the US infrastructural crises of between 1965 or passed its design life. The main problem
and the early 1980s in a little more detail. was insufficient maintenance or rehabilitation,
The key element in the development of caused by the combination of massively
the crisis debate was the notion that urban extended infrastructure grids built up through
infrastructure was rapidly deteriorating and the modern ideal and a collapse of fiscal
becoming physically obsolescent. Widely capacity at local, federal and national levels
publicised examples of crumbling bridges, to support these infrastructure grids. The result
worn-out roads, poor-quality sewage treat- of the collapse of cross-subsidies within
ment, dirty water, and inadequate energy and between cities was growing inequality
and telecommunications infrastructures all between the richer and poorer parts of cities to
became dramatic symptoms of a widening finance maintenance and new infrastructure
collective sense of urban infrastructure crisis. projects.
In 1995, for example, Perry found that 40 In 1989 the US Department of Trans-
per cent of the nation’s 600,000 bridges could portation estimated that $50 billion were
be classed as deficient and that two-thirds required to repair the nation’s 240,000
of the country’s water treatment facilities bridges, $315 billion was needed to repair its
were substandard (1995, 3). Slightly earlier, highways and that national spending on new
the 1982 US national urban policy report had infrastructure had fallen from 2.3 per cent
expressed concern about the ‘signs of erosion of GNP in 1963 to 1 per cent in 1989 (Reich,
in the condition and performance of the urban 1992, 254). The crisis in water and sanitation
spatial plant, especially in the oldest urban was just as severe.
areas’ (US Congress, 1984, 11).
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 94

NEW YORK’S INFRASTRUCTURE CRISES

For instance, New York had one of the oldest of the valves that are at least sixty years old
and most extensive water distribution systems and have exceeded their design life’. Such a
in the United States. An estimate of water programme would be extremely disruptive
distribution replacement needs was made in to traffic and it was not even clear whether
Rebuilding During the 1980s: New York City’s such a costly programme would solve the
Capital Requirements for the Next Decade. city’s chronic water supply problems. Instead,
This report concluded that ‘approximately the State of New York, in co-operation with the
$12.45 billion should be spent over the next city, requested the army Corps of Engineers
decade to replace 39 per cent of the city’s to investigate replacement water mains
water mains (2,404 miles) and 8 per cent needs.

THE CAUSES OF THE US INFRASTRUCTURE CRISIS

At one level, the infrastructure crisis had to $50 billion in 1984 (1984 prices), surpassing
an apparently simple cause: state and local capital spending after 1977. Operating expen-
expenditure on infrastructure was on an erratic diture had remained fairly steady at 1.4 per
path downward as a result of a widespread cent of GNP over this period. While overall
fiscal crisis at all levels of the US state. expenditure had increased, the composition of
Expenditure was approaching the point at spending had changed dramatically:
which it could barely maintain investment
in net infrastructure assets. In fact, with the in the 1960s highway spending predominated,
extra demands caused by the completion accounting for 60 per cent of all spending. In
of interstate highways, net disinvestment the 1970s highway spending began to fall and
was actually occurring (Petersen, 1984, 111). waste water treatment and water supply
Although overall public expenditure on infra- projects began to increase. By 1980 the
structure quadrupled in 1960–84 to $40 billion interstate highway system was 97 per cent
(1984 prices) this actually represented a decline complete, and highway spending dropped to
when measured as a fraction of GNP. Capital 45 per cent of all spending; spending on waste
spending declined from 2.3 per cent of GNP in water treatment and water supply continued
1960 to 1.15 per cent in 1984. The picture looked to grow, and mass transit doubled. The three
very different when considering expenditure on programs accounted for 41 per cent of all
infrastructure maintenance and operations, government infrastructure spending.
which had increased from $800 million in 1960 (US Congress, 1984, 47)

C H A N G I N G P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M I E S O F U R B A N
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E D E V E L O P M E N T A N D
G O V E R N A N C E

The second broad set of forces undermining the modern infrastructural ideal surrounds the
wholesale political economic shift in processes of urban and infrastructural development that
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 95

has occurred since the early 1970s. The classic territorial ‘containers’ of nation states and
national markets are being tied together into integrated regional blocs supporting integrated
flows of investment, capital and technology. Moreover, fiscal crises are forcing virtually all types
of nation state – advanced industrial, newly industrialising, developmental and post-
communist – to explore transferring some or all of their infrastructure operations to private
operators, in the search for the ‘one off’ spoils of privatisation (Martin, 1999).
The privatisation of infrastructure has been most widespread in the Anglo-American, post-
communist and Developing worlds (Offner, 2000). Perhaps the most famous and extreme
example has been the United Kingdom’s programme of wholesale infrastructural privatisation
since 1984 (see Table 3.1). But infrastructural privatisation is a growing trend in all types of
nation state, as the global pressures of the IMF, World Bank, WTO and regional trade blocs
are forcing the colonisation of public infrastructure by global finance capital and a widespread
retreat from collectivised, integrated and ‘bundled’ ways of managing urban infrastructure
(Schiller, 1999a; Clark, 1999).
Within the emerging internationalised capitalist political economy, transnational
corporations – of which there were over 37,000 in the early 1990s – dominate trade, invest-
ment patterns, technological innovation and the reshaping of systems for the provision of
infrastructure networks. Operators of national infrastructure monopolies geared to rolling
out networks coherently over national and regional spaces are increasingly striving to
piece together the global–local transport, communications and energy grids that most ‘fit’
the demands of transnationals, lucrative consumers and the investment strategies of large
institutions (Offner, 2000).
Within such a massive, complex and diverse transition, we would like to emphasise only
three aspects here. These are: the retreat of state-backed, collectivised forms of urban

Table 3.1 The programme of wholesale infrastructure privatisation in the United Kingdom,
1984–91

Privatisation Total shares General public Institutional

offered allocation (%) allocation (%)

British Telecom (1984) 3 012 000 000 38.5 61.5

British Telecom (1991) 1 597 500 000 65.7 34.3
British Telecom (1993) 1 311 500 000 55.8 44.2
British Gas (1986) 4 025 500 000 62.0 38.0
British Airport Authority (1987) 500 000 000 46.0 54.0
Regional water companies (1989) 2 185 000 000 44.0 56.0
Regional electricity companies (1990) 2 311 614 000 50.6 49.4
Northern Ireland Electricity (1991) 164 600 000 67.0 33.0
Scottish Electricity (1991) 1 198 259 000 58.0 42.0
RailTrack (1995–97) 500 000 000 42.0 58.0
GENCO (1991) 1 253 565 706 49.4 51.6
GENCO (1995) 759 691 098 51.3 48.7
British Energy (1991) 700 000 000 42.6 57.4

Source: Martin (1999), 271.

 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 96

infrastructure provision; the rising imperative of ‘competing’ locally through particular

configurations of urban infrastructure; and the widespread retreat of the idea that networked
services are ‘public’ services that should be available to all at standard tariffs.

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE RETREAT OF THE STATE:

FROM ‘PUBLIC WORKS’ MONOPOLIES TO
INTERNATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURAL CAPITAL

First, supranational, national and local governments are easing restrictions on private entry
into previously monopolistic infrastructure markets in many economic and urban contexts
around the world. This is allowing many new, customised infrastructure networks to be
overlaid within, through, above and below the monopolistic legacies of modern infrastructural
planning and development.
Encouraging liberalised competition is once again a growing approach to national
infrastructure regulation. On the supply side, powerful and transnational alliances and mergers
between network operators in telecommunications, energy, water and transport are rapidly
growing as newly private or entrepreneurial infrastructure firms attempt to position themselves
favourably within dominant and emerging markets (see, for example, Summerton, 1999;
Curwen, 1999). Whilst such internationalisation is far from new – before the era of national
infrastructure ‘champions’, intense patterns of cross-national ownership existed in energy
and telecommunications – it is now intensifying to a level never seen before (McGowan,
1999). Consolidation deals to create larger utility power companies in the electricity
sector alone amounted to US$50 billion in 1998 across the world (Rider, 1999). In
telecommunications and water the figures were much higher still.

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E D E V E L O P M E N T A N D

F I N A N C I A L M A R K E T S

Stock market flotations and the speculative effects of globalising financial markets fuel much
of the frenzied process of internationalisation that is occurring today in global infrastructure
capital (Hirsch, 2000). In a widening range of cases, ‘in urban infrastructure and development
. . . the state has displaced its responsibility for financing and provision to the financial sector’
(Clark, 1999, 242). Private infrastructure firms need to attract investment from pension
funds, institutional investors and private shareholders, which have an extraordinarily diverse
choice of investment options (equities, property, securities, etc.). But, as Poole argues, ‘the
world’s financial markets are awash with private capital looking for economically sound
infrastructure projects to invest in. Several multibillion dollar infrastructure funds have already
been assembled’ (1998, 7). The remarkable investment in international and national
telecommunications grids, by alliances of private telecom, media, entertainment and Internet
firms, is especially noteworthy, as it makes it very difficult for nation states to direct
infrastructure development in this crucial field (Everard, 2000; Sassen, 1999).
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 97

F R O M L A R G E - S C A L E I N T E G R A T E D I N V E S T M E N T S

T O P R O J E C T - B Y - P R O J E C T R I S K A S S E S S M E N T S

Given the long-term and risky nature of infrastructural investment, investors from financial
markets are likely to be reluctant to invest in large-scale, comprehensive and ‘bundled’
networks unless there are ways to guarantee certain rates of return (Clark, 1999). Usually,
such investors will tend to demand a project-by-project risk assessment, identifying individual
revenue and profitability streams for particular infrastructural developments, within tight
definitions of accounting that minimise social or geographical cross-subsidies (Schiller,
1999a). Thus we could argue that the supplementation of state forms of collectivised
infrastructure development that supported the modern ideal with privatised regimes that
need to attract international finance capital seems very likely to support the splintering
of integrated and ‘bundled’ networks into a myriad of individually financed and managed
infrastructure projects. As Gordon Clarke suggests, ‘one result of scrutiny has been a shift away
from long-term investment relationships to project-by-project assessments ruled by the law
of contract’ (1999, 257).
This growing crossover between private finance capital and infrastructural development
thus increasingly works to ‘unbundle’ the more or less coherent and integrated infrastructure
networks that were the legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal. Such unbundling can
happen organisationally, sociotechnically and geographically. From the point of view of
infrastructure privatisation in Brazil, for example, Sueli Ramos Schiffer observes that private
capital is often attracted only by the low-risk elements of infrastructure networks that can be
‘splintered’ off from the whole and directly managed for private profit:

the functional and territorial unbundling of infrastructure networks is necessary to make the private
operation of public utilities feasible. Besides the desirable doctrinaire appeal to competition, the
unbundling of complex unitary networks is a precondition for schemes of project finance based strictly
on each project’s risk.
(1997, 19)

Such a transition seems very likely to exacerbate the uneven development of urban
infrastructure. Investment seems likely to focus on low-risk, lucrative projects with short-
term, demonstrable profitability. Networks supporting more socially and economically
marginal parts of cities are likely to experience increasing underinvestment, neglect and
marginalisation. If such a logic works to shape infrastructural investment and disinvestment
over a long period, fewer and fewer material connections will work to integrate the diverse
social and economic circuits of cities. Such stark increases in the unevenness within cities
seem especially likely when pension funds have systematically taken over the financing
function, as in parts of the Anglo-American world. ‘With the advent of pension fund
capitalism,’ suggests Gordon Clarke:

Urban structure will be increasingly an investment good managed with respect to the interests of pension
funds and their beneficiaries. . . . It is likely that the urban fabric of Anglo-American societies [will]
be systematically discounted by underinvestment over the coming generations with selective private
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 98

investment replacing comprehensive investment by the state. There need be no connection

between the goals of funds’ investment strategies and the economic and social coherence of
urban society.
(1999, 258)

But, to understand the broader significance of this shift, we need to look beyond the urban
scale to the wider role that infrastructure capital is playing within the mushrooming political
economies of international finance as a whole. Here it becomes clear that the increasing
incursion of global finance capital into infrastructure is unleashing a frenzied process of alliance
formation, mergers and acquisitions across the planet. In the interests of profitability
and speculative growth, newly privatised national and regional monopolies are diversifying
into new territories and sectors. Foreign infrastructure companies are acquiring networks in
each other’s countries. New entrants are taking on incumbent companies. And infrastructure
capital is diversifying into, and making alliances with, other sectors (retailing, financial services,
home entertainment, media, insurance, etc.). The ‘map’ of alliances in the global tele-
communications industry, the sector that is rationalising most quickly on a global scale, is
especially complex and fast-moving (see Figure 3.1; Curwen, 1999).

Figure 3.1 Telecommunications industry alliances, 1997. The map is already considerably out of date, for
example MCI severed relations with BT on being taken over by WorldCom in 1998. Source: Winsbury
(1997), 29
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 99

N A T I O N A L A N D T R A N S N A T I O N A L R E - R E G U L A T I O N

But nation states do not tend to simply abandon infrastructure to private capital; they must
find new ways of regulating. Many regulatory institutions, increasingly transnational
themselves, are, in turn, starting to develop mandates to support the splintering of
infrastructure networks within and between national borders. Neoliberal orthodoxy,
supported by global economic institutions like the IMF, World Bank, World Trade
Organisation, G8 and some regional trading blocs, is looking towards constructing the new
infrastructural grids to support a global system of ‘free trade’ and foreign direct investment
(FDI) by transnational corporations (TNCs).
In the Developing World, ‘structural adjustment’ programmes are now being combined
with the efforts of national states to gain global financial credibility to encourage the growth
of state sell-offs in infrastructure (Harris and Fabricius, 1996). Financial constraints on
governments, rapid population growth, the qualitative infrastructural demands of foreign
investors and elite residents, the perceived ‘inefficiencies’ of state-owned enterprises and
general dissatisfaction with the supposed inflexibilities of centralised infrastructure planning
have all supported policies of privatising and liberalising infrastructure markets.
But the crisis in the developmental state has also been substantially induced by national
debt repayments and the strategies of the IMF to force ideologically driven, neoliberal
‘structural adjustment’ packages on to nation states. Such packages often ‘give no option’ but
to privatise, liberalise and sometimes ‘dismantle the public sector’ as a whole (Hoogvelt,
1997, 169, original emphasis). The implication is that ‘any hint of Keynesian notions of
national economic management [is to be consigned] to the dustbin of history’ (ibid.). As
Western infrastructure firms have sought to acquire the infrastructure networks subject to
privatisation, so global–local linkages and flows of capital, technology, infrastructure specialists
and information have intensified further.
In post-communist states, finally, the highly standardised and extensive but often poor-
quality infrastructure networks rolled out under the communist versions of the modern
infrastructural ideal have often been decapitalised and rapidly decayed. In response, state-
owned infrastructure monopolies have been widely privatised and transnational infrastructure
firms have been invited in to lay new networks which often tend to ‘bypass’ the technically
obsolescent legacies of the old systems (Enyedi, 1996; Berlage, 1997; Marcuse, 1996). In
many cases small ‘islands’ of new and relatively functional telecommunications, water, power
and road infrastructure networks, patched together to serve defensive enclaves or massive
new development and consumption zones, are rising out of the decaying, comprehensively
planned networks rolled out with such resolute determination during the communist era of
centralised economic and urban planning (see Castells, 1998; Herrschel, 1998).

ECONOMIC INTEGRATION, URBAN COMPETITION, AND

THE IMPERATIVES OF GLOBAL–LOCAL CONNECTIVITY

Our second point follows directly from the first. In virtually all contexts, it seems, the
development agencies representing cities and regions are now struggling ‘entrepreneurially’
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 100

to develop the networked infrastructures that they think will lure foreign and tourist-related
investment, and so position their cities favourably within divisions of labour which are being
constructed across international borders with unprecedented precision (Hall and Hubbard,
1998; Knight and Gappert, 1989). Thus, single, monopolistic infrastructure grids start giving
way to multiple, separate circuits of infrastructure which are customised to the needs of
different (usually powerful) users and spaces. ‘If there is a technical trend,’ writes Paul Trenor,
‘it is to division: separate infrastructures become more feasible’ (1997).

P R E M I U M I N F R A S T R U C T U R E N E T W O R K S A N D

T R A N S N A T I O N A L C O N N E C T I V I T Y

Increasingly, as we shall see in the rest of this book, such infrastructures straddle and
interconnect urban, interurban and international scales, aligning with dominant vectors of
global–local flow rather than the modern ideal of intra-urban connectivity. The economic
development of spaces emerges as a ‘war-like power struggle of deterritorialisation and
reterritorialisation’ within an internationalising capitalist system (Thrift, 1996a, 285).
As a result, infrastructure development increasingly centres on seamlessly interconnecting
highly valued local spaces and global networks to support new vectors of flow and interaction
between highly valued spaces and users locked into highly sophisticated international divisions
of labour (Peck, 1996). As any examination of hub airports, logistics zones, global
telecommunications grids and international energy connections will now demonstrate,
seamless global–local technological and organisational connection of infrastructure networks
is now the central emphasis, geared to the logistical and exchange demands of foreign direct
investors, tourist spaces or socioeconomically affluent groups (Schiller, 1999a; Castells, 1996).
Through these processes, the global–local connections of cities and spaces are increasingly
scrutinised by agents of global capital and other mobile investors, as they search to locate
in areas with maximum infrastructural capabilities, lowest costs, and maximum flexibility and
mobility potential. As an example, a frenzy of alliances, acquisitions and joint ventures in the
fast-growing world of telecommunications and digital media is now under way (McGowan,
1999). These promise ‘one-stop shop’ service and distance-independent tariffs on a global
scale for corporate clients in highly valued locations but effectively bypass less profitable or
more marginal spaces and users (Schiller, 1999a; Noam and Wolfson, 1997; Mosco, 1999b).
‘Not only is this new industrial and spatial scenario built on the assumption that long-
distance, reliable transport and communications networks are implemented,’ write
Giannopoulos and Gillespie (1993, 51), ‘but it rests on the idea that these networks have to
be “integrated networks”, both geographically and technologically.’ Thus infrastructure
networks can simultaneously be ‘unbundled’ locally whilst being integrated internationally.
This fundamentally challenges the modern notion that a ‘city’ or ‘nation’ necessarily has
territorial coherence in its own right, as a spatial container for economic activity which is
somehow ‘naturally’ separate from surrounding spaces (Virilio, 1991).
The growing interconnections between national and urban economies, and the widespread
crisis of confidence in Keynesian approaches to infrastructural development, have thus
significantly undermined the notion that infrastructure networks should be publicly planned
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 101

and laid out as single monopolies to add ‘coherence’ to urban and national territories.
Spatially:

networks which are confined to national [or urban] territories, whether for the movement of material
or people, will be of limited use. Segmented markets need flexibility and responsiveness. New markets
and competitive strategies require a highly flexible transport system, able to cope with frequent
movements of small quantities, rather than with the predictable, less frequent, larger volumes of
transported goods that characterised Fordism.
(Giannopoulos and Gillespie, 1993, 46–51)

C U S T O M I S I N G N E T W O R K S F O R P R E M I U M S P A C E S

Development processes in developed, developing and post-communist cities are thus starting
to emphasise the provision of customised, networked spaces within cities and regions. Frank
Peck (1996) has shown that transnational corporations engaged in decisions over foreign
direct investment now encourage public and private infrastructure developers and urban
agencies to develop highways, ports, logistics centres and telecommunications, energy and
water services that are specifically tailored to their requirements. There is a general trend
‘towards the customisation of public infrastructure on behalf of private firms’ (Peck, 1996,
36). Linked with this is the widespread ‘re-infrastructuring’ of redundant spaces in the form
of trade zones, enterprise zones, export processing areas, teleport spaces, logistics platforms,
world trade centres, media zones, tourist enclaves and the like.
To Peck, the combination of profit-hungry private infrastructure firms and entrepreneurial
city authorities provides an irresistible support towards focusing investment on fewer spaces
and networks that most meet the perceived needs of global transnational capital (see Jessop,
1998). He writes that ‘this pressure to comply with very precise [infrastructural] requirements
means that the creation of customised space can be a vital factor in levering in new inward
investment’ (Peck, 1996, 329).
In this changing context, the strategic priorities of dominant economic players now
emphasise flexibility, responsiveness, technical specialisation and, above all, the ability precisely
to control and monitor processes of logistical flows across space and time (Hepworth and
Ducatel, 1992). In an increasingly liberalised global market place for infrastructure services,
the providers of infrastructure services are having to rethink their styles of planning and
management to tie in with the demands of their most lucrative corporate customers (for ‘one
stop’ corporate telecommunications services, transparent logistical management, cost-effective
and uninterruptible energy and water services, and high-quality back-up and value-added
service support) (Schiller, 1999a). In the process, infrastructure services become much more
than the laying of the hardware within and between spaces; value added now centres on
customising services to corporate needs on a seamless, multilocational basis. In these changing
competitive conditions, infrastructure providers must either develop strategies to define and
expand their markets or become obsolete, bypassed or taken over.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 102

REMOVING NETWORKS FROM THE WELFARE STATE:

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INFRASTRUCTURAL
CONSUMERISM

Finally, the changing political economies of cities and infrastructure have often amounted
to a decollectivisation of energy, water, waste, transport and telecommunications services,
and the reduction of their status as quasi-public goods to be consumed by all, at similar,
generalised, tariffs. Instead, infrastructure services are being remodelled and recommodified
to be distributed within more or less regulated markets between liberalised, competing
providers. ‘Throughout Western countries, it seems now self-evident that the role of the
state as the provider of a wide range of public services, rooted in the promise of dramatically
evening up the life chances of individuals and populations, is coming to an end’ (Leonard,
1997, 1).
As Saunders argues, it seems possible from current standpoints that ‘collective consumption
is proving to be not a permanent feature of advanced capitalism but a historically specific
phenomenon’ – a ‘holding operation’ between old and new forms of market provision
(Saunders and Harris, 1994, 211). This is supporting the fragmentation of the production
of infrastructural goods and services as firms struggle to engage with the instruments of
market research and advertising, as well as the individualising capabilities of information
technology, to carve lucrative niches for themselves within volatile contexts (Clarke and
Bradford, 1998, 874).

S O C I A L L A N D S C A P E S O F C O N N E C T I O N : N E W E X T R E M E S

O F I N E Q U A L I T Y

Infrastructure networks, thus, can no longer be dismissed as immanent, universal and homo-
geneous grids; as local public goods which can remain the arcane and technical preserve
of the civil engineer. Market-based and consumerist logics are increasingly being imprinted
on to such networks. The assumptions that underpinned the public, monopolistic provision
of infrastructure services are increasingly being challenged. Across the advanced industrial
world, utility infrastructures are now the focus of radical reregulation. Public, monopolistic
models of regulation and ownership are being challenged by waves of privatisation and
liberalisation. Generally, this ‘means a loss of the redistributive, social role implied by such
public monopolies’ (Little, 1995, 9).
Such a shift is ‘imposing an ethos of individual choice which belies the role of consumption
in the systemic reproduction of capitalism’ (Clarke and Bradford, 1998, 874). This
infrastructural ‘choice’, however, often tends to be limited to certain social and spatial groups
within the city. The ability to access competing providers is usually highly dependent on
wealth, location, skills and how lucrative one is to serve.
In some parts of the city, then – perhaps those that used to pay above-cost rates for services
so that cross-subsidies could support poorer districts – the splintering of networks that come
with imposing a logic of consumer choice on previously public infrastructures is likely to lead
to considerable variety, choice and improved service. Such groups will be actively seduced into
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 103

‘premium’ markets for the most capable road, energy, telecommunications and water
networks.
In poorer parts of cities, however, large parts of the population seem likely to be forced to
remain with incumbent monopolies, as they are not lucrative enough to attract competition
and the seductive attention of new, risk-averse, market entrants. Such groups and areas are
likely to remain highly vulnerable to the efforts of states to shift from the mass, collective
organisation of social infrastructure to a dwindling ‘safety net’ covering only the needs of the
most desperate for fuel, communications and water.
The danger, of course, is that the consumerism and individualism of the new debates on
social access to infrastructure will undermine the position of the poor, who often tended to
benefit most from universal service obligations and cross-subsidies inherent in the approaches
of the modern infrastructural ideal. Markets for advanced infrastructural services seem likely
to fail such people, possibly even excluding them from access to very basic and essential
infrastructures in the process. Sophie Body-Gendrot wonders whether, even in Western
Europe, where public service principles and welfare states have been most comprehensively
elaborated, the restructuring of welfare states means that:

we are now observing the exhaustion of a model for state-provided protection against hardship. . . .
National societies seem to be disarticulating in a strange movement of demodernisation. . . . In an era
of globalization, the processes of disintegration, disempowerment, social invalidation, marginalization
– whatever terms one wishes to use – fracture post-industrial cities . . . into a myriad of patterns.
(2000, xx)

T H E C O L L A P S E O F T H E C O M P R E H E N S I V E
I D E A L I N U R B A N P L A N N I N G

The concept city is decaying.

(De Certeau, 1984, 95)

Which brings us neatly on to the third set of forces which have undermined the modern
infrastructural ideal: the related collapse of notions of comprehensive and ‘rational’ urban
planning first built up by Haussmann over a century before. The technocratic and compre-
hensive styles of urban planning most closely allied with the rolling out of the modern
infrastructural ideal have also found it difficult to survive the shift to an increasingly globalised
political economy driven by liberalised flows of capital, technology and information. It has
also lost much of its legitimacy in Western nations as a result of being undermined by powerful
‘postmodern’ social and cultural critiques.
As a result, urban planning now tends to centre on projects rather than comprehensive and
strategic plans; on getting other agencies to deliver required urban services or infrastructures;
and on pragmatic attempts to address perceived local problems rather than utopian or visionary
frameworks for re-engineering metropolitan regions according to idealised blueprints or
desired urban forms. This shift, along with the withdrawal through privatisation and
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 104

liberalisation of many infrastructure networks from even the peripheral orbit of public sector
planning, has significantly contributed to the onset of splintered models of infrastructural
development. Overall, as David Harvey notes, there has been a decisive break ‘with large-scale,
metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban plans’ (1989, 66, original
emphasis).

CRITIQUES OF INTEGRATED URBAN AND

INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING

During the period of the urban infrastructure crises, and the rapid restructuring of the public
institutions forged to implement the modern infrastructural ideal, a range of powerful critiques
effectively destroyed the idea of comprehensive urban planning. Increasingly vociferous
economic sectors and firms argued that such plans were inflexible, unwieldy, and failed to
deliver infrastructure networks able to meet their increasingly sophisticated locational and
technological demands (Fillion, 1996).
Many planners, in turn, have themselves developed a ‘growing skepticism towards large-
scale infrastructure projects’ and urban ‘renewal’ schemes, especially in the West (Fillion,
1996, 1640). Increasing social resistance to major highway, port, rail, road, airport and
construction projects has faced them. In a smaller-scale version of the collapse of the modern
nation state, planners, and their local state employers, found themselves increasingly unable
actually to control or orchestrate the development of their territories in any meaningful
manner. Leonie Sandercock writes that now ‘the local state is less comfortable exerting control
over its territory in terms of who is investing and what kinds of investments are being made
in local development’ (1998a, 28).

MODERN PLANNING’S PARADIGM CRISES OF

INFLEXIBILITY

Modern urban planning also tended to lose confidence in its core notions of ‘progress’,
technical rationality and benefits for all as environmental and social movements lambasted its
underlying assumptions. The static, orderly models of cities at the root of the modern urban
ideal found it impossible to cope with the turmoil of social, economic and cultural change
between the 1960s and 1980s. As Polo puts it:

the predominance of flows, deformations and dimensional and dynamic heterogeneity within the urban
structure of advanced capitalism puts into question the static spatiality, homogeneity and constancy of
urban form in time that once characterised urban structures and planning methods.
(1994, 29)

Sandercock points out that ‘there are processes of socio-cultural change that have been
reshaping cities and regions over the past 20 years in ways not dreamed of in the Chicago
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 105

model of the rational, orderly, homogeneous city’ (1998a, 27). The arrogance, unrecognised
bias and relentless homogeneity of the planned city forms dreamt up by modernist planners
were especially lambasted by a wide range of social movements. As a result, as Fillion argues,
‘the postmodern fragmentation of values and the proliferation of conflicting interest groups’
tend to ‘undermine the political consensus required to carry out large-scale planning projects’
(1996, 1640).
Urban planning has thus lost its ability to conceive of a ‘public interest’ against which to
justify the on-going reorganisation and rationalisation of urban space through modern
infrastructure and urban planning (Gandy, 1998). As Paul Knox puts it, in many cases urban
planning has tended to become:

fragmented, pragmatically tuned to economic and political constraints and oriented toward stability
rather than being committed to change through comprehensive plans. . . . It became increasingly geared
to the needs of producers and the wants of consumers and less concerned with overarching notions of
rationality or criteria of public good. The outcome has been a disorganised approach that has led to a
collage of highly differentiated spaces and settings.
(1993b, 12)

The traditional tools of modern urban planning – development plans and zoning ordinances
– have thus in many cases become more and more discredited. Modern planning’s analytical
techniques – gravity modelling, regression analyses, cluster analyses, cost–benefit analyses –
have been widely criticised for providing the obfuscating jargon through which essentially
political decisions could be represented as somehow ‘technical’ and value-free (see Box 3.2).

B O X 3 . 2 P A R A D I G M C H A L L E N G E S T O
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E P L A N N I N G : T H E C A S E
O F U R B A N T R A N S P O R T

As a result of wider shifts in urban planning and such processes have been profoundly de-
its social context, it was becoming increasingly stabilising to the professional cultures that
untenable by the late 1970s to maintain that rested on the axioms of rationality. ‘Technicians,
infrastructure networks were simply technical, deprived of the objectivity of the standardised
engineered systems existing somehow sepa- formula,’ he writes, ‘often find themselves in a
rate from society which operate to ‘impact’ on difficult situation concerning the evaluation and
society. The methodological and analytical justification of their actions ‘ (1992, 12).
tools underlying urban infrastructure planning Whilst utilities and telecommunications
were similarly under question. The collapse of operators are having to explore new ways
the notion that civil engineers could roll out of planning infrastructural development and
integrated infrastructures rationally to meet investment, the crisis is most visible in trans-
perceived needs, whilst abstracted from the port. For example, the whole subfield of
social and political worlds of their city, has been regional transport modelling and regional
especially important. But, as Chatzis suggests, science, built up since the 1950s and 1960s to
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 106

apply quantitative methods to understanding long used to support transport planning are
spatial interaction within and between cities, ‘a profoundly ahistorical’ approach which
is undergoing severe criticism. To Barney resort to ‘static analyses that reify time’ (1995,
Warf, for example, the spatial analysis models 187).

PROBLEMS WITH MODERN TRANSPORT

PLANNING

In their efforts to uncover transcendental enraptured with that desolate, asocial, self-
‘laws’ of aggregate transport behaviour, such centred individual, homo economicus. Even
technocratic and essentialist models have behavioural approaches have essentially
tended to squeeze the whole gamut of human replaced deterministic approaches with
life into crude, quantitative, deterministic, stochastic and probabilistic ones’ (Warf, 1995,
mechanistic equations based on the notion 190).
that the social world is analogous to Newton’s The field of transport planning is an espe-
mechanistic ‘billiard ball’ universe. Such models cially powerful example of the collapse of the
as the gravity model – the basis of count- notion that infrastructure is simply a technical,
less transport and infrastructure plans in the engineered system. It shows especially clearly
postwar years – followed Newton in treating how such notions effectively collapse in the
space and time as absolute, essential objects. maelstrom of the crisis of technical rationality,
It reduced the complex social world to over- the undermining of mechanistic thinking,
arching geometric and morphological laws. the highly embarrassing modelling failures of
And it relied on essentialist technological the past, and the broader context of socio-
determinism of the simplest kind in extra- technological and political–economic change
polating and forecasting into the future. In discussed above. Tim Marshall (1997) points
effect, ‘history became little more than a static out that transport planners have virtually
objectified data source, and all that marched given up forecasting the future, not only
through it were abstracted spatial processes because past efforts were so embarrassingly
purged of social meaning’ (Duncan, 1979, inaccurate, but because of transport ‘planners’
1). At the root of the problem was the sense of being adrift in a confusing and un-
false assumption that mechanistic cause- controllable flux’ (31). He cites recent attempts
and-effect models of social behaviour were in the United Kingdom at foresighting (rather
possible (when Physics had actually ditched than forecasting) technological shifts in trans-
such modes of the behaviour of subatomic port which confronted the essential problem
particles forty years before in favour of that ‘Technology Foresight is something of
probabilistic, indeterminate and relativistic a contradiction in terms, because the future
thinking). development of the transport sector is deter-
To Warf, whilst there are important shifts mined as much by economic, social, political
towards complexity theories and probabilistic and environmental factors as it is by the
modelling within such approaches, regional availability of technology’ (Technology Fore-
science, and the whole edifice of econometric sight Panel on Transport, 1995, 59, quoted
infrastructure modelling based on it, ‘remains in Marshall).
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 107

SIGNS OF A PARADIGM SHIFT

Guy and Marvin (1999) point out that this social accessibility; and towards a managerial
paradigm shift involves a shift from simply engagement with users as diverse groups of
promulgating extra road space to offering social beings rather than a hands-off treatment
integrated packages of private and public of people as homogeneous, atomistic, eco-
transport solutions and land use changes; from nomic men, behaving in aggregate according
using positivist analytical models like the gravity to mathematical formulas.
model towards more social concepts of real

THE LIMITATIONS OF PLANNING’S BINARY

DUALISMS

Moreover, modern urban planning’s attempt to establish order within the urban fabric was
exposed as the imposition of static geometries based on binary distinctions: centre and
periphery, core and fringe, inside and outside – categories which are ‘no longer adequate to
describe the urban conglomerate’ of today in all its complexity and dynamism (Sandercock,
1998b). In fact, ‘in the new city formal principles of composition miss their target. Its
morphology instead unfolds from a system of relations between different, sometimes
contradictory forces, no longer as an absolute but in reference to other structures’ (Angélil
and Klingmann, 1999, 24).
The engineering-dominated ethos of the modern city has also found it especially hard to
accommodate public political and social challenges for more democratic ways of organising
urban infrastructure development. As Matthew Gandy suggests, there emerged a:

conflict between the centralised engineering dominated ethos behind infrastructural development and
growing demands for greater public participation in urban policy making. Urban planning faced the
disintegration of the kind of putative ‘public interest’ which had sustained the kind of urban renewal
through large scale investment in infrastructure. Planners themselves increasingly recognised that ‘the
ideal of master planning’ was illusionary and began exploring ways of bolstering legitimacy through wider
public consultation.
(1998, 13)

SCRUTINISING THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF

COMPREHENSIVE URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING

It is important not to lose sight of [modern planning’s] utopian ideals but . . . these were achieved
by less than democratic means. . . . In effect – and in isolation – it has often proven elitist and
alienating.
(Ley and Mills, 1993, 265–6)
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 108

Not only were the axioms of modernist planning systematically dismantled; its achievements
came under increasingly close scrutiny, too. To King, this scrutiny of the effects of the modern
infrastructure ideal, and of modern urban planning more widely, revealed modern city planning
to be little less than ‘a supreme delusion’ (1996, 1). Rather than ‘unify’ and ‘bind’ cities by
distributing benefits to all – its alleged purpose – it became increasingly clear that practices of
modern city planning had tended, in practice, bureaucratically to perpetuate inequalities across
space. They had often worked, moreover, ‘to the disadvantage of women and of all those able
to be labelled as “others” – ethnic minorities, the handicapped, the unsmart’ (King, 1996, 3).
Rather than support urban ‘coherence’, ‘order’ and ‘cohesion’, as argued in so many
modern infrastructure plans since the days of Haussmann, it was increasingly realised that such
planning had, more often than not, supported social turmoil through the on-going fracturing
and restructuring of urban space, especially within the spaces of the weak or marginal (see
Box 3.3). From the 1960s onwards, books like The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(Jacobs, 1961) and The Evangelistic Bureaucrat (Davies, 1972) helped to stimulate enormous
popular protest against the whole edifice of modernist planning and architecture.

B O X 3 . 3 T H E I N T E R N A L C O N T R A D I C T I O N S
O F C O M P R E H E N S I V E U R B A N H I G H W A Y
P R O G R A M M E S : U R B A N ‘ C O H E R E N C E ’ V E R S U S
U R B A N ‘ F R A G M E N T A T I O N ’

The urban highway, that Leitmotif of virtually tems for smoothly integrating their limited
all modern urban plans between the 1920s entry points, major highways epitomised the
and 1960s, was particularly associated with standardised, centrally imposed design of
promising urban ‘cohesion’ whilst delivering segregated transport systems that was
fracturing and fragmentation (Dear, 1999, 110). so central to modernist planning and traffic
Multilane highways, cutting through the urban engineering. As with the mass-produced
fabric to ‘integrate’ urban regions through housing of the postwar era, the ethos was
tunnels, cuttings and elevated sections, were ‘the more neutral, uniform, and quantifiable,
‘seen as a marvel of the modern metropolis’ the more bankable’ (Easterling, 1999a, 3).
(Gandy, 1998, 1). Designed as totalising sys-

‘YOU HAVE TO HACK YOUR WAY THROUGH

WITH A MEAT AXE’: THE CASE OF ROBERT MOSES
IN NEW YORK

Marshall Berman (1983) famously discussed public highways and works projects across
perhaps the best-known example of the New York, a programme linked with the federal
use of highway networks to force an indus- New Deal and highway programmes (see
trial metropolis into some form of ‘modern’ McShane, 1988). Aimed at maximising regional
integration through highway construction: markets, productivity and ease of circulation,
Robert Moses’ plans in New York. Over a Moses wanted the highways to unify the
period of about thirty years, Moses used bond city, creating an ‘integrated car-oriented
issues to finance an ever-expanding web of urban form’ (Gandy, 1998, 6). The resulting
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 109

highways ploughed through disadvantaged 306). He imagined a ‘utopian new city of unified
neighbourhoods like Brooklyn in the process. flow whose lifeblood was the automobile’. City
But Moses’ modernising zeal was unabashed. spaces were thus ‘conceived principally as
He declared, in his defence, that ‘when you obstructions to the flow of traffic’ (Berman,
operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to 1982, 307). In that period, Berman remembers,
hack your way through with a meat axe’ ‘to oppose his bridges, tunnels, expressways,
(Robert Moses, quoted in Berman, 1983, 307). housing developments, power dams, stadia,
Echoing Haussmann, Moses wanted to cultural centers, was – or so it seemed – to
‘create a system in perpetual motion’ (ibid., oppose modernity itself’ (Berman, 1982, 293).

THE SOCIAL BIASES OF HIGHWAY DESIGN

But the parkways were, according to Langdon One of the professed aims of a co-
Winner (1980), carefully configured to meet ordinated, national system of urban highways
the needs of increasingly affluent suburban in the United States was to bind cities and
commuters whilst excluding the poor and systems of cities into modern coherent
black inner city populations (see Bayor, 1988). wholes. After all, such strategies drew their
In one of the most infamous examples of inspiration from Haussman’s regularisation
building social bias into technology, Winner plans in Paris in the nineteenth century. In
alleges, the Long Island State Park Commis- effect, though, they contributed not only to
sion engineers designed the parkways and the enormous urban sprawl of the 1980s and
highway bridges on Long Island to be only 1990s, but to a retreat from the notion of the
9 ft at the kerb – 2 ft lower than the height open, interconnected city (Pope, 1996). For
of buses – thus guaranteeing that the roads they have served to fragment the traditional
would remain permanently for car use only North American cityscape based on the urban
(McShane, 1988, 81; although see Joerges, grid, leading to a series of closed, hierarchical
1999a, for a refutation of this relatively simple ‘ladder’-style urban highways rather than an
interpretation). open urban street system.

FREEWAYS AS A ‘REVERSAL’ OF GRIDDED SPACE

‘With the introduction of the freeway,’ writes campus becomes a theme park, traditional
Alexander Pope, ‘the continuities of gridded suburbs become xenophobic enclaves, and
space are thrown into a fantastic reversal. [It] one is (still) left wondering how it ever
eliminates choice by enforcing a strict hier- happened’ (ibid., 96). To Pope, serendipitous
archical movement along a primary route of interconnections and relationships – the
transportation, [so] dramatically coarsening essence of the urban – are severely limited by
the urban fabric’ (1996, 109). Pope believes the new ‘laddered’ urban landscapes. The
that such ‘ladders’ have supported a broader erosion of grids has also supported the
trend towards xenophobic enclaves. Through centripetal shift of cities to ever wider regional
such processes, ‘historically open urban fields where closed-off places are increasingly
centres degenerate into tourist sites. Main defined by rapid interconnections elsewhere
Street becomes a festival marketplace, the by limited-access highways.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 110

THE CRISIS IN PLANNING AND THE RETREAT

FROM THE UNITARY CITY IDEAL

Most especially, it was increasingly argued that the ideals of modern, unitary city planning
had required the ‘total subordination of the individual to the collective industrial machine’
(Ravetz, 1980, 345). In its use of single, idealised representations of urban space, modern
urban planning had thus wielded crude social power based on arrogant, undifferentiated
notions of identity and need that were little more than laughable in the context of the
fragmenting identity politics of the postmodern city.
Urban planning is, in short, facing a ‘paradigm crisis’ as its classical foundations are exposed
as anachronistic, dangerous and intellectually spurious (Sandercock, 1998a, b). Ezquiga notes
that ‘the nature of the planning crisis is twofold: the bankruptcy of its epistemological
fundamentals as a discipline, but also a crisis in the culture that has considered the urban plan
as the sole, holistic expression of the public interest’ (1998, 7).
The idea of the comprehensive urban plan, as guarantor of some single, orderly ‘progress’
offering ‘benefits for all’ through the laying out of urban activities and their connective
infrastructures, has been the major casualty here. The classic urban planning tradition of
equating order with equilibrium and disorder with disequilibrium can have little place within
the volatile and complex dynamics of the postmodern metropolis. Such approaches have been
shown to be reductionist and naively functionalist; in their endless search for a perfect
equilibrium through controlling ‘urban morphology and building typologies, the passage of
time stands still, dead, petrified’ (Solà-Morales, 1998). Miles argues that:

the urban plan is a representation of space which enables idealised conceptions of the city. From it
are derived the methodologies of planning and design which depend on the reduction of realities
to geometries. And, through the representation of space in urban planning, users become an
undifferentiated public ascribed the same disempowered role as women, slaves and strangers in classical
Athens.
(1997, 131)

ACCEPTING CITIES AS ‘ARCHIPELAGOES

OF ENCLAVES’

In a supreme irony, urban planning faced the realisation that it had often had precisely the
reverse effects to those it aspired to and coveted (at least rhetorically). As Aksoy and Robins
(1997, 26) point out, in the case of Istanbul, in assuming that orderly plans could make cities
orderly, and in imagining that urban space could ever be truly unitary and coherent, urban
planning had often directly supported the development of enclaves and the social
fragmentation of urban space.
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 111

M O D E R N I S T P L A N N I N G I N S T R U M E N T S A N D T H E T U R N T O

U R B A N F O R T I F I C A T I O N

In practice, then, the instruments of modernist planning, ostensibly developed to support

coherence and urban egalitarianism, have often been appropriated to support fragmentation
and social exclusion. This has especially been the case as economic change, polarising income
levels, motorisation for the well-off, the privatisation of public services, rising crime levels
and the growth of corporate and consumer ‘mega-projects’ have rewrought the fabric of
metropolitan life (see Olds, 1995). As Teresa Caldeira argues, from the point of view of
Brazil:

ironically, the instruments of modernist planning, with little adaptation, become perfect instruments
to produce inequality. . . . Streets only for vehicular traffic, the absence of sidewalks, the enclosure and
internalisation of shopping areas, and spatial voids isolating large sculptural buildings and rich residential
areas are great instruments of generating and maintaining social separations. . . . Contemporary fortified
enclaves use basically modernist instruments of planning with some notable adaptations.
(1996, 317)

A C C E P T I N G P L A N N I N G ’ S ‘ O T H E R S ’

Modern urban planning, it was also increasingly realised, had neglected many voices, in its
‘mainstream’ depiction of the modernist planner as an omniscient, benevolent (inevitably
male) ‘hero’, taming the wild chaos of the disorderly metropolis. The views of women,
minority ethnic groups, indigenous people, disabled people, gay men and women, older
people and children were largely ignored (Sandercock, 1998b). Modern urban planning
had often therefore ignored the essentially patriarchal, racist, disablist, socially divisive and
colonialist assumptions woven into its master plans and utopian visions, being even less
concerned when such assumptions were imprinted on to cities and city life (Sandercock,
1998b; Weisman, 1994). Urban highway networks, for example, which purported to deliver
‘access for all’ and add ‘coherence’ to cities, were often found to destroy communities,
undermine interactions in places, and worsen social and gender unevenness in access to
transport (see Box 3.3).
The result of this coming together of social critiques and uncomfortable self-realisations
was a widening sense of the failure of comprehensive, modern plans for cities and networked
urban infrastructure. This, in turn, resulted in the growing politicisation of urban space, a
consequence of the challenge that has been posed to the modernist vision (Aksoy and Robins,
1997, 33). As King suggests, as the twentieth century progressed, ‘modernity [increasingly]
present[ed] itself as fragmentation itself, and the nineteenth century was the age when its
opposite, in the unitary dreams of the Enlightenment, finally disintegrate[d]’ (1996, 44).
Very quickly the linkage of large-scale infrastructure projects with urban ‘progress’ and
improvement was replaced by representations that portrayed modern infrastructure grids,
especially highway networks, as destroyers of valuable social and urban environments. ‘Aspects
of infrastructural investment which had previously been conceived as integral to urban
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 112

revitalization,’ suggests Gandy, ‘had now become directly implicated in post-war urban
decline and the destruction of city life’ (1998, 13).
All these intertwined realisations forced urban planning to retreat systematically from the
notion of comprehensive urban and infrastructural planning, effectively ditching the idea that
the development of cities could be somehow orchestrated and shaped as a whole. Virtually
all planning concepts today agree, at least implicitly, that ‘the primary matter of importance
is no longer an integral approach, but the cheerful acceptance of regions as an archipelago of
enclaves’ (Bosma and Hellinga, 1998, 16).
Increasingly, then, planners are forced to accept that their cities are ‘collages of fragmented
spaces’ defined by multiple identities, aspirations, life worlds and socioeconomic and
time–space circuits (Fillion, 1996, 1640). Imposing some simplistic notion of order or
representation on such places is not only a power-laden act, but it is an arrogant act which
privileges the ‘technical’ knowledge of the ‘expert’ over all other forms of knowledge,
experience and opinion (Healey, 1997). And, suggests David Harvey, ‘since the metropolis
is impossible to command except in bits and pieces, urban design (and note that
postmodernists design rather than plan) simply aims to be sensitive to vernacular traditions,
local histories, particular wants, needs, and fancies’ (1989, 66, original emphasis).

U R B A N P L A N N I N G , E N C L A V E C O N S T R U C T I O N ,
A N D G L O B A L E C O N O M I C I N T E G R A T I O N

Key works like Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space (1972) helped further to encourage planners
to reject large-scale integrated modernist city schemes for smaller-scale, inward-looking
projects designed to address people’s ‘need’ for enclosed personal spaces. ‘Defending our own
turf’ increasingly became sanctioned by certain strands of planning theory (Luymes, 1997,
201). Waterhouse criticises the role played by ‘a new generation of planners in extending, then
partitioning, the urban realm’ (1996, 311) . More positively, though, many planning agencies
sought to undermine the modern ideal’s insistence on rigidly enforced technocratic standards
for street layouts, allowing a whole range of shared streets and traffic calming measures to be
introduced at the grass-roots level (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 1997).
As part of a wider professional paradigm crisis, however, the worry is that formal planning
processes, whilst not entirely marginalised, seem increasingly driven by the entrepreneurial
imperatives of making specific spaces ‘competitive’ within the metropolis, where ‘competi-
tiveness’ needs to be seen as ‘an essentially contested, inherently relational and politically
controversial concept’ (Jessop, 1998, 81). The result, suggests Bob Beauregard, is that, in
the United States at least, ‘at present, the physical city exists within planning as a series of
unconnected fragments rather than as a practical and theoretical synthesis of planning thought
and action’ (1989, 382). Leonie Sandercock even worries that there is a serious risk that ‘the
profession of planning is becoming increasingly irrelevant except in its role of facilitating
global economic integration’ (1998a, 2).
Certainly, as neoliberal agendas drive changes in urban governance and policy in a growing
range of cities, the ‘collages of fragmented spaces’ that make up many cities are, in turn,
becoming subject to widening arrays of urban governance agencies, special economic
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 113

development and enterprise zones, ‘partnership’ organisations and single-purpose economic

development bodies (see Foster, 1996; Nunn and Schoedel, 1997). Many Western cities now
exhibit a myriad of small, special-purpose zones, from cultural, heritage or leisure and sports
districts to Business Improvement Districts, Enterprise Zones, shopping malls, financial
districts, cultural quarters, affluent enclaves, etc. Such spaces increasingly tend to be developed,
organised and managed by property-led development bodies, urban marketing organisations
and special infrastructure developers (Boyer, 1996).
Public and private sector planners supporting the construction of the new edifices of urban
development thus articulate a very different strategy and set of ideals from those which aspired
to use modern plans to bring order and coherence to a whole city space. The logic is now for
planners to fight for the best possible networked infrastructures for their specialised district,
in partnership with (often privatised and internationalised) network operators, rather than
striving to orchestrate how networks roll out through the city as a whole (Nunn and Schoedel,
1997). As Sandercock argues, ‘to fast track many of these mega projects governments have
short circuited established planning processes and removed these developments from public
scrutiny and democratic politics, creating such entities as “special exemptions” and the like’
(1998a, 28). As a result:

the planners working for the state on the kinds of mega-development projects that have become common
to this round of capital accumulation (the Docklands in London, Darling Harbour in Sydney, the casino
and Docklands projects in Melbourne, New York’s World Trade Center, Mitterand’s Grands Projets in
Paris . . .) have a hard time convincing anyone of their ‘critical distance’ or objectivity.
(Ibid.)

Thus not only is the physical and technical fabric of urban infrastructure splintering in many
urban regions; in many cities, the fabric of urban governance and planning is, too (Fillion,
1996, 1640). Increasingly, the nexus between fragmented urban governance and splintering
infrastructure networks is strengthening as special-purpose governance agencies try to get
actively involved in customising networked infrastructures – highways, telecommunications,
energy, water and waste – to the precise needs of the targeted users of the space of the city
they are responsible for developing.
Within high-value spaces colonised by users that are intensively international and even
global in their operations – the global financial and research and development clusters, the
logistics hubs around airports, the advanced port districts, the global media spaces – attention
now centres powerfully on equipping city districts with the best possible infrastructure to link
the local into global matrices of flow through powerful connections elsewhere (Castells,
1996). The emphasis is on developing sophisticated new infrastructures – teleports, ‘smart’
ports, global airport hubs, special rail links to downtown cores, direct links to transoceanic
fibre networks – that effectively bypass the relatively homogeneous street, energy, transport
and communications grids that are the legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal.
Inevitably, with the growing emphasis on global–local rather than intra-urban connections,
the notion that the level of the city per se is the most appropriate scale at which to manage
and articulate infrastructure is transcended. Contemporary planning practices further support
the notion of buildings and zones as terminals on grids of global connection – hubs on
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 114

international networks which effectively radiate spokes to other spaces through time–space
‘tunnel effects’ between them (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 58–9). The idea that cities
necessarily work to enclose their contents, providing infrastructural coherence in the process,
becomes yet further undermined (Virilio, 1991).

THE RESILIENCE OF THE URBAN AS

A POLITICAL ARENA

And yet the idea of the unified city as a political jurisdiction has often managed to maintain
a powerful discursive hold on urban politics (see, for example, Bagnasco and Le Galès, 2000).
Despite the fragmenting logic of global–local exchanges, in certain cases, cities remain
powerful, perhaps increasingly powerful, political actors, and urban political actions strive to
address the ambivalent roles of urban places within contemporary social change (Body-
Gendrot, 2000). Complex political coalitions and ‘regimes’ articulate how national and
international political processes relate to the particular development of individual cities (see
Jonas and Wilson, 1999; Hall and Hubbard, 1998). Even with liberalisation and privatisation,
complex intergovernmental relations, deep institutional histories and diverse regulatory
approaches shape how the regulation and development of networked infrastructures is
constructed locally (Lorrain, 2000; Lorrain and Stoker, 1997). This ensures a wide variety
of particular ways in which the political action of city agencies and politics intersects with that
of nation states and international governance bodies, to shape the reconfiguration of
infrastructure networks.
Cities therefore remain as places where significant and potent power exists to plan and act
to address the complex and ambivalent position of place within globalising vectors of flow
(Amin and Graham, 1998a; Healey, 1997; Bagnasco and Le Galès, 2000). What is needed,
however, as we suggest later in this book, are new ways of thinking about networked urban
infrastructure, and new ways of imagining the territorial politics of networked urbanism, to
best address contemporary challenges.

N E W U R B A N L A N D S C A P E S : P H Y S I C A L
D E C E N T R A L I S A T I O N , M O T O R I S A T I O N A N D
T H E P O L Y N U C L E A T E D C I T Y

The city’s reign over our senses, our moods, our very ways of being is outmoded. The suburban
metropolis has superseded the city. . . . The city’s long shadow fades in the dappled light of
the suburban metropolis.
(Lerup, 2000, 85)

Discussions by urban planners and urbanists about the changing nature of urban landscapes
and development processes lead us to the fourth set of processes that have undermined the
modern infrastructural ideal: the physical spread of cities and the widespread shift from
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 115

traditional core-dominated cities to polycentric and extended urban regions. For global trends
towards urban decentralisation and the growth of the urban ‘periphery’ seem further to
undermine the whole project of using integrated infrastructure networks coherently to bind
cities as a whole (Woodroffe et al., 1994; Keil, 1994).

URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE RISE OF

THE URBAN PERIPHERY

The future is peri-urban. We must stop considering the hinterland as an indescribable horror, as
an illegitimate and residual part of the city.
(Guido Martinotti, 1997, cited in Foot, 2000, 7)

There is little doubt that current urban trends, based on the growing mediation of urban
life by highly capable infrastructure networks, are ‘contributing to the mono-centric city
eroding, fragmenting, and metamorphosing into a poly-centric metropolis’ (Woodroffe et al.,
1994, 6). Such a transition exposes strange urban landscapes where the marginal can be
central; centrality can be on the urban margin; and the ‘urban’ expands far into spaces
previously considered as ‘countryside’.

U R B A N P E R I P H E R I E S A N D T H E ‘ L I Q U E F A C T I O N ’
O F U R B A N S T R U C T U R E

Many cityscapes now reveal what Deyan Sudjic has called a ‘single urban soup’ (1995, 30).
Within them complex patchworks of growth and decline, concentration and decentralisation,
poverty and extreme wealth are juxtaposed. Whilst downtowns may maintain their dominance
of some high-level service functions, back offices, corporate plazas, research and development
and university campuses, malls, airport and logistics zones, and retail, leisure and residential
spaces spread further and further around the metropolitan core. In many cities, complex
social and cultural ‘turfs’ driven by international migration, add further levels of complexity
and polynucleation. ‘The contemporary city, exposed to the instability of late-capitalist
production, cannot maintain the rigidities of an organic structure that articulates urban events
within a global structure’ (Polo, 1994).
Instead of the ordered, hierarchical and cohesive structure of the modern city (always an
oversimplification), we increasingly encounter what Polo terms the ‘“liquefaction” of the
urban structure’ (1994, 26). This unleashes ‘a discontinuous, unarticulated, urban growth’
of polycentric, intensively (but highly unevenly) networked urban regions (ibid.). In many
sprawling megalopolises, in both developed and developing nations, Bernard Tschumi
observes an apparently ‘scaleless juxtaposition of highways, shopping centres, high-rise
buildings and small houses’ (1996, 41). In the ‘generic’ landscapes of the spreading urban
periphery, car-oriented buildings, no longer defined by systems of walls, are increasingly ‘lone
objects’, ‘one element within a rhythmic succession of space and matter, voids and solids’
(Neumeyer, 1990, 19). In the process of peripheralisation, Woodroffe et al. argue that the
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 116

modern ‘binary metropolis [of core and periphery] explodes into a regional carpet’ of
fragmented communities, zones and spaces. Each is an enclave in its own right with its own
boundaries and edge conditions (1994, 8).

T H E C H A L L E N G E T O C L A S S I C A L N O T I O N S O F T H E C I T Y

I N U R B A N G E O G R A P H Y A N D U R B A N I S M

In short, the idealised structures of classical urbanism and urban geography – always dramatic
oversimplifications – are increasingly at odds with the forms and landscapes of most
contemporary cities. ‘The textbook geometry of sectors and zones has become increasingly
difficult to discern in the landscapes, social economies, and bid-rent patters of cities’ (Knox,
1993b, 1). To Richard Skeates the growth of megacities and transnational urban corridors
means that the very distinctiveness of a place called the ‘city’ is now threatened. He believes
that:

we can no longer use the term city in the way it has been used to describe an entity which, however big
and bloated, is still recognisable as a limited and bounded structure which occupies a specific space. In
its place we are left with the urban: neither city in the classical sense of the word, nor country, but an
all-devouring monster that is engulfing both city and country and in so doing effectively collapsing the
old distinction.
(1997, 6; see Castells, 1999c)

Overall, then, the expanding periphery seems increasingly to drive the development dynamics
of many metropolitan regions. In the United States, for example, suburbs accounted for
60–85 per cent of new construction, new investment and new jobs in the last thirty years of
the twentieth century. Suburban office stock rose 300 per cent during the 1980s, accounting
for over 70 per cent of commercial office space in cities like Atlanta, Dallas and Detroit
(Dunham-Jones, 1999, 3). Roger Keil asks, ‘Have we reached the era of the outer city, and
does the real urbanism of the waning century really happen on the edge?’ (1994, 131).
Urban planning is poorly equipped to coordinate or control development across the
regionally extending and polycentric metropolis. The architects Koolhaas and Mau (1994)
famously argued that planners and urbanists, with their obsession with tidiness and order
within the confines of the traditional city, were, in effect, doing little but ‘making sandcastles’.
But, with the traditional city swamped by the polycentric urban region, urbanists and planners
can now do little but ‘swim in the sea that swept them away’.

E C L I P S I N G T H E U R B A N C O R E : G R O W T H B E Y O N D

T H E L I M I T S O F T H E M O D E R N I D E A L

The spectacular growth of urban peripheries tends geographically to eclipse or even isolate
the networked urban cores that were the legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal (Jackson,
1985). Such legacies, whilst often geographically far from the new centres of economic and
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 117

demographic growth around urban peripheries, tend in any case to be physically or

technologically obsolescent, requiring significant and costly retrofitting. To the municipal
jurisdictions in old urban cores, securing the financial and technological expertise to update
infrastructure, whilst also facing the fiscal and social crises surrounding deindustrialisation and
social polarisation, poses enormous challenges.
In the United States, for example, the physical expansion and economic restructuring of
US cities has meant that much of their infrastructural inheritance is technologically obsolescent
and physically decaying – a key element of the broader urban infrastructure crisis discussed
above (Lewis, 1997). Simply put, the legacies of modern infrastructure planning failed to
support the changing geographies and economies of the nation’s cities. The Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey identified in a 1979 survey that:

Much of the infrastructure in our nation’s larger cities was put in place during the nineteenth and early
part of the twentieth century. The average life expectancy of these systems was considered to be
somewhere between fifty and seventy-five years. Upgrading and modernisation of these systems probably
should have started during the 1930s, but the nation was in the midst of a great depression.
(Quoted in Perry, 1995, 18)

THE ‘TERRITORIAL ADAPTER’ AND THE ‘ROAD PLACE’:

MOTORISATION AND THE URBAN EFFECTS OF CAR
CULTURE

Traffic circulation is the organization of universal isolation.

(Kotamyi and Vaneigem, 1961, 17)

It is a profoundly modern idea that we can enter a flow, be carried along with it, and exit again
effortlessly, unscathed.
(Mau, 1999, 204)

Of course, the extension and growth of urban peripheries is also intimately bound up with
the mass diffusion of the automobile and the increasing dominance of car culture within
virtually all contemporary urban contexts. This process itself has been intimately linked with
the construction of a whole system of supportive infrastructure, from highways to service
stations, to drive-through fast food centres and out-of-town malls and auto-access leisure and
retail complexes (Lewis, 1997; Dupuy, 1995).
The landscapes of many contemporary cities have been powerfully shaped by the
standardised laying out of circulation and storage systems for automobiles, under the powerful
supervision of professional corps of traffic engineers. In the United States, for example, most
cities now devote over half their entire land area to the car; in extreme cases of automobile
dependence like Los Angeles, the fraction reaches almost two-thirds (Southworth and Ben-
Joseph, 1997, 5). ‘Endemic to sprawl, the square footage required for the parking lot typically
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 118

matches or even exceeds that required for the building. . . . Employees’ office cubicles are
smaller . . . than the space allotted for their car’ (Dunham-Jones, 1999, 6).
In many cities virtually all urban uses are now constructed in articulation to the dominant
and space-hungry technological systems that surround the car. In a sense, cars, and the
enormously complex sociotechnical ‘hybrid’ infrastructures that support them, work as
‘territorial adapters’ for the decentralised, polynucleated metropolis (Dupuy, 1995; see Urry,
1999). Along with plug sockets, mobile phones, Internet terminals, and television
transmissions, cars work to adapt the ‘traveller’ to the multiplying and multiscalar territories
and spaces of the extending, global, urban world. They do this through a widening and
interconnected array of roads of various sizes that were often laid out according to the strict
formulas and protocols of traffic engineering (see Easterling, 1999a; Southworth and
Ben-Joseph, 1997; Urry, 1999).

C A R C U L T U R E A S ‘ C O E R C E D F L E X I B I L I T Y ’

Thirty-four man-years are spent per day commuting on the freeways of Houston. Yet the ride
heals, soothes, and eases the jump cuts between home and work, between nature and culture,
between byways and freeway, between his and hers.
(Sic.; Lerup, 2000, 19)

On the one hand, then, as John Urry writes, ‘automobility is a source of freedom, the
“freedom of the road”. Its flexibility enables the car-driver to travel at speed, at any time in
any direction, along the complex road systems of Western societies that link together most
houses, workplaces and leisure sites’ (1999, 12). Automobiles and their associated roads and
support infrastructures of service stations, communications and information services have
thus become a fully integrated and extended system (Dupuy, 1995, 4). This allows flexibilities
of time–space movement that public transport systems, geared to traditional monocentric
cities, simply cannot match.
In reality, however, the flexibility of the car is a ‘coerced flexibility’ in the sense that the
extended, polycentric cities that automobility supports entail an ever-increasing spatial
separation of uses (Urry, 1999, 13–14). This, in turn, necessitates more and more use of the
car to bring the distanciated and fragmented time–space ‘bundles’ of the metropolis into
some manageable articulation. For this reason, and very importantly, ‘mass mobility does
not generate mass accessibility’, despite the widespread depiction in advertising and the media
of automobiles as harbingers of unproblematic liberation (ibid.).
A central paradox of processes of splintering urbanism is that the extension of standardised
highways and roads across and beyond the metropolitan region – ostensibly to support
metropolitan integration – has tended in practice to support the partitioning and
fragmentation of urban space. Three interrelated processes can be identified surrounding the
motorisation of metropolitan life which directly work to support the processes of splintering
urbanism.
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 119

T H E R O A D A N D T H E ‘ R O A D P L A C E ’

First, motorisation has supported a shift in the use of streets from multi-use meeting and
transit spaces to single-use spaces which do nothing but vector car flow or house parked or
gridlocked stationary vehicles (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 1997). This role is not to be
underestimated. Such is the dominance of car-based mobility in most cities that car-oriented
roads and highways are about more than flow; they are complex social spaces in their own
right. ‘Today the road transcends its function as connector and becomes both a threshold and
a place,’ writes Alex Wall. ‘If the space of the car is sometimes an office, a home, a place of
courtship, then the roadscape becomes the place where we live’ (1994, 10).
It follows that ‘the “road place”, rather than a residual or leftover place . . . should be seen
as a contiguous realm, the site of smooth and fluid interchange between freeway, arterial road
or city street and adjoining land’ (Wall, 1996, 161). But the road place is also a highly
personalised and cocooned space, riddled with clashing personal territorialities, fears of
incursion, and the real and perceived dangers of crime and conflict. For the car has powerfully
supported the notion that private enclosure is equated with personal freedom:

the car represents freedom because: it is privacy, a place to be alone, as a mobile apartment, a place where
your children can misbehave without embarrassing you and themselves in public, a place for sexual
activity; you can pick and choose your companions; the car waits for you; waiting at a bus stop is far less
comfortable than sitting in traffic jams.
(Hamilton and Hoyle, 1999, 29)

The modernist zeal to eradicate traditional street patterns has often also served to undermine
the social patterns of life that were associated with those traditional urban forms. Social
life has often been internalised, encouraging the gradual privatisation of social relations
(Holston, 1998, 45). Such privatisation, in turn, has tended to allow ‘greater control over
access to space, and that control almost invariably has served to stratify the public that uses
it. The empty “no man’s spaces” and privatised interiors that tend to result contradict
modernism’s declared intention to revitalise the urban public sphere, rendering it more
egalitarian’ (sic. ibid.).

M O T O R I S A T I O N A N D U R B A N F R A G M E N T A T I O N

Second, the widespread shift to highways and automobiles as the dominant transport
system of polynuclear cities has strongly supported the broader shift towards urban physical
and social fragmentation and separation. Highways and motorisation have contributed to
a coarsening, widening and stretching of the urban fabric. To Haug ‘the private car, together
with the running down of public transport, carves up the towns no less effectively than
saturation bombing, and creates distances that can no longer be crossed without the car’
(1986, 54, quoted in Clarke and Bradford, 1998, 874). To Woodroffe et al., in ‘transforming
from main street to freeway culture, North American cities have most clearly demonstrated
the paradigmatic qualities of fragmentation’ (1994, 7).
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 120

Figure 3.2 Defining urban location by topological connection: ‘first class’ hotels on French highway
networks. Source: Dupuy (1995), 27

As strictly hierarchical highway systems with highly limited access points have been
superimposed on more fine-grained street structures the possibilities of interaction have been
radically altered. Increasingly, as the automobile and road–highway systems become
normalised as the dominant mode of personal transport in many cities, the location of an urban
space is defined by its topological relation (or lack of relation) to highway access points within
the regional, national or international urban field (see Figure 3.2).
Automobiles and highways have thus tended to support the horizontal segregation of uses
within the extending metropolitan region. As Calthorpe suggests, ‘the car is now the defining
technology of our built environment. And, more importantly, it allows the ultimate
segregation of our culture: land uses which separate old from young, home from job, and rich
from poor, and owner from renter’ (1993, 21). In many countries highway construction has
also tended to support and entrench patterns of ethnic segregation (see, for example, Bayor,
1988).
These new horizontal segregations, reflecting the chaotic nature of polynuclear urbanism,
tend to be difficult to interpret and understand, resisting all the easy distinctions and categories
of classical urban and infrastructure planning and analysis. In this new condition, social spaces
may be less visible and not necessarily comprehensible. Further, they may no longer be static
or embedded in the physical fabric of the city in any simple or comprehensible way (Wall,
1994, 10).

R E S I D U A L I S I N G T H E S T R E E T : C A R C U L T U R E A N D

T H E T U R N I N W A R D I N U R B A N D E S I G N

Finally, urban spaces are being increasingly reconfigured towards dominant car-using users
as inward-looking ‘islands’ or ‘enclaves’, surrounded by the physical highways, connections
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 121

and services to support motor access, parking and use (see Box 3.3). In a growing number
of cities, traditional streets, laid out under the influence of the early stages of the modern
infrastructural ideal and before, have often been marginalised by the growth of highways as
places of danger, fear and mistrust.
Complex causal loops are clearly at work here. They defy easy analysis and should make us
wary of simple technological determinism. But connections between motorisation (and the
associated individualisation and decollectivisation of movement within cities), a shift towards
private, inward-looking urban developments, the demise of the ‘public’ nature of many streets
and the associated rise in fear of crime can be identified. Kerry Hamilton and Susan Hoyle,
for example, argue that:

society’s notion of what the street is for has been profoundly altered by car-culture. One of the first effects
of the car’s take-over of a city street is to denude it of people. This creates a physical as well as a conceptual
space on the street, a space which is filled (or is perceived to be filled) by crime, insanity, and other social
deviation – and by more cars. Thus a downward spiral is created of experience and expectation of what
it is to be on the street (except in a car). People come to resist venturing into public space: they seek
bolts and entry phones on the door, moats around the house, gates on the street. . . . We are not
suggesting a simple causal model here. . . . What we do want to stress, however, is that there is a
connection.
(1999, 35)

Thus urban highway programmes, whilst often justified in the language of ‘urban cohesion’
reminiscent of the modern infrastructural ideal, have actually tended to support fragmentation
and fracturing of the fine-grained urban fabric. The case of New York is typical (see Box 3.3).

NETWORKED INFRASTRUCTURES AND THE

‘INFINITE CITY’

Urban development processes now centre on combining flexible bundles of tailored

infrastructure networks to suit a myriad of needs of organisations, buildings and clusters,
within extending urban regions which may or may not resemble the modern notion of a
‘city’. Right across the planet, the traditional urban cores that were subject to the modern
infrastructural ideal have been swamped by widening, polynuclear, urban regions.
As the expanding cities emerge as archipelagoes of economic, social, ethnic and cultural
enclaves, so the use of networks to link beyond the city with international infrastructures
supporting intense flow, exchange and mobility, managed through unprecedented logistical
precision, becomes critical. ‘The landscape currently being punched out [of cities] is charac-
terised by a major reorganisation of production and distribution, mostly linked to changes
in logistical processes (such as just-in-time production)’ (Storper and Walker, 1989, 205).
As Richard Skeates suggests, our world of exploding megacities, of extending urban
regions, of expanding urban corridors and of transnational ‘network cities’ thus raises the
prospect of the ‘infinite city’ (1997, 6). To him, we are moving from the modern world of
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 122

the discrete ‘city’ to an ‘all-pervasive and ever-present urbanisation. . . . The urban is

becoming the overwhelmingly predominant way in which the world is experienced by the
majority of people whether they live in the city or not.’
In such sprawling and ‘supermodern’ urban landscapes, notions of networked infra-
structures configuring ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ become much less clear. An ‘amorphous
homogeneity’ (ibid.) of the urban emerges which, in rapidly growing ‘megacities’ like São
Paulo or the Pearl River Delta, seems to eclipse completely any traditional, modern notion
of ‘cityness’ at all (Castells, 1996).
New, sprawling Special Economic Zones like Shenzen, for example, are massive
archipelagoes loosely laced together by huge new infrastructure networks – private tolled
superhighways, airports, optic fibre grids, new water and energy networks, ports and logistics
centres. In such places position and centrality are configured less by geographical location
with respect to ‘downtown’ than by the conditions of buildings and places with respect to
global–local networked infrastructures like international airports, high-speed rail and port
terminals, transglobal optic fibre links, broadband Internet ‘pipes’ and satellite terminals,
and, increasingly, links with distant water and energy reserves.

T H E L O G I S T I C A L S W I T C H I N G C E N T R E S

O F ‘ S U P E R M O D E R N I T Y ’

Urban sites thus emerge as staging posts on internationally organised flows of goods, people,
signs, images, commodities and information – all mediated by physical urban infrastructures
(Lash and Urry, 1994). Managing exploding traffic flows – in transport, telecommunications
and media, energy and water – becomes the central focus of infrastructure development,
requiring new ‘megastructures’ like high-speed rail networks, global airport hubs, transglobal
optic fibre grids and international water and energy networks. Global property capital
increasingly centres on constructing such edifices to mobility; global infrastructure capital
increasingly focuses on linking them up into (highly uneven) international grids of exchange
via sophisticated infrastructure networks. Separation becomes not so much a function of
distance as of time, the time it takes to exchange with and relate to far-off places via
infrastructure (Woodroffe et al., 1994; Urry, 1999).
Mark Augé (1995) terms such sites ‘non-places’ – sites that are wholly constructed and
controlled to support the mobility of global commodities, signs and transnational travellers.
In these ‘generic cities’, intense concentrations of networked infrastructure are laid down to
construct ‘supermodern’ spaces of flow that are, arguably, the dominant urban landscapes
of the late twentieth century (Koolhaas and Mau, 1994; see Augé, 1995). Whilst the
construction of ever more heavily networked technopoles, research and development parks,
edge cities, peripheral malls, airport cities, leisure complexes and exurban housing areas creates
what Skeates terms ‘an overabundance of space’, the disjointed and instrumental nature of
such new networked spaces means that ‘there is simultaneously a lack of place’ in the exploding
urban peripheries (1997, 9).
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 123

N E W ‘ S T R U C T U R E S O F F E E L I N G ’ :
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S O C I A L A N D C U L T U R A L
C H A N G E A N D S O C I A L M O V E M E N T S

The fifth and final challenge to the modern infrastructural ideal has been thrown down
by processes of social change and an interrelated array of social and political movements.
Social theorists capture these interrelated social and cultural shifts within the concept of
the shift from the modern to the postmodern urban condition (Harvey, 1989; Ellin, 1996;
Dear, 1999). Such transitions have been complex and varied and their interpretation has
been fiercely contested. A key element, however, has been the ways in which a wide range of
new social movements have brought resistance to bear on the technical and ideological
assumptions that underpinned the establishment and propagation of the modern infra-
structural ideal.
In combination with the political-economic, planning and urban shifts outlined above,
a diverse range of social and cultural movements have contested the very notion that
any single, coherent notion of the networked city, with its single public realm, is either
possible or desirable. No universal, essential subject, common to all humanity, is possible.
No all-encompassing struggle for emancipation, whether based on ‘progress’ or on new
infrastructural technology, can ever be attained. The starting point for any real process
of development must be recognition of the cultural politics of difference which ground
the diverse and multiplying social worlds of contemporary cities (Fincher and Jacobs, 1998).
The social democratic welfarist consensus in Western nations in the postwar period
has emerged from such critiques as not a ‘consensus’ at all. Rather, in many cases, it is cast as
a patriarchal, racist construction based on privileging bureaucratic, masculine and technical
rationalities over all other forms of social being. Legitimised by scientific and technological
practices, such a state-backed bureaucratic construction worked relentlessly to impose its
vision of order on city and society, treating humans as objects in the process in both the
capitalist and the socialist worlds. In this context, as Nigel Thrift argues, ‘the importance
of new generations and new social groups can be seen in the way that matters of gender,
sexuality and race have been taken up and have led to much greater attention being given
to borders, transgression, third cultures, and other motifs of the new structure of feeling’
(1996a, 260).
The cultural, social and political struggle to move away from the totalising and reductionist
orders of the modern infrastructural ideal is wide and diverse. It touches on the whole complex
of contemporary cultural and environmental politics and theory: social movements revolving
around the quest for environmental ‘sustainability’ as well as cultural movements asserting
the rights of women, gay people, the disabled, ethnic minorities, aboriginal groups, religious
and spiritual minorities, the young, and older people (see Sandercock, 1998b). Such struggles
encompass Western, postcolonial, developing and post-communist cities in different ways.
In the brief space available here we can only stress the social movements that were instrumental
in bringing down the modern infrastructural ideal: the feminist movement, postcolonial
critiques of the modern infrastructural ideal in developing cities, and the environmental and
appropriate technology movements. We add to this a brief, broader discussion of how the
fragmentation of cultural politics has also served to undermine the modern ideal.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 124

FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF THE MODERN

INFRASTRUCTURAL IDEAL

Feminists, in particular, have been able to demonstrate the existence of deeply embedded impulses
to domination and gender inequality often lurking beneath the surface of socialist rhetoric of
equity and liberation.
(Leonard, 1997, xi)

First, one of the most powerful social challenges to the modern infrastructural project
came from the feminist movement. It increasingly became clear that urban infrastructure,
as developed within the rubric of modern urban planning and design, had provided
physical services that were central in structuring social relations between men and women
in very particular and biased ways (see Kirkup and Smith, 1992; Weisman, 1994). As Leonie
Sandercock (1998a, 52) suggests, ‘the spatial order of the modern industrial city came to
be seen as a profoundly patriarchal spatial order; that is, an arrangement of space in which
the domination of men over women was written into the architecture, urban design, and
form of the city’.

T H E M O D E R N I D E A L A S A ‘ P O E M O F M A L E D E S I R E S ’

Following the first feminist critiques of the late 1960s, it quickly became apparent that
the ‘coherence’ and order that were such a central aspiration of modern urban plans and
infrastructure strategies were imposed (see Hayden, 1981). To a large extent, the practices
and ideologies of modern city planning were, as Barbara Hooper puts it, ‘a poem of male
desires’ (1998, 227). They tended to privilege overwhelmingly masculine, technocratic and
perspectival ways of seeing the ‘city’ and its inhabitants. They gave the masculine gaze of the
‘rational’ planner and engineer all-encompassing power to structure urban space according
to notions of instrumental rationality which systematically marginalised women as ‘other’
within the form and process of urban life. And they worked within a wider system of orderly
separation where the structure and functioning of cities were driven by a reductionist and
repressive system of binary divisions:

public space separated from private, moving vehicles separated from pedestrians, recreation and housing
separated from work, underground from above-ground, poor from rich, respectable from dangerous,
sick from well, dead from living, women from men.
(Hooper, 1998, 239)

Hooper argues that female bodies, in particular, tended to be cast as a threat to such
masculinised notions of social and urban order (ibid.). The fantasy of the straight line within
both Haussmann’s and Corbusier’s strategies for regularising cities and urban infrastructure,
for example, was, in a sense, directed against the ‘disorder’ of the body, and more particularly
against (what were seen as) ‘the dangerous curves and excesses of the female body’ (Hooper,
1998, 230). Women were configured through such practices as domesticated ‘home makers’
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 125

or ‘housewives’ whose ‘natural’ domain was the private, newly networked household spaces
of the suburbs (Weisman, 1994, 72). Women remaining on the street – for example, homeless
women or prostitutes – tended to be rendered invisible, or were assumed to be uncontrollable,
pathological, dangerous or sexually threatening. In a sense, then, both planners and doctors
were, to paraphrase Foucault, ‘specialists in space’ – one of the body, one of the city (1977,
150). Both were ‘men of reason whose medical and medicalised attentions will restore
the logic of borders – the logic of function and system – that is order and health’ (Hooper,
1998, 236).

T H E G E N D E R I N G O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

N E T W O R K S

The networks laid out to service the new networked households of the increasingly polycentric
city – electricity, gas, streets, water and the telephone – were also constructed in gendered
ways to reinforce this patriarchal stereotyping in the partitioning of bodies in urban space.
Other networks – notably the car and highway system – tended to be constructed
overwhelmingly as masculine systems geared to the male breadwinner’s commute to work.
All other identities found it hard to escape the relentless construction of dominant patriarchal
social, spatial and technical forms based on simplistic, binary divisions.
Feminist movements, linked closely with other critiques from black, lesbian and
disabled groups, quickly sought to expose the inherent biases and disciplinary goals within
modern urban and infrastructural planning. In particular, the binary separation of ‘public’ and
‘private’ spheres, each supported by differently configured networked infrastructures, was
widely criticised, as were the efforts of planners and infrastructure companies to maintain
the resulting gendered notions of urban space – the ‘home’, the ‘suburb’, the ‘street’, the
‘city’.
As Box 3.4 shows, the suburban, networked household, in particular, came to be seen by
feminists as ‘the prominent locus of confinement. Its street – the milieu of quiet, discreet,
respectful surveillance – and its neighbourhood becomes the new panopticon. Women
become their own keepers, and the new bourgeois suburbia produces and reproduces the
ideology of self-surveillance’ (King, 1996, 39). Similarly, as Box 3.5 shows, the application
of the modern infrastructural ideal embedded profoundly gendered landscapes of movement
and mobility within cities.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 126

B O X 3 . 4 F E M I N I S T C R I T I Q U E S O F T H E
M O D E R N N E T W O R K E D H O U S E H O L D

One of the first achievements of feminist that the hours spent on housework had
critiques of the modern infrastructural ideal changed very little. For instance:
was to expose the gendered construction
of urban infrastructure networks – particularly Despite massive technological changes in
electricity. Most central here was the con- the home, such as running water, gas and
testation of the notion that electrification had electric cookers, central heating, washing
displaced the need for housework. Despite the machines, refrigerators, . . . studies show
widespread assumption that electric ‘labour- that household work in industrialised
saving devices’ had brought housewives into countries still accounts for approximately
an age of leisure, research on womens’ time half of total working time.
budgets between 1920 and 1960 indicated (Wajcman, 1991, 238)

GENDER DIMENSIONS OF HOUSEHOLD

MECHANISATION

The development of the four other household in the context of a privatised single family
infrastructure systems – water, gas, transport home. This context reinforced the sexual
and the telephone – was equally ambivalent. division of labour and hindered the
While they could be used to transform house- reallocation of work. Millions of American
work and dramatically increased housewives’ women cooked supper each night in
productivity, they did not reduce the necessity millions of separate homes on millions of
for time-consuming labour. Urban infra- separate stoves. Reinforcement of gender
structure had thus failed to ease or eliminate relations was also reflected in the
household tasks (R. Cowan, 1997). This was construction of women as users of new
because mechanisation had: technology whilst men were constructed
as the ‘fixers’ of such technology.
• Given rise to a set of new tasks that were
just as time-consuming, if not as physically The atomised logic of the suburban networked
demanding, as the tasks they displaced. household meant that the dominant feature
Middle-class housewives, rather than of the use of infrastructure in the home was
servants, were expected to do all the that energy and expertise were devoted to
housework. the mechanisation of housework in individual
• Been accompanied by rising expectations households rather than through collectivised
of the housewives’ role – generating even or socialised efforts. During the early part
more work. The germ theory of disease of the century there were a number of alter-
and the domestic science movement led natives, including commercial services, the
to exacting new standards of housework establishment of alternative communities,
(Lupton and Miller, 1992). co-operatives and the invention of different
• Only a limited effect because it took place types of machinery (Hayden, 1981).
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 127

EXPLAINING THE TRIUMPH OF INDIVIDUALISED

HOUSEHOLDS

Yet the privatised and individualised household limited. ‘State policy in the area of housing
triumphed. There were a variety of reasons for and town planning played a key role in
this: promoting privatism’ (Wajcman, 1991,
249). At the same time, the manufacturers
• Women embraced new technologies of appliances and electricity supply
because they made possible a higher networks played a central role in shaping
material standard of living for an unchanged domestic technology and their diffusion to
expenditure of housewives’ time. build loads for their networks and profits for
• A more powerful factor may have been manufacturers.
the value ascribed to the ‘privacy’ and
‘autonomy’ of the family over technical The importance of domestic infrastructure,
efficiency and community interest when therefore:
making decisions about the expenditure
of limited funds. lies in its location at the interface of public
• Major contradictions underlay the and private worlds. The fact that men in
rationalisation and mechanisation of the public sphere of industry, invention
domestic life. Individual forces were and commerce design and produce tech-
constrained by powerful structural forces. nology for use by women in the private
For instance, the 1930s provision of domestic sphere reflects and embodies a
municipal wash houses, laundries and complex web of patriarchal and capitalist
communal areas was not always seen as relations . . . By refusing to take tech-
progressive but was associated with poor- nologies for granted we help to make
quality sanitation, shared water supply and visible the relations of structural inequality
squalid housing. In any case the alternative that give rise to them.
to single family houses were extremely (Wajcman, 1991, 254)

B O X 3 . 5 T R A N S P O R T A N D T H E G E N D E R I N G
O F T H E M O D E R N C I T Y

Feminist critiques also examined the wider Although it was clear that people did not
built environment as a biased technological live according to these simple dichotomies,
construct. The structuring and form of modern the widespread belief in them profoundly
cities, they argued, worked to reinforce the influenced women’s lives. The design of
sexual division of labour as architecture and the modern networked city was stamped with
urban planning structured separation between wider normative assumptions about social and
men and women, private and public, home economic relations.
and paid employment, consumption and Feminist critiques of transport planning
production, suburb and city (Weisman, 1994). and policy thus emerged, arguing that
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 128

communications systems and the car actually The assumption of car ownership dis-
worked to restrict women’s mobility and criminates against the poor and working
reinforce their confinement to the home and class in general. Older women and single
immediate locality. Wajcman (1981, 126), for mothers are amongst the poorest groups
example, suggested that: in society and have been left literally
stranded in, or outside of, cities designed
Women’s and men’s daily lives trace around the motor car. Although the auto-
very different patterns of time, space mobile did not create suburbia, it certainly
and movement, and the modern city is expanded and accelerated this process.
predicated on a mode of transport that The promotion of mass motor-car owner-
reflects and is organised around men’s ship has tended to exacerbate a greater
interests, activities and desires, to the dispersal of residential settlement often
detriment of women. without any other mode of transport to
(Wajcman, 1981, 126) service such areas.
(Wajcman, 1981, 129)
During the development of the modern city the
car had been widely expected to emerge as Despite women’s relatively low mobility, their
the future of urban transport. Many of the land travel needs were expanding as increasing
use planning and transport planning styles of numbers of them entered paid employment
the 1950s and 1960s had centred on planning and the location of health, shopping and edu-
for roads and elaborate highway, freeway cational services became more decentralised.
and motorway systems (see Box 3.3). How- Women were more reliant on off-peak and
ever, new road construction had generated unreliable public transport. Women’s journeys
more traffic which, in turn, led to a response were more complex and multipurpose, owing
based on the construction of more roads to their multiple roles as mothers, domestic
to eliminate congestion. This set in motion workers, social agents and paid employees.
a vicious circle that has only recently been This meant that they did more journeys of
questioned. Economic, largely masculine, shorter duration, requiring time-consuming
vested interests from car manufacturers, road and expensive changes. Because much of
construction companies, oil companies and the public transport laid out by modern infra-
property developers all shared in accelerating structural planning was designed around the
the development of the motorised city. But needs of full-time, largely male, workers
these developments affected different social commuting to a city centre, services rarely met
groups, and especially women, in different women’s needs, limiting them to a more
ways: spatially restricted job market.

‘POSTCOLONIAL’ CRITIQUES OF THE APPLICATION OF

THE MODERN IDEAL IN DEVELOPING CITIES

Second, from the early 1970s, postcolonial critiques in developing cities began to question
the usefulness of modernisation and import substitution theories as the basis of infrastructural
policy in developing cities (see Balbo, 1993).
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 129

T H E F A I L U R E S O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L ‘ T R I C K L E D O W N ’

The empirical evidence did not support the theory that infrastructural investment in urban
cores, targeted at the needs of local and international elites, ‘trickled down’ through the
rapidly growing spaces of developing cities. Instead there was increasing recognition that the
processes of city growth were fundamentally different in developing cities, particularly in the
stark urban–rural differences in wealth levels, the intense concentration of limited resources
in capital and primary cities, and the very high economic disparities between the main bulk
of the population and small political and cultural elites within dominant cities (Balbo, 1993).
It was increasingly realised that colonial infrastructure policies, and broader ideologies of
modernist urban planning, had supported a powerful fragmentation in developing cities
between minority elites in their well networked enclaves and the poorly served majority.
Informal economies, fast-growing squatter settlements – in many cases the majority of a city’s
population – had simply been ignored by the adapted notion of the modern infrastructural
ideal in developing countries.

T H E B I A S E S O F M O D E R N I S A T I O N T H E O R Y

These features were dramatically reflected within, and reinforced by, infrastructure networks
as developed under modernisation theory. Such networks tended to be heavily concentrated
in urban areas, most highly developed in quality and coverage in primary cities and, within
cities, largely configured to exclude the poor by providing formal infrastructure services only
to wealthy elites. It was increasingly obvious that infrastructure networks in developing cities
were ‘outcomes not of smooth, natural processes of innovation and diffusion but of political
and economic battles. In most cases, these contests [were] rather one-sided, and the resultant
transportation and communication systems [were] much more likely to facilitate the interests
and needs of wealthy people’ (D. Smith, 1996, 147; see Box 3.6). By channelling scarce
resources into highly uneven networked connections, it emerged that:

B O X 3 . 6 T H E P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y O F
T R A N S P O R T N E T W O R K S I N D E V E L O P I N G
C O U N T R I E S

Political economy perspectives argue that periphery is geared to supporting accumu-

developing countries are held in unequal and lation in the North. Any industrialisation in
exploitative relationships with metropolitan the South therefore tends to be of the
cores in the wealthy North. Capitalist devel- enclave type, with little potential to support
opment in colonial peripheries is a distorted development outside urban centres. Transport
or subordinate form of development that technologies form the key bridge between
will lack the potential or dynamism to develop the core and the periphery. While the tech-
any autonomy. Economic development in the nologies themselves may be neutral they
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 130

were developed in the North under particular routes. Slater illustrates how this was a simul-
social conditions and utilised to serve those taneous process of internal disintegration and
interests. external reintegration.
In the context of transport, Slater (1975) At independence, colonial states faced
shows how colonial transport networks massive problems as they inherited infra-
reflected colonialists’ perceptions of the structure networks designed to serve metro-
strategic importance and economic value politan rather than local needs. Many newly
of colonial territories. Transport networks independent states won power on an agenda
provided the material sinews and shaped designed to meet local needs and distribute
the extent to which different regions were development more equitably. In Tanzania the
incorporated into the global economy. In transport infrastructure was a major hurdle
Tanzania, for example, the territorial space to the new development trajectory. Physically
economy was divided into three zones by embedded networks could not simply be
the 1930s. First, the coastal belt comprising rerouted to link bypassed regions. While
major towns and cash crop-producing regions foreign aid supported the construction of trunk
was most directly linked to the transport and secondary roads in some regions, little
network. It was surrounded by a second zone change occurred in the inherited rail system of
that supplied food and services, while a third three unlinked parallel lines running east–west
and most peripheral zone served as a source to the main ports. Virtually all railways built
of migrant labour from declining subsistence in Africa since independence have replicated
economies. This process cut across pre- the colonial pattern of linking enclaves with
existing modes of production and transport the nearest port.

The provision of specific types of infrastructure (where and when to build highways, ports, rapid transit,
‘smart-wired’ buildings, and so on) had become implicitly urban policy. The construction or selective
upgrading of particular roads, railroads and ports to accommodate the evacuation of particular export
products, and the disproportionate expenditure of scarce national resources on telecommunications and
highway grids in capital cities, [were] bound to skew city growth and settlement patterns. . . . They
[were] the result of policy making decisions that usually reflect[ed] dominant class interests.
(Ibid., 147)

As Box 3.7 demonstrates in the case of water infrastructure, powerful elites in developing cities
tended to use modernisation theory to orchestrate the development of urban policies that
reflected their own narrow interests. Surpluses that were extracted under colonial rule often
accrued directly to the national capital in the form of taxation and trade duties. A large part
of the surplus usually went into public works disproportionately benefiting the national capital.
These public works were often directed towards conspicuous infrastructure investments
designed to create and symbolise a ‘modern’ aura in the capital city – airports, highways and
skyscrapers. Such policies exacerbated inequality of access to infrastructure. Numerous urban
residents, particularly with the explosive growth of informal settlements to house rural in-
migrants, lacked access even to the most basic services. From the late 1970s there was
increasing recognition that modernisation theory was effectively unable to deliver affordable
and reliable infrastructure services to new users in rapidly growing developing cities.
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 131

B O X 3 . 7 T H E S O C I A L A N D G E O G R A P H I C
D U A L I S A T I O N O F U R B A N I N F R A S T R U C T U R E
I N D E V E L O P I N G C I T I E S : T H E E X A M P L E
O F W A T E R

The example of water services illustrates modern infrastructural ideal. The modern logic
how hundreds of millions of users have been has thus come in for increasing criticism
excluded from access to modern infra- from development agencies, environmental
structure networks in developing cities, even organisations, international aid agencies, non-
though the development of such networks governmental organisations and local social
has often been legitimised by notions of movements.
ubiquity and universal roll-out adapted from the

THE GLOBAL WATER AND SANITATION CRISIS

Initially the development of networks tended ing countries and cities, the variations between
to keep pace with the accelerating process of different areas within the same city are usually
urbanisation (see Goubert, 1989). But nation even more marked (see Table 3.2). A common
states have found it extremely difficult to pattern of water provision has emerged (see
keep pace with increasing urban demand for Banes et al., 1996; Black, 1996; World Bank,
water (see Gilbert, 1992; Serageldin 1994). The 1994). The upper and middle income groups
UN Habitat programme estimated that by the are usually well served, while delivery to the
year 2000 an urban population of 450 million less affluent areas of the city is often very
people would be deprived of urban water poor. For instance, in Lima over 90 per cent
services and a further 720 million would lack of the top 10 per cent income group have
urban sanitation. Domestic underinvestment direct connections to water and sewerage,
and chronic dependence on external capital compared with an approximately 60 per cent
resulted in the systematic exclusion of the rate of connection for the bottom 10 per cent
new urban poor from easy and cheap access of income groups (Glewwe and Hall, 1992,
to potable water (see Banes et al., 1996; Bhatia 30). The level of connection is also linked with
and Falkenmark, 1993; Black, 1995; Gilbert, the age of the settlement, the poor living
1994; Swyngedouw, 1995a). in older-established areas tending to have
Although there are major variations in the access to most services while those in the
quality of service provision between develop- newest are often less well provided for.

OPTIONS FOR NON-SERVED LOW-INCOME SPACES

Communities without access to the formal sanitation services. Residents in marginal

water network are more likely to buy water communities typically spend between 10 per
from private vendors, and are prone to have cent and 40 per cent of their income on water
more interruptions of supply, to have more services (see Black, 1996, 6). Paradoxically,
polluted water, and not to be connected to these users also pay much higher prices for
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 132

Table 3.2 Dual circuits of water provision

Formal Features Informal

Public monopoly Provider Private water traders

Higher socioeconomic Network Marginal socioeconomic

groups connected groups unconnected

Subsidised prices Costs Expensive

Higher quality and reliability Quality Lower quality and disruption

Slowly enrols new users New users Large numbers of new

users enrolled

Low cost to users but low Consequences High health, environmental,

returns to water provider social and economic costs
to users

Source: Marvin and Laurie (1999), 343.

water, with charges up to ten, twenty and even Increasing evidence from studies of water
400 times higher than those paid by domestic resource management in developing cities
users of the public utility (see Black, 1996; indicates that many elements of the current
Petrei, 1989; Swyngedouw, 1995a). In many logic of provision are based on dual circuits
cities a form of negative redistribution operates of supply (see Montgomery, 1988). The con-
because the unconnected poor pay very high sequences of each circuit are very well
prices for water from private traders because known and documented (see Black, 1996;
the public system cannot deliver services in a Banes et al., 1996; World Bank, 1994). In the
comprehensive way. formal sector, users benefit from low prices
The deficit and underpricing of water results and lax recovery of charges. There are few
in a massive transfer of income from marginal incentives to restrict consumption while the
users to the middle and upper-class con- water provider fails to recover the costs, and
sumers and to commerce and industry. A there is insufficient finance to extend the
study of five Latin American countries found network to new users. In the informal sector,
that wealthy users always benefit dispro- users suffer serious economic, health, social
portionately from subsidies for water and and environmental costs associated with
sanitation services (Petrei, 1989). Utilities face uncertain, low-quality and expensive water
increasing difficulty in extending networks: the supply, while the total charges paid by such
cost of new supply is often two or three times users are often greater than the revenue
more than that of existing supply (IBRD, 1993, collected by the formal provider. Many of
37) and it is estimated that complete coverage the social, economic, health, social equity and
of the water network will require US$5 billion political conflicts over urban water supply can
investment and sewerage US$7 billion over the be traced to these dual circuits of differential
decade 2000–10 (Idelovitch and Ringskog access to urban water resources.
1995, v).
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 133

ENVIRONMENTAL, ENERGY, AND INTERMEDIATE

TECHNOLOGY MOVEMENTS

The third social movement which powerfully undermined the modern infrastructural ideal,
the environmental movement, began to have an important role in shaping infrastructure
development in the 1970s. The 1973 energy crisis brought into sharper focus the connections
between energy supply, infrastructure networks and the vulnerability of societies dependent
on external energy sources. This led to the rapid expansion of research and development into
the diversification of energy supplies.

R E A S S E R T I N G T H E P O W E R O F H U M A N

C H O I C E : F R O M ‘ H A R D ’ T O ‘ S O F T ’ E N E R G Y P A T H S

Central to this debate was the notion that energy futures were not technologically determined
but open to human choice. Amory Lovins’s (1977) seminal work systematically articulated
the view that urban industrial societies needed to make a transition from the dominant ‘hard’
energy strategy to alternative ‘soft’ energy strategies. Distortions in the market such as massive
government subsidies, and lack of knowledge about alternatives, prevented the emergence
of a softer ‘pathway’. (An ‘energy pathway’ refers not only to the direction of energy use
but the institutional, social, economic and cultural factors that make up an energy system in
a society.) Lovins argued that different paths have different social impacts: a ‘hard’ path will
have disruptive impacts while a ‘soft’ pathway will be relatively benign. Lovins portrayed the
dominant hard energy path as involving capital-intensive systems with complex, large-scale,
centralised and resource-depleting technologies that alienated human beings, generated
inequality and damaged the environment.
There were a number of further elements to the environmental critique of the conventional
approach to urban infrastructure provision that surrounded the modern ideal. In the energy
sector, environmental and tax payers were increasingly critical of the large tariff rises needed
to support supply-oriented investment in large nuclear and coal-fired power stations. Under
pressure, state regulators forced utilities to consider equally the value of both supply- and
demand-oriented measures to meet energy needs. In response, power companies postponed
or even cancelled new power stations and instead invested in energy efficiency and conservation
measures to push peak demand for power downwards. Increasing resistance to highly
disruptive urban highway projects also eventually forced government agencies to consider
alternative options, rerouting highways and increasing investment in mass transit.
The US case is illustrative of the major policy turn-rounds prompted by such environmental
critiques. Between 1973 and 1977, for example, federal funding for mass transit grew fourfold,
to $1.3 billion, with a large increase in the level of public subsidy to services. In the waste and
water sector, environmental pressure caused the US government to improve the environ-
mental performance of networks. Between 1967 and 1977 federal expenditure on sewer
systems increased from $150 million to $4.1 billion. By 1977 over 30 per cent of federal aid
for cities was for expenditure on sewer systems. New environmental concerns have therefore
had quite dramatic implications for the rehabilitation and style of urban infrastructure
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 134

management. The conventional supply logic that traditionally ignored environmental

concerns, or operated only to minimal standards, was dramatically challenged. Infrastructure
providers had to consider alternatives to the conventional supply-oriented approach in both
the transport and energy sectors, and massive investment in sewerage and water treatment
was required to bring systems up to new environmental standards.

C R I T I Q U E S O F ‘ B I G ’ T E C H N O L O G Y

Environmental and energy critiques were also backed up by a broader attack on the large-scale
centralised technologies surrounding the modern infrastructural ideal, led by the appropriate
or intermediate technology movement (Willoughby, 1990). The impetus for the development
of this movement came from a response to the growth of modern ‘technological’ society as a
whole (Nelkins, 1979; Yearly, 1992). In particular, a groundswell of dissent started to challenge
the dominant notion that technology was inherently progressive. Responses to, and perceptions
of, technology became increasingly controversial and vehement.
There were a number of dimensions to these critiques. The ‘big’ technoscience of
nuclear weapons and energy led many to question the neutrality and supposed benevolence
of technology. The rapid growth of environmentalism was linked with the realisation
that technology had insidious effects on health and the environment. It was increasingly
obvious that harmful impacts could arise from the unforeseen side effects of technology. And
a growing number of writers argued that the dynamics and imperatives of capitalist and state
technological development transcended the control of individuals and communities
(Willoughby, 1990).
Intermediate technology was initially formulated as a response to the problems of the
modern integrated infrastructural ideal in cities in the Developing World. Later the concept
was developed in the advanced economies of the North when new energy technologies and
energy conservation measures were linked with the development of employment and
cooperatives. In particular, critiques focused on the problems of technological dependence,
technology transfer and technology underdevelopment. The main issue has been the
inappropriateness of applying the infrastructural models developed in the context of Western
cities to the very different socioeconomic and cultural contexts in developing cities. New
approaches to infrastructure development, based on Schumacher’s (1973) famous dictum
‘Small is beautiful,’ were developed, based on notions of grass-roots-scale technology,
minimising capital costs and technological complexity, and maximising the degree to which
communities could support their own infrastructural needs.

TECHNOLOGICAL FETISHISM AND THE ASCENDANCY

OF SYMBOLIC CULTURAL POLITICS

Finally, it is important to locate this broad range of social movements and social critiques
of the modern infrastructural ideal within the wider processes of social and cultural change
which also served to render the modern infrastructural project increasingly problematic.
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTEGRATED IDEAL / 135

Currently, the ‘postmodern’ turn in social theory and social and cultural change
increasingly stresses the aesthetics of cultural production as the defining aspect of cultural
identity (Dear, 1999; Soja, 2000). Both the production and the consumption of cities, and
the production and consumption of infrastructure products and services, are increasingly
dominated by the language of commodity aesthetics and semiotics (Knox, 1993b, 16). The
relatively standardised ‘mass society’ of Fordist production, distribution and consumption has
fractured into a massive pluralisation of practices, enjoyments, tastes and needs.
The differentiation of lifestyles is supported by combinations of specialised urban
neighbourhoods and spaces, and customised infrastructure networks. The cultural politics
of cities which result are increasingly driven by the construction of places, commodities and
services as signs defining social identity. From the Fordist period, where ‘consumption was
a means of social integration’, we have shifted to a world where ‘consumption is viewed
increasingly as a means of asserting distinctiveness within mass society’ (Knox, 1993b, 20).
Within increasingly differentiated, mobile, and socially and culturally diverse cities, such
consumption is now tied to socioeconomic status, ethnicity and ‘race’, lifestyle and interests,
and profession as means to construct and differentiate identities.

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E N E T W O R K S A N D L I F E S T Y L E

D I F F E R E N T I A T I O N

Thus, in many cases, standardised and ‘black-boxed’ infrastructural services – such as the
classic ‘black’ bakelite telephone, the ubiquitous public electricity supplier, the mass-broadcast
television signal, the public water monopoly and the standardised ‘Fordist’ motor car on the
public street or road – have become hard to maintain. The aesthetic and stylistic forms of
‘high-tech’ infrastructures and appliances, in particular – laptop computers, personal digital
assistants but also computerised cars, phones, television sets, houses and domestic appliances
– have become deeply fetishised as symbols of power, status, mobility and worth. The fetishism
of technology – that is, the celebration of its surface appeal whilst ignoring or covering up
the broader social relations that produce and surround it – ‘seem to be inherent in the very
notion of high-tech’ (Rutsky, 1999, 129). As Nan Ellin (1996, 12) suggests:

in this new period of late capitalism, cultural production assumes a centrality and significance never
previously attained. Image, appearance and surface effect dominate forms of cultural production in
which the distinction between original and simulacra dissolves, nostalgia and kitsch supersede realism
and naturalism in art, and cultural aesthetics dominate everyday life.
(Ellin, 1996, 12)

C O N C L U S I O N S

In this chapter we have explored and exposed the complex range of pressures behind the
collapse of the modern urban infrastructural ideal. This exploration has necessarily been
multifaceted and diverse; such pressures are far from simple or straightforward. The collapse
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 136

of the modern ideal has been found to be inextricably bound up with the changing political
economies of capitalist urbanisation, with transitions in cultural politics, with changing
practices and ideals of urban planning, with radical restructurings in all types of nation state,
with transformations in the form and structure of cities, and with transitions in the politics
and sociologies of technology.
What is left, it seems, is a logic which threatens to support the separating circuits of
exchange and interaction, through the interlacing of customised networks and specialised
spaces within and between cities. Notions of ‘public’ spaces and realms where the mixing of
differing social, political and cultural groups is actively encouraged are becoming increasingly
problematic. Ideas of the unitary nature or ‘wholeness’ of both cities and urban infrastructure
networks are unravelling. Territorially driven policies and politics that try to use networked
infrastructures to redistribute between the circuits and spaces of the metropolis are starting
to appear at odds with the wider transformations under way. When backed by the ascendancy
of neoliberal policies an infrastructural individualism threatens to emerge, bearing all the
divisive and polarising hallmarks of wider transformations in ‘public’ and ‘welfare’ services.
As Leonard suggests:

welfare as a function of the state under capitalism, postmodern critiques argue, epitomizes that
contradiction between domination and emancipation which has been historically an invariable feature
of modernity. As the political agenda of the Right comes to dominate the discourse on welfare, its
empowering and caring side loses ground to a brutal individualism intent on the further degradation
of the poor.
(1997, xii)

And yet, in keeping with the wider ambivalence that runs through ‘postmodern’ critiques of
urban and technological change, it is difficult to criticise some of the more positive aspects
of the collapse of the modern ideal. For example, can we possibly argue against the idea that
spaces and networks should be splintered from the homogeneous, stultifying, gendered and
dominating logics of modernist urban and infrastructure planning? Are we to regret the
reduced power of the all-seeing planning ‘expert’ who systematically imbues urban structures
and infrastructure networks with masculinised, partial ideologies whilst ignoring all other
forms of knowledge and experience? Can we seriously challenge the notion that network
market places cannot, in some cases at least, deliver appropriate services in a more diverse and
flexible manner than homogeneous public monopolies? And would we argue against those
groups most marginalised by modern planning – the disabled, ethnic minorities, women –
gaining the ability to negotiate energy, transport and communications services within markets
that might be specifically tailored to their needs?
Clearly, the processes surrounding the collapse of the modern ideal are profoundly
ambivalent. The risks of urban fragmentation and the reduction in the degree to which large
cities bring together and interconnect their diversifying socioeconomic circuits need to be
weighed against the benefits that come from recognising and addressing the needs of urban
diversity. With such ambivalence in mind, it is time for us to look in more detail at the precise
mechanisms and processes through which infrastructure networks can become splintered and
cities fragmented. It is to these mechanisms that we turn in the next chapter.
 4 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM

Plate 7 ‘Power up. Have you switched on to electricity competition?’ An advertisement in Woman’s
Journal, 1998, 89
 U N B U N D L I N G I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A N D T H E
R E C O N F I G U R A T I O N O F C I T I E S

In the last chapter we explored the many forces that are contributing to the demise of
the modern ideal of monopolistic, standardised and integrated networked infrastructures.
Our broad analysis of the processes that are undermining the modern infrastructural ideal
raises a series of questions. How are integrated infrastructure networks being restructured in
practice? What are the implications of these transformations for urban change in developed,
developing, post-communist and newly industrialised cities? Is it possible to develop a
broad perspective on the various practices of splintering urbanism which can be applied
to all networked infrastructures, and all types of city, without falling into the trap of
oversimplification, technological determinism or ethnocentrism?
This chapter explores how processes of splintering urbanism operate in practice. It is
divided into two parts. In the first we analyse in detail how processes of infrastructural
‘unbundling’ work in practice. We closely examine the implications of privatisation, liberali-
sation and the application of new technologies for integrated urban infrastructures. The
transitions are varied and complex; we illustrate how the unbundling of networked
infrastructures actually encompasses a wide variety of shifts. But we argue that the current
unbundling of networks is to a considerable extent an overarching, universal process that is,
at the same time, diverse and multifaceted. As such, the unbundling of infrastructure networks
defies easy generalisation. It varies considerably between particular political, economic,
territorial and social contexts. And it is bound up with complex processes of urban change
across the world.
The second section constructs an exploratory typology of how unbundled networks
are involved in the simultaneous reshaping of social and spatial relations in cities. Here we
develop an understanding of how real cities are being fragmented in parallel with processes
of infrastructural unbundling. Central to this is an understanding of how unbundled infra-
structure networks more intensively and actively connect valued places, while at the same
time progressively withdrawing and disengaging from less valued places. Our typology
attempts to examine how this shift works its way through different cities in varied contexts
across the globe.

P R A C T I C E S O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L
U N B U N D L I N G

Within the last two decades there has been a paradigmatic shift across all networked
infrastructure sectors based on the movement from integrated to unbundled urban networks.
As Curien argues:

what is now becoming quite clear is that the era of integrated monopolies operating infrastructure
and providing the totality of services is over. The ‘industrial structure’ of future networks is a complex
one, where a dominant firm, the former monopoly, maintains its monopoly over some segments
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 139

of the market, is open to competition in others and does not intervene at all in segments where there
are other providers.
(1997, 51)

Working together, the economic liberalisation of infrastructure and the development

of new technologies have made possible an entirely new infrastructural landscape that
radically challenges established assumptions that have underpinned the relations between
integrated networks and cities. In this section we provide a guide to the complex processes
of infrastructural unbundling across different networks and within particular national
contexts. We focus on the processes through which integrated infrastructure networks
become segmented (see Guy et al., 1997). We review the marketability of different segments
of unbundled networks. Finally, we map the multiple pathways towards unbundled
infrastructure.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND SEGMENTED

INFRASTRUCTURE

We need, first, to understand the ways in which new technological innovations have supported
network unbundling. For it is clear that broader institutional shifts surrounding infrastructural
liberalisation have been paralleled by a set of technological innovations that provide the ability
to challenge the conventional technical assumption that infrastructure had to be provided by
public monopolies. Although a number of these innovations have existed for some time, it
was only in the 1990s that the applications were exploited to provide support for the measures
that effectively unbundle integrated infrastructure.
It is important to stress that liberalisation, combined with new technology, creates great
flexibility in the styles of unbundling that can be applied to the integrated modern infra-
structures created through the modern ideal. In particular, we suggest that new technologies
have:

• Helped to reduce the conditions for natural monopolies in infrastructure supply. In the
telecommunications sector, new technologies such as cable, radio, microwave and satellite
have reduced the cost of providing both long-distance and local telecom networks,
effectively undermining economies of scale and the cost barriers to new entrants. These
innovations are paralleled by the development of decentralised technologies in the power
and water sector, including gas turbines, renewable energy systems and smaller-scale
water treatment and waste disposal techniques. The lower costs, high efficiency and
flexibility of new and decentralised technologies facilitate the entry of new competitors
into increasingly contestable infrastructure markets.
• Enabled the unbundling of integrated networks and operations. These technologies
facilitate the division of integrated networks into monopolistic and non-monopolistic
segments that are contestable by new entrants. Complex control, monitoring and data
management systems deal with all the millions of transactions involved in segmenting
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 140

power generation, the transmission network and the local distribution system in the
electricity sector. Information and communications technologies (ICT) allow new
entrants to participate in the contestable segments of unbundled networks – power
generation and the supply of power to users – while providing access to those parts of
the network that still have monopoly status – power transmission and the local
distribution network. These technologies also facilitate the segmentation of gas, water,
transport and telecommunication networks whilst effectively maintaining the appearance
of an integrated network. The networks are effectively split into the monopolistic and
competitive elements, with ICT seamlessly managing transactions between millions of
users and multiple suppliers in contestable markets.
• Increased the range and quality of infrastructure services. Value-added services in the
telecommunications sector, such as high-speed data transmission and mobile com-
munications, are the most dynamic sources of demand and are based on new digital
transmission and processing technologies. The containerisation of freight, together with
complex logistics systems, permits cost-effective, high-speed and high-quality transfer
of freight across multiple transport modes. Power companies use specially tailored
distribution networks and back-up systems to offer extremely reliable and high-quality
energy supplies to industrial and commercial users. In the domestic sector, premium
users are increasingly offered differentiated packages of enhanced and high-quality utility
services – these include green power, special maintenance and security services, and
services tailored to their specific needs (e.g. swimming pool or greenhouse heating).
Information and communication technologies thus challenge the traditional notion that
infrastructure services are standardised and homogeneous products. Instead they become
increasingly complex and differentiated products offered to a much more fragmented
market of users (Graham, 1997).
• Expanded options for the management of demand for infrastructure services. In the
transport sector, new electronic road pricing technologies permit the introduction of
user charges that can be differentiated to reflect the impact of vehicle loads and the level
of congestion, so internalising the social costs of pollution. In the power and water
sectors, small-scale demand management technologies can improve the efficiency and
promote the conservation of energy and water on networks that have economic or
environmental limitations on the expansion of supply options.
These technologies therefore challenge the assumption that relations between
users and providers are standardised and homogeneous. Instead the interface becomes
much more complex: users may be enrolled by producers to shift the timing and level
of demand; new pricing technologies can send real-time economic signals to shift
consumption patterns; and new intermediaries such as logistics specialists, energy and
water conservation agencies, and property developers, increasingly manage relations
between users and network providers.
• Supported the development of appropriate technologies which have facilitated low-cost
infrastructure supply options. Intermediate water and waste technologies have lower costs
than conventional, heavily engineered supply options, making them potentially much
more affordable to low-income communities, especially in developing nations. Smaller-
scale irrigation, energy production, water treatment and waste disposal technologies can
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 141

permit lower-cost alternatives and facilitate community involvement in the planning,

installation, maintenance and administration of infrastructure networks. These users
traditionally rely on informal systems of infrastructure provision – private water vendors,
charcoal sellers and private transport. Yet, with technical and institutional support, such
users can become enrolled on to community infrastructure networks, challenging the
traditional assumption that new users have to connect to formal public or private
infrastructure networks.

S T Y L E S O F N E T W O R K S E G M E N T A T I O N A N D U N B U N D L I N G

New technical capabilities can therefore actively facilitate the unbundling of infrastructure
networks. Central to the notion of unbundled networks is the concept of ‘segmenting’
integrated infrastructure into different network elements and service packages. Segmentation
involves detaching activities and functions that were previously integrated within monopolies
and opening them to different forms of competition. Segmentation challenges the assumption
that one infrastructure monopoly can provide a service at a lower cost than two or more
competitive providers can. Economic liberalisation has also challenged the idea that there are
strong technical and institutional reasons why infrastructure networks should be provided on
a monopoly basis by the public sector. Many infrastructure suppliers usually provide a range
of services, only some of which can genuinely be defined as ‘natural monopolies’. The process
of unbundling, therefore, attempts to separate the natural monopoly segments of a network
and then promote new entrants and competition in segments that are potentially competitive.
Network unbundling can take three different forms: vertical segmentation, horizontal
segmentation or virtual segmentation. These are not mutually exclusive, however; they can
coexist within a single unbundled infrastructure network.

VERTICAL SEGMENTATION

This involves the division of vertically integrated infrastructure networks. In the power sector,
it usually encompasses separating the generation, transmission and distribution of power into
a number of different segments open to competitive entry, while some segments retain their
natural monopoly status.
As Figure 4.1 shows, in the unbundled electricity sector, generation is usually open to
independent power producers, using a range of new, small renewable and conventional power
production technologies, who enter the market and compete with incumbent generators.
To facilitate competition in the distribution of power the transmission and distribution parts
of the networks are also often separated. The transmission network tends to remain a natural
monopoly in either the public or the private sector, within a national or regional regulatory
framework structured to allow reasonable access and connection to new power generators and
energy suppliers. The local distribution network is also likely to remain a monopoly, while
virtual network unbundling allows new suppliers to compete for the right to supply users over
a single distribution network. It would not be economic to run more than one distribution
network to customers’ premises.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 142

Figure 4.1 Vertical segmentation of the UK electricity infrastructure. Source: Guy et al. (1997), 200

In the gas sector, resources, treatment, transmission pipelines and local distribution
networks can also be owned and operated by different entities. Networks that were previously
considered to be integrated can be effectively taken apart and unbundled into different
elements to stimulate new entrants and competition in non-monopoly segments of the
networks.

HORIZONTAL SEGMENTATION

Here, activities are separated by markets, either geographically or by service categories.

Geographical unbundling into a number of producers allows direct competition within a
single region. Alternatively, the creation of regional monopolies can facilitate performance
comparisons between different providers and more efficient regulatory monitoring. For
instance, with privatisation, the UK water sector was divided into a number of regional
monopolies, with the regulatory agency using a range of comparators to monitor the efficiency
of the industry. The telecommunications sector lends itself to horizontal unbundling when
the operation of cellular and satellite-based services is typically separated from the provision
of traditional landline-based services.
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 143

VIRTUAL SEGMENTATION

Virtual segmentation cannot always be sharply distinguished from vertical or horizontal

unbundling. Virtual unbundling refers to the development of new competitive services that
can be effectively superimposed on the monopolistic elements of unbundled infrastructure
networks. Although the local gas, electricity and telecommunications distribution network
is effectively a natural monopoly, new entrants gain access to individual users over these
networks because of the ability of new information infrastructure to handle all the millions
of transactions between users and multiple suppliers.
In the transport sector, virtual network unbundling allows new entrants to offer a range
of additional services, such as traffic information and route guidance systems, that can be
layered on top of the existing monopoly highway networks. This creates an enhanced set of
premium service options. Within the United States the conventional freeways can now be
effectively segmented into a series of different lanes offering a range of mobility services:
privately funded and tolled express lanes, high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, lanes for
commercial trucks that can all coexist with conventional public-access freeways (see Figure
4.2). New information and surveillance technologies can control access and police these
differentiated lanes. Virtual network unbundling thus provides the technological capacity
effectively to segment and splinter established integrated infrastructure networks.

Figure 4.2 Virtual segmentation of the US highway infrastructure. Source: Toll Roads Newsletter, March
1999, 8, 14
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 144

N E W T E C H N O L O G I E S A N D I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L

U N B U N D L I N G : A S U M M A R Y

New technologies have challenged many of the traditional assumptions that infrastructure
networks needed to be provided by public or private monopolies. There are significant new
potentials to unbundle integrated networks using a number of different styles of segmentation.
Yet the distinctions between these three forms of unbundling are not necessarily easy to make.
Within a particular infrastructure sector, various forms of network unbundling are likely to
coexist in parallel. For instance, in the UK telecommunications sector, new entrants can
provide value-added services over their own parallel networks or use local distribution
networks owned by incumbent operators (see Figure 4.3). In such cases, vertical unbundling
between the management of distribution networks and the supply of services is needed to
allow competition between horizontally separated service providers. Virtual network
unbundling allows these new entrants to use the incumbent’s distribution network because
telematic systems manage information and transaction flows between users and multiple
suppliers. With this wide range of options how do policy makers identify elements of a network
that are provided as a monopoly and those that are contestable?

Figure 4.3 Segmentation of the UK telecommunications infrastructure. Source: Guy et al. (1997), 201
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 145

THE MARKETABILITY OF UNBUNDLED

INFRASTRUCTURE

The second key area we need to address is the ways in which economic, technical, social and
political constraints on the segmentation of networks work to limit the degree to which the
integrated infrastructure networks of the modern ideal can be totally segmented within
infrastructural markets. Across national contexts and infrastructure sectors there is wide variation
in the potential for, and acceptability of, the different options for segmenting networks.
The key to understanding the break-up of integrated infrastructure is to explore how
the marketability of the various segmented elements of a network is contested and defined.
In what follows we develop a conceptual framework that builds an understanding of the
marketability of different segments of infrastructure networks. This framework explains
the process through which infrastructure is unbundled and presents a guide to the process of
infrastructural unbundling, across different sectors, identifying where competitive conditions
could apply or be approximated and contexts where they do not apply. The framework is based
on an understanding of the four characteristics that influence the ‘marketability’ of
infrastructure:

• The character of the service. The degree to which an infrastructure service is a jointly
consumed ‘public good’ or individually consumed as a ‘private good’.
• The conditions of production of the infrastructure service. The extent to which an
infrastructure service is ‘contestable’ and open to new entrants who can compete with
incumbents.
• The environmental externalities and social objectives of service provision. The extent to
which the costs and benefits of an infrastructure affect other persons than those directly
involved in consuming the service.
• The character of users’ demand for infrastructure services. The degree of consumer access
to information about supply alternatives and the existence of substitutes for particular
kinds of services.

In what follows we will discuss each of these in turn.

R I V A L R Y A N D E X C L U D A B I L I T Y : T H E C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S

O F T H E I N F R A S T R U C T U R E S E R V I C E

Turning first to infrastructure service characteristics, Figure 4.4 presents a matrix that attempts
to assess the potential for introducing competition into various types of infrastructure. Each
infrastructure sector contains activities which can be unbundled or segmented, each of which
is shaped by two key concepts: ‘rivalrousness’ and ‘excludability’. Purely private goods are
usually consumed by one person at a time. These goods, such as food and consumer durables,
are highly rivalrous in consumption.
At the opposite extreme are purely public goods. These have low rivalry because consumption
by one individual does not lessen availability to others. Such goods are said to be jointly
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 146

Figure 4.4 Infrastructure potential for competition. Source: Israel (1992), 52

consumed. For example, highway use by one vehicle does not usually affect use by other
vehicles. But there are circumstances when a highway starts to become congested as additional
users impose additional costs on existing users.
The second criterion is the concept of ‘excludability’, which can be defined as the feasibility
of controlling access to infrastructure. Usually, individual consumers can be excluded from
transactions involving purely private goods. Such exclusion is usually not feasible, or very
costly, in the case of public goods.
Between the two extremes of purely private and public goods are toll and common pool
goods. Toll goods are characterised by high levels of excludability but a low level of
rivalrousness. For instance, it is possible to control access to a piped sewage system, but
consumption by one user does not usually lessen its availability to others. Common pool goods
are rivalrous in consumption but have low feasibility of excluding individual users – examples
would include small rural roads and access to storm drainage. There is an increasing tendency
for infrastructures that were seen as purely public goods, such as urban roads, to be viewed
as private or tollable because the technology now exists to restrict access through road pricing
technologies. Particular judgements in these cases are powerfully shaped by assumptions
about the type of technology and the costs of exclusion.

C O N D I T I O N S O F P R O D U C T I O N O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

S E R V I C E S

The efficiency of the private market depends on the existence of effective competition. This
does, however, preclude services that are delivered by natural monopolies – transmission
networks, local distribution networks and rural roads.
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 147

Natural monopoly conditions occur where there are high economies of scale, which implies
that the unit cost of supplying a service will be minimised when the market is served by a single,
rather than multiple, supplier. A natural monopoly has a high degree of market power that
it can exploit by increasing prices in excess of marginal cost. The lack of competition may blunt
the incentive to increase efficiency while high levels of market power are a barrier to new
entrants. New technologies may reduce economies of scale and decrease the capital investment
needed to enter the market.
However, the main deterrent to competition in infrastructure provision is the magnitude
of sunk costs in the event of exit from the market. The costs are sunk to the extent that they
cannot be recovered for other uses – this is generally the case with specialised equipment and
fixed installations such as roads and sewers. When the production of a service requires no sunk
costs it is referred to as contestable and the threat of entry is usually considered to provide
similar market discipline to an incumbent monopoly. But there may still be practical barriers
to entry imposed by other policies or shortage of financing.
A concept which is related but distinct from natural monopoly is the degree of coordination
needed for an infrastructure network to function effectively. Because of the interlocking
networks involved in infrastructure systems, and the complexity of the resources that flow
along networks, their management must follow a number of minimum rules and regulations.
Consequently, regulation needs to ensure that there is a degree of formal co-ordination in
the planning of investment, technical operation and setting of minimum standards for
connections between networks.

E X T E R N A L I T I E S A N D S O C I A L O B J E C T I V E S

Externalities occur where the benefits and costs of producing or consuming goods affect
persons other than those involved in the transaction. In the infrastructure sector negative
externalities include air, noise, water and land pollution from motor vehicles and electricity
production. Positive externalities include the public health benefits of access to water and
sanitation infrastructure. Many infrastructure activities also generate network externalities
where all users benefit when a new user joins the network because of the ability to
communicate with more people. Similarly, broader social and political objectives, valued by
the wider social community, such as universal access regardless of location to a minimum level
of service, have wider social benefits. Regulation needs to ensure that externalities and social
obligations are managed to meet wider societal objectives.

C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S O F D E M A N D A N D

S E R V I C E U S E

Finally, there are five features of infrastructure demand that suggest an enlarged set of
requirements for consumers to obtain satisfaction from infrastructure supply. These will have
important implications for regulatory policies and the form of privatisation:
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 148

• The existence of substitutes for infrastructure. In some cases, acceptable and affordable
alternatives can substitute for the services provided by the incumbent supplier, weakening
their market power. For instance, consumers may turn to private electricity generation
even at a higher cost because of the unreliability of public power sources. Households
may resort to private water vendors when the quality and/or reliability of the public
system fails to provide an adequate service. Specialised communication networks for
high-volume business users can bypass congested public telephone networks. Yet many
consumers, especially low-income users, are financially or physically restricted in their
access to substitutes. Regulation may need to ensure that competition from substitutes
can discipline an incumbent monopoly provider.
• The price elasticity of demand for infrastructure services. For certain infrastructure services
in certain minimum quantities – such as water and energy – demand is virtually inelastic
because the service would have to be consumed at almost any price. Water is an essential
service that cannot be substituted for and must be consumed in certain minimum qualities
to sustain life. Beyond this particular case, the price elasticity of infrastructure varies
among different groups of users. There is a recognition that a minimum level of public
transport, electricity and the basic telephone demonstrate inelastic demand as
development increases. This is because they are necessities if people are to gain access to
jobs, health care, etc. Where demand is price-inelastic, especially for low-income groups,
suppliers must be regulated on welfare grounds.
• Consumers’ access to information about infrastructure services. Market-based provision
assumes that consumers have access to information about the cost and quality of
infrastructure services. But, in a number of sectors, the quality and cost of a service are
difficult to assess, e.g. water or energy quality, the safety of different urban transport modes
and the availability of services at a particular point in time. All these factors mean that it is
difficult for consumers to make informed choices about the services they want to use.
Regulators may need to develop indicators of service quality to make the performance of
services more transparent to increase the marketability of competing services.
• The pattern of demand for infrastructure. Demand for many infrastructure services,
especially power, voice telecommunications, water supply and urban transport, is not
distributed evenly over time but shows distinct peak and off-peak periods. Such services
cannot simply be stored, so the capacity of the system must be designed to meet peak,
rather than average, demand in real time. The supplier must therefore meet the high
cost of providing excess capacity in slack periods to meet higher demand during peaks.
Infrastructure networks are often configured to meet peak demand that only occurs once
or twice a day at different times during the year. The construction of additional capacity
to meet peaks can be delayed or postponed by using pricing mechanisms to shift
consumption from peak to off-peak periods. Regulation may need to ensure sufficient
capacity is provided to meet peak demand or provide incentives to accelerate the
development of demand management activities.
• The diversity of users’ infrastructure needs. The modern conception of infrastructure as
homogeneous products provided by a standardised production process, through
monopolistic providers, is no longer relevant. User needs in the water, power, transport
and telecommunications sectors are becoming much more diverse, owing to rapid
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 149

changes in production processes and users’ lifestyles. Industrial firms, using sensitive and
electronically mediated production processes, are increasingly reliant on extremely reliable
and high-quality electricity sources that minimise voltage ‘spikes’ and ‘troughs’ to avoid
interference with sensitive equipment. The financial services sector depends on extremely
reliable telecommunications networks with stand-by systems designed to allow seamless
operations if the primary network is disrupted. Domestic users are now interested in
value-added utility services such as green electricity produced by renewable sources.
Regulation may need to ensure that the structure of supply has to become much more
diverse to reflect the differing infrastructural needs of different users.

T H E M A R K E T A B I L I T Y O F U N B U N D L E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E :
A S U M M A R Y

Table 4.1 summarises this assessment of the marketability of infrastructure. There are three
key conclusions here. First, the provision of networked infrastructure networks, especially the
primary or trunk elements of the network – the transmission of gas, electricity, water, sewerage
and highways – tends to exhibit the characteristics of public goods. That is, they have high
sunk costs and are most effectively provided by natural monopolies. Second, the operation
of the networks often does not now entail large sunk costs of equipment and is usually
contestable. Finally, the infrastructure sector is highly heterogeneous, both within and
between sectors, in the level of marketability assigned to specific activities and different
segments of the networks.

INSTITUTIONAL PATHWAYS TO UNBUNDLED

INFRASTRUCTURE

The above framework has shown that there is considerable economic and technological
potential to reassign infrastructural activities between the public and private sectors. However,
it also demonstrates the need for a third area of discussion to explore the different pathways
to unbundled infrastructure networks and the ways in which they reflect the broader social,
political and economic feasibility of segmenting networks in quite different national and
political contexts.
The transition from integrated to unbundled networks is often captured within a single
concept – privatisation or deregulation – but the process is actually much more complex and
‘messy’. The transition from integrated infrastructure can follow a series of pathways
characterised by significant variation across infrastructure sectors and nation states. When the
marketability of different infrastructural activities has been assessed within particular contexts
the responsibility for different services and segments can potentially be reassigned between
the public and private sectors.
The range of alternatives, as illustrated in Table 4.2, is very broad. Options range along a
continuum between completely public and completely private sector participation. The range
Table 4.1 The marketability of infrastructure

Service Production Externalities Summary

character and social

Rivalness Excludability Economies Sunkness Co-ordination Externalities Social Potential for

of scale of costs requirements objectives competition

Telecommunications Network effects USO, national

integration
Local networks Private High Low Low High Medium
Long-distance value added Private High Low Low High High
Energy Pollution USO
Generation Private High Medium Medium High Low
Transmission Private High High Medium High Medium
Distribution Private High Medium Medium High High
Water Allocation and public health USO
Urban piped Private High High High High Medium
Non-piped Private High Low Low Low High
Sanitation Pollution and health USO
Urban piped sewage Toll Medium Medium High High High
and treatment
On site High Private Low Low/medium Low High

Transport
Urban bus and taxi Private High Low Low Low Pollution Affordability High
Urban transit Private High Medium High High Land use Affordability Medium
Urban roads Common/ Low/high Low High High Land use, Integration Medium
private environment
Port and airport facilities Toll High Medium High High Noise safety Integration Low
Port and airport services Private High Low Low High Noise safety Integration High
Rail network and stations Toll High Medium High High Network effects Remote access Medium
Rail services Private High Low Low High Medium

Source: Israel (1992), 115.

 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 151

of options does not extend from government monopoly to unfettered markets. Rather, it
involves a wider series of different options. Yet, while this typology provides a useful indication
of the range of options for involving the private sector in the provision of infrastructure, it
does not provide an assessment of the importance of network segmentation. We therefore
need to move from overly simplistic typologies that only focus on the level of private sector
participation in the provision of networks. A more useful conceptualisation would be able to
recognise the diversity of institutional forms that can surround network unbundling. Our
central concern in what follows is not with privatisation per se. Rather, we are concerned with
those urban contexts in which infrastructure networks become unbundled, bringing new
parallel contestable networks to coexist with the incumbent network.
Figure 4.5 provides a more detailed conceptualisation of the institutional alternatives for
infrastructure provision. This transcends the limitations of a simple comparative framework
based on degree of public and private sector involvement. There are three key features of this
model.

Table 4.2 Infrastructure: degree of public/private responsibility

Role of market Range of Institutional Description

incentives responsibility options

Public sector
Low •••••••• Government Service provided by civil servants and
department accounts in government budget
••••••• Parasatal An organisation owned and controlled
by the state
•••••• Service contract Contracting out services to the private
sector for fixed period and fee
••••• Management contract Private sector manages publicly
owned infrastructure for fee or
performance-related fee
•••• Leasing Private sector operates a public facility
for a fixed period but does not provide
fixed assets
••• Concessions (BOT) Private sector leases an asset for an
extended period – investment reverts
to public sector
•• Communal arrangements Users cooperatively plan, build,
maintain and manage infrastructure
High • Private entrepreneurship Ownership by private sector either
through transfer of assets from public
sector or new entry
Public sector

Source: Kessides (1983a), 18.

 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 152

Figure 4.5 Pathways to unbundled networks. Source: based on World Bank (1994), 56

First, the new model is able to map a much more complex set of pathways towards
unbundled infrastructure than the usual polarities of ‘private’ and ‘public’ provision. In many
contexts the transition away from integrated networks is a complex and highly contested
process and at least in the early stage the move is not to competitive markets. There may
actually be a number of intermediate stages.
Second, the model illustrates that shifts in the social organisation of infrastructure services
can occur, incorporate more private sector participation, but not require the unbundling of
networks. Private sector participation cannot simply be equated with unbundling and the
competitive provision of infrastructure. Yet privatisation may be able to increase accountability
through the discipline of budgetary constraints and the signal sent through government
regulation.
Finally, two of the options do create the context for competitive conditions:

• Delegated infrastructure. Governments create the conditions through which firms

compete for the right to supply an entire market of users through leases or concessions.
• Liberalised infrastructure. Multiple providers compete directly with each to provide
services within a regulatory framework.

It is worth briefly examining the key features of these six different pathways. In what follows
we do this, whilst selecting examples from different infrastructure and national contexts to
illustrate the shifts involved.
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 153

0 I N T E G R A T E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : G O V E R N M E N T

D E P A R T M E N T

Option 0 is the status quo, with integrated infrastructure still being provided by a government
department or a publicly owned utility. This option is increasingly untenable with international
regulatory agencies placing increasing pressure on developing countries to reform public
infrastructure and with regional trade agreements forcing governments in the advanced
economies to introduce private sector participation and liberalise integrated infrastructure
networks. There are a range of different options for restructuring infrastructure provision, with
the selection being shaped by the particular socioeconomic and institutional context within
which the transition away from integrated networks is being developed.

1 C O M M E R C I A L I S E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : P U B L I C

O W N E R S H I P A N D O P E R A T I O N

Option 1 does not require the unbundling or segmentation of the networks. Instead, an
integrated infrastructure provided by a government department or a public utility is
transformed into an independent but publicly owned corporatised parastatal organisation
designed to run on commercial lines. Networks are still owned by the state, limited subsidies
from government may fund capital expenditure, but the objective is that costs should be
covered by revenues. The public sector will continue to have the primary responsibility for
the provision of infrastructure networks in many countries and sectors.
In low-income countries weak private sector and management capabilities will improve only
slowly. Even with a dynamic private sector, roads and major public works are likely to remain
in the public domain. National governments may also decide for strategic, regulatory and
political reasons to retain public sector responsibility for infrastructure provision. In many
contexts, however, especially low-income countries, governments are under pressure from
international aid agencies and the World Bank to improve the performance of publicly owned
infrastructure organisations because more effective performance by the public sector will
actively facilitate future private sector participation.

2 D E L E G A T E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : P U B L I C O W N E R S H I P

A N D P R I V A T E O P E R A T I O N

In option 2 the integrated network can remain bundled or be segmented into contestable
and monopoly elements. Delegated infrastructure involves suppliers competing for the right
to supply a market. Governments create market conditions by offering leases or concessions
for either integrated or monopoly elements of the networks. These can range from specific
contracts to longer-term concessions that require operation, maintenance and facility
expansion. Competition occurs before the contract is signed and when it expires and is due
for renewal. Therefore the government creates competitive conditions through leases or
concessions and firms compete for the right to supply the entire market (see Box 4.1). The
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 154

B O X 4 . 1 E X A M P L E S O F D E L E G A T E D
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

THE FRENCH WATER SECTOR

The ownership of infrastructural assets in operations could distort investment incentives.

France remains with municipalities, which One mechanism that helps is full cost recovery
contract-out operations and maintenance to through water tariffs: since both owner and
private firms under management contracts, operator recover costs from the same source,
lease contracts or concessions. Under lease they have the incentive to collaborate in mak-
contracts and concessions, fees are estab- ing a sound investment decision. The length
lished through negotiation or on the basis of concessions may also result in better asset
of competitive bidding, with adjustments for management, but it reduces the potential for
inflation according to an agreed formula. Tariff competition.
levels are monitored by the Ministry of the The French system has been the model for
Economy and Finance, and environmental several developing countries. The approach
standards, and are enforced at the départe- can be adapted to a variety of situations.
ment level of government. Competition for the If properly designed, for example with com-
market is the key to efficiency. The water pensation linked to the volume of water
supply market of each municipality is con- delivered to consumers, such arrangements
testable, and the existence of two major firms, can transfer all the commercial risk of operation
Lyonnais des Eaux and Compagnie Général and maintenance to the private sector. Actual
des Eaux, also permits the use of benchmark ownership of the assets may not matter very
indicators. much because the utility owns the right to a
However, the separation of ownership and stream of revenues.

WATER SUPPLY IN GUINEA

Before 1989 Guinea had one of the least new connections. The company benefits from
developed water supply sectors in West Africa. improvements it achieves in the collection ratio
Then the sector was restructured: ownership and the reduction of operating costs and
of the urban water supply infrastructure and unaccounted-for water. It has incentives to
responsibility for sector planning and invest- seek adequate tariffs and to invest carefully
ment were transferred to a new autonomous based on realistic demand forecasts, since
water authority, SONEG. A new company, it has responsibility for capital finance. Water
SEEG, was created to operate and maintain tariffs have increased from US$0.12 per
the facilities; it was a joint venture, 49 per cent cubic metre in 1989 to about US$0.90 in
owned by the government and 51 per cent by 1995. Despite higher tariffs, the collection
a private foreign consortium. ratio of private customers has increased
Under the ten-year lease signed with dramatically from 20 per cent to around 85 per
SONEG, SEEG operates and maintains the cent in 1995. Peak technical efficiency of
system at its own risk, with its remuneration the network and service coverage have also
based on user charges actually collected and improved.
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 155

commitments in contracts can then provide an alternative to independent regulation. The use
of leases and concessions has become increasingly common in the infrastructure sector in
both developed and low-income countries. They are particularly common in the transport
sector for large fixed facilities such as ports and toll roads and have been very common in the
water sector. There are, as Table 4.3 demonstrates, a wide variety of arrangements possible

Table 4.3 Contractual arrangements for water supply

Contract Applications Incentives Examples

Service Meter reading, billing Permits competition A public water company,

and collection, and among multiple providers, EMOS, in Santiago,
maintenance of private each with short and Chile, encouraged
connections specific contracts employees to leave the
company in 1977 and
compete for service
contracts for tasks
previously performed
internally – resulting in
large productivity gains

Management Operation and Contract renewed every Electricity and water

maintenance of the one to three years, and company of Guinea-
water supply system remuneration based on Bissau (EAGB); contract
or major subsystem physical parameters, awarded to Electricité
such as volume of water de France, with about
produced and improvement 75% of the
in collection rates remuneration and a
possible additional 25%
based on performance

Lease Extended operational Contract bidding, with Water supply in Guinea

contract contract duration of about owned by state enterprise
ten years; provider assumes (SONEG) and leased to
operational risk operating company (SEEG)
from 1989 for ten years;
achieved large increases in
bill collection

Concession All features of the Contract bidding, with Côte d’Ivoire’s urban water
lease contract, plus contract period up to supply concession went to
financing of some thirty years; provider SODECI, a consortium of
fixed assets assumes operational and Ivoirien and French
investment risk companies; SODECI
receives no operating
subsidies and all
investments are self-
financed

Source: Triche (1990).

 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 156

within these agreements. Using this option, the public sector can delegate the operation of
infrastructure and responsibility for new investment to the private sector without dismantling
existing institutions or creating new regulatory frameworks.

3 P R I V A T I S E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : P R I V A T E O W N E R S H I P

A N D O P E R A T I O N

Option 3 can also apply to integrated and unbundled elements of the network. In both cases,
monopolies continue to exist. No competitive element is involved in this transition but it is
assumed that the transfer from public to private ownership will produce efficiency gains. This
option involves the private ownership and operation of infrastructure, usually in contexts
when commercial and political risks are low and there is high potential for securing revenue
from user charges. A system of regulation is needed to ensure that private monopolies do not
exploit market power and that providers seek increased efficiency gains.
Although privatisation has a long history it is comparatively new in the infrastructure
sector. Privatised utilities usually undergo major corporate restructuring. The benefits of
privatisation are ambiguous. Many studies show short-term benefits to producers, consumers
and employees, but longer-term effects have not been demonstrated. Infrastructure priva-
tisations are often linked with a requirement to undertake certain minimum investments and
roll-out obligations contained with service conditions imposed on companies. Governments
transfer monopolies to private ownership with a regulatory mechanism to reward performance
and efficiency gains. This may lead to improvements in economic efficiency but is not a
sufficient condition for improved economic performance because privatisation simply transfers
assets out of the public sector.
Privatisation has spread rapidly through developed and developing cities. In the Western
world the United Kingdom has led in the scale of its privatisation of infrastructure, while many
developed and middle-income nations have privatised telecommunications, power and,
increasingly, their water sectors. In such processes, public infrastructure undergoes major
corporate restructuring. But there is often considerable controversy about the requirement
to undertaken minimum levels of investment, roll-out obligations and universal service
requirements.
Table 4.4 illustrates that, between 1988 and 1993 the global value of infrastructure
privatisation was over US$30 billion. Telecommunications and power are the most dynamic
sectors and over 60 per cent of all infrastructure privatisation by value has taken place
in Latin America. In the advanced economies the value of infrastructure privatisation is
likely to be in the hundreds of billions. Yet, in all these contexts, privatisation does not
necessarily create contestable infrastructure markets. Without unbundling, integrated infra-
structure networks can be privatised as integrated privatised monopolies. If the networks
are unbundled the monopolistic elements of the trunk networks can also be privatised. But,
in both cases, privatisation does not inevitably lead to competition in the provision of
networked services.
Table 4.4a Value of infrastructure privatisations in developing countries, 1988–93, by subsector (US$ billion)

Subsector 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 Total, No. of

1988–92 countries

Telecommunications 325 212 4,036 5,743 1,504 11,821 14

Power generation 106 2,100 20 248 1,689 4,164 9
Power distribution 0 0 0 98 1,037 1,135 2
Gas distribution 0 0 0 0 1,906 1,906 2
Railroads 0 0 0 110 217 327 1
Road infrastructure 0 0 250 0 0 250 1
Ports 0 0 0 0 7 7 2
Water 0 0 0 0 175 175 2
Total 431 2,312 4,307 6,200 6,535 19,785 15
Closely related privatisations
Airlines 367 42 775 168 1,461 2,813 14
Shipping 0 0 0 135 1 136 2
Road transport 0 0 0 1 12 13 3
Total developing country privatisations 2,587 5,188 8,618 22,049 23,187 61,629 25

Note: Countries undertaking infrastructure privatisations:

1988. Power: Mexico; telecom: Belize, Chile, Jamaica, Turkey; airlines: Argentina, Mexico.
1989. Power: Korea; telecom: Chile, Jamaica; airlines: Chile.
1990. Power: Malaysia, Turkey; telecom: Argentina, Belize, Chile, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland; roads: Argentina; airlines: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan.
1991. Power generation: Chile, Hungary; power distribution: Philippines; roads: Argentina; telecom: Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Hungary, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru,
Philippines, Venezuela; airlines: Honduras, Hungary, Panama, Turkey, Venezuela; shipping: Malaysia; road transport: Togo.
1992. Power generation: Argentina, Belize, Malaysia, Poland; power distribution: Argentina, Philippines; gas distribution: Argentina, Turkey; telecom: Argentina, Estonia,
Malaysia, Turkey; railroads: Argentina; ports: Colombia, Pakistan; water: Argentina, Malaysia; airlines: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama,
Philippines, Thailand; shipping: Sri Lanka; road transport: China, Peru.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 158

Table 4.4b Value of infrastructure privatisations

in developing countries, 1988–93, by region
(US$ billion)

Region Value

Africa 0.1
Asia 7.4
Latin America 22.5
Eastern Europe and Central Asia 2.0

Total 32.0

Note: Number of divestitures 267.

4 L I B E R A L I S E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : P R I V A T E

C O M P E T I T O R S

Liberalised infrastructure requires unbundling and the segmentation of contestable elements

of the network to allow multiple providers to compete directly for users within the context
of a regulatory framework. The shift towards the liberalisation of infrastructure restructures
both the size and the structure of the industry. This is a most dramatic shift in the infrastructure
sector where a combination of technological and regulatory change is making competition
possible. Central to the process is the unbundling of networks by detaching activities
previously undertaken by monopolies and opening them to various forms of competition.
Unbundling of infrastructure is moving at a brisk pace as governments isolate the natural
monopoly elements of networks and encourage new entrants in segments that are competitive.
In the energy sector energy supply, generation, transmission and distribution can now
be owned and operated by different companies. While the physical distribution network
will retain natural monopoly characteristics, the alternative suppliers can gain access to the
network on an equal basis. Box 4.2 illustrates the claims made for liberalised infrastructure
policies in the United States while Box 4.3 provides an example of liberalisation in the tele-
communications sector of a developing country.

5 C O M M U N I T Y I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : U S E R P R O V I S I O N

W I T H P O L I C Y S U P P O R T

There are a number of problems with market-based approaches to infrastructure provision

that cannot be addressed in the above options. In many developing cities, for instance, no
formal infrastructure exists and there are few incentives to extend services, especially to low-
income users. In these contexts, coordination across and between infrastructure sectors may
not receive enough attention. In those urban areas where there is no infrastructure, the
amount and type of infrastructure must be planned, investments made, and infrastructure
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 159

B O X 4 . 2 L I B E R A L I S E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E
I N T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S

With its long history of private infrastructure responsibility of ensuring that service obliga-
provision, the United States exemplifies the tions were fulfilled at reasonable and just
changes in regulatory goals and implemen- prices. Inflationary pressures in the early 1970s
tation of the ensuing cycles in regulatory policy. caused regulators to intervene even more
In the late nineteenth century, and well into the heavily in the operations of service providers.
early part of the twentieth, much competition Health, safety and environmental regulation
prevailed, especially in electric power and also gained momentum around that time.
telecommunications. Public dissatisfaction with regulatory out-
An early instance of economic regulation, comes resulted in a move to reduce economic
the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was regulation in many sectors in the late 1970s and
concerned with monopoly power in railway 1980s. According to one estimate, 17 per cent
operations. The bounds of economic regu- of the US gross national product (GNP) in 1977
lation were extended gradually but, especially was produced by fully regulated industries.
during the Great Depression and the 1930s, to By 1988 the proportion had declined to 6.6
virtually all infrastructure sectors and to other per cent as large parts of the transport, com-
areas of public interest (for example, creating munications, energy and financial sectors
service obligations and information disclosure were freed from economic regulation. Greater
requirements). operational freedom, and competitive threats,
Delivery of infrastructure thus came to stimulated service providers to adopt new
be based on a particular social compact. marketing, technological and organisational
The service provider was typically granted practices. Evidence from the United States
exclusive rights to specific markets, and, in points to substantial economic gains from
return, the government took on the public deregulation.

provided and maintained. Private entities are not likely to make investments in roads and
water, since user charges that fully cover costs are not always feasible. Private sector
participation in the provision of infrastructure is not, therefore, likely to be an option open
to governments.
An alternative approach is a shift towards the devolution of infrastructure planning and
management, with a higher degree of user and community involvement. As Box 4.4 shows,
the aim is to use appropriate technologies, local organisation and installation, and lower
technical standards, to create quite literally a self-built infrastructure in cities that have been
abandoned by formal networks and are not attractive to private sector participation. A high
degree of support, usually delivered through development organisations, is required to
develop these bottom-up models of infrastructure provision. Once the network is built and
operated with a significant consumer base it may be possible for such informal networks to
be incorporated into the formal system of infrastructure provision. At that stage there may
be the potential for private sector participation in the provision, management or ownership
of the network.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 160

B O X 4 . 3 L I B E R A L I S A T I O N I N T H E G H A N A
C E L L U L A R T E L E P H O N E M A R K E T

Ghana’s telecommunications sector is sub- phones. In 1990 six private companies were
stantially underdeveloped. In the 1980s there licensed to operate cellular telephone services
were on average twenty-three telephones per and the market is open to other operators
1,000 people and levels of connection were who wish to enter. Competition between the
actually declining. Over half the country’s cellular companies to provide local telephone
districts were entirely without a telephone services has had the effect of expanding the
service and effectively cut off from the capital, network and lowering the prices of mobile
Accra. In 1994 30 per cent of local calls could telephony. The cost of adding cellular users is
not be completed, international calls had lower: about US$1,000 per customer versus
only a 15 per cent completion rate and it was US$3,600 per customer for the hard wire
estimated that every line in the country experi- service operated by Ghana Telecom. Services
enced at least one or more faults per year. may therefore be expanded to geographical
The response to these problems was to areas that contain at least half the country’s
encourage private sector participation and population and the regional capitals over the
create a competitive market in cellular tele- next few years.

B O X 4 . 4 C O M M U N I T Y I N F R A S T R U C T U R E :
W A T E R S U P P L Y

World Bank-funded projects in Brazil provide are consulted on basic choices and the details
a useful example of how demand-oriented are worked out with the actual beneficiaries. In
planning of low-cost water and sanitation another approach, agreement is reached
requires considerable adjustment by the between design engineers and beneficiaries
formal institutions of government, engineering directly in consultation with community leaders
and external donors. In Brazil the water and and organisations. In both these models,
sanitation programme for low-income urban conflicts of interest between the water com-
populations is investing US$100 million to panies and community-based organisations
provide water and sanitation infrastructure to are resolved through negotiation, with the
about 800,000 people in low-income areas in project design consultant acting as facilitator.
eleven cities. These approaches have dramatically lowered
Participation must be tailored to the investment costs and increased the sense
population. Since 1997 the programme has of project ownership among communities. The
taken a variety of approaches to involve process has directly affected the kind of
beneficiaries and the design of projects. In one engineering advice adopted.
approach, leaders of community organisations
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 161

6 I N F O R M A L I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : S E L F - H E L P A N D

P R I V A T E P R O V I S I O N

The final option is a pathway that continues to allow the development of informal infrastructure
services. Basically, those users who cannot afford to obtain access to formal systems are forced
to search for informal and usually unregulated alternatives. These informal options are very
costly for low-income households, especially in the water sector, where there is overwhelming
evidence that households pay significantly higher tariffs from private water vendors, shown to
be between 20 per cent and 2,000 per cent higher than normal public tariffs. Without reform
of the state-owned infrastructure networks in these contexts, significant costs are imposed on
households and businesses. There are, however, major difficulties in sustaining institutional
reform, attracting private sector interest and maintaining wider social equity objectives.
The options for reform are likely to be limited without significant external financial support.

T R A N S I T I O N S T O U N B U N D L E D I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

The pathways followed in an infrastructure sector are also powerfully shaped by particular
national contexts of transition and the particular characteristics of the infrastructure network.
These include the coverage, effectiveness and demand for existing infrastructure; the
institutional capacity for the development of commercial and competitive infrastructure:
management and technical capabilities; the development of a regulatory environment that
facilitates private activity; and the private sector’s interests and capacity. Table 4.5 compares
the coverage and quality of infrastructure in five types of national economy, and here we
review the relative importance of different pathways from integrated infrastructure among each
country bloc:

• Low-income developing nations. In low-income countries infrastructure is characterised

by low coverage and poor performance, and a high rate of population growth means that
demand for new services is growing rapidly. The challenge is to improve the performance
of existing networks and expand networks to meet unmet and growing levels of demand.
In such countries the technical capability, enabling environment and private sector interest
in unbundled infrastructure are often very low. Table 4.6 illustrates that the dominant
pathway away from integrated infrastructure in Africa has tended to focus almost
exclusively upon the commercialisation and devolution of infrastructure networks, with
few examples of privatisation or liberalisation.
• Post-communist states. The transition economies of former communist countries are
usually characterised by high levels of infrastructure coverage and reasonably good,
although rapidly deteriorating, technical performance. The central challenge is to
reorientate infrastructure supply to meet changing demands brought about by economic
restructuring. While technical capability can be high, the enabling environment for private
activity is still developing. The middle-income reforming economies have reasonable
coverage but weak performance, especially in maintenance. The key challenge is to
improve efficiency to support higher economic growth. While the capacity to privatise
Table 4.5 Country infrastructure: coverage and performance

Indicator Low-income Transition Middle-income High-growth OECD

economies economies reforming economies economies
economies

Coverage of infrastructure
Main lines per thousand persons 3 95 73 122 475
Households with access to safe water (%) 47 95 76 86 99
Households with electricity (%) 21 85 62 61 98

Performance of infrastructure
Diesel locomotives unavailable (%) 55 27 36 26 16
Unaccounted-for water (%) 35 28 37 39 13
Paved roads not in good condition (%) 59 50 63 46 15
Power system losses (%) 22 14 17 13 7

Basic indicators
GNP per capita, 1991 (US$) 293 2,042 1,941 3,145 20,535
GNP per capita average annual growth rate, 1980–91 (%) –0.2 1 –0.6 5 2

Population average annual growth rate, 1980–91 (%)

Urban 6 1 3 4 1
Total 3 0.3 2 2 0.5

Source: World Bank (1994), 12.

Table 4.6 Infrastructure transitions in Africa

Management Lease Concession/ Demonopolise Divestiture

contract BOOT BOO

Water
Gabon CAR
Gambia Côte d’Ivoire
Mali Guinea
South Africa

Electricity
Gabon Côte d’Ivoire Côte d’Ivoire
Gambia Guinea Mozambique
Ghana
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
Rwanda
Sierra Leone

Telecoms
Benin Guinea-Bissau Burundi Sudan
Botswana Ghana
Guinea Guinea
Madagascar Madagascar
Mauritius
Namibia
Nigeria
South Africa
Tanzania
Uganda
Zaire
Railways
Cameroon Burkina Faso
Tanzania Côte d’Ivoire
Togo Gabon
Zaire

Airports
Togo Benin Cameroon
Gabon Mali
Guinea
Madagascar
Mauritania

Ports
Sierra Leone Cameroon Mali South Africa
Mozambique Mozambique

Source: Kerf and Smith (1996), 19.

 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 164

infrastructure is well established, low rates of economic growth restrict private sector
involvement.
• High-income developed economies have comparatively good coverage and performance.
The key challenge is to meet the demands of economic growth and increasing urban
population growth. The OECD countries have the highest level of coverage and the
most effective infrastructure performance. Population growth rates are low, so the main
requirement is to reorientate the supply of infrastructure to meet new demands brought
about by economic and technological change, especially in telecommunications. In such
contexts there is usually strong technical capacity, a supportive regulatory environment
and strong interest from the private sector; all institutional pathways are open but with
strong emphasis on the development of private and liberalised options. We saw in Box
4.2 that nearly all the major US infrastructure sectors have been liberalised, with electricity
currently undergoing rapid unbundling.

S E C T O R A L V A R I A T I O N S I N U N B U N D L I N G O P T I O N S

Finally, the institutional pathways are not simply determined by the particular technical,
economic, institutional and social characteristics of a national state. We have seen that there
are important variations in the marketability of different infrastructure networks, therefore
the institutional options are also likely to vary by infrastructure. Table 4.7 identifies the
pathways that are open to different types of infrastructure networks.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

The marketability of unbundled telecommunication services is high – particularly for the

provision of long-distance and value-added services. Growth in demand for telecom-
munication services, coupled with technological innovation such as wireless and mobile,
which have lowered the cost of network construction, have boosted the potential for
competitive entry even at the local level. This sector is most often characterised by liberalised
provision, with a mix of public and private service providers using a range of telecom-
munication technologies and offering different services tailored to meet different user needs.

ELECTRICITY AND GAS

In the electricity sector, generation and distribution can be separated from transmission and
operated under concession or by privatised and liberalised provision. The national power
transmission system tends to retain elements of a natural monopoly and can be either publicly
or privately operated, providing access to the network is regulated. Gas can also be
competitively supplied in many countries. Usually, natural gas production is vertically
integrated, often with petroleum production, under public ownership. Transition from
integrated supply requires segmentation of the networks to permit competitive production
– through delegation or private ownership. The main regulatory issue is to ensure competitive
access of producers to the transmission and distribution network. The UK gas sector has also
introduced competition into local distribution.
Table 4.7 Pathways applicable to infrastructure networks

Form

Government Parastatal/ Service Management Leasing Concession Regulated Unregulated

department entrepreneur Entrepreneurs Cooperative
Public utility contract contract (affermage) BOT cooperative
(national or communal
sub- (Investment
Sector (O&M only) (Investment plus O&M)
national) plus O&M)
Generation Small scale
Power Overall Communal
sectoral Transmission system
Enclave systems
planning Distribution system
and Terminal
Telecoms Local transmission, switching system Long distance equipment
policy Communal
making Transmission Service systems
extension
Transport
Passenger and freight rail Enclave
Railways
Urban Taxi, van
Urban transport Commuter rapid transit
bus interurban bus

Road freight

Rural and
Roads Primary, secondary, urban roads Toll road Enclave local roads

Airport/airlines General-use airports Enclave and airlines

Ports and
General-use ports Enclave and shipping
waterways
Water and Enclave
sanitation Communal
Pipe water trunk and distribution
Shallow well; systems
Water supply vendor
Sewerage Conventional sewerage and treatment Intermediate sewerage

Source: Kessides (1993a), 20.

 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 166

WATER, WASTE AND SEWERAGE

Activities involving water and waste all have strong environmental links that make them less
marketable than telecoms and power. But imaginative ways are being developed to facilitate
competition in different elements of the networks or for the right to supply the market. The
main pressure is for urban piped water and sewage networks to be provided by municipal or
public enterprises that are run on commercial principles. The pressures on governments are
to commercialise aspects of the public networks, to improve management and efficiency, and
to ensure commercial operation, either through delegation or privatisation. Public regulation
is necessary to ensure access for low-income customers and to protect health and the quality
of water.
Sewage services can also be dealt with in a similar fashion. Low-income countries also have
to consider another option for users not connected to the formal network. This includes the
development of community-based options to be financed, constructed and managed by users
to provide a minimum level of service. Finally, the transport sector creates the potential for
a complex mix of options involving different forms of public and private provision.

I N S T I T U T I O N A L P A T H W A Y S T O U N B U N D L E D

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : A S U M M A R Y

In this section we have outlined the six main pathways from integrated to unbundled
networks. These lead us to two key conclusions. First, only a limited number of options
require the unbundling of infrastructure and then only two options create competition.
Delegated networks stimulate competition for the market, while liberalised infrastructure
stimulates competition in infrastructure markets. Second, there is a huge degree of diversity
in the pathways away from integrated networks that can be followed in a particular national
context and for a particular infrastructure network.

U N B U N D L I N G I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A N D U R B A N
T R A N S F O R M A T I O N S

With our analysis of detailed practices of infrastructure unbundling now complete, to round
off this chapter’s discussion of practices of splintering urbanism we now need to return to
the central concern of the book: how the transitions away from integrated networked
infrastructures towards unbundled networks are involved in reconfigurations of social and
spatial relations within and between cities.
In this section we develop a broad conceptual framework that can help us address this
question in the remainder of the book. We will continue to look across water, energy and
communications networks in both advanced and developing countries, focusing especially on
the urban issues in contexts where networks have been unbundled. We primarily focus on
those options that segment networks into monopoly and contestable elements. All transitions
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 167

from the integrated ideal discussed above will involve a parallel reshaping of the sociotechnical
relations and geographic landscapes of cities. In what follows, however, we focus on the most
advanced and dramatic of these transitions: the creation of parallel or substitute networks that
build multiple infrastructures in cities. We believe that the key to developing an understanding
of the complex connections between unbundling and urban restructuring is to explore the
uneven nature of three forms of what we call ‘infrastructural bypass’ (represented
diagrammatically in Figure 4.6). These we define as:

• Local bypass. The physical development of a parallel infrastructure network that effectively
connects valued users and places while simultaneously bypassing non-valued users and
places within a city.
• Glocal bypass. The material development of a network that is configured to support
interaction between local valued users and spaces and global circuits of infrastructural
exchange.
• Virtual network bypass. The use of new information and communication technologies that
support and facilitate the distribution of competitive infrastructure services over a single
physically integrated network inherited from the modern ideal.

Bypass

Figure 4.6 Diagrammatic representation of the three types of infrastructural bypass

 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 168

We need to recognise that these categories are not mutually exclusive. Different styles of
bypass usually coexist within the same network and city. For instance, local bypass usually relies
on virtual network bypass to identify elements of the network, users and places in the city that
should be targeted or ignored by new infrastructure networks, while facilitating connections
between the monopolistic and competitive elements of different networks. Our typology
should therefore be regarded as an ideal type through which we can build an understanding
of how unbundled infrastructures have a central role in the reconfiguration, that is, the
rebundling, of users and places within and between contemporary cities. We examine the
three different forms of urban reconfiguration associated with unbundled infrastructure in
more detail below.

LOCAL BYPASS

Our first type of infrastructural bypass, what we term ‘local bypass’, refers to the development
of new parallel or substitute infrastructure networks that facilitate the development of
contestable markets in infrastructure services within a city. These can take the form of multiple
telecommunications networks (basic telephony, satellite, cable and mobile), the development
of substitute energy sources (electricity, gas, district heating networks or local generation)
and the creation of parallel or substitute telecommunications connections (‘fat’ Internet
‘pipes’) or highways, streets (private skywalks and tunnels as an alternative to the public street
network). In each case a private company or public–private partnership can build an alternative
or substitute network to the publicly provided infrastructure system. Such networks can be
new, physically distinct material systems retrofitted through the city and/or they can be
composed of the contestable segments of unbundled integrated infrastructure. These new
networks are not ubiquitous or universal; they tend to be configured to connect only selected
users and places while simultaneously bypassing others. Those users and places who are
effectively bypassed by the new parallel networks then have to rely on the remaining public
network or on informal mechanisms for infrastructure services. There are three main styles
of local bypass.

S U P E R I M P O S I T I O N O F A P A R A L L E L I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

N E T W O R K

The first style of local bypass is linked with the provision of entirely new infrastructure networks.
Local bypass often involves the construction of an entirely new infrastructure that is retrofitted
through the cityscape and operates in parallel with existing public networks. The objective
here is to develop a new parallel infrastructure network that provides valued zones and users
with a high-quality and enlarged range of services that transcend the perceived problems –
unreliability, poor quality, congestion, high costs and lack of choice – often associated with
monopoly infrastructure networks. The parallel networks can be retrofitted within the existing
city and are, therefore, often associated with initiatives designed to renew parts of the city.
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 169

Examples of the superimposition of parallel infrastructure networks are proliferating in all

sectors.

• In the energy sector, steam networks or specialist air conditioning networks may be fitted
in parallel with public energy supplies to provide more choice and cheaper supplies for
commercial users. An example is the Citizen energy and steam distribution network in
the city of London, which uses an abandoned pipe network to distribute heat to large
users in competition with incumbent utilities and new entrants.
• In many North American city centres (for example Houston, Atlanta, Minneapolis and
Montreal) massive skywalk pedestrian systems have been constructed to link malls,
corporate office centres and entertainment complexes whilst bypassing the traditional
municipal street system. Major new malls can also be considered as efforts to privatise and
enclose pedestrian spaces, so bypassing local, public controls.
• New private transport systems are also being built in parallel with congested public
networks to provide increased speed, certainty and reduced travel time for users who are
prepared to pay. In Bangkok a network of private toll highways has been superimposed
on top of the heavily congested public highway network. In North America and Australia
there are a number of examples of new privately funded highway networks that have
been built as alternatives to the public network. They include Highway 407, which runs
for nearly 50 km in one of the most congested highway corridors near Toronto, and
California Highway 91, located in the space between the lanes on the state highway with
differential tariffs depending on the time of travel. There are at least another twenty-five
proposals for privately funded networks to be developed in parallel with congested public
highway networks.
• Even in water and waste, the least contestable of networks, recent UK policy has allowed
large users to bypass local suppliers through pipelines and arrange what are known as ‘inset
agreements’ with adjacent companies. Contestable water networks are not restricted to
the commercial sector. Again in the United Kingdom, executive housing market-leading
builders are constructing homes that are much less reliant on the incumbent utility’s
water and waste networks. In the first initiative in the north west of England 123 homes
have been constructed with the Waterwise system, which recycles waste water that is
routed back into the toilet cistern for reflushing, with the remaining water discharged to
a nearby river. Water consumption is reduced by 30 per cent, and the housing does not
have to be connected to the incumbent utility’s waste network. The system enables house
builders to develop executive housing estates in areas that would conventionally lack the
necessary water and waste infrastructure to support major development projects.

S E G M E N T A T I O N O F A N E X I S T I N G I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

N E T W O R K

The second form of local bypass involves the physical segmentation of existing infrastructure
systems as elements of the network are seceded from the public sector to alternative providers
and are then rebundled with the production of new zones within existing cities. This process
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 170

can take a number of different forms. In the water and power sectors specialist users
are provided with quality water, waste disposal or energy supplies to meet rigorous production
needs; these are usually linked with special tariff reductions to attract users into these
customised infrastructure zones. Although the network looks very similar it may be managed
quite differently in different parts of the city to meet the particular needs of commercial
users. In the telecommunications sector incumbents may respond to new entrants by
segmenting their networks in areas of intense competition to respond to tariff reductions and
the provision of value-added services – targeted at particular users under threat from cherry-
picking.
Examples of the superimposition of the segmentation of existing infrastructure networks
include:

• The emergence of special bodies for managing highly valued portions of the city street
systems, such as the Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), of which there are over
1,800 in the United States; the so-called ‘Ring of Steel’ cordon which has been established
to control entry into the financial district of London; and the recent spate of electronic
road pricing (ERP) schemes in cities such as Singapore and Tromsø.
• The growing separation of highway lanes on existing public highway systems exclusive
to particular types of users – high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, special lanes for trucks,
and toll lanes.
• The construction of new ‘premium’ rail networks between valued spaces that bypass
older, slower networks. Here we would include the whole movement towards interurban
fast rail and trains à grande vitesse (TGV), as well as premium links between major airports
and city centres such as the Heathrow Express rail link between central London and
Heathrow airport.
• The creation of special zones in the water and waste sector, designed to have highly
reliable or cheaper infrastructure services that sit within, yet transcend, the incumbent’s
network.
• The construction of tailored zones in the energy sector. For example, the Baglan Energy
Park in south Wales is based on a public–private partnership to attract manufacturing
industries back to the area. A 500 MW gas-fired combined heat and power plant is being
built to provide steam and power to factories on the site. The developers are hoping to
attract new users to a 1,000 acre development site with the incentive of power costs that
are 30 per cent lower than conventional industrial tariffs, and the power plant may
eventually provide power and heat for off-site users.

C O P I N G W I T H T H E W I T H D R A W A L O F

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

The final style of local bypass focuses on the coping strategies of those users who are least
valued and who inhabit the places that are effectively bypassed by infrastructure networks.
These local users and places tend to have three forms of bypass imposed upon them and
respond with different types of coping strategy.
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 171

• First, there are those marginal users who have never been connected to an infrastructure
network. The logic of local bypass may mean that they are even less likely to be connected
now than they were to the formal networks that characterised the period of integrated
infrastructural development. Such users rely on a whole set of coping strategies to obtain
access to informal systems of infrastructure provision – private water vendors, non-
networked energy supplies, walking or private transport systems. These tend to be more
expensive, less reliable, more hazardous and of lower quality than public networks. Where
users are provided with technical and institutional assistance they may be able to organise
community-based networks based on local construction, maintenance and operation of
networks.
• The second category are those users who are left tenuously connected to highly unreliable
public networks as new investment is focused on new, parallel, segmented or more reliable
networks for the more valued users. Such users must either turn to informal networks or
develop other coping strategies. In Africa, for example, many small businesses have taken
to boring their own wells and buying their own generators to provide electricity during
the frequent power cuts. These additional costs are imposed on businesses already
struggling to compete.
• The final category are those users who have infrastructure networks withdrawn from them
as they are not profitable and new investment is focused elsewhere on valued enclaves.
There are a range of different forms of withdrawal. For instance, infrastructure services
could become more expensive to small users and the service may become less reliable.
Marginal and low-income users are often asked to pay in advance, to manage problems
of debt and disconnection, as is the case with the United Kingdom’s ‘prepayment’ utility
meters. Alternatively, public transport may be withdrawn from enclaves to prevent
inappropriate users from gaining access to retail or shopping centres, even whole towns.

GLOCAL BYPASS

The second type of infrastructural bypass, what we call ‘glocal bypass’, involves the
construction of new, materially distinct networks that are configured to support interaction
between local valued users and places and global circuits of infrastructural exchange. Although
this style is often closely linked with local bypass and virtual network bypass, the main feature
is the reorientation of networks to connect local segments of cities to other valued segments
in different parts of the globe. Glocal networks effectively bypass local infrastructure networks,
as they are based on the physical construction of new networks or the segmentation of exist-
ing networks. Glocal bypass often coexists with major physical planning schemes that link
the customisation of places targeted at meeting the needs of global capital and foreign
direct investment (FDI) with the infrastructural networks that make location in low-cost
production zones possible. The infrastructure is provided either by private firms specifically
for global companies or by the local providers who develop their network to provide
infrastructure targeted at this valued segment. In this context there may be insufficient
investment to meet the infrastructural needs of the local population, as investment is targeted
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 172

at privileged users in an effort to attract foreign capital investment. Two forms of glocal bypass
can be identified.

N E W A N D S E G M E N T E D G L O C A L I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

N E T W O R K S

The distinction between the construction of new physical networks and the segmentation
of existing infrastructure networks is less easy to make in cases of glocal bypass. Nearly all the
examples of glocal bypass fundamentally involve the construction of new networks and
the segmentation of the existing public network. Additionally, there are also often close links
between glocal and local bypass. For instance, the Heathrow Express rail link is clearly a form
of local bypass providing a parallel and much faster private link to the public Underground
system. But it is also about providing a premium local link to the global airline hub of
Heathrow airport.
There are a wide range of examples of glocal bypass across different infrastructure
sectors:

• In the water and waste sectors specialist tourist and industrial zones are often provided
with water treatment and supply networks that are designed to meet international
rather than local standards. These systems usually operate only within particular enclaves
and, although not physically connected internationally, the whole rationale is to
build an infrastructure that is tailored to meet the exacting needs of foreign direct
investment.
• In the energy sector, glocal infrastructure supports international trading of power
to support the needs of large commercial and industrial users. The French electricity
utility EDF claims that it will supply business users on all their sites in ‘Europe and
beyond’. Access to glocal energy infrastructure is often linked with the development
of special zones for commercial and industrial users who are able to import power over
new and segmented networks to gain access to better-quality and more reliable power
sources.
• In the telecommunications sector there are numerous examples of glocal infrastructure
networks. Multiple providers offer private fibre optic networks that are configured to
bypass local networks and interconnect sites on global corporate networks seamlessly
and reliably. These networks are highly selective; they tend to be limited to the top fifty
business and finance cities and are configured to meet the needs of the largest corporate
users. In specialist ‘back office zones’ in the Caribbean and Ireland, meanwhile, specialist
telecom operators offer multiple networks to allow the insurance, retail and financial
service sectors to export routine administrative functions from low-wage enclaves. In
addition, a wide range of private Internet ‘pipes’ are being deployed to bypass the
constraints of old Internet trunks so that content delivery networks can be operated
which enable the high-speed delivery of media and e-commerce services to selected
affluent markets by the major media conglomerates (Tseng, 2000).
• This style of infrastructure development is also echoed in the transport sector, where the
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 173

TGV, the Channel tunnel, logistics hubs, and airports are designed to provide specialist
high-quality, fast and reliable networks that connect the most valued users and places in
cities with similar locations internationally.

B U I L D I N G R E S I L I E N T G L O C A L I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

The second type of glocal bypass concerns the development of ‘zero defect’ or extremely
resilient infrastructural enclaves (Pawley, 1997). It is associated with premium users creating
multiple alternatives and points of access through different infrastructure at the level of specific
premises rather than zones. Such systems are designed to provide extreme reliability and
alternative supplies if an existing network is threatened by natural disaster, terrorism, technical
collapse or any form of risk that might disrupt the operation of infrastructure services. In
cases where many users are totally reliant on infrastructure for the effective and profitable
operation of their business, particular attention is focused on the resilience of infrastructure
services. In this context, selected users and zones are provided with multiple networks, usually
based on the construction of new systems, parallel systems, the segmentation of existing
networks and, finally, back-up provision of devolved, decentralised or even autonomous
infrastructure services.
Resilient glocal networks themselves are likely to be characterised by a high degree of
surveillance to prevent interference and attack. But, in the event of failure, these users are likely
to have a number of back-up systems that build up the basic redundancy offered by the public
network. Specialist infrastructure, communications and logistics companies are likely to have
access to multiple and redundant systems to provide back-up in emergency situations. In
worst case scenarios, individual users are likely to have their own water supply and treatment,
an emergency energy supply, specialist mobile or satellite communications and travel plans
to cope with the breakdown of transport services. Such services are likely to become a more
important part of infrastructural unbundling as recognition increases of the threat of
disruption from natural disasters such as earthquakes in San Francisco, ice storms in Canada
and the breakdown of power networks in Auckland, New Zealand. The cost of disruption is
measured in billions of dollars; therefore users are likely to demand much more infrastructural
asset resilience.

VIRTUAL NETWORK BYPASS

Our final type of infrastructural bypass, what we term ‘virtual network bypass’, entails the
use of new technologies to support and facilitate the distribution of customised infrastructure
services over a single physically integrated network inherited from the modern ideal. This has
important implications for cities and the global competitiveness of networks. Virtual network
bypass supports both local and glocal bypass – it allows the segmentation and splintering of
a single physically integrated infrastructure that can effectively differentiate between different
types of users, allowing new entrants to gain access to the most lucrative users. Virtual network
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 174

bypass, therefore, is based on a more subtle set of processes than those which support other
forms of bypass. Three, in particular, can be identified.

S E G M E N T I N G M A S S M A R K E T S

The first process involves the segmentation of infrastructure markets. The mass infrastructure
markets of the integrated ideal required very little segmentation between different types of
user because services were provided on a monopolistic and homogeneous basis. But the
unbundling of networks forces providers to segment what were previously mass markets into
different elements, in order to identify the most profitable and valuable users to target for new
network and service provision. Geographical information systems (GISs), geodemographic
and new marketing techniques are being imported from the retail and financial services sectors
to segment utility markets. Billing data, housing information, payment methods and service
use are being combined with other forms of data to build much more detailed profiles of users.
This information is used in a number of different ways by infrastructure providers. It
enables utilities to identify the most and least profitable users, to identify users who may
purchase value-added services, to build customer retention and loyalty schemes, to plan the
roll-out of new parallel infrastructure networks, and to provide a range of value-added and
enhanced services to selected users. New information and marketing techniques are utilised
to segment the mass markets of the integrated era, allowing new and incumbent utilities to
develop detailed social and spatial profiles of the most and least valued users. These can be
used to plan the construction of new physical networks and support the development of
strategies designed to effect disengagement from the least valued users.

S E G M E N T A T I O N O F I N T E G R A T E D N E T W O R K S

The second form of virtual bypass involves the segmentation of integrated networks into
contestable and monopoly elements. Telecommunication and ICT systems actively facilitate
the unbundling of integrated networks, allowing new entrants to construct parallel segments
of the networks that are contestable and to interconnect with monopolistic segments of the
network. In the water sector these systems facilitate the development of contestable water
supply and waste treatment by remotely monitoring the levels of water consumption, network
use and waste disposal over the incumbent’s network. In the power sector, integrated
networks can be segmented into generation, transmission and distribution. ICT technologies
facilitate flows of power and transactions between the contestable and monopolistic elements
of the networks. Multiple local telecommunications networks can be constructed within a city
with complex control systems ensuring that calls are routed seamlessly over mobile, cable and
telecommunication networks, despite their separate technologies and ownerships. Road
networks can be segmented with access control and pricing technologies monitoring and
charging users for access to different parts of the network.
Taken together, then, this form of virtual bypass allows the monitoring and control of
access to complex and fragmented networks. It also supports the complex pricing formulas
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 175

involved in user networks owned by multiple users, manage complex pathways of resource
flows over many different elements of the network. Effectively these technologies are able to
support a ‘seamless’ infrastructure service, even though the network over which the services
flow can be in multiple ownership, and flow over a number of different pathways and
technologies.

V I R T U A L N E T W O R K C O M P E T I T I O N

The final form of virtual bypass involves laying entire ICT infrastructures over a physically
integrated infrastructure to support competition between incumbents and new entrants for
users whilst providing specialist customised services to selected users. The key to these systems
is the development of ‘intelligent’ infrastructural terminals: smart meters, road pricing, and
the specialist technologies of tolling and electronic route guidance and driver information
systems. These technologies allow users to differentiate between specialist services provided
to different groups of users with all the relations mediated through terminal technologies,
even though the same physical infrastructure network is used to distribute the service:

• In the water and power sectors smart card prepayment technologies allow providers
effectively to disengage from the least valued users, as all relations are mediated through
prepayment cards. These users usually pay higher tariffs than more valued users. They also
effectively self-disconnect themselves from networks when they cannot afford to charge
their smart card.
• In the telecommunications sector similar technologies allow domestic users to gain access
to alternative national and international telecommunication operators over the
incumbent’s local network.

Users simply purchase a brand, which then provides heat, light and movement. All transactions
take place over virtually integrated infrastructure networks. Customers simply select the service
level, speed, time, cost and enhanced features for an infrastructure service that intermediaries
will bundle together from a range of different producers so that they are seamlessly delivered
to users.

C O N C L U S I O N S

U R B A N I N F R A S T R U C T U R E : T O W A R D S
N E W P A R A D I G M S

This chapter has provided a broad descriptive and conceptual framework of the social and
technical practices through which integrated infrastructure networks can be actively
segmented and unbundled. We have examined these processes in some detail in order to
illustrate the complexity of the unbundling process, the diversity of pathways through which
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 176

integrated networks can be splintered, and the complex variety of ways in which monopolistic
and contestable elements are selectively reassembled. Our discussion leads to five conclusions.
First, we argue that the processes of infrastructural unbundling analysed above are likely
to reshape dramatically relations between cities and their networked infrastructures. The
selective reassembly of segmented network elements effectively leads to the selective rebuilding
of different sets of social and spatial relationships. This is a multiscalar process which operates
both within and between cities. Generally, it involves intensifying the connections between
most valued users and places while simultaneously weakening the connections with least
valued users and places. Multiple providers of contestable infrastructure networks, new
entrants and incumbents, build new and segment existing networks that, quite literally, bypass
the least valued users, districts and cities, leaving such places to the remnants of monopoly
networks while providing higher-quality, more resilient and less costly infrastructure networks
for the most valued users. These processes of reassembly usually take place in parallel with
new styles of urban planning: the creation of zones and enclaves for users provided with
specialised infrastructure services.
Second, it is essential to recognise that the infrastructural unbundling is not a simple
process but one that can take a wide range of different styles and institutional forms. The
transitions away from integrated towards unbundled networks are extremely complex, ‘messy’
and time-consuming. In many developing, and some advanced, economies the initial shift has
been towards commercialised, devolved infrastructure or privatised monopolies that do not
necessarily involve unbundling. But the logic of the new paradigm would suggest that these
may be intermediate stages of infrastructural restructuring that represent pathways towards
unbundled infrastructure.
Third, it is not easy to characterise the trajectories of individual cities along pathways to
segmentation and unbundling in a simple way. Within any particular city a variety of different
pathways towards or away from integrated networks are likely to coexist across the full range
of infrastructure networks. Although the cities of the advanced economies are likely to exhibit
more fully liberalised networks, there are also clearly significant opportunities for privatisation
and liberalisation in many cities in the developing world.
Fourth, it is also crucial to stress that the changing infrastructural landscapes of cities are
much more complex than the simple displacement of the old by the new. The evidence seems
to point to a much more complex set of pathways towards unbundled networks that are
moving at a range of speeds across different infrastructural sectors and national contexts.
Mapping the social organisation of any city’s infrastructural assets in this new context would
undoubtedly reveal that, across different networks, quite different pathways away from the
integrated ideal actually coexist. Some networks will be more liberalised while others still
have to be unbundled. A key challenge for researchers and policy makers is to map the dramatic
reconfigurations that are taking place in the infrastructural assets of cities.
Finally, while infrastructure networks are undergoing a period of dramatic restructuring,
they have certainly not all been unbundled. Many countries simply do not have the capacity
to segment networks. They lack the private sector interest in providing services. And they
cannot overcome social and political resistance to segmentation as strategic and political
forces work to limit the loss of government control of infrastructural assets. Yet the defining
feature of the emerging paradigm is that the pathways we have identified lead logically, but
 PRACTICES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 177

not inevitably, towards the eventual unbundling and liberalisation of infrastructure networks
where ever more segmented elements of the networks can be made marketable and can be
contested by new entrants. The logic of international trade liberalisation agreements and the
conditions tied to international aid in many developing countries increases the pressure on
national governments to move away from government monopolies that provide integrated
infrastructure and towards institutional models that actively facilitate greater private sector
participation in the provision of services. Each of the pathways away from integrated networks
effectively seeks to create contexts in which networks can be unbundled and infrastructure
markets made contestable.
The framework constructed in this chapter has focused on describing and identifying
pathways from integrated networks that involve infrastructural unbundling. In particular we
wanted to show that this very specific form of network transition is involved in the dramatic
reshaping of cities. We showed that the development of substitute and new parallel
infrastructure networks, either physically material networks or existing monopoly networks
opened up to competition, has significant implications for different types of users and the
organisation of movement, resources and information flows within and between cities. Central
to this process was the notion of bypass. The development of alternative, parallel and substitute
networks allows both new and incumbent network providers to make choices about the users
and places that are connected or not connected.
In this chapter we have been forced by the very complexity of the shifts in infrastructure
networks to consider the unbundling of networks and fragmentation of cities as largely
separate processes, in order to build a conceptual understanding of the different pathways away
from integrated networks and cities. At the same time, we have emphasised the importance
of building a relational understanding of the linkages between shifts in the style of
infrastructure provision and the restructuring of sociospatial relations in cities. Cities and
infrastructure are mutually constructed and highly interdependent.
In the next chapter we therefore aim to develop a theoretical understanding of the complex
interdependences between infrastructural unbundling and urban fragmentation by drawing
insights from social, technological and urban theories.
5 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS

Theorising splintering urbanism

Plate 8 The Pudong redevelopment area, Shanghai, China.

Photograph: Stephen Graham

Formerly the dominant forces were separation and

specialisation, the struggle for clarity, and the
reduction of the world to calculable proportions;
now we talk about simultaneity, multiplicity,
uncertainty, chaos theory, networks, hubs and nodal
points, interaction, the hybrid, ambivalence,
schizophrenia, space of flows, cyborgs, and so on.
(van Toorn, 1999, 90)
The last chapter outlined in detail the parallel processes that surround the unbundling of
infrastructure networks and the sociospatial fragmentation of cities that, we argue, are
so comprehensively undermining the legacies of the modern infrastructural ideal in many
cities around the world. In this chapter we turn from the description of these trends to their
explanation. Our task now is to engage with contemporary social, technological and urban
theories that help us to understand further why parallel processes of infrastructural unbundling
and urban splintering are under way.
We seek help in this task from four particular strands of theory, each of which helps us in
different ways to explore further how current urban trends across the world relate with the
current revolution in infrastructure networks surrounding globalisation, privatisation,
liberalisation and the application of new technologies. These are the theories of large technical
systems (LTSs), actor network theory (ANT), theories of the changing political economies
of capitalist infrastructure, and what we call ‘relational’ theories of contemporary cities.
These four perspectives are especially useful for our purposes. All four suggest that it is
possible to develop a theoretical perspective which can be broadly applied to all networked
infrastructures, and all types of city, without falling into the trap of oversimplification,
technological determinism or ethno-centricism. They support the notion that parallel trends
towards unbundling networks and splintering urbanism exist. And they help support the
building of an explanation of these trends which does not overly separate treatment of the
‘city’ and the ‘urban’ from ‘technology’ and ‘infrastructure’.
This chapter uses these four strands of theory to develop a theoretical synthesis through
which we can go on to explore and understand the parallel, yet diverse, transformations of
cities and urban infrastructures across the globe in Part Two. This chapter therefore provides
the final element of empirical, theoretical and conceptual foundation in Part One. We aim to
do this in a parallel way which does not overprivilege cities over infrastructure, or infra-
structure over cities. In fact, we want to avoid the problem that has beset so much literature
in the field, that of separating the ontological status of ‘infrastructure’ or ‘technology’ from
the ‘urban’ or the ‘city’, as though they stand in a state of simple distinction.
We recognise, rather, that much of the ‘urban’ is infrastructure; that most infrastructure
actually constitutes the very physical and sociotechnical fabric of cities; and that cities and
infrastructure are seamlessly coproduced, and co-evolve, together within contemporary
society. This problem resonates with the wider problem of separating ‘technology’ and
‘society’ into an easy, modernist, dualism with clear boundaries and simple causal links
between them. As Kirsch suggests, ‘the point is that whilst technology is a thoroughly social
construction, society is a technological construction as well’ (1995, 531) . Thus, by impli-
cation, we need to remember that infrastructures are thoroughly social constructions whilst
cities are also infrastructural constructions.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 180

O P E N I N G ‘ B L A C K B O X E S ’ :
T H E D E S T A B I L I S A T I O N O F L A R G E
T E C H N I C A L S Y S T E M S

With such points in mind, we can turn to our first perspective: the so-called ‘large technical
systems’ approach (see Mayntz and Hughes, 1988; Summerton, 1994a; Coutard, 1999).
The notion of infrastructure networks as large technical systems derives from the pioneering
work of Thomas Hughes (1983) on the evolution of electricity networks in early twentieth
century Britain, the United States and Germany. Using an explicitly sociological and historical
perspective, Hughes demonstrated how the linkage of technical apparatus into widening,
engineered infrastructure networks involved complex economic, political and social
negotiations. By linking venture capital with engineering, innovation and organisation
building, Hughes showed how what he called ‘system building’ entrepreneurs struggled to
impose systemic qualities on their infrastructures, through a particular technical style, in often
difficult and usually volatile circumstances.

BUILDING LARGE TECHNICAL SYSTEMS AND

THE IMAGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL PERMANENCE

Through such system-building processes the diverse, local systems set up by initial
entrepreneurs gradually merged into the standardised, national, widely accessible large
technical systems that became central to the modern infrastructural ideal, especially in the
West. Such systems were gradually ‘rolled out’ on an increasingly monopolistic basis to cover
whole national and regional territories; Hughes’s thinking was that ‘LTSs can be managed
only through growth’ (Offner, 1999, 230) (see, for example, Figure 2.1). Through such
growth, large technical systems gradually diffused to become taken for granted and
‘normalised’ as essential, but largely invisible, supports of modern urban life. In the language
of LTS research, such infrastructures became ‘black-boxed’ by their users, who often had no
other functional alternative to relying on the large technical system, whether it was water,
sewerage, electricity, the telephone or the automobile system.
Thus, in general, Hughes argued, large technical systems tend to be characterised by an
initial growth phase, an accelerated growth phase, a stabilisation phase (where the system
became black-boxed and taken for granted), and (sometimes) a decline phase (where newer
infrastructure systems came in to substitute for it, as, for example, with the postwar decline
of mass transit through automobile use in many North American cities) (Gökalp, 1992, 58).
The large technical system perspective therefore helps demonstrate how systemic changes
appear in the whole technological fabric of society, as interrelated clusters of innovations
sometimes cohere into large technical systems through processes of social, political and
institutional agency and entrepreneurship. Through complex interactions between technology
‘push’ and demand ‘pull’ factors, capitalist society has come to rely on a whole interconnected
web of primary large technical systems: the automobile transport system, telecommunications,
media networks, gas and electricity systems, water, waste and sewerage, and air transport.
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 181

In addition, an extending assembly of secondary large technical systems – such as scientific

research systems or electronic finance, currency exchange, state bureaucracy systems and organ
transplant systems – have also emerged. These rely, in turn, on primary large technical systems
to operate (Mayntz, 1995). Large technical system research suggests that a fully sociotechnical
perspective on the development of cities and infrastructure networks is necessary: neither
technically determinist nor socially voluntarist approaches are satisfactory (Gökalp, 1992).

THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF LARGE

TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

Invariably, large technical systems work in combination and are subtly interdependent. The
latest fuel pump at a typical US filling station is a classic example. It allows users to insert a
credit or ATM card to pay for the transaction. The pump is, in effect, a machine that seamlessly
integrates the operations of (at least) four separate large technical systems: the highway/
automobile system, the computer and telecommunications system, the banks’ financial, credit
card and ATM chequing system, and the global oil production and supply system.
Such a perspective implies strongly that infrastructure networks tend to accrue in society
on an incremental basis, creating ever denser and more elaborate systems, strung out over
wider and wider distances. Together these interconnected systems are much more important
in social development than individual innovations (Mayntz, 1995; Beniger, 1986). Whilst
some substitution may take place (air for rail, teleworking for commuting, car for metro, gas
for coal, debit card for cash, etc.), it is less common for older networks to disappear altogether.
Instead they tend to become taken for granted, ubiquitous, standardised and ‘black-boxed’
– an essential prop to society and the economy which few take much notice of until failures
or collapses.

THE BANALITY OF TECHNOLOGICAL ARTEFACTS

AND THE DESTABILISATION OF LARGE
TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

Telephones, electric plug sockets, water taps, flushing toilets and cars are thus so utterly
ubiquitous in advanced industrial societies that these apparently banal artefacts give no hint
to the average user of the huge technical systems that invisibly sustain them. Few venture to
understand the inner workings of the technology or the giant lattices of connection and flow
that link these network access points seamlessly to distant elsewheres.
The entire technological systems are black-boxed. ‘Black boxes are therefore settled items
whose users and colleagues (human and non-human) act in ways which are unchallenging to
the technology’ (Hinchcliffe, 1996, 665). However, the shift towards unbundled networks
forces many users to rethink this idea of permanence and stability. But, at the same time, our
tendency to take large technical systems for granted still means that, for most of us, ‘technical
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 182

systems [now] conjure up images of stability and permanence’ (Summerton, 1994a, 1). This
is because of their historical evolution from small, fragmented, specialised systems to
integrated, often (quasi) universal, and technologically standardised ones that can be regarded
as ‘functional subsystems of society as a whole’ (Mayntz, 1995).
Because of the apparent permanence of black-boxed large technical systems, infrastructure
networks thus retain powerful images of stability. Often they are regarded as ‘symbols of the
complexity, ubiquity and the embodied power of modern technology’ (Summerton, 1994a,
1). This explains why Urban Studies, for example, still often uses a language such as ‘public
infrastructure’ or ‘public works’ that traps these networks within a historically specific period,
so utterly failing to acknowledge radical shifts in the social organisation of the sectors. Urban
Studies appears to have difficulty acknowledging the intrinsically dynamic nature of network
changes. It, too, has, in effect, tended to ‘black-box’ networks like electricity as permanent,
ubiquitous and banal underpinnings of urban life that do not really warrant contemporary
attention.

LARGE TECHNICAL SYSTEMS AS ‘PRECARIOUS

ACHIEVEMENTS’

Recent analyses, however, have shown that infrastructure networks, despite the veneer of
permanence, stability and ubiquity built up by the modern ideal, are never structures that are
given in the order of things. Instead of being static material artefacts to be relied on without
much thought, they are, in effect, processes that have to be worked towards. The dynamic
achievement of a functioning energy, communications, water or transport network requires
constant effort to keep the system functioning. It is easy to overplay the degree to which
infrastructure networks necessarily ‘mature’ to become socially ignored and ‘embedded’.
Jane Summerton writes that:

we sometimes seem to view mature Large Technical Systems as invulnerable, embodying more and more
power over time and developing along a path whose basic direction is as foreseeable as it is impossible
to detour. [But] systems are more vulnerable, less stable and less predictable in their various phases than
most of us tend to think.
(1994b, 56)

Infrastructure networks are, in short, precarious achievements. The links between nodes do
not last by themselves; they need constant support and maintenance. When the heterogeneous
elements are coupled and interact according to their assigned roles, allowing the intended
effects to be expected with high reliability, the network is described as stable and closed. Take
the ‘large technical system’ of the automobile and its related highways and service
infrastructure, for example:

the techno-structure of automobile traffic is a striking example of this stability: the strongly knit relations
between automobile manufacturers and suppliers, the close intertwining of transport and taxation
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 183

policy, the long-lasting tradition of motor-car engineering and the mass myth and mass practice of
automobilism. Each of these relations guarantees the continuation of a technological trajectory, although
the automobile traffic system has been deeply shaken by the crisis of oil supply, air pollution, and urban
traffic jams. This close coupling of things, people, and signs and its continuous production by routines
are the social base of the technological momentum and the myth of technics-out-of-control.
(Ranmert, 1997, 186)

PROBLEMATISING AND ‘UNBLACK-BOXING’

LARGE TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

This precarious nature of large technical systems means that they can be reconfigured and
‘unblack-boxed’ as a result of major social, political, economic or organisational upheaval –
such as those associated with the current transformations surrounding the unbundling of
networks (Summerton, 1994a, b). Taken-for-granted assumptions about large technical
systems – such as the idea that they are monopolies requiring universal service regulations –
can thus be challenged. Periods of volatility may emerge. Through such volatility,
entrepreneurial forces may strive to reach new periods of stability, through new linkages of
the ‘social’ and ‘technical’ into large technical systems across distance (see Coutard, 1999).
Large technical system research has thus begun to acknowledge that the large, centralised,
publicly owned and controlled systems that have been the object of its attentions thus far now
seem to be out of keeping with contemporary societal shifts towards globalisation,
liberalisation, privatisation and general scepticism about centralised bureaucracies and ‘big
technology’ (Summerton, 1994a; Coutard, 1999). Renata Mayntz, for example, notes the
recent:

deregulation of LTSs that are organised as monopolies. [This implies] vertical deconcentration, or
uncoupling, [as has] happened in the case of telecommunications, the railways and electricity networks.
The identity of network owner, system operator, service provider, and supplier of the user interface, e.g.
telephones, has been broken up; these different functional parts now tend to be separated and
transformed into independently operating profit centres.
(1995, 7)

THE FAILURE TO DEVELOP TERRITORIAL ANALYSES

OF LARGE TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

Unfortunately for the purposes of this book, the historical and supply-side focus of LTS
research, and the overwhelming concern with ‘system builders’, mean that it has been slow
to explore fully contemporary infrastructural transformations. Some useful work on the
current reconfiguration of large technical systems has, however, emerged, especially from the
work of Jane Summerton. Her edited book (1994a) offers case studies of the reconfiguration
of large technical systems, from organ transplant systems, global corporate telematics
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 184

networks, railways and electricity to the Internet and the emergence of the notion of the
smart highway (ibid.; see also Coutard, 1999). As well as emphasising supply-side trans-
formations, Summerton has attempted to focus more on the changing orientation of the
users of large technical systems, particularly the growing assertion of diversified user demands
within previously homogeneous energy markets – in effect, opening the ‘black box’ of
domestic energy consumption by allowing users to choose from many different styles
of provision: ‘green’ renewable energy, ‘red’ energy provided through social housing and left-
wing municipalities, or special packages designed to meet their particular needs, say, for
swimming pool or greenhouse heating (Summerton, 1995).
Its origins in sociology and history also mean that this strand of research has tended to
neglect the ways in which large technical systems become embroiled in the production and
reconfiguration of urban spaces and places. Research has also almost completely neglected
the territorial foundations and implications of large technical systems, and the necessary
relations between infrastructure and the governance of the cities, regions and spaces that they
pass through. Whilst there are now signs of a long overdue ‘reterritorialisation’ of large
technical system research (Joerges, 1999b), Olivier Coutard has lamented that:

apart from some specific studies, the territorial dimension of LTS has been ignored. The relation
between LTS and territories seems to boil down to the assumption that system development goes
with (more or less impeded) spatial expansion – which need not always be true. This seems to leave
a number of issues unexplored: the urban issues related to LTS, the impact of LTS on the organi-
sation of territories (local, regional, global), [and] the legitimacy of LTS in relation to political
spaces.
(1996, 47; see Joerges, 1999b; Offner, 1999)

A C T O R N E T W O R K S A N D C Y B O R G
U R B A N I S A T I O N

Our second perspective stems from the recent work of actor network theory (ANT). Anchored
in the work of Michel Callon (1986, 1991) and Bruno Latour (1993), a range of researchers,
including those writing of the proliferation of blended human–technological ‘cybernetic
organisms’, or ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991), have argued for a highly contingent, relational
perspective on the subtle linkages between technologies and social worlds. By ‘relational’
we mean focusing in detail on the ways in which relations are constructed which entail both
social and technical connections across time and space. Such a perspective necessarily
emphasises the social nature of infrastructural and technological innovations and the active
constitutive roles of technologies as well as people.
Actor network theory emphasises how particular social situations and human actors enrol
pieces of technology, machines, as well as documents, texts and money, into actor networks,
configured across space and time (see Law and Hassard, 1999). Its central message is that
‘modern societies cannot be described without recognising them as having a fibrous, thread-
like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers,
territories, spheres, categories, structure, systems’ (Latour, 1997, 2).
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 185

BREAKING DOWN A PRIORI DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN

THE ‘TECHNICAL’ AND THE ‘SOCIAL’

Through such an approach, actor network theory abandons any a priori distinctions between
the ‘social’ and the ‘technological’. Rather, contemporary life is seen to be made up of complex
and heterogeneous assemblies of both social and technological actors, strung out across time
and space and linked through processes of human and technological agency (Murdoch, 1995).
Drawing on Thomas Hughes’s (1983) idea that society is a ‘seamless web’ of sociotechnical
constructions, actor network theory ‘eschews the modern’s language of purity, of wrapped
packages and firm boundaries in favour of an emphasis on connection, interdependence,
mutuality and . . . flux’ (Bingham, 1996, 644).
The networked infrastructures or ‘technical networks’ which are the focus of this book are
only ‘one possible final and stabilised state of an actor network’ (Latour, 1997, 8).
Nevertheless, the ANT perspective is useful to an understanding of infrastructure networks,
as it attempts to develop a fully relational understanding of ‘how all sorts of bits and
pieces, bodies, machines, and buildings, as well as texts, are associated together in attempts
to build order’ (Bingham, 1996, 32). Absolute spaces and times, and simple separations
between society and technology, are meaningless here. Agency is a purely relational process.
Technologies have contingent and diverse effects only through the ways they become linked
into specific social contexts by human and technological agency. What Pile and Thrift call a
‘vivid, moving, contingent and open-ended cosmology’ emerges (1996, 37). The boundaries
between humans and machines become ever more blurred, permeable, interpenetrating and
‘cyborgian’. And ‘nothing means outside of its relations: it makes no sense to talk of a machine
in general than it does to talk of a “human in general”’ (Bingham, 1996, 17, original
emphasis). To Nigel Thrift a key conclusion of the approach is that:

no technology is ever found working in splendid isolation as though it is the central node in the
social universe. It is linked – by the social purposes to which it is put – to humans and other technologies
of different kinds. It is linked to a chain of different activities involving other technologies.
And it is heavily contextualised. Thus the telephone, say, at someone’s place of work had (and
has) different meanings from the telephone in, say, their bedroom, and is often used in quite different
ways.
(1996a, 1468)

Thus the development of networked infrastructures within and between cities boils down to
the linkage of massive, heterogeneous arrays of technological elements and actors, configured
across multiple spaces and times (see Picon, 1998). This is a profoundly difficult process
requiring continuing effort to sustain relations which are ‘necessarily both social and technical’
(Akrich, 1992, 206, original emphasis).
Once infrastructure networks are successfully built, ‘unconnected localities’ can be linked
through what Latour calls ‘provisionally commensurable connections’ (1997, 2).
Infrastructure networks, then, are vast collectivities of social and technical actors blended
together as sociotechnical hybrids that support the construction of multiple materialities and
space–times.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 186

INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS, REMOTE CONTROL,

AND TECHNOLOGICAL ORDERING

Actor network theory also stresses that successfully linking arrays of social and technical actors
over distance requires continuous effort, even within mature, black-boxed infrastructure
networks. Connections are always perilous and fragile; never-ending effort is required to
sustain them. For example, the growing ability of telecommunications to support action at a
distance and by remote control does not negate the need for the human actors who use them
to struggle to enrol passive technological agents into their efforts to attain meaningful remote
control. ‘Stories of remote control tend to tell of the sheer amount of work that needs to be
performed before any sort of ordering through space becomes possible’ (Bingham, 1996, 27).
In telecommunications such:

heterogeneous work involving programmers, silicon chips, international transmission protocols, users,
telephones, institutions, computer languages, modems, lawyers, fibre-optic cables, and governments,
to name but a few, has had to be done to create envelopes stable enough to carry [electronic
information].
(Bingham, 1996, 31)

Actor network theory thus also undermines the notion that we can simply and un-
problematically generalise a single material ‘thing’ called an infrastructure network, just as it
challenges the idea that we can simply generalise a city. Instead, sociotechnical worlds emerge
as a continuing cacophony of endless flux and fragile, multiple interdependences. It follows
– again using the example of telecommunications – that there is no single, unified ‘cyberspace’.
Rather, there are multiple, heterogeneous networks and ‘cyberspaces’ surrounding the
Internet, and many other infrastructures, within which telecommunications and information
technologies become closely linked with human actors, and with other technologies, into
systems of sociotechnical relations linked across space and time. As Nick Bingham again
argues, ‘the real illusion is that cyberspace as a singular exists at all’, rather than as an
enormously varied skein of networks straddling and linking different space–times (1996, 32;
see Latour, 1993, 120).
Bruno Latour captures the complex inclusionary/exclusionary nature of technical networks
in words that have deep resonance with our arguments about unbundling networks and
fragmenting cities. To him infrastructure networks:

are composed of particular places, aligned by a series of branchings that cross other places and require
other branchings in order to spread. Between the lines of the network there is, strictly speaking, nothing
at all: no train, no telephone, no intake pipe, no television sets. Technological networks, as the name
suggests, are networks thrown over spaces, and they retain only a few scattered elements of those spaces.
They are connected lines, not surfaces. They are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic,
even through they embrace surfaces without covering them, and extend a very long way.
(Latour, 1993, 117–18)
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 187

NETWORKED SPACES OF CONNECTION AND THE

‘INFINITY’ OF DISCONNECTION

Actor network theory and related ‘cyborgian’ perspectives on the city offer a fully relational
perspective which has important implications for the ways in which we conceptualise the links
between cities, unbundling infrastructure networks, and space and time (see Box 5.1). For
actor network theory suggests that, rather than simply being space- and time-transcending
technologies, infrastructure networks actually act as technological networks within which
new spaces and times, and new forms of human interaction, control and organisation are
continually (re)constructed. As Bruno Latour argues:

B O X 5 . 1 ‘ C Y B O R G ’ R E A D I N G S O F
C O N T E M P O R A R Y U R B A N I S M

Actor network and cyborgian theories offer over a certain scale, a certain spatial
powerful new insights for exploring the com- surface.
plex sociotechnical negotiations that have (1995a, 22)
surrounded the mass application of ‘machinic
ensembles’ and infrastructure networks Such cyborgian conceptions of urbanisation
through contemporary capitalist society. They demonstrate the immanence of relations
help us to collapse unhelpful and overly between modern urban society, and urban
dualised distinctions between the social and subjects, and the technological infrastructures
technical, the city and infrastructure, the that support them (Picon, 1998). Processes
local and global. And they underline that of urban life are now intimately constituted
‘attempts to find the boundary of any practice through extended webs of technologies;
– where one ends and the other begins – are these define the ways in which the city re-
increasingly artificial’ (Mau, 1999, 203). Eric constructs nature, processes resources and
Swyngedouw suggests that: serves as a crucible of social relations and
the production of services and commodities.
the production of the city as a cyborg ‘Cyborgs, then, are “networked” entities; they
. . . opens up a new arena for thinking do not exist simply as autonomous individual
and acting on the city: an arena that is subjects, but through connections and affini-
neither local nor global, but that weaves ties, including their connections to technology.
a network that is always simultaneously Indeed, cyborgs are never entirely separate
deeply localised and extends its reach from technology’ (Rutsky, 1999, 148).

CYBORG LIAISONS AND THE CITY

At least for more affluent city dwellers, then, systems, infrastructure, energy, water and
the human body now enters into a myriad of waste networks, electronic finance, com-
increasingly intimate, continuous and seam- munications, home management and air-
less ‘cyborg’ liaisons with cars, entertainment conditioning systems, and constructed and
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 188

digital spaces. Such liaisons serve to extend machine, or the clothing machine, most
the influence of the human actor across many cyborganised humans cannot survive
geographical scales and territories through its or thrive, because these concretions of
daily physical and virtual mobilities (Lupton, machinic ensembles generate their basic
1999). environment. Hence cyborgs, like us, are
Contemporary urban life, thus, can be endlessly fascinated by mechanic break-
conceptualised as a palimpsest of socio- downs, which would cause disruptions
technical relations and processes. However, in, or denials of access to, their mega-
Timothy Luke claims that it is only the collapse technical sources of being. Beirut in the
of the sociotechnical relations – rare in the fifteen years war, Sarajevo in the two year
West, common in war zones and but part of long siege, or the Road Warriors’ travels
everyday life in many developing cities – that in post-megamachine Australia [in the
fully demonstrate how bound up modern Mad Max films] are all dark revelations –
urban life is with many superimposed webs in fact and fiction – of what once were
of urban infrastructure networks (1997, 1368). highly evolved cyborg beings, struggling
He argues that: to survive decyborgised societies without
all the life support systems of humachinic
without the agriculture machine, the hous- megatechnics.
ing machine, the oil machine, the water (Luke, 1997, 1368)
machine, the electrical machine, the media

Most of the difficulties we have in understanding science and technology proceed from our belief that
space and time exist independently as an unshakable frame of reference inside which events and place
would occur. This belief makes it impossible to understand how different spaces and different times may
be produced inside the networks built to mobilise, cumulate and recombine the world.
(1987, 228)

Actor network theory usefully collapses taken-for-granted notions of ‘far’ and ‘close’ by
revealing that elements which seem at first to be physically close ‘when disconnected [by
networks] may be infinitely remote if their connections are analysed’ (Latour, 1997, 3).
Conversely, ‘elements which would appear as infinitely distant may be close when their
connections are brought back into the picture’ (ibid.). Latour continues, ‘it may be that the
telephone has spread everywhere, but we still know that we can die right next to a phone line
if we aren’t plugged into an outlet and a receiver. The sewer system may be comprehensive,
but nothing guarantees that the tissue I drop in my bedroom will end up there’ (1993, 115).
‘I can,’ he suggests:

be one metre away from someone in the next telephone booth, and be nevertheless more closely
connected to my mother 6,000 miles away . . . a gas pipe may lie in the ground close to a cable television
glass fibre and near by a sewage pipe, and each of them will nevertheless continuously ignore the parallel
world lying around them.
(1997, 3)
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 189

Technological networks, despite the modern rhetoric of universality, are thus always specific
and contingent in linking one place with another. They ‘always represent geographies
of enablement and constraint’ (Law and Bijker, 1992, 301). They continually link the
local and non-local in intimate relational, and reciprocal, connections. And they always
support unevenness in inclusion and exclusion, differentiation, and presence and absence –
but in ways that challenge simplistic ideas about how geographical space links with these
phenomena.

THE USEFULNESS OF ACTOR NETWORK AND

CYBORGIAN PERSPECTIVES

So – and this is of crucial importance – unbundled infrastructure networks and fragmented

cities emerge as two sides of the same overarching societal process. But the logic of unbundling
networks actually merely accentuates the ways in which infrastructure networks both
reflect and support relational differentiation between and within places, by tying them into
multiple and diverse spatiotemporalities which challenge traditional assumptions that social
and technological relations can simply be understood by adopting binary dualisms like
local–global, close–far, social–technical or in city–out of city.
In the broad shift from the single, coherent infrastructure networks laid out during the
modern ideal to the competing, overlaid patchworks of unbundled networks now emerging,
we would argue that the geographies of topological connection and exclusion, as manifest
within contemporary cities, are becoming much more complex and uneven. Single geog-
raphies where networks bind spaces and cities are giving way to multiple, overlaid and
customised grids that unevenly connect parts of cities together and to intensifying interactions
elsewhere. The fragmenting social and economic geographies of contemporary urban areas
are simultaneously being structured by the emergence of multiple, superimposed infra-
structure grids whose complex combinations of connections and disconnections constitute
a major reconfiguration of the ‘power geometries’ of the city (Massey, 1992; Amin and
Graham, 1998b).
As Bruno Latour suggests, infrastructure networks and their access points thus tend to
‘warp’, ‘stretch’ and ‘compress’ the natural and social spaces and times of our daily lives,
based on who is enrolled into the networks and who remains physically or technologically
disconnected (1997, 3). As the access points and topological geographies of urban networks
become more and more unevenly customised to particular users, spaces and zones in the
contemporary metropolis, such stark processes of relational incorporation or exclusion become
closely and subtly woven into the contemporary urban fabric.
In Latour’s schema it is therefore a mistake to develop binary oppositions of ‘local’ and
‘global’ infrastructure networks. Rather than one network being ‘bigger’ than another it is
simply longer or more intensely connected. In this sense a network must always remain
continuously local, as it inevitably touches down in particular places. The task is to trace how
a node becomes strategic through the number of connections it commands and how it loses
importance when the connections are lost.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 190

Actor network and ‘cyborgian’ readings of contemporary urban and infrastructural change
are thus of considerable value to this book. For they suggest a clear theoretical argument which
may help account for the parallel trends towards unbundling networks and urban frag-
mentation. It is that current shifts in cities and infrastructure allow the heterogeneous
engineering of technologies and infrastructural artefacts to be done in a much more custom-
ised manner than in the past. Users no longer necessarily need to be drawn into the
comprehensive, standardised urban infrastructure grids, as in the modern infrastructural
ideal. Relatively homogeneous associations, through standardised grids, are replaced by a
great diversity of increasingly customised or specialised associations with and through network
technologies. Network associations in ‘actor networks’ between users, artefacts, finance and
texts can be done on a much more customised basis, in particularly through ‘enrolling’ the
powers of information technologies as ‘selective agents’.
Of course ‘action at a distance’ and ‘technological ordering’ are still complex and difficult,
requiring continuous effort. But successfully enrolling the control capabilities of information
technology as technological agents can make the ordering of specialised sociotechnical
networks a great deal more possible than previously. This can be done, moreover, without
losing the ability to connect from tailored infrastructures like smart highways, customised
electricity supplies, global telematics networks or global airline links to planetary grids as a
whole. Social power, thus, is wielded through heterogeneous associations of technical
infrastructure networks and specialised urban places, linked in parallel.
Sociotechnical constructions increasingly resemble specialised, heterogeneous arrays
laid out within and through technical networks. Sometimes these interconnect; at other times
they run parallel and in isolation from each other. It is here, most often within the unbundled
networked infrastructures of the contemporary city, that we see complex combinations
of ‘infinite’ disconnection, physically cheek by jowl with customised arrays of highly capable
global–local infrastructure.

C H A N G I N G P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M I E S O F
C A P I T A L I S T U R B A N I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

Capitalism as a mode of production has necessarily targeted the breaking down of spatial barriers
and the acceleration of the turnover time as fundamental to its agenda of relentless capital
accumulation.
(Harvey, 1996)

Our third perspective revolves around analyses of the geographical or spatial political
economies of contemporary capitalism. The starting point of this perspective is that the
ability to transcend space and time constraints selectively, by building or using transport,
telecommunications, energy and water infrastructures, is central to the economic and
geographical development of modern capitalism.
The production of infrastructure networks, and the financial, engineering and governance
practices that support them, are therefore necessarily embedded within the broader power
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 191

relations of global capitalism. ‘Infrastructure networks of all types are deeply embedded and
implicated in the process of production, reproduction, and legitimation in a functioning
capitalist economy’ (Hodge, 1990, 87).
Taking this idea as his starting point, Eric Swyngedouw goes one step further. He suggests
that ‘changes in mobility and communication infrastructure and patterns are not neutral
processes in the light of given or changing technological–logistical conditions and capabilities.
Rather, they are necessary elements in the struggle for maintaining, changing or consolidating
social power’ (1993, 305). Mobility, he continues, is ‘one of the arenas in which the struggle
for control and power is fought’. An important strategic weapon of the powerful in this
struggle ‘is the ideology of progress and the legitimising scientific discourse of scientists and
engineers’ that so dominated the construction of the modern urban infrastructural ideal
discussed in Chapter 2 (Swyngedouw, 1993, 324).
But how, exactly? Critical geography, in exposing the spatial political economies of
contemporary societies, has done most to reveal fully the subtle power relations surrounding
the parallel production of infrastructure networks and new urban landscapes. In what follows
we will examine the seven key arguments of spatial political economy approaches to
understanding the contemporary transition of capitalist urban infrastructure. The first three
encompass the core arguments of the perspective; the remaining four address its contribution
to understanding contemporary processes of urban fragmentation and infrastructural
unbundling.

CENTRAL ARGUMENTS OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

PERSPECTIVE

Spatial infrastructure is embedded within capitalism, and complex terrains of winners and
losers inevitably accompany urban infrastructural change. But the spatial political economy
perspective to urban infrastructure makes three further central points.

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A S F I X E D S U P P O R T S F O R T H E

S P A C E – T I M E M O B I L I T I E S O F C A P I T A L I S M

First, the production of infrastructure networks to transcend space and time barriers
simultaneously requires those infrastructure networks to be geographically fixed in space.
David Harvey (1985), drawing on Marx (1976, 1978), argues that the changing configuration
of infrastructure networks represents the development of new solutions to the basic tensions
inherent in capitalism between what he calls ‘fixity’ and the need for ‘motion’, mobility and
the global circulation of information, money, capital, services, labour and commodities. Even
‘mobile’ infrastructures like wireless telephony require fixed infrastructure or satellites to be
constructed to cover geographical space.
To understand the tensions between fixity and mobility one must explore the essential
geopolitical economy of capitalism in a little more detail. To Harvey (1985) capitalism is
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 192

inevitably expansionary. Because it is driven by the search for new profits and ‘capital
accumulation’, the aggregate effect of capitalism is to expand into new geographical markets,
as well as continually to restructure the development of old ones, through new products and
new technologies. This means that widely dispersed sites of production, consumption and
exchange need to be integrated and coordinated, to support processes of production,
distribution, consumption and social reproduction. In order to achieve this, space needs to
be ‘commanded’ and controlled, particularly by large, dominant, transnational firms.
The theoretical ‘goal’ of global capitalism, and the key to maximum profits with minimum
risk, is therefore perfect mobility for labour and goods (through transport), capital (through
financial markets) and water, energy and information products (through infrastructure
networks). Erik Swyngedouw calls this ‘the desire to produce a spaceless world’ (1993, 313).
But in a fundamentally spatial and geographical world, where infrastructure networks must
be fixed and embedded in space, this goal is impossible. Both the new spatial structures that
are the bases of production and consumption – cities, industrial areas, consumption zones,
etc. – and the new infrastructure and transport networks needed to support this mobility are
inevitably fixed and embedded in produced space (Swyngedouw, 1993). New infrastructure
networks ‘have to be immobilised in space, in order to facilitate greater movement for the
remainder’ (Harvey, 1985, 149). As Swyngedouw continues:

a railway, a motorway or communication line, for example, all liberate actions from place and reduce
the friction associated with distance and other space-sensitive barriers. However, such transportation
and communication organisation can only liberate activities from their embeddedness in space by
producing new territorial configurations, by harnessing the social process in a new geography of places
and connecting flows.
(1993, 306)

Produced infrastructure networks within, between and below the fabric of cities thus literally
underpin the territorial configurations of global capitalism. To Swyngedouw:

geography is actively produced in a well-defined and relatively immobile physical infrastructural and
social way. . . . The production of territorial organisation, a combination of economic, infrastructural
and institutional–regulatory practices, is a historical product which simultaneously defines, shapes and
transforms social relationships and daily practices.
(1993, 310)

In contemporary processes of capitalist globalisation, spatiality, power and infrastructure

networks are therefore intimately connected. ‘Some barriers are torn down; others are main-
tained. New spaces are created (for global trade, or new favelas [shanty towns]); others are
destroyed (the spaces of more integrated national economies, and those of small-scale
agriculture)’ (Massey, 1995, 140).
An essentially relational theory of what Swyngedouw (1993, 308) terms the ‘reshuffling
of spatial relations’ in capitalism thus emerges, as networked infrastructures support new
configurations within and between places, in keeping with the wider geopolitical logics of
capitalism.
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 193

Infrastructure networks thus become central to the reproduction and development of

capitalism because they link multiple spaces and times together. This is a necessity because
of ‘the fundamental diversity and heterogeneity in time and space’ in our contemporary
globalising world (Dupuy, 1988, 5). As Jean-Marc Offner puts it, rather than somehow
causing ‘territory to disappear’, as in the immaterial dream of so many IT utopianists, ‘it is
precisely the fact that a multitude of places exist which creates the need for exchange based on
infrastructure networks’ (1996, 26, emphasis added).

T H E D I F F E R I N G T I M E – S P A C E C A P A B I L I T I E S

O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R E N E T W O R K S

Second, infrastructure networks obviously differ in their ability to transcend space and time
barriers. Telecommunications, transport, energy and water networks clearly vary dramatically
in the degree to which they are fixed and embedded in space, in the degree to which the
mobility they support is retarded by the frictional effects of overcoming distance and in the
scale at which mobility is required. This is shown schematically in Table 5.1.

Table 5.1 Understanding the embeddedness and time–space capacity of different infrastructure
networks

Network Fixity/embeddedness Frictional effects Scale of operation

in space of distance

Water/waste Very high Very high Local/regional

Transport Very high Very high Local–global
Energy Medium Medium Local–international
Telecoms High to low Very low Local to global

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E N E T W O R K S A S L O C A L L Y

D E P E N D E N T C A P I T A L

Third, because they necessarily have to be produced in space, utilities, transport and telecom
grids are therefore also classic examples of what Cox and Mair (1988) call locally dependent
capital. They are, quite literally, materially embedded in territory. Gas, electricity, water,
waste, transport and telecommunication networks inevitably require the investment over
relatively long periods of large amounts of capital within territorially bounded areas. The
capital is quite literally sunk into the vast (sometimes hidden) lattices of ductwork, pipes,
wires, cables, roads, ports, airports and railways that lie beneath, within and above modern
cities and fill the corridors between them. Even when it is not so – as with radio-based
telecommunications networks – the antenna infrastructure is still rooted in largely immobile
patterns across particular territories and often depends on the conventional phone system for
transmission.
The local dependence of infrastructure capital makes it expensive, uncertain and risky to
develop – especially for the profit-seeking firms that increasingly control it. This inflexibility
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 194

means that sunk infrastructures go on to present problems later in further ‘rounds’ of

restructuring as the continuous dynamism of capitalism plays out. Crises emerge where older
infrastructure networks, which are embedded in space, become barriers to later rounds of
capitalist accumulation. To David Harvey:

the tension between fixity and mobility erupts into generalised crises, when the landscape shaped in
relation to a certain phase of development . . . becomes a barrier to further accumulation. The landscape
must then be reshaped around new transport and communications systems and physical infrastructures,
new centres and styles of production and consumption, new agglomerations of labour power and
modified social infrastructures.
(1993, 7)

It follows that the production and reconfiguration of space are intrinsic to the development
of infrastructure networks within and between cities. One needs to maintain a linked, relational
perspective on how broad societal shifts are constituted through the production of both cities
and urban landscapes and the infrastructure networks that are sunk into the territory within
and between them.

UNDERSTANDING TRANSITIONS IN CONTEMPORARY

URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE

With these essential starting points established we can now explore what spatial political
economy perspectives have to say about contemporary transitions in urban infrastructure.
Here we can separate the recent contribution of political economy perspectives into four
further arguments.

T H E S O C I A L B I A S E S O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L C H A N G E :
‘ T I M E – S P A C E C O M P R E S S I O N ’ A N D ‘ P E R S O N A L

E X T E N S I B I L I T Y ’

First, it is clear that, at a general level, the new capabilities of infrastructure networks
are underpinning what is called ‘time–space compression’ – the uneven collapse or reduction
of time and space barriers (Harvey, 1989). This applies, in particular, to telecommunications
and fast transport networks like airlines and high-speed trains. But it also applies to widening
grids of long-distance energy and water flow.
In the process, the spaces within and between cities become ‘wired’ and gridded with
highly uneven networks of ever more capable infrastructures. The technologies of infra-
structure increasingly become the very ‘organisation principle to everyday life’, supporting
‘ever-accelerating geographies of production, exchange, and consumption’ (Kirsch, 1995,
541). As Harvey suggests, we have, as a result, ‘learned to cope with an overwhelming sense
of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds’ (1989, 240).
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 195

But extreme care needs to be taken over the definition of ‘we’. For it must be remembered
that the linked production of fixed infrastructure networks and urban spaces is an exercise
infused with struggles between groups, firms and institutions that possess highly uneven
social, economic, environmental and cultural power. Such struggles tend to reflect and
reinforce the wider reproduction of capitalist social relations. Far from being somehow neutral
or intrinsically beneficial, urban infrastructure networks embody power relations and reflect
highly uneven political-economic struggles between firms, state and public sector organ-
isations and wider social agents, which are intrinsic to the spatial geopolitics of capitalism as
a whole (Samarajiva and Shields, 1990).
The uneven and partial integration of territories via infrastructure networks, and the current
era of infrastructural unbundling, are therefore dynamic social and political processes filled
with ambivalence, conflict and multiply contested perspectives (Graham, 1994). Complex
terrains of winners and losers, woven into the wider social and spatial inequalities of capitalist
urbanism, are an inevitable feature of the continual uneven construction, and reconstruction,
of infrastructure networks between and within cities. Moreover, the conceived technological
logics of powerful firms and their infrastructural suppliers tend to dominate the lived,
emotional spaces of human life (Lefebvre, 1984; Kirsch, 1995, 545).
Time–space compression via infrastructural development is therefore necessarily very
uneven and partial. Powerful interests may have ever more power over space and time. But,
counter to the widespread ideology that people benefit universally from such processes, the
space–time constraints on poor or marginal communities may actually increase, both relatively
and absolutely, because their position with respect to accessing new infrastructures may
become even more marginal. As Erik Swyngedouw writes:

the changed mobility, and hence power patterns, associated with the installation of new mobility
commodities and infrastructure may negatively affect the control over place of some while extending
the control and power of others. . . . Being trapped in particular places and subject to processes of
restructuring and depreciation undermines the control and command of spatially imprisoned individuals
and social groups, while this very restructuring and depreciation is organised by those Cyborg men and
women whose ability to command place is predicated upon their power and ability to move over
hyperspace.
(1993, 322)

But it is also vital to stress the complexity of such processes. ‘The spaces of exclusion and
inclusion are always heterogeneous and subject to change’ (Hinchcliffe, 1996, 674). A
person’s or group’s ability to construct their identity, and to exercise social and economic
power, thus derives very strongly from the degree to which they can mediate their lives with
infrastructure and so extend their influence over space. To draw one last time on
Swyngedouw’s analysis, the key point here is that, in contemporary society:

cashing in on cultural capital assets is related to an individual’s capacity to construct a multi-scaled and
multiple identity; an identity which comes about in and through the command of space and the capacity
to move across space. In other words, social power cannot any longer (if it ever could) be disconnected
from the power or ability to move quickly over space. The necessary resources to minimise time–space
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 196

distances and the unquestioned commodification of time–space compressing processes accentuate social,
economic and cultural inequality.
(1993, 323)

Places are thus infused with complex ‘power geometries’ based on their highly uneven
interconnection with the full range of infrastructural means to overcome time and space
barriers (Massey, 1993). ‘Equidistant destinations within the city may take radically different
lengths of time and effort to reach, and different people, for a variety of reasons, may have
quite different problems in reaching the same destination from the same origin’ (Hamilton
and Hoyle, 1999, 18). The presence of a road, telecommunication line, energy or water
conduit dictates that exchanges must flow along their lines of connection. Equally, such
networks can divide spaces and deter exchange in transverse ways. Whilst their axes and
end points may powerfully connect parts of cities together, ‘dramatically reducing those
distances between people who happen to be connected along such routes’, roadscapes tend
to be physically very divisive in a lateral sense (Urry, 1999, 16). ‘The shops may be in full view
across the road from the place where you live, but if there is a three-lane dual carriageway in
between, and the nearest footbridge is half a mile away, the shops are pretty inaccessible to
you’ (Hamilton and Hoyle, 1999, 20).
Along a similar line of argument, Paul Adams (1995) offers the concept of ‘personal
extensibility’ to capture how a subject’s use of networked infrastructures, to access or connect
with (more or less) distant spaces and times, may allow them to extend their domination
of excluded groups, and so support the production of divided spaces and cities. ‘One person’s
(or group’s) time–space compression,’ he writes, ‘may depend on another person’s (or
group’s) persistent inability to access distant places.’ As Adams suggests, ‘the variation of
extensibility according to race, class, age, gender, (dis)ability, and other socially significant
categories binds micro-scale biographies to certain macro-level societal processes’ (1995,
268; see Massey, 1993, 66). Whilst Adams considers only information technology and
telecommunications, these ideas may also apply to transport or the use of water and energy
infrastructures to access resources and reserves far from the point of consumption.
Thus, within contemporary cities, forms of ‘super-inclusion’, based on the intensive use
of information technology and other networks to access far-off places, emerge for socio-
economically affluent groups (Thrift, 1996c). Such groups may, at the same time, work to
secure cocooned, fortified, urban (often now walled) enclosures, from which their intense
access to personal and corporate transport and ICT networks allow them global extensibility.
‘Those who already have more power within the power geometry can wall themselves in’
(Massey, 1995, 104).
Meanwhile, however, a short distance away, in the interstitial urban zones, there are often
‘off-line spaces’ (Aurigi and Graham, 1997) or ‘lag-time places’ (Boyer, 1996, 20). In these
often forgotten places time and space remain profoundly real, perhaps increasing, constraints
on social life, (say) because of welfare and labour market restructuring or the withdrawal of
bank branches or public transport services.
It is easy, in short, to overemphasise the mobility of people and things in simple, all-
encompassing assumptions about place transcendence and ‘globalisation’ which often
conveniently ignore the fragmenting reality of many urban spaces (Thrift, 1996a, 304; see
Massey, 1993).
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‘S T R A T E G I C L O C A L I S M ’ A N D T H E ‘ G L O C A L S C A L A R

F I X ’: U N B U N D L I N G M O D E R N N O T I O N S O F T E R R I T O R I A L

G O V E R N A N C E , I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A N D S P A T I A L S C A L E

The second contemporary point stressed by spatial political economists addresses the effects
of globalisation on national infrastructural monopolies. In the contemporary world, as we
began to discuss in Chapters 3 and 4, the changing geometries of infrastructural power tend
to be bound up with internationalisation, liberalisation, privatisation and the application
of new information technologies. Such transformations mean that the modern nation state,
in particular, is tending to leak its power to continuous and largely invisible circuits of fast or
instantaneous financial and infrastructurally mediated flow.
Some argue that the nation state is actually becoming fragmented or ‘hollowed out’ in the
face of globalisation and the growth of transnational governance institutions (Taylor, 1994).
Coherent national economies – always a deeply rhetorical construction – no longer exist. The
territoriality of politicians survives despite the collapse of the notion of the national state as
a social or wealth container (ibid.).
As we saw in the last chapter, such processes tend to support the active construction of
highly capable and customised networked infrastructures for highly valued spaces whilst the
remaining portions of national territories often become neglected. In response, nation states,
whilst being far from redundant, are often becoming, in a sense, ‘spatially selective’ (Jones,
1997). They are constructing experimental models of urban planning and infrastructure
provision for building local microgeographies within strategically significant regions whilst
withdrawing policies geared to mass integration and redistribution (ibid.). Jones terms this
a policy of ‘strategic localism’ (ibid., 852).
Contemporary shifts therefore suggest that preoccupation with the national scale of
produced infrastructure, characteristic of the period of the modern infrastructural ideal
between 1880 and 1960, is but one, historically specific, orientation towards geographical
scale. In fact, it is increasingly realised that, like places, spatial scales themselves are socially
constructed. As Neil Brenner argues, ‘spatial scales can no longer be conceived as pre-given
or natural arenas of social interaction, but are increasingly viewed as historical products – at
once spatially constructed and politically contested’ (1998b, 460). In fact, he suggests that
current shifts require us to rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about how spatial scales
and territories relate to economic and social life. ‘One of the most daunting methodological
challenges’ facing contemporary social science, he believes (1998b, 28), is:

to rethink the role of spatial scale as a boundary, arena, hierarchy of social relations in an age of intensified
capitalist globalization. The current round of globalization calls into question inherited Euclidean,
Cartesian, and Newtonian conceptions of spatial scales as neutral or stable platforms for social relations,
conceived as containers of different geographical sizes.

In such a view the ‘state’ or the ‘city’ should therefore not be allocated some natural, given
coherence in ordering social life. Neither the local nor the global is pre-eminent in the
construction of contemporary cities. Cities, rather, are bound up in a dynamic continuum
of global–local or ‘glocalised’ interactions. Multiple geographical scales now intersect in
potentially highly conflicting ways within the landscapes and sociotechnical fabric of cities
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 198

(Brenner, 1998b, 438). What Henri Lefebvre called a ‘generalized explosion of spaces’ occurs
as new spatial and temporal ‘fixes’ are established and reworked between and within social
scales via continually shifting mixtures of territorialisation and deterritorialisation (1979,
289–90, cited in Brenner, 2000, 361). The:

scales of capital accumulation, state territorial power, urbanization, societal networks and politico-
cultural identities are being continually transformed, disarticulated and recombined in ways that severely
undermine this pervasive naturalization of the national scale of social relations.
(Brenner, 1998b, 28)

Using this perspective, Brenner goes on to argue that the period since the mid 1970s has
witnessed a progressive denationalisation of capitalist territorial organisation and the widening
production of a new set of dominant social scales, oriented towards intense global–local
interaction, especially for powerful interests (1998b, 473). Infrastructure developments by
national states and subnational governments have provided the most significant supporters
of the construction of such ‘glocal’ scales. In a sense, then, ‘globalisation’:

emerges when the expansion of capital accumulation becomes intrinsically premised upon the
construction of large-scale territorial infrastructures, a second nature of socially produced spatial
configurations such as railways, highways, ports, canals, airports, informational networks and state
institutions that enable capital to circulate at ever-faster turnover times.
(2000, 7)

As a result, in a shift driven by the rising power of transnationals, global financial integration,
the collapse of Fordist and Keynesian styles of policy, and growing competition between
spaces, older national states had all, by the mid 1980s, ‘substantially re-scaled their internal
institutional hierarchies in order to play increasingly entrepreneurial roles in producing
geographic infrastructures for a new round of capitalist accumulation’ (1998b, 29).
In the infrastructural arena this has meant a widespread shift to privatisation, liberalisation,
the opening up of public infrastructure to private investment, and increasing the freedom
of private capital to develop limited, customised infrastructures in specific spaces, without
worrying about the need to cross-subsidise networks in less favoured zones. In France and
the United Kingdom, for example, the vast bulk of investment in telecommunications
following liberalisation has been within the Île-de-France and M25 regions respectively
(Graham, 1999).
Neil Brenner calls these new approaches to infrastructural development ‘glocal scalar
fixes’ (1998b, 476). To him, they differ radically from the styles of infrastructure development
that characterised the latter stages of the modern ideal. The Fordist–Keynesian practices
that characterised the modern ideal were geared, at least discursively, to ‘homogenising
spatial practices on a national scale’. In contrast, ‘a key result of these processes of state
re-scaling has been to intensify capital’s uneven geographical development’ (ibid.). As Susan
Christopherson has suggested, ‘with the withdrawal of national “equalizing” investment, the
privatisation of previously public investment and the concentration of public spending in
some types of localities, public investment programmes have deepened trends toward uneven
spatial development’ (1992, 284).
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 199

T H E ‘ P A Y P E R ’ R E V O L U T I O N : N E W T E C H N O L O G I E S A N D

T H E U N R A V E L L I N G O F ‘ N A T U R A L M O N O P O L I E S ’

The penultimate contemporary argument of political economy perspectives is that, as part

of such restructuring and rescaling, the redistributive role of infrastructure networks in modern
welfare states is under severe strain. In particular, the rationale for cross-subsidy and
redistribution is becoming more threadbare. ‘The old welfare state, that once-seeming jewel
in the crown of moral progress in democratic societies, is finished, although it has taken
twenty years for the gradual erosion to reach the present point of collapse’ (Leonard, 1997,
22).
As we saw in Chapter 4, the control capabilities of information technologies, in particular,
are allowing modern infrastructure grids to be ‘unbundled’ and (re)commodified.
Information technologies can help turn ‘dead’ infrastructures, streets and networks, based
on mechanical and electromechanical technologies, into ‘smart’ infrastructures, managed by
computers linked over telecommunication links. As a result, ‘technology has further
challenged the notion of the natural monopoly’ (Rosston and Teece, 1997, 5).
Paul Virilio has discussed current trends towards the replacement of bureaucratic and
electromechanical systems of control by smart electronic systems for controlling and
monitoring access to goods and services in cities. To him, such trends mean the evolution of
complex, subtle forms of real-time control, within which ‘the rites of passage [in cities] are
no longer intermittent – they have become immanent’, in that they consist of cybernetic,
intelligent systems that are subtly woven deep into the fabric of cities and regions (1987, 16;
see Graham, 1997).
This means that the traditional characteristics of public infrastructure networks that made
them ‘natural monopolies’ can in many cases be eroded or avoided completely, allowing
infrastructure goods and services to be delivered as commodities to be bought and sold in
capitalist infrastructure markets. Thus the high capital cost of building new or competitive
infrastructure networks (say a new highway or telecommunications network) can be offset
against a predictable revenue stream that comes from users being charged market rates to
use that system (even if the network runs parallel to older, public networks). Economies of
scale become less important because, again, customised infrastructures can tap into specialist
market niches. The ‘public good’ nature of infrastructure networks and services can also be
undermined, because new technologies of access control make it possible to control who has
access to the network and the precise flows that go over it with unprecedented accuracy and
ease. Good examples are the shift from public highways to electronic road pricing and the
shift from national public television broadcasting to ‘pay per view’ charging.
‘The essence of what is happening,’ suggests Vincent Mosco, is that ‘new technology
makes it possible to measure and monitor more and more’ of our consumption and use of
infrastructure networks and services in real time (1988, 5, original emphasis). This monitoring
can be cybernetically linked with building up precise records of consumption, behaviour and
tastes, so fuelling further rounds of direct marketing and infrastructure planning in a cybernetic
and iterative cycle. In addition, the predictable revenue streams that ‘pay per’ arrangements
offer can, in turn, mean that specific, targeted infrastructure investments can be undertaken
which guarantee a substantial profit stream based on monitored and charged access and use.
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 200

Infrastructure services can thus be developed as pay-per-use commodities rather than natural
monopolies (Mosco, 1988).
Finally, of course, as we saw in the last chapter, information technology and telecom-
munications can enable what we call virtual network competition to occur over previously
standard and monopolistic infrastructures – as with the emerging electricity markets in North
America and Europe. Here the enormous transactional complexity of infrastructure markets
is supported by the monitoring and tracing ability of electronic and computerised controls.
As with the case of telephone or energy liberalisation, numerous service providers can now
use the monitoring and surveillance capabilities of information technology to use the old
networks to access specialised, targeted markets, in any part of a city or region, on a tailored,
controlled basis. At the same time, they can avoid the problems of ‘free riders’ or of servicing
low-profit or no-profit users or districts. Thus virtual network competition, as a form of
network unbundling, may be just as closely linked with the social and spatial fragmentation
of users within cities as the ‘hard’ construction of new, bypassing transport, streets or
telecommunication links. The process of transformation is simply less visible.

F R O M H O M O G E N I S I N G I N F R A S T R U C T U R E S T O ‘ H U B S ’,
‘ S P O K E S ’ A N D ‘ T U N N E L E F F E C T S ’

Space-time no longer corresponds to Euclidean space. Distance is no longer the relevant variable
in assessing accessibility. Connectivity (being in relation to) is added to, even imposed upon,
contiguity (being next to).
(Offner, 2000, 172)

Which brings us to the fourth and final key issue that emerges in our discussion of spatial
political economy: imagining the urban geographies of unbundled infrastructures, ‘strategic
localism’, ‘glocal scalar fixes’ and (re)commodified infrastructures in a little more detail.
Clearly the shift from relatively homogenising and hierarchically organised infrastructures,
oriented to the urban and national scale, to infrastructures configured for glocal interaction
makes the maintenance of infrastructure networks that were (more or less evenly) laid out over
urban and national spaces to ‘bind’ them more and more problematic (Offner, 2000).
But what happens to such homogenising networks? We believe that they increasingly
become punctured and ruptured; in our language, they are unbundled and splintered,
ushering in new geopolitical and geoeconomic logics based on the highly uneven warping of
time and space in highly localised and valued places. Advanced telecommunications and fast
transport, in particular, are being used to link producers, distributors and consumers across
distance in radically new ways. ‘More complex geographical arrangements’ are emerging,
write Beckouche and Veltz (1988). In these ‘the production–distribution system can fight it
out in space using the length of the infrastructure and communication networks on a national,
even planetary level’. Guiseppe Dematteis (1994, 18) notes ‘the passage from a functional
organisation [within cities] in which the centres are graded with a multi-level hierarchy (as
in the models of the economic geographers Christaller and Lösch) to interconnected networks
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 201

organised on the basis of the corresponding complementarities of the nodes and the synergies
produced’.
To some, these trends mean that the old territorial identity of the city economy, as the heart
of its hinterland, has been totally lost; instead ‘the city is divided into as many fragments as
the networks which traverse it’ (Dematteis, 1988). This new emerging type of unbundled
infrastructure logic is shown schematically in Figure 5.1. Telecommunications, fast transport
networks (and, to a lesser extent, customised energy and water services) now interconnect
cities into systems of ‘hubs’ and ‘spokes’ across wide distances.

'Tunnel effect'

'Tunnel effect'

Figure 5.1 The logic of unbundled infrastructures: a schematic representation of ‘hub and spoke’
infrastructure networks which use ‘tunnel effects’ to traverse non-valued territory. Source: Graham and
Marvin (1996), 59

Instead of standardised infrastructure networks operating more or less homogeneously to

‘bind’ a city, there is a set of so-called ‘tunnel effects’. These are caused by the uneven
‘warping’ of time and space barriers by the advanced infrastructure networks, targeted on
valued parts of the metropolis and drawing them into intense interaction with each other.
Andreu believes that ‘in our search for maximum speed, roads have been turned into tunnels.
But this tunnelling effect is not only confined to roads. Present in all modes of transportation
today, tunnelling isolates us from reality and cuts us off from the intelligible world. This is
even true with trains and airplanes’ (1998, 59).
Often these unbundled infrastructures link nodes together into networks whilst using such
tunnel effects to exclude and bypass much of the intervening spaces, excluding them, in turn,
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 202

from accessing the networks. Good examples of such ‘tunnel effects’ can be found in the
advanced telecom systems that link New York, London and Tokyo in a single global ‘virtual’
financial market place, the global ‘hub and spoke’ arrangement of airline networks and
airports, and the fast train or TGV networks that link up the major European cities whilst
excluding smaller intervening centres from access.
Of course, we need to be careful not to overstress the uniformity, speed or simplicity of
this transition from national, homogeneous infrastructures to ‘glocal scalar fixes’, unbundled
networks and hubs, spokes and tunnel effects. Many national, regional and local infrastructural
monopolies, which throw their networks across Euclidean definitions of territory, continue
to define jurisdictions and political legitimacy. There is much inertia in developing and
regulating infrastructures, with old practices continuing and many billions of sunk investment
built into the urban fabric of every city. And many cases of privatisation do strive to keep the
integrity of urban and national infrastructure networks intact through using franchising and
detailed regulation of the whole territory (Offner, 2000).
But the key point is that there are fewer and fewer spaces where pressure for liberalisation
and/or privatisation is not allowing new private infrastructural competitors to begin assailing
the coherent urban networks left over from modern infrastructure planning. Crises of both
corporatist welfare states and interventionist and developmental states have apparently been
wholesale. ‘It [has now] become more and more clear that there are limits to [the state’s]
ability to pursue a “structural policy” which can promote socio-technological processes or
modernisation’ (Hirsch, 1991, 20). The national policy imperative is now to liberalise and
privatise infrastructure networks to support ‘profitability of the national location for an
increasingly international capital’ (ibid., 21).

F R O M ‘ U N I P L E X ’ T O ‘ M U L T I P L E X ’ C I T I E S :
R E L A T I O N A L T H E O R I E S O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y
U R B A N I S M

What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never

a ‘thing’.
(Bateson, 1978, 249, cited in Star, 1999, 379)

Which brings us to our final theoretical perspective: a broad swathe of recent theoretical
writing about cities and social change that, like actor network theory and the more recent
political economic work analysed above, can broadly be described as ‘relational’ (Amin and
Graham, 1998a, 1999; Allen et al., 1999). Such perspectives imply that ‘infrastructure is a
fundamentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure [only] in relation to organized
practices’ (Star, 1999, 380). Whilst relational writings on contemporary cities are diverse and
notoriously difficult to define precisely, they rest on two essential ideas about the interplay
between cities, technologies and infrastructure networks which have critical importance for
this book.
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 203

REJECTING SIMPLISTIC IDEAS OF SPACE,

TIME AND PLACE

Place itself is no fixed thing. It has no steadfast essence. [The challenge is] to find place at work,
part of something ongoing and dynamic, an ingredient in something else.
(Casey, 1998, 286, original emphasis)

First, relational urban and social theorists reject any idea that space, place and time have any
essential, predefined or fixed meaning. Instead, relational urbanists suggest that ‘both space
and place are constituted out of spatialised social relations’ working in practice over time
(Allen et al., 1999). Places are worked out through social action in dynamic, specific ways that
resist easy generalisation and constantly change over time.
Relational urban theories thus help us to understand the ways in which infrastructure
networks serve to mediate and construct our diverse experiences of time and space. On the
one hand, space, rather than being some universal, Euclidean plane, is seen to be a multiple,
socially constructed and increasingly fragmented phenomenon. Time, on the other, is also
multiple and constructed – a contingent phenomenon, rather than some abstract and universal
social ‘container’ for events.
Time and space are thus both socially constructed together in all sorts of diverse ways
within and through the contemporary metropolis, often via the uneven use of and connection
to networked infrastructures that selectively help construct new social times and spaces (Casey,
1998). As Nigel Thrift puts it, drawing on his long-standing work on time geography, ‘time
is a multiple phenomenon; many times are working themselves out simultaneously in resonant
interaction with each other’ (1996c, 2; see Thrift et al., 1978). For example, stock exchanges,
linked instantaneously with distant points on the planet, through billion-dollar-a-day
electronic transactions, are often physically surrounded by homeless people living on the
street – people whose times and spaces remain highly local and relatively unconnected with
far-off places and time.
Place, thus, is a diverse social process rather than, as so often imagined in the utopian
diagrams of modern urban planners and infrastructure engineers, a simple, bounded piece
of ‘Euclidean’ territory to be designed and ‘rationally’ controlled, through physical plans
and the configuration of infrastructure networks. Places are not contiguous zones on
two-dimensional maps. They are not, suggests Doreen Massey, ‘areas with boundaries around’
(1993, 66). Rather, they are ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations and
understandings’ (ibid.). It is how these ‘articulated moments’ in the diverse circuits
and space–times of urban life come (and do not come) together within a place that shapes
the dynamic nature of that place. David Harvey argues that it is ‘cogredience’ that matters
most in making a place. He defines this as ‘the way in which multiple processes flow together
to construct a single consistent, coherent, though multi-faceted time–space system’ (1996,
260–1).
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 204

THE CITY AS A ‘GEARBOX FULL OF SPEEDS’:

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ‘UNITARY’ OR
‘COHERENT’ CITIES

It is misleading to speak of ‘the city’ as if it were a whole, organic entity.

(Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000, 264, original emphasis)

The second point, which follows from the first, is that such a dynamic and multiple conception
of place should make us highly sceptical about the notions within the modern infrastructural
ideal suggesting some essential or necessary order, coherence or unitary quality to cities as
‘things’. If cities are social processes, rather than ‘things’, and if such social processes are the
‘messy’ and dynamic results of on-going ‘cogredience’ between myriads of spaces and times,
ideas of unitary coherence and order in cities cease to make much sense, other than as crude
efforts to wield social power.
As Joe Painter puts it, ‘cities are not unitary, cohesive or integrated . . . , any coherence
that does emerge [in cities] will be unstable, fleeting, and probably unintended and un-
reproducible’ (1999, 13). Cities and urban life, especially in today’s heterogeneous, culturally
mixed and polynuclear metropolitan areas, therefore need to be considered as ‘multiplex’
rather than ‘uniplex’ phenomena (Amin and Graham, 1998a; Graham and Healey, 1999).
Figure 5.2 captures a UK perspective on the broad shift from the classical ‘unitary’ or ‘uniplex’
metropolis to today’s ‘multiplex’ extended urban regions, which bring together many social
relations and experiences of space and time in an inevitably uneasy cogredience. The ‘ruptures,
deformations and dissonances’ within the complex relations of the contemporary city actually
‘constitute spatiality itself’ (Leong, 1998, 203).
Importantly for our understanding of processes of infrastructural unbundling and
urban splintering, such an approach again implies that geographical proximity within cities
is no guarantee of meaningful relations or connections. Relational links within and between
cities are far too multiple and complex, and far too mediated by local and glocal networked
infrastructure, to obey any naive geographical laws implying that far-off people and places
do not relate whilst close-up ones do.
The spaces of contemporary cities thus resist easy categorisations of function and
interaction; time patterns in the city are being stretched and reconfigured beyond the rigid
routines of work, commuting and home time characteristic of the classic industrial metro-
polis. ‘The city is a gearbox full of speeds’ (Wark, 1998, 3). The contemporary urban
fabric, as both the product and the site of multiplying and diverse relational networks, offers
stark contradictions and huge tensions, which sometimes connect and sometimes do not.
Time and space within cities present a ‘multiple foldable diversity’ (Crang and Thrift,
2000, 21).
As Joe Painter continues, ‘urban space is radically discontinuous; metaphorically, the urban
fabric is “torn” or “ragged” because of the non-integration between relational networks’
(1999, 25). But important connections do remain among the disconnections; the spatialities
of urban life still matter. So, whilst ‘the urban–regional multiplex has become, more so than
ever before, a fragmented kaleidoscope of apparently disjointed spaces and places, a collage
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 205

INPUTS:
CONSUMER PRODUCTS
AND RAW MATERIALS

u n d ary of U
r a ti v e B o
i n ist rban
Adm reg
i on

Ri
ng
Ro

ad
SMALL TOWN

Built up Area

Green Belt

Central Areas

Major Flows

OUTPUTS:
SPECIALISED PRODUCTS
AND SERVICES

City Centre & Old Central Area Nodes

a ti v e B o u n d ary of Urb
i n is tr an r
Adm
Industry/Business Nodes e gi
on
Retail & Leisure Park

Built up Area

Leisure Nodes Sunday

Market
Leisure Complex
RR Retail Nodes
RR
Some People Village
Flows Business Park

Industrial Estate

CITY CENTRE
Small old Centre
RR

Retail &
Leisure Complex

Figure 5.2 The shift in the United Kingdom from (upper) the uniplex metropolis to (lower) the multiplex
urban region, as envisaged by Patsy Healey (personal communication, 1999)

of images, signs, functions, and activities’, connections do remain between these ‘in a myriad
of ways’ (Swyngedouw, 1998, 117). As Timothy Luke suggests:

given these larger structural trends, the concrete realities of place, expressed in terms of a sociocultural
context of spatial location, gradually is being displaced by the tangible imaginary of flow, understood
in terms of operational access to, or process through, zones of informational operation. The latter is
not entirely disrupting the former; rather, they are coexisting together.
(1994, 613)
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 206

1 The result is that it is no longer easy (if it ever was) to separate a ‘city’ from the ‘outside
2 world’. (Parts of) cities are now so integrated into the outside world that we have to be very
3 precise in identifying cities as separate entities at all. The urban fabric is (unevenly) porous
4 and ‘exposed’ to the penetrating effects of infrastructure networks connecting it with multiple
5 space–times around the globe (Virilio, 1991). Relations between people, firms, institutions,
6 communities and buildings on the global scale, mediated by the sorts of ‘glocal’ infrastructure
7 just discussed, may in many cases be more significant than their relations with urban activities
8 or spaces that are physically adjacent.
9 The new paradoxes of connection and disconnection in contemporary cities, along with
10 the collapse of the modern infrastructural ideal, therefore have major implications for how
11 we think about both territoriality and temporality – the defining domains of human life (Amin
12 and Graham, 1998b). The ordering power of Euclidean notions of space and Newtonian
13 ideas of time that were so central to the modern infrastructural ideal, and the notion of urban
14 coherence they were used to support, have collapsed in on themselves. To Peter Emberley,
15 for example, the shift to global network societies, based particularly on instant electronic
16 communications and uneven, customised infrastructures, is:
17
18 indicative of a significant alteration and ha[s] created an environment where the bases of our moral and
19 political terms – the Euclidean notions of space (enclosure and exclusion) and time (succession and
20 duration) which constituted the human experience of sequentiality, causality, continuity – have lost their
21 ordering power. . . . Everything is fused with everything else; all is one, full and yet void in a perpetual
22 movement of flow, of fragmented space, time, and objects. If there is coherence and integration, it
23 comes not from socially imposed power, but from the circulation of power within the technological grid,
24 of interlocking, interdependent agencies, practices and knowledges.
25 (1989, 745–58)
26
27 To authors like Ezechieli (1998) and Castells (1996, 1998, 1999b) global interconnections
28 between highly valued spaces, via extremely capable infrastructure networks, are being
29 combined with strengthening investment in security, access control, gates, walls, CCTV and
30 the paradoxical reinforcement of local boundaries to movement and interaction within the
31 city. Carlo Ezechieli writes that ‘the glassy ramparts of corporate buildings, the brick and stone
32 bastions of the temples of consumption, the aristocratic and exclusive stockades of gated
33 communities, represent the new hard-edge boundaries of cities’ (1998, 1). At the same time,
34 ‘increasingly advanced infrastructural connections compress space and time, reshape territorial
35 patterns and challenge boundaries’ (ibid.).
36 In Boxes 5.2 and 5.3 we examine in detail the authors who have perhaps done most to
37 develop relational understandings of contemporary urban life: Martin Pawley, Manuel
38 Castells, Mike Davis and Christine Boyer.
39
40
41 E V A L U A T I N G T H E F O U R P E R S P E C T I V E S
42
43 This chapter has sought to provide the final element of the book’s conceptual perspective. It
44 has done so by undertaking a long and complex conceptual journey across the four theoretical
45 perspectives which are most suited to helping us understand the parallel processes of
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 207

B O X 5 . 2 R E L A T I O N A L U R B A N T H E O R Y ( I )
‘ T E R M I N A L A R C H I T E C T U R E S ’ A N D ‘ Z E R O
D E F E C T ’ E N C L O S U R E S

Our first example of how ‘relational’ thinking to an optic fibre grid going ‘down’ – say
might help us understand contemporary through a misplaced shovel in a roadworks
urban and infrastructural change concerns the trench – may cost £1.4 billion sterling
importance of infrastructural connections (Pawley 1997, 179).
between a point in urban space and distant • The way in which computer failure in one
circuits of exchange. For the absolute reliability part of a global airline, energy or
and quality of such infrastructural connectivity telecommunication network may throw the
are becoming increasingly important to pow- entire international system into costly, not
erful international actors as corporate activity to say dangerous, disarray. This was
becomes driven by incessant, controlled shown by the failure of the computerised
flow over physical and electronic networks baggage and freight handling system after
(Pawley, 1997). This idea resonates strongly the opening of Hong Kong’s new airport,
with Brenner’s (1998c) notion of ‘glocal scalar which led to utter chaos in the whole air
fixes’, discussed above. freight and baggage movement system
The security of global–local network con- across the Asia Pacific region, costing
nections for the most powerful and highly hundreds of millions of dollars.
valued spaces in cities is thus now reaching • How terrorist attacks or electricity outages
paramount importance. Buildings can increas- in city centres can quickly lead to near
ingly be viewed as terminals articulating economic collapse (as in the case of the
vast infrastructure connections with distant IRA bombs in Docklands and the City of
elsewheres. Such connections, moreover, London, and the collapse of electricity in
are unevenly developed within, beneath and Auckland for five weeks during the winter
above the fabric of contemporary cities, a of 1997–98).
largely invisible panoply of hardware, tech- • The way in which interruptions of
nology and infrastructure that subtly weaves sophisticated and ‘just in time’ logistical
beneath the visual fabric of buildings and flows can disrupt the operation of strings
streets. Premium infrastructural connec- of plants and transport networks on a
tions, tailored to the needs of corporate users planetary basis. Hence infrastructure
in highly valued spaces, start to become industries increasingly emphasise the
the dominant logic of (unbundled) network sophistication of ‘back-up’ services –
development. Consider, for example: unstaffed computer centres located
in heavily protected bunker-style
• The extreme sensitivity of global financial buildings waiting to be used at a minute’s
services, where one day’s lost trading due notice.

NETWORKED CONNECTIONS MEET BOUNDARY

CONTROL

It is no wonder that boundary control, security work hubs are starting to take on military
and surveillance of the most vulnerable net- proportions. Multiple, high-quality supplies of
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 208

optic fibre loops, electricity and water become single failure, adding ‘resilience’ to a building’s
constructed and superimposed in case of a networked connections elsewhere.

‘TERMINAL ARCHITECTURES’

Through such processes the central ‘post- neighbours through container ports, air-
modern’ combination emerges of intensely ports and railway stations, automated
networked spaces and what Martin Pawley freezer stores, sealed warehouses, vast
(1997) terms ‘terminal architectures’. At the truck parks, and transient dormitories of
same time, such heavily protected architec- mobile homes.
tures – stock exchange trading floors and
computer centres, logistics hubs, airports, Pawley (1997, 171) even contends that the
back offices – seem to establish highly con- articulation of urban spaces through such
trolled relationships with their surrounding ‘terminal architectures’ is now of considerably
urban districts. In such ‘stealth buildings’ greater importance than the articulation of
or ‘zero defect enclosures’ ‘the cost of the networks with the surrounding ‘city’ (which,
computer-controlled mechanical and elec- in any case, is being drawn into incoherent
tronic equipment . . . can often exceed their and transplanetary urban fields). To him ‘the
construction costs’ (Pawley, 1997, 184). act of building can be better understood,
Infrastructure networks become a means and valued,’ he writes, ‘as the provision of
of securing spaces from surrounding cities “terminals” for the systems and networks that
whilst at the same time tying their inner work- sustain modern life, rather than the creation
ings intensively into global vectors of flow and of cultural monuments’ (1997, 97).
interconnection. As the relational connections To Pawley, it follows that urbanity is
of buildings elsewhere through customised being redefined as ‘an instantaneously timed,
infrastructure start to mediate ever greater infinitely apertured, omnidirectional phenom-
proportions of economic interaction, topo- enon’ which collapses any notion of urban
logical positions on infrastructure grids start coherence or the urban planning of coherent
to define the location of spaces (numbered infrastructure networks (1997, 171). The chal-
autoroute stops, computer addresses, airline lenge for architecture and urbanism, according
destinations). to this argument, is to acknowledge rather
Writing about the new financial dealing than camouflage the intense infrastructural
houses subtly woven into the fabric of ‘world networking of contemporary built space. Such
cities’ like London, Pawley (1997, 194) argues a practice – what Pawley calls ‘posturban
that: terminal architecture’ – ‘would involve a
dramatic shift from the worship of the culture
these blank-walled buildings are visible of enclosure to the belated recognition that the
manifestations of the abstract, invisible, hidden networks that provide us with trans-
digital network that now links all the port, energy, nutrients and information are the
European Community countries and their real riches of the modern world’ (1998, 9).
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 209

B O X 5 . 3 R E L A T I O N A L U R B A N T H E O R Y ( I I )
C O N N E C T I O N P A R A D O X E S I N C O N T E M P O R A R Y
U R B A N L A N D S C A P E S

Our second example of relational urban theory It is clear that intense global connections for
concerns the way in which cities can be made people, institutions, buildings and firms within
up of apparently paradoxical combinations cities are not universal or general within the
of intense connections with far-off places and diverse spaces and times of cities. Rather, they
profound disconnection between adjacent tend to be customised spatially, financially and
ones. As Wall suggests, there seem to be technologically towards the more powerful
strong contradictions between highly designed and economically valuable spaces and users
and planned enclaves of contemporary devel- within and between cities. Often such power-
opment and wider urban spaces within the ful connections are relationally combined
extending landscapes of contemporary cities. with intense local disconnections, between
‘As we move through the contemporary city,’ the emerging metropolis’ ‘archipelagoes of
he writes: enclaves’ – a geometry which strikingly reflects
the polarising social fabric of the contemporary
the contradictory and opposing conditions urban world (in the developed, developing and
that are the result of its dispersal become post-communist contexts).
immediately apparent. On the one hand, The three commentators who have
the city is composed of highly planned done most to develop a relational under-
private ensembles of buildings, often large standing of contemporary urban restructuring
commercial or residential developments are Manuel Castells, Mike Davis and Christine
that skilled consultants in many fields took Boyer.
years to put together; on the other hand,
large areas of the city appear to be uncared
for, forming an entropic landscape.
(1994, 8)

MANUEL CASTELLS’S ‘NETWORK SOCIETY’ THESIS

To Manuel Castells (1996, 1997a, 1998) it metrical power and the highly differentiated
is the remarkable growth in the application articulation of people and places with what he
of information technologies and telecom- calls the ‘space of flows’ – the incessantly
munications that is the prime supporter of the mobile, technologically mediated flows of
shift towards an integrated, global, ‘network finance, capital, information and media that
society’. The uneven architecture and ‘variable dominate contemporary capitalist societies.
geometry’ of this society are necessarily about Castells argues that the shift to such a net-
the application of these technologies to help work society means that socioeconomically
splinter and fragment urban space. This is affluent groups – what he calls ‘producers
because all spaces are being drawn into an of high value (based on information labour)’ –
integrated logic based on globalisation, asym- are everywhere being drawn into powerful
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 210

articulation with global communications infra- being penetrated by social and geographical
structures. These are tailored to their needs in logics of disconnection, as ‘redundant’,
the urban districts and spaces where they live, devalued labour that is of no functional use to
work and play. Elite spaces in all cities become the logic of the network society – typically
‘superconnected’ via high-capacity tailored manual labour in barrios, ghettoes and favelas
infrastructures, through which they articulate – becomes more and more distanced from
with the global ‘space of flows’ from a position formal circuits of social and economic life (not
of considerable power (Offner, 1996). just in the city but globally). Such groups face
On the other hand, however, Castells the collapse of employment prospects and
believes that virtually all nations and cities are worsening poverty.

MIKE DAVIS’S VISION OF SOCIO-SPATIAL

‘APARTHEID’ IN THE US METROPOLIS

To Mike Davis the sprawling, networked capitalist interests the tribalist fragmen-
megalopolises of the United States increas- tation of these diverging communities:
ingly surround the decrepit infrastructures guarded and fenced off from one another,
of the declining urban cores, where crime, crammed in between the barriers of high
alienation and unemployment concentrate speed traffic and humming to the deafen-
(1992, 6). In Davis’s scenario, drawing on Los ing sound of electronic highways?
Angeles experience and the darker portrayals
of cyberpunk science fiction, the concentration Increasingly, in many urban landscapes, the
of new networked infrastructures into the emphasis is on retreat into the corporate,
valued peripheries of cities, backed up by domestic, consumption or transport cocoons
private capital, repressive policing and special of the postmodern city whilst using highly
infrastructure measures, leads to the collapse capable networks – particularly highways,
of the coherence of the old city as global capital telecommunications, television – physically to
and wealthier social groups flee. Global eco- extend one’s actions to link into the wider
nomic convergence may, according to this social worlds within and beyond the urban
argument, parallel local social divergence. As region. Such trends threaten the ‘public’ nature
Roger Keil (1994, 131) suggests: of the legacies of modern infrastructural
planning, especially the street. They also tend
what is converging is the space of global to support the withdrawal into new mediated
capital whereas communities in different forms of experience, as recent debates about
locales are diverging. Is the only counter- cyberspace and the city suggest (see Robins,
force to the convergence of global 1996; Graham and Marvin, 1996).

CHRISTINE BOYER’S ‘FIGURED’ AND

‘DISFIGURED’ CITIES

Our final relational urban theorist, Christine She argues that contemporary restructuring
Boyer (1995, 82), also addresses US cities. trends are supporting the divergence of what
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 211

she calls the ‘figured’ city from the ‘disfigured’ On the other hand, though, there is the
city. disfigured city: the ‘abandoned segments’ that
The figured city is the city ‘composed as a surround and interpenetrate the figured city
series of carefully developed nodes generated (ibid.). Remaining ‘unimageable and forgotten’,
from a set of design rules or patterns’ (1995, the disfigured city is largely ‘invisible and
81). It is ‘fragmented and hierarchized, like a excluded’. Being detached from the well
grid of well-designed and self-enclosed places designed nodes and the prime infrastructure
in which the interstitial spaces are abandoned networks, the disfigured city actually has ‘no
or neglected’ (ibid.). It is, in short, the highly form or easily discernible functions’. As ‘the
valued archipelago of spaces and zones – connecting, in-between spaces’ with the
financial and corporate districts, heritage weakest and most vulnerable network infra-
zones, leisure, media and cultural areas, malls, structure the disfigured city remains easily
festival market places, theme parks, affluent forgotten by powerful groups inhabiting
housing, hospital and university districts, the figured city (ibid.). Within processes of
research and development campuses, high- infrastructural unbundling the disfigured city
tech business parks, etc. – that are the is likely to fair badly. Not only will it lose the
focus of customised infrastructure develop- cross-subsidies inherent within Keynesian and
ment. As well as being favoured by unbundled monopolistic models of network manage-
infrastructure connections – airports, fast ment, but it is likely to fail to attract new private
highways, telecommunications, energy and entrants to transport, energy, communications
water – the figured city is ‘imageable and and water markets.
remembered’ to affluent and upper-income
populations who live, work and play within it
(1995, 82, original emphasis).

infrastructural unbundling and urban fragmentation that we encompass within the umbrella
term ‘splintering urbanism’. In particular, we have identified the implications of LTS
approaches, actor network and cyborgian perspectives, analyses of the changing spatial political
economies of capitalist infrastructure, and relational urban theories, for our understanding
of the interrelated transitions linking cities and infrastructure networks. It is worth briefly
reviewing the usefulness of each in turn.

THE LARGE TECHNICAL SYSTEMS APPROACH

The LTS perspective develops powerful insights into contemporary shifts in the relations
between cities and infrastructure. Whilst it has unfortunately largely ignored the inevitable
spatiality of infrastructure networks, it has given rich insights into how groups of innovations
become linked together to (sometimes) gain the systemic qualities of networked
infrastructures. It has also helped explain the ways in which infrastructural technologies and
services diffuse and become widely accepted ‘black boxes’ permeating and mediating large
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 212

parts of the social and economic fabric (a process which leads us to take them for granted as
banal, ubiquitous and permanent).
The LTS perspective, moreover, has begun to suggest that the current reconfiguration or
unbundling of infrastructure may represent a reversal of long-term historical trends towards
more territorially integrated and standardised infrastructures within and between cities. Thus
we might read the unbundling of networks as a process through which infrastructures are
taken out of their ‘black boxes’, to be socially and technically reconfigured. This is a ‘messy’
and complex process through which institutional efforts attempt heterogeneously to engineer
social and technical artefacts in profoundly new ways.

ACTOR NETWORK THEORY AND CYBORGIAN

PERSPECTIVES

Actor network theory and cyborgian perspectives add to such an understanding in three ways.
First, they rightly suggest caution as to whether any meaningful distinction between
‘technology’ and ‘society’ or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘cities’ can now be made – so seamlessly are
they interpenetrated. Just as the body blurs with technologies to become a cyborgian whole,
so does the contemporary city. As everything within cities becomes seamlessly integrated
into skeins of technical networks to distant elsewheres, we can no longer assume that ‘cities’,
or, indeed, infrastructures, can be separated or compartmentalised, as in the pure modernist
vision.
Second, such perspectives underline the tenuous fragility of infrastructure networks. They
stress the immense, heterogeneous arrays of ‘actors’ that constitute them. And they emphasise
the continuous effort needed to ensure that all the constituent elements operate to remake
spaces and time in the desired fashion. If unbundled networks are constructing distant energy
resources, water reserves, and transport and communications opportunities, to be targeted
at particular parts of the world within and between cities, we should remember the sheer
magnitude of social effort required by that task. Seeing the impact of the collapse of
infrastructure networks, whether from war or natural disaster, forcefully hammers home their
fragility and the constant efforts required to make them function.
Finally, actor network and cyborgian perspectives help us to understand how infrastructure
networks weave the very constitution of geographical configuration through their subtle
hybrid logic of offering provisional connections between certain points whilst offering nothing
to the gaps, zones and interstices that fail to be enrolled on to them.
In so doing, actor network and cyborgian analyses help us to be sensitive to the subtle,
capillary reach of networked infrastructures, especially as they unbundle into myriads
of customised and fragmented time–space arrangements. We are left in no doubt about
the profound difference between being spatially close to accessing a network – through a
telephone, an electricity point, a motorway slip road, an Internet access point, an airport or
whatever – and the reality of doing so. More and more, it seems, the logic of unbundling
networks means that this infinite distance between spatial proximity and network access is
closely woven into the fabric of urban life.
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 213

Thus many social and economic worlds within cities, particularly (but not exclusively) in
the cities of the South, may be physically surrounded by water pipes, electricity grids, phone
and cable lines, and rapid highways, but utterly excluded from the use of such networks.
It really is a case, as the photograph of electricity pylons in Durban, South Africa shows (see
p. 7), of being physically close but relationally severed.

THE SPATIAL POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF

CAPITALIST URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE

Our third perspective, that of spatial political economy, takes such analyses of the power
relationship surrounding infrastructural development further still. Analysts here offer a
powerful, integrated view of how the production and reconfiguration of infrastructure net-
works is intimately bound up with the production and reconfiguration of cities and capitalist
urban landscapes. Once again, this allows us to overcome overly separated and deterministic
notions of technology and space. Instead, we see both as being intrinsically produced together
within the dynamic political economies of contemporary capitalism.
‘Technology’ or ‘infrastructure’ thus become much more than materially impacting
‘things’. They emerge, rather, as embedded instruments of power, dominance and
(attempted) social control. They are intrinsically geopolitical and social phenomena that
are ‘sunk’ into certain spaces and not others. Cities, moreover, emerge as contested terrains
for capitalist political economy. They are dynamic spaces that are always in a state of uneasy
tension with the infrastructure networks that fill and crosscut them. The traditional view
of cities as bounded spatial ‘containers’ is thus in perpetual dynamic tension with the varying
ability of infrastructure networks to crosscut and unevenly compress space and time barriers
– as in the current period of ‘time–space compression’. Urban spaces, and the geopolitical
corridors between them, are thus full of struggles and contests over the highly uneven ability
to overcome space–time constraints.
Moreover, with the arguments of Castells, Brenner, Swyngedouw, Gillespie and others,
we can clearly begin to see how the changing political economies of urban and infrastructural
development is supporting development logics based on the parallel unbundling of
infrastructure networks and the fragmentation of cities. Castells’s ‘variable geometry’ and
Brenner’s ‘glocal scalar fixes’ are based, at least in part, on restructuring the monopolistic,
integrative infrastructures inherited from the modern ideal. Replacing them, using the power
of new technologies to break down ‘natural monopolies’ in the process, are a widening array
of customised, tailored, unbundled infrastructure networks targeted largely at highly valued
economic and social spaces within and between cities.
Such valued spaces and users increasingly integrate into ‘hub’ and ‘spoke’ networks,
through the ‘tunnel effects’ and ‘global scalar fixes’ of global airline, optic fibre, satellite, rail,
road, sea and, increasingly, energy and water networks. All types of city demonstrate that the
logic also supports the dislocation and distancing of non-valued spaces and users from
networks. Here, again, we come across the relational perspective of time and space that
demonstrates how physical proximity can be combined with relational severing, and how
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 214

geographical distance can be combined with relational intensity (through the ‘tunnel effects’
of high capability infrastructures that operate on the principle of ‘glocal bypass’).
As a last point, spatial political economy perspectives usefully allow us to collapse dualist
distinctions of local and global. They suggest that we are moving from a period when an
infrastructure network was considered coterminously with a Cartesian space or territory to
one where infrastructure hubs, spokes and tunnel effects will increasingly characterise the
links between infrastructure and territory on all spatial scales, from global airline and optic
fibre grid systems to local highway and utility grids. Certainly it is becoming increasingly
difficult to assume that infrastructure networks are coterminous with any particular bounded
definition of territory (be it neighbourhood, city, district, nation or whatever).

RELATIONAL URBAN THEORIES

Our final approach, relational urban theory, further illuminates how the ambivalent tensions
surrounding the construction, use and reconfiguration of infrastructure networks are bound
up within the social construction and development of cities both as places and as sociotechnical
processes. Such theories serve further to debunk the notions that time and space are universally
experienced wholes; that cities as places have any necessary coherence; that we can assume
closely placed activities to be more related than far-off ones; or that we can simply and
unproblematically characterise the ‘wholeness’ of cities.
Relational urban theories also do much to begin illuminating the ways in which the parallel
worlds of intensely interconnected and high-value spaces interweave paradoxically with the
worlds of exclusion and disconnection within the same urban fabric, as our discussion of
Martin Pawley’s ‘terminal architectures’ and Christine Boyer’s ‘figured’ and ‘disfigured’ cities
demonstrates.

C O N C L U S I O N S

To us the multidisciplinary theoretical journey that we embarked on in this chapter leads to

four clear conclusions as to how we might understand the linkages between fragmenting
cities and unbundling infrastructure networks. Crucially for this book, these four conclusions
offer us clear foundations as we embark on the empirical chapters that comprise Part Two.
The first conclusion that all four perspectives have forcefully underlined is the intrinsic
dynamism and seamless interdependence between the ‘urban’ and the ‘infrastructural’, or the
‘social’ and the ‘technical’. ‘Urban infrastructures’ are heterogeneous assemblies of materials,
technologies, social institutions, cultural values and geographical practices. Cities are held
together by intimately linked social and technical assemblages that mutually construct one
another in increasingly seamless ways. This mutual construction makes functionalist separa-
tions of ‘city’ and ‘technology’ as pointless as the separation of the ‘body’ and ‘technology’
becomes in the cyborg perspective. Cities, in fact, are the greatest ‘sociotechnical hybrids’ of
 THE CITY AS SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS / 215

all. Every aspect of urban life is utterly infused with, and dependent on, the heterogeneous
filaments and capillaries of infrastructure networks, all working within subtle patterns of
layered interconnection and mediation (Graham, 1998a).
Within this contemporary urban world, however, the modern infrastructural ideal founders.
Its essentialist notions of Euclidean space and Newtonian time, of functional planning towards
unitary urban order, of single networks mediating some ‘coherent’ city, are paralysed. It is
largely incapable of dealing with the decentred, fragmented and discontinuous worlds of
multiple space–times, of multiple connections and disconnection, of superimposed cyborgian
filaments, within the contemporary urban world.
Second, urban infrastructure networks are only ever temporarily stabilised. Despite
appearances, they are never stable or enduring, at least not without continuous effort to
maintain the connective channels they support. Their complexity, and the difficulties involved
in making them work to sustain control across time and space, often cause destabilisation,
turmoil and even breakdown. Moreover, during periods of social and economic trans-
formation, infrastructure networks are vulnerable to obsolescence, even though, as ‘sunk
capital’, their physical legacies are often very enduring parts of the urban scene.
Third, the above discussion has added much to our understanding of the contemporary shift
towards splintering urbanism, with its parallel and mutually constitutive processes of network
unbundling and urban fragmentation. In the contemporary world, where distant infrastructural
connections are becoming ever more highly valued in mediating exchanges and interactions,
a central urban dynamic is emerging to assert the primacy of utterly reliable ‘glocal’ connection
with places elsewhere. The central dynamic of urban fragmentation and infrastructural
unbundling is thus a reduction of emphasis on standardised connective fabrics within cities.
At the same time, emphasis on specialised, high-capacity connections between highly valued
points within the city, and between those spaces and elsewhere, is massively inflated.
This transition manifests itself through innumerable constructions and reconstructions of
actor networks and sociotechnical assemblies, and through the destabilisation and ‘unblack-
boxing’ of many previously taken-for-granted large technical systems. It is manifest through
the changing spatial political economies of infrastructure development. And it is becoming
subtly woven into the connective fabric within and between many cities.
Correspondingly, as the networked infrastructure within and between cities becomes
reformulated in this way, physical and network spaces often tend to secure themselves off from
the remainder of the urban fabric, either subtly (through access control technologies and
intensifying surveillance), or overtly (through walls, ramparts, carefully controlled access
ways, gates and ‘zero tolerance’ policing). Highly valued spaces, zones and buildings often
retreat from the space–times and circuits of the wider city, which are seen as threatening and
potentially disruptive of their seamless integration into the exchanges and interconnections
of international capitalism. For such spaces and users ‘mobility becomes the primary activity
of existence’ (Thrift, 1996a, 286). Transformations in the orientation and structuring of
urban infrastructure must simultaneously involve reshaping the social organisation of power
relations in both time and space and the heterogeneity of the networks.
We are thus able to understand why, currently, we see great attention to connecting parts
of cities and certain urban spaces to distant elsewheres whilst, at the same time, there is a
widespread parallel collapse of the notion of the integrated, coherent city served by single,
 UNDERSTANDING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 216

harmoniously developed, infrastructure networks. As indirect relations mediated by

infrastructure become increasingly important, drawing individual cities and urban sites into
the planetary urban universe, so borders are increasingly mutually supported by the ramparts,
walls and barriers of urban physical space and the relational disconnection of networked,
infrastructural space. It has, in short, ‘become increasingly difficult to imagine cities as
bounded space–times with definite surroundings, wheres and elsewheres’ (Thrift, 1996a,
290).
But connections elsewhere remain astonishingly uneven. They fold and warp the urban
fabric into a multiplex of time–space circuits through which social agents try to wield power.
In this scenario, to be disconnected from circuits or exchange and interaction threatens to
be an ever more absolute form of exclusion as network-mediated forms of exchange become
utterly normalised.
For those residents of Boyer’s ‘disfigured city’, for example, who are not the privileged
focus of customised infrastructures, of bypass optic fibre networks, of broadband telecom
services, of modern water connections, of electronic financial and economic power or of
rapid automobile or airline connectivity the greater porosity of their city space to flow and
exchange may mean little more than buying foreign fast food and watching cheap, imported
television (Massey, 1993). The rump of public network monopolies, be they for street space,
energy, telecommunications, transport or water, threaten to offer little by way of salvation
as they, too, re-engineer themselves into corporate or quasi-corporate bodies addressing the
infrastructural needs of those within the circuits of the ‘figured’ city.
The final conclusion of this chapter draws from the emphasis of all four perspectives on
dynamically working through social relations in action, rather than the use of essentialised
and ossified notions of scale, space, technology, the city, agency, structure or identity. It is
clear that only by maintaining linked, relational conceptions of infrastructural networks,
technological mobilities and urban spaces and places shall we ever approach a full under-
standing of the changing relationships between them. This is especially so in the present
period of apparent infrastructural unbundling and urban fragmentation when older notions
of the natural relationship between territories, temporalities and networks become utterly
anachronistic.
For Latour’s ‘skein of networks’ (1993, 120) involves relational assemblies linking
technological networks, spaces and places, and the space- and place-based users of such
networks, in complex, folded geographies of exchange, connection and disconnection. The
linkages between place and technologically mediating networks are so intimate and recom-
binatory that defining space and place separately from technological networks soon becomes
as impossible as defining technological networks separately from space and place. It is especially
so when linked processes of infrastructural unbundling and urban fragmentation are under
way. Thus unbundled configurations of infrastructure networks continuously and subtly
recombine with the production of new configurations of urban space; understanding one
without the other soon becomes impossible.
Part Two takes these perspectives forward and applies them to a range of detailed empirical
analyses of the linked dynamics of unbundling of networks and fragmenting cities in a variety
of contexts around the world. This starts in the next chapter with an exploration of the
changing social landscapes of contemporary cities.
PART TWO
EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING
METROPOLIS

Plate 9 The World Financial Center at Battery Park City on the south-western
tip of Manhattan, New York. A classic ‘premium network space’, the Center is an
enclave configured for companies in global financial services and their employees.
The development is equipped with its own infrastructure: schools, services, shops,
marina, park, freeway connections, internal private winter garden and a skywalk
link across the highway to the World Trade Center. Photograph: Stephen Graham

6 Social landscapes of splintering urbanism

7 ‘Glocal’ infrastructure and the splintering of urban economies
Authority produces space through . . .
cutting it up, differentiating between parcels
of space, the use and abuse of borders
and markers, the production of scales (from
the body, through the region and the
nation, to the globe), the control of move-
ment within and across different kinds
of boundaries, and so on.
(Steve Pile, 1997, 3) The network society has exploded limits,
between human and non-human, between
nation states, between the cultural and the
material. But, under the motive force of the
global corporations in the new sectors, it
has created a new border: between those
included and those denied access.
(Scott Lash, 1999, 344)

[Infrastructure] networks have tended to

enhance the power of the powerful while
reducing the negotiating power of the weak.
It is also extremely important to recognise
the part such networks play in allowing
the separation of consumption from pro-
duction, rich from poor, and a consequent
apathy towards what were once considered
to be civic and social obligations for one
another.
(Ellen Dunham-Jones, 1999, 11) The modern promise that sanctioning the
pursuit of self-interest brings freedom is
mocked by the uncrossable boundaries
surrounding every territory of modernity’s
own cipher, the metropolis.
(Alan Waterhouse, 1996, xxi)
6 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING
URBANISM

Plate 10 Gated condominium complex in central São Paulo,

Brazil. Photograph: Stephen Graham

A deepening spatial segregation between rich and

poor, both within countries and in the world as a
whole, defines our era, and enhances central power
just as it peripheralizes those left behind, creating
new polarizations of wealth and poverty that have
only increased in the past two decades.
(Bruce Cumings, 2000, 19)

The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the dis-
placed or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee,
no distance is more awesome than the few feet across
borders or frontiers.
(Homi Bhabha, 1992, 88)
 S O C I A L D I M E N S I O N S O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L
U N B U N D L I N G A N D S P L I N T E R I N G U R B A N I S M

With this chapter we begin to address the task of Part Two, which is to develop two thematic
empirical analyses of processes of splintering urbanism in practice in a variety of urban contexts.
The challenge will be to explore how the revolution in urban infrastructure and technology
is bound up with urban social change in cities across the world. We will look, in particular,
at shifts in the social ‘landscapes’ of contemporary cities, drawing on examples from North
America, Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The chapter addresses two questions. First, how are processes of infrastructural unbundling
involved in wider processes of urban social change? Second, in what ways are the social
landscapes of cities being reconfigured in parallel with the widespread unbundling of
infrastructure networks?
In attempting to explore how urban splintering and infrastructural unbundling mutually
support each other, this chapter has three parts. First, we set the scene by analysing three
key social aspects of parallel processes towards infrastructural unbundling and splintering
urbanism: wider trends towards social polarisation and the construction of secessionary
network spaces; the withdrawal of network cross-subsidies; and the socially polarising
influences of information and communications technologies (ICT).
Second, we review how urban ‘spaces of seduction’ and safety are being ‘bundled’ together
with advanced and highly capable premium networked infrastructure (toll highways,
broadband telecommunications, enclosed ‘quasi-private’ streets, malls, and skywalks, and
customised energy and water services). Together, these linked complexes of networks and
spaces provide secessionary ‘network spaces’ for elites and upper-income groups in the
contemporary metropolis – shopping malls, entertainment and leisure developments, gated
communities, ‘smart’ homes and the like.
Finally, we look at some of the spaces being left behind by infrastructural unbundling and
urban splintering. We explore the ‘network ghettoes’ of the contemporary metropolis and
analyse those parts of cities which are home to the people who are being marginalised by the
reconfiguration of contemporary cities.

U R B A N L A N D S C A P E S I N T H E ‘ A G E O F
E X T R E M E S ’ : S E C E S S I O N A R Y N E T W O R K E D
S P A C E S A N D T H E W I D E R M E T R O P O L I S

Many parts of the ‘Third World’ today show Europe its own future.
(Ulrich Beck, 1999, 3)

The 447 mainly American dollar billionaires listed by Forbes magazine in 1996 had a stock wealth
in excess of the annual income of the poorest half of the world’s 6 billion people.
(Coyle, 1997, 11)
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 221

To understand the social importance of parallel trends towards splintered urbanism and
unbundled infrastructure we need to stress three supporting trends. The first is the broader
shift towards social and geographical polarisation within decentralising and polycentric urban
landscapes across the world. Robinson and Harris argue that roughly 30–40 per cent of the
population in ‘core’ developed nations, and rather less in developed countries, are now
effectively ‘tenured’ within the global economy, with jobs that offer livable incomes, some
degree of security and opportunities to maintain or expand consumption (2000, 50).
In a second ‘tier’ some 30 per cent in the core and 20–30 per cent in the global periphery
form a growing army of ‘casualised’ workers facing chronic insecurity and the absence
of social or health benefits. And in the third ‘tier’ – representing some 30 per cent in the
core and 50 per cent on the periphery – people are structurally excluded from productive
activity and ‘completely unprotected from dismantling welfare and developmentalist states’.
Robinson and Harris define these people as the ‘superfluous’ population of global capitalism
(ibid.).
The United Nations reported in 1999 that, between 1995 and 1999, the world’s 200
richest people doubled their wealth to more than US$1,000 billion. At the same time 1.3
billion people continued to live on less than a dollar a day. In 1983 the resource disparity
between the world’s richest fifth and the world’s poorest fifth stood at 30 : 1; by 1990 this
had shifted to 60 : 1; by 1999 it was 74 : 1 and the picture was continuing to worsen (Denny
and Brittain, 1999).
The new socioeconomies of all cities thus seem to be characterised by increasing rewards
for socioeconomic elites and affluent professional classes but increasing impoverishment for
social and geographical groups unable to qualify as the so-called ‘symbolic analysts’ of
changing urban socioeconomies (Reich, 1992). The inevitable diagnosis, according to David
Massey (1996), is that we live in an urban ‘age of extremes’. The withdrawal of wholesale social
redistribution, especially in Western nations, is combining with polarising urban labour
markets, ‘ushering in a new era in which the privileges of the rich and the disadvantages of
the poor are compounded increasingly through geographic means’. Such trends are not at
all surprising when they are placed against the backcloth of urban economic restructuring and
the emergence of new, intensified patterns of urban poverty and social polarisation (see
O’Loughlin and Friedrichs, 1996; Castells, 1998; Sassen, 2000b).
Across the cities of the developed world, for example, Enzo Mingione notes a ‘growing
conflict between new urban poverty and the system of citizenship and social inclusion’ (1995,
196). Whilst there remains considerable variety of experience between nations and cities,
dual labour markets have, in many cases, combined with welfare restructuring to undermine
the fragile webs of more inclusionary urban development built up during the postwar boom
and the elaboration of welfare states and public housing (Musterd and Ostendorf, 1998). At
the same time, real incomes have often dropped for the poorest communities reliant on poor-
quality, part-time service jobs and public or social housing (Sassen, 2000b).
Not surprisingly, this ‘age of extremes’ is being etched into social landscapes, both between
and within nations and cities, especially as urban populations grow across the world (UNDP,
1999, 36). The result, in cities in virtually all areas of the world (developed, developing,
newly industrialising and post-communist), seems to be an increasingly ‘acute sense of relative
deprivation among the poor and heightened fears among the rich’ (Massey, 1996, 395).
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 222

Doel and Clarke (1998) call this the pervasive ‘ambient fear’ of the postmodern city, a feature
related also to the international migration and mixing of wide ranges of ethnic and cultural
groups in the city.
Such fears and practices threaten to support the separation of the socioeconomic circuits
of the rich and the poor in the metropolis. ‘In the social ecology now being created around
the globe,’ predicts Massey, ‘affluent people increasingly will live and interact with other
affluent people, while the poor increasingly will live and interact with other poor people. The
social worlds of the rich and poor will diverge’ (1996, 409). Shifts towards liberalised housing
markets seem likely to encourage further such polarisation by pricing lower-income groups
out of higher demand and higher-valued spaces whilst, at the same time, large-scale
redistributive and social housing programmes are undermined or withdrawn in many countries
(O’Loughlin and Friedrichs, 1996).

MUTUALLY SUPPORTIVE PROCESSES:

THE ‘UNBUNDLING’ OF INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE
‘REBUNDLING’ OF CITIES

We create colonies of cohesion.

(Jon Jerde, mall and theme park architect, 1999, 152)

Ironically, however, in many cities, geographical distances between rich and poor may actually
be shrinking as richer groups colonise and gentrify selected pockets of previously poor areas
(see Caldeira, 1994; Smith, 1996). In such cases, richer and more powerful groups, and the
real estate, retail, housing and infrastructure industries that target their markets, are attempting
to use other strategies, as well as simple geographical distancing, to withdraw from what they
perceive as threatening contact with poorer groups.
The result is the attempted piecing together of what we might call hermetically sealed
‘secessionary networked spaces’. These intimately combine built spaces and networked
infrastructures. They encompass malls and business parks as well as the highways and cars that
carry the affluent to the heart of such spaces; gated communities as well as broadband optic
fibre and highway connections elsewhere; downtown skywalk cities as well as customised
energy, water and security services; airports, theme parks and city-size museum complexes as
well as dedicated transit systems and railways.
The production of such secessionary networked spaces enrols security, urban design,
financial, infrastructural and state practices in combination, to try and separate the social and
economic lives of the rich from those of the poor. As secessionary enclaves become more
grandiose and massive – encompassing housing, work spaces, resort and theme park activities,
leisure, entertainment and cultural attractions – Dick and Rimmer (1998) argue, such
complexes represent, in effect, a ‘rebundling’ of cities.
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 223

‘S U B S T I T U T I N G T H E C I T Y B Y T H E B U I L D I N G ’: U R B A N

M E G A P R O J E C T S

Jon Jerde – architect of some of the most massive and influential ‘rebundled’ complexes, such
as LA City Walk, California, Canal City Hakarta in Fukuoka, Japan, and the nineteen-storey,
2 million ft2 Core Pacific City complex in Taipei, Taiwan – captures the supporting argument
perfectly. To him ‘the “art” of citymaking disappeared with the segregation-by-use theories
of contemporary real estate’ practices and functional and modern urban planning. ‘Instead
of city,’ he continues, ‘we now have office park, cultural center, government district, etc.’.
The task of his largest projects, as he sees it, is nothing less than to ‘reassemble the city from
the current disarray’ (sic.; quoted in Wieners, 1999, 307; see Jerde Partnership, 1999).
So, just as infrastructure networks become ‘unbundled’, the built spaces of many cities
are tending to become ‘rebundled’. Both processes mutually support each other and the
attempted secession of new, elite, sociotechnical configurations from the wider metropolis.
The result in many contemporary cities – both Northern and Southern – is a mosaic of
‘packaged developments’ (Knox, 1993b): shopping and entertainment malls, affluent housing
complexes, hotels and convention centres, business parks, theme parks, airport complexes,
refurbished heritage and cultural zones, resort complexes, affluent housing enclaves,
administrative districts, etc. Each space tends to be separated off by highways, design strategies
and security practices from the poorer zones which often geographically surround or adjoin
them. This new urban landscape, writes Rowan Moore:

is manifest in shopping malls, airports, new residential enclaves, and in hybrids like the themed shopping
mall or the airport retail area. Each element creates a self-sufficient, artificial, all-embracing experience
that is both controlled and controlling. The space between them is seen as background, as something
you see through a a car window when travelling from one such space to another.
(1999, 10)

Such urban ‘megaproject’ developments represent new, specialised urban development

products, which are rapidly diffusing across the globe through the operation of international-
ising real estate capital and planning and design consultancies (Logan, 1993; Peacock, 2000).
By way of example, Table 6.1 lists the urban ‘megaprojects’ that were under way or planned
in the cities around the Pacific Rim in 1995. The efforts of city authorities to secure build-
ings from ‘star’ architects such as Norman Foster, Frank Gehry or Rem Koolhaas serve to
encourage further the construction of high-status ‘edifice buildings’ as symbolic capital
to demonstrate the dynamism of the host city as a node on global networks of flow (Dunham-
Jones, 2000).
In all such developments the goal is to maximise profitability by carefully packaging enclave-
style ‘total environments’ (Crilley, 1993, 127) encompassing a range of uses, differentiated
according to logics of geodemographic marketing (Knox, 1993b). In this rebundling of cities,
casinos, theme parks, multiplex cinemas, virtual reality centres and hotels and transport
facilities are built together with offices and affluent housing within integrated ‘macrobuildings’
(Cerver, 1998, 29) (see Figure 6.1). Whilst urban areas have spread out and dispersed virtually
‘to the point where territory and metropolis are synonymous’, writes Francisco Cerver, ‘at
Table 6.1 Urban megaprojects under development or planned in Pacific Rim cities, 1995

Project Estimated Developer Estimated cost Approx. development Approx. year

size (ha) (US$ billion) period (years) of completion

Vancouver
Pacific Place 80 Private 2.3 10–15 2005
Coal Harbor 41 Private 0.760 10–15 2005

San Francisco
Mission Bay 127 Public/private 2.0 25 2018

Sydney
Darling Harbour 54 Public/private 1.3 10 1993

Melbourne
Bayside 31 Private 0.670 5–10 In dispute
Melbourne Docklands 150–2200 Public/private 0.860 20 Proposal
minimum

Adelaide
Multifunction Polls 3500 Public/private 3.3–6.6 30 Uncertain

Jakarta
Sudirman central business district 44 Private 3.2 10–15 1995–2007 (phased)

Singapore
Suntec City 12 Private 1.5 10 1995–97 (phased)

Johor Baru
Waterfront City Unknown Private 1.6 15–20 2013

Manila
Asia World City 173 Private 22.0 25 Uncertain

Kuala Lumpur
City centre 40 Public/private 1.2 15–20 2013
Table 6.1 continued

Project Estimated Developer Estimated cost Approx. development Approx. year

size (ha) (US$ billion) period (years) of completion

Bangkok
Muang Thong Thani 750 Private 1.5 5 1995

Shanghai
Lujiazui 170 (core); Public/private Unknown 7–30 Established by 1997;
2800 (district) complete by 2030

Tokyo
Tokyo Bay waterfront projects 448 Public/private 64 5–20 2004
(including Tokyo Teleport Town)

Yokohama
Minato Mirai 186 Public/private 20 17 2000

Osaka
Osaka Technoport 775 Public/private Unknown 20 2010
Kansai Airport 511 Public/private 13.5 25 1994 (phase 1)

Rinku Town 320 Public/private 5.3 25 1994–2000

Source: Olds (1995), 1721.

 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 226

Figure 6.1 The rebundling of cities: how large, packaged developments under single ownership combine
residences, workplaces, malls, restaurants and hotels in a single complex. Source: Dick and Rimmer
(1998), 2313

the same time, within the city, new constructions have appeared which are more “city-
like” than the city itself; that is, they are a distillation and intensification of the concentration
that the city symbolises’ (1998, 29). To him, this process is the ‘substitution of the city by
the building’, a tendency that architects label, following Rem Koolhaas, the shift to ‘bigness’
(ibid., 30; Koolhaas and Mau, 1994, 510).
Thus the planned, corporate environments of business parks are developed with golf
courses, lush landscaping, day care centres, fitness centres and integrated retail and
entertainment spaces (Knox, 1993b). Airports and railway stations are starting to devote
more space to leisure and consumption than to passenger processing. Resorts, malls and
entertainment and theme park complexes mushroom to the scale of mini metropolitan areas
in their own right, with dedicated hotel complexes, transport systems, utility grids, even
airports. And gated communities ‘are packaged with security systems, concierge services,
exercise facilities, bike trails, etc.’ (Knox, 1993b, 9).

A I R - C O N D I T I O N I N G A N D U R B A N S P L I N T E R I N G

In tropical and warm climates, meanwhile, these increasingly integrated transport networks
and urban spaces are now air-conditioned. This, again, tends to exaggerate the social and
technical distance between the cool ‘inside’ – secured by security guards and often accessible
only by air-conditioned car – and the stifling heat of the ‘outer space’ of the poorer districts
and the traditional city (Dick and Rimmer, 1999). In South East Asian cities, for example (at
least before the Asian financial crisis):
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 227

Privatised, high-rise urban space is the core of the market economy. This space commands the highest
land price and so must attract custom. It therefore has to be a comfort zone. . . . The easiest way
to achieve this is to air-condition the space. The aim is to create a microclimate which people will pay
a premium to enjoy. . . . Air-conditioning and the built environment that goes with it has actually
widened the gap between the ‘man-in-the-street’ [sic] and denizens in the urban comfort zone. . . . The
exhalation of hot air [from the vents of air-conditioned buildings] becomes yet a further burden on the
external environment.
(Dick and Rimmer, 1999, 322)

The result, in many emerging cases, seems to be what Badcock calls ‘spatially partitioned and
compartmentalized cities’ (1997, 256). Whilst the United States tends to offer the emblematic
examples of such trends, there are signs that broadly similar processes of social and spatial
change can be observed in India (Madon, 1998; Masselos, 1995), China (Koolhaas, 1998b),
South East Asia (Dick and Rimmer, 1998; Connell, 1999), Australia (Badcock, 1997), the
Middle East (Aksoy and Robins, 1997) and Eastern and post-communist Europe (Castells,
1998; Herrschel, 1998). Such trends are also manifest, to a somewhat lesser extent, in Western
Europe, where welfare and distributive policies, and the legacies of democratically organised
public street systems, retain most power (Keil and Ronnenberg, 1994).

INTERNATIONAL REAL ESTATE CAPITAL AND

ENTREPRENEURIAL PLANNING

Clear production-side forces are shaping the packaging of urban landscapes and the
rebundling of cities. In all the above cases, local and international real estate interests seem
to be intent on packaging together larger and larger luxury spaces of seduction or secession
for the more affluent groups whilst, at the same time, they work harder to secure such spaces
from incursion, or, perhaps more important, the perceived threat of incursion, from the new
urban poor (Logan, 1993; Crilley, 1993).
The collapse of the comprehensive ideal in urban planning also serves to support the
emergence of incoherent enclaves and clusters across the urban fabric. Urban planning
and development agencies, keen to compete entrepreneurially for international tourists, con-
ventions, sports events and favourable media exposure, are everywhere constructing
spectacular flagship projects, set-piece developments aimed at revitalising downtowns or
launching peripheral and ‘postsuburban’ spaces towards economic success (Knox 1993b,
11). Heavy public subsidies, infrastructural contributions and seductive grants are mobilised
by public and public–private development agencies alike, to lure in the international real
estate capital that has the muscle to make such projects work. The predilection of postmodern
architecture for grandiose, inward-looking set pieces further strengthens such trends (Knox,
1993b, 14).
In general, as Boyer suggests, many contemporary planning practices serve to further the
sense of fragmentation within contemporary urbanism. This is particularly so in the United
States, where, as she writes, ‘the city no longer plans for its physical development; it simply
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 228

manipulates zoning bonuses and tax incentives that facilitate the building of huge real estate
developments in ad hoc locations all over town’ (1994, 113). Disjointed, decentralised urban
landscapes thus tend to result, studded with grandiose real estate developments and their
customised infrastructure links. To Michael Dear and Steven Flusty the North American
‘city’, at least, emerges as a ‘partitioned gaming board subject to perverse laws and peculiarly
discrete, disjointed urban outcomes’ (1998, 66). In many cases, they continue, ‘urbanization’
can now be seen to be:

occurring on a quasi-random field of opportunities. Capital touches down as if by chance on a parcel

of land, ignoring the opportunities of intervening lots. . . . [T]he relationship between the development
of one parcel and the non-development of another is a disjointed, seemingly unrelated affair. . . . The
traditional, center-driven agglomeration economies that have guided urban development in the past
no longer apply. Conventional city form, Chicago style, is sacrificed in favor of a noncontiguous collage
of parcelized, consumption-oriented landscapes devoid of conventional centers yet wired into electronic
propinquity.
(Ibid.)

What Pierce Lewis (1983, 2) famously termed a ‘galactic metropolis’ thus emerges. Here
elements ‘seem to float in space: seen together, they resemble a galaxy of stars and planets,
held together by mutual gravitational attraction, but with large empty areas between clusters’.

INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORKS AND

ENCLAVE FORMATION

The establishment of large urban enclaves, whose evident purpose is protecting a specific territorial
circle, reveals the rise of the new paradigm of the occupation and control of space in the ‘network
society’.
(Ezechieli, 1998, 7)

Secessionary enclaves appeal because they are grounded in ‘the presence of an outside,
unbounded, and opposing world against which [they] define the terms of [their] exclusion’
(Pope, 1996, 96). But enclaves can exist only when they are connected to the networked
infrastructures that allow them to sustain their necessary or desired socioeconomic connections
with spaces and people in more or less distant elsewheres. Here the logic of unbundled
infrastructure networks helps such spaces to connect very closely with the highly capable, yet
socially highly exclusive, infrastructure networks necessary to support and sustain their
operation – freeways, telecom networks, water and energy services, and direct links with
international airports. These, as we have seen, are the instruments of local bypass, glocal
bypass or virtual network competition. Thus networked infrastructure becomes directly
embroiled in the secessionary process, supporting the material construction of partitioned
urban environments. This is most visible with urban highways, with the production of
‘substantial interurban spatial barriers [which] aggressively separate and exclude urban
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 229

development from the greater urban continuity’ (Pope, 1996, 181). In Box 6.1 we examine
the particular ways in which contemporary car and highway systems contribute to such urban
partitioning in US cities.

B O X 6 . 1 I N F R A S T R U C T U R E N E T W O R K S A N D
E N C L A V E F O R M A T I O N : ‘ G R I D E R O S I O N ’ ,
‘ S P A T I A L I N U N D A T I O N ’ A N D T H E
C O M P U T E R I S I N G A U T O M O B I L E S Y S T E M
I N U S C I T I E S

The results of the extreme dependence on parks, corporate plazas, high speed roads and
the automobile that characterises many US urban expressways, the now requisite cordon
cities are stark and clear: ‘Vast parking lots, sanitaire surrounding office parks, industrial
continuous or sporadic zones of urban decay, parks, theme parks, malls and subdivisions’
undeveloped or razed parcels, huge public (Pope, 1996, 5).

GRID EROSION

As dedicated freeway drops start to define the

linkage between the rebundled elements
of the polynuclear urban landscape, so, as
Albert Pope writes, each road termination or
residential cul-de-sac increasingly becomes
an exclusive destination on the ‘roadplace’
(1996, 189). This process Pope labels ‘grid
erosion’ (see Figure 6.2). In car-dependent
US cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles,
the relatively even and publicly developed
infrastructure ‘grids’ of the modern ideal are
splintering and being remodelled into what
Pope terms infrastructure ‘ladders’ where
the terminal point of each link is geared
towards exclusively servicing a single seces-
sionary space. Pope argues that the con-
temporary closed urban systems in many US
cities simulate the characteristics of open ones Figure 6.2 The process of grid erosion, according
whilst at the same time carefully limiting and to Albert Pope (1996, 60, 94), through which
controlling unforeseen connections. In ‘prac- open gridded streets (upper) give way to laddered
streets (lower) where every destination has an
tically any street layout’ in contemporary US
exclusive highway entrance/exit
cities, he writes:
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 230

whether the cul-de-sac housing tract, a fragments establish, not traditional urban
peripheral slab city, a gutted, skywalked associations, but oblique suggestions,
CBD, or an upscale suburban office park, subtle omissions, minor exclusions, and
the traditional open urban grid . . . exists incompletion.
in fragmentary form as the remnant of a (1996, 58)
recognizable urban order. These reordered

SPATIAL INUNDATION

Thus a dialectical and mutually reinforcing The result of these processes is that
process is established through which both urban freeway links now funnel the mobile
constructed networks and constructed ‘containers’ of cars directly into the built hearts
spaces turn their backs on the wider metro- of rebundled or packaged developments. ‘The
polis. As Pope further argues, in this process, soft interior of the car itself,’ suggests Rowan
which he terms spatial inundation, ‘in the Moore, ‘is itself a kind of kindred space to
absence of open cities, closed developments the nerveless insides of the shopping malls
no longer function as countersites which are and airports, so that it becomes possible to
both a reflection of, and a retreat from, the lead life as if in a continuous, carpeted, air-
greater urban world. Rather they are now conditioned tube’ (1999, 10). Cars are, in turn,
themselves obliged to be the greater urban now advertised as an elaborate form of mobile
world that was heretofore represented by the body-armour, secure cocoons against the
city and the metropolis.’ To Pope all this means (perceived) risks of the wider urban environ-
that, whilst the urban fabric has been ‘opened ment. Many are now replete with alarms and
up by space’, ironically it has been punctured high-security locks (Ellin, 1997, 38). In cities
by countless closed and exclusive urban like Johannesburg and São Paulo many
developments (ibid., 17). Intervening spaces middle- and upper-income drivers now insist
and traditional streets, in the meantime, which on bulletproofing their vehicles as a response
fail to benefit from customised networked to the rising incidence of car-jackings and
connections often decay and are downgraded hostage taking.
as ‘interstitial voids’ (Pope, 1996, 109).

RECONSTRUCTING THE CAR AS A PARALLEL VEHICLE

OF PHYSICAL AND ELECTRONIC SPACE

At the same time as cars become more communications systems to support com-
defensive, ever more elaborate navigational, munication, transactions, road pricing and
communications and entertainment devices information retrieval on the move. These days
are being integrated into them, to while away more money is spent on equipping such cars
the hours spent in worsening traffic. Luxury with computerised equipment than on the
cars, at least, are gradually being turned engine. ‘The 500 million hours a week that [US]
into mobile ‘cyborg’ digital appliances that Americans spend in their cars represents
are intimately linked into complex computer a huge audience of consumers,’ suggests
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 231

Figure 6.3 Advertisement for the Visteon voice-operated Internet system for US luxury
cars, 1999. Source: New York Times, 14 February 2000

Lappin (1999, 127). This ‘explains why an Figure 6.3 shows a US advertisement
emerging constellation of auto makers, elec- for one such system – Visteon – which was
tronics manufacturers, and telecom providers launched in 1999. Effectively transforming
convert transportation platforms into com- the luxury car into a vehicle in both physical
munications platforms that connect the driver, space and electronic space, Visteon sup-
and the vehicle itself, to the rest of the data- ports wireless Internet access, allowing
sphere’ (ibid.). continuous streams of electronic navigation,
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 232

communication, transaction and information the car’s occupant (s) from the surrounding city
retrieval while on the move. Thus the space (Visteon advertisement, see Figure 6.3).
increasingly common experience of gridlock is At the same time, cars become ever more
rendered much less troublesome: a standstill in central means for drivers to express and
physical space allows users to extend their construct their identities as advertising feeds
influence in electronic space via voice control. into the dominant notion that cars represent
The worlds of electronic finance, navigation, ‘freedom, autonomy, success, potency
e-mail and transactions all, in the words of (sexual and otherwise) and mastery’ (Lupton,
the advert, become ‘superintegrated into your 1999, 61).
[car’s] interior’, heralding the further isolation of

PUBLIC SPACE, SOCIAL CONTROL AND

SPLINTERING URBANISM

Finally for our first discussion, we also need to stress the degree to which splintering urbanism
and unbundled infrastructures are matched by proliferating attempts at the explicit social
control of ‘public’ spaces within the contemporary metropolis – that is, those streets and
pedestrian spaces that were ostensibly configured for more or less free and open access within
the modern infrastructural ideal.
Cities, of course, have always been contested spaces within which dominant power holders
try to stipulate ‘normative ecologies’ of who ‘belongs’ (and who does not) where and when
within the urban fabric (Norris and Armstrong, 1999). Urban ‘public space’ has never been
truly ‘public’. But the urban splintering process is making these normative ecologies more
tightly defined and more self-reinforcing (Graham and Aurigi, 1997). The ‘public’ streets and
spaces of many cities in North America, Australia, the United Kingdom and continental
Europe, and increasingly of Asian, Latin American and African cities too, are giving way to
instrumental quasi-public spaces geared overwhelmingly to consumption and paid recreation
by those who can afford it and who are deemed to warrant unfettered access.
At the same time extraordinary efforts are made to control the incursions and behaviour
of groups not seen to ‘belong’ in such spaces: young men in British towns and cities experience
the scrutinising gaze of CCTV; poor groups are directly excluded from São Paulo shopping
enclaves; thirty ‘dangerous zones’ have been designated in Berlin, giving police extensive
new powers of eviction and search (Grell et al., 1998, 211); homeless people are routinely
expelled from the renovated and privately managed downtown districts of US city centres
(Mitchell, 1997).
In many cases ‘public space’ is now under the direct or indirect control of corporate, real
estate or retailer groups which carefully work with private and public police and security
forces to manage and design out any groups or behaviour seen as threatening to the tightly
‘normalised use’. This generally amounts to the recreation, consumption and spectacle of
middle-class shoppers, office workers and tourists. Within secessionary street spaces those
not seen to belong are actively pursued with the latest CCTV and surveillance technologies
as attempts are made to ‘sift’ the quasi-public spaces in search of people transgressing the
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 233

normative ecologies of the splintered metropolis. ‘The proliferation of CCTV cameras

surveilling city streets do not represent a panoptic gaze,’ write Clarke and Bradford. They are,
instead, ‘a selective gaze, focused on those deemed to be “out of place” and “out of time”’
(1998, 689).
Some now even doubt whether ‘public space’ still exists in certain Western cities (for example,
Los Angeles; see Loukaitou-Sideris, 1993), as city centres become packaged and commodified
for consumption, as enclosed malls start to dominate suburbs, and as middle classes retreat to
cocooned houses and cars, linked via new communications infrastructures. ‘Have we reached,
then, the “end of public space”?’ asks Don Mitchell. ‘Have we created a society that expects
and desires only private interactions, private communications, and private politics, that reserves
public spaces solely for commodified recreation and spectacle?’ (1995, 110).
However, we need to be careful not to assume the inevitable emergence of some universal
urban dystopia. Many cities in Western Europe, for example, where the fabric of traditional
streets and the operation of welfare states retain most resilience, are managing to maintain
relatively open and socially democratic public spaces, even though commercialisation and
privatisation may be encroaching. ‘Spaces in London,’ for example, ‘do retain some semblance
of “public” irrespective of whether they are enveloped in a privatised commercial environment’
(Merrifield, 1996, 67).

T H E W I T H D R A W A L O F N E T W O R K
C R O S S - S U B S I D I E S A N D T H E C O N S T R U C T I O N
O F I N F R A S T R U C T U R A L C O N S U M E R I S M

The second broad trend underpinning the social dimensions of splintering urbanism is the
gradual withdrawal of the practices of social and geographical cross-subsidy that tended to
underpin the extension of networked infrastructures under the modern infrastructural ideal
(Schiller, 1999a). ‘The present trend toward privatization is likely to end all such subsidies,’
writes Kalbermatten. ‘In the absence of effective regulation (a real risk in most developing
countries), privatization is likely to result in efficiency gains and better service for those who
already have service or who can afford to get connected to the existing system. The urban
poor will again be overlooked’ (1999, 15). An example comes from the South African town
of Stutterheim. Here, post-apartheid privatisation of water ‘was carried out in such a way that
a large foreign firm “cherry picked” the lucrative white and colored areas which receive
dependable water supplies at present, but which left much of the official Stutterheim township
unserved’ (Bond, 1998, 162).
As infrastructure services are developed as commodities to be offered at a price within
markets, the ideals of universal tariffs and service are remodelled, just as the notion of the
territorial monopoly unravels. Cross-subsidies between profitable spaces and routes are
withdrawn and a project-by-project logic tends to replace the analysis of whole urban
infrastructure grids and services. Affluent consumers often attempt to exercise their buying
power by purchasing new, customised, private services that precisely meet their expanding
needs to extend their powers in time and space.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 234

Infrastructure industries, offering what were previously assumed in many cases to be public
or quasi-public goods – city streets, urban highways, public transport networks, electricity or
gas services, telecommunication links, and the like – thus start to ‘mimic the market
segmentation strategies of their private sector counterparts’ (Christopherson, 1992, 274).
Susan Christopherson, writing about retailing and banking services in the United States,
captures this shift well when she says that:

the imperatives of the US investment system are associated with firm strategies that target low-risk, high-
profit markets and discriminate among clients and customers, gearing product and service costs to profit
and risk potential. Whilst these strategies are not new, the ability to target markets has been significantly
enhanced by technological innovations and sophisticated market research.
(1992, 274)

As in other service industries, shifts are thus occurring towards differentiated ranges of highly
symbolic infrastructural services, offering wider and wider choices of tailored infrastructure
services, often within internationalising niche markets. Infrastructure services become less
and less a basic means to sustain and socially reproduce modern life and more and more a
means to support and construct diverse cultural identities and politics. Clearly, along with the
automobile, it is broadcasting and telecommunications, as the dominant media of cultural
production, that are leading this shift towards the splintering of mass markets under forces
of global capitalism and privatisation (satellite television, pay-per digital television, the
Internet, global telephone competition, mobile communications, interactive television, etc.).
But street, transport, energy and water services are being remodelled in many cases, too.

FROM NETWORK CROSS-SUBSIDIES TO ‘FISCAL

EQUIVALENCE’

In some contexts like the United States, affluent social groups are tending to grow more
resentful of traditional forms of redistributive local taxation. In particular, they may start to
demand practices of ‘fiscal equivalence’ – ‘where people and businesses get what they pay for’
(Mallett, 1993b, 407) – rather than socially or geographically redistributive notions of
universal service development. Thus, as cross-subsidies are withdrawn, increasingly ‘if you
can’t afford services you do not get them’ (Mallett, 1993b, 405).
Within liberalised infrastructure regimes, above all, infrastructures and services start to be
developed on the basis of the price of delivery and the desire for maximum profits: explicit
social redistribution tends to be withdrawn from the equation. In fact, it could be argued
that cross-subsidies are often reversed; they now often go from poorer communities paying
sales, income and municipal taxes, and towards the construction of secessionary network
spaces, with their tax breaks, public grants and subsidies, and intensive private and public
investment.
The dynamics of contemporary urban growth and change, and in particular the high levels
of wealth of the new growth spaces of many cities, are leading to increasing infrastructure
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 235

demands which cannot be met within the constraints of the modern public infrastructural
ideal. In most, ‘local government has not been able to respond quickly enough to satisfy the
needs of developers’ (Mallett, 1993b, 405). Instead, in many cases, private firms and
developers are working together, often with financial and political support from official local
governments, to construct networks and spaces that are customised specifically to the needs
of the upper-income social and economic groups who are the target users. Mallett, speaking
from the point of view of the growth of privatised, special infrastructure bodies in US cities,
argues that this process of private governance formation amounts to the construction of a
‘parallel local state’. He points out that:

some residents and businesses have been able to afford to buy services for themselves and, in the process,
have been able to provide such services quickly and in a manner that gives them a high degree of control.
. . . Thus, residents of postsuburbia are demanding and paying for exclusive services and regulations,
and businesses are demanding and paying for enhanced mobility for workers and customers on the
fringe, and better services in the core.
(1993b, 405)

Thus, as Glancey (1997) suggests, in many Western cities ‘those of us with money and a
degree of health and security are offered an ever increasing choice, not only of things but
of ideas and ways of ordering our lives’. But people and spaces who tend to benefit from
the modern ideals of universal connectivity and social access at standard tariffs tend to lose
out as cross-subsidies are withdrawn – a process known as the ‘rebalancing of tariffs’. Costs
for them tend to rise and new investment focuses elsewhere on servicing the emerging
secessionary enclaves of richer socioeconomic groups.
In short, infrastructural policy and regulation seem to be losing their social content as
regulators in many cities, countries and regions construct markets for niche services developed
unevenly across space. In many cases, neoliberal notions of social welfare have triumphed;
competition is the means to maximise benefits for all in previous territorial monopolies. The
United Kingdom’s water services regulator, Ofwat, for example, has argued that:

it would be unfair to other water customers if general tariff policy were to reflect social objectives. These
should be health and social service policy. Any costs from providing support to customers with particular
needs should be met by the appropriate agency, and not by the water customers generally.
(Ofwat, 1990)

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF INFRASTRUCTURAL

CONSUMERISM

When power is moving between different bits of the value chain, you need to own the whole value
chain.
(President of Time Warner, 1998; source: John Langdale,
personal communication)
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 236

There has been a notable shift from treating the user population as a largely homogeneous
group of citizens, with notional or formal rights, to a heterogeneous group of consumers,
carefully differentiated according to how lucrative they are to serve. Essential resources
like energy, street space, highway space, electronic communications and water become
commodified to be distributed through markets. Not surprisingly, virtually all entrepre-
neurial activity and innovation attempts to meet the needs and desires of profitable groups,
and the geographical spaces they inhabit, through ‘the introduction of new tariffs, products
and styles of service which vary across space, time and customer classification’ (Marvin and
Guy, 1997).
In telecommunications, for example, it has been shown recently that the newly liberalised
communications markets in US city regions are marked by mosaics of extreme unevenness.
Providers are seeking to ‘cherry-pick only the most lucrative business and professional
customers’ from across the urban landscape (cited in Schiller, 1999a, 52). Upper-income
spaces and buildings are targets of vast investment in broadband infrastructure and services
(dedicated ‘T-1’ Internet trunks, cable Internet, digital subscriber lines, and the rapidly
decreasing cost of international communications); poorer parts of cities are prone to
underinvestment, deteriorating service quality and being disproportionately affected by the
rising relative costs of local communications (Schiller, 1999a, 55).
Such dualisation is underpinned by the widespread shift from the standardised marketing
of services to all to sophisticated marketing precisely targeted at socioeconomically affluent
and highly profitable groups and areas. AT&T, for example, reorganised their approach after
realising that they made 80 per cent of their $6 billion annual profits from 20 per cent
of their customers (Schiller, 1999a, 54). The shift is also supported by the attempts of
cross-media alliances – for example the merged AOL–Time Warner group – to take advantage
of technological and financial ‘synergies’ in offering high-value customers whole baskets of
services on a single ‘one-stop shop’ contract basis. In the United States, for example, John
Donaghue, the CEO of MCI (part of WorldCom), stated that ‘we’re going to change our
focus from being omnipresent to the entire market to talking to the top third of the
consumer market that represents opportunities in cellular, Internet and entertainment’
(quoted in Schiller, 1999a, 54). Dan Schiller calls these consumers the ‘power users’. He
defines them as:

high value residential customers who spend lavishly on a basket of telecommunications and information
services, typically including (on an annualized basis) $650 on cellular; $500 on local wireline phone
service; $400 on long distance telephony; $375 on cable, pay-per-view and video-on-demand; $250
on paging; as well as hundreds of additional dollars on online access, newspapers, magazines, and fiction.
(1999a, 54)

Clearly, there are likely to be mutually reinforcing connections between the construction of
secessionary enclaves in cities and uneven investment and innovation within liberalised
infrastructure markets. ‘Premium’ infrastructure services like electronically tolled highways,
broadband and mobile telecommunications, and sophisticated water and energy services, are
likely to be configured largely to the needs of the secessionary spaces and high-income groups
of the changing metropolis. Infrastructure firms, now keen to construct or ‘reposition’
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 237

successful brands, are eager to adopt the advertising and public relations techniques of
retailers, taking the homogeneous infrastructure product and customising its identity to
specified socioeconomic groups, using the language of geodemographics. Users become
carefully segregated and categorised according to profiles of what suppliers see as their needs,
desires and profitability. Service provision becomes a means of tailoring packages of services
to the most profitable target markets. All sorts of services are becoming ‘unbundled’ which
previously offered a single set of prices and conditions to all customers. United Kingdom
supermarkets have even suggested charging more for groceries at ‘peak’ times of the day to
deter ‘cash-poor but time-rich’ customers from getting in the way of ‘cash-rich but time-poor’
professional people (Garner, 1997).
Customer loyalty cards, electronic ‘smart’ cards, bulk discount schemes, discounts for
frequent users, geodemographic profiling, multiple tariffs and packages, concentrating on
adding value for profitable users – the litany of marketing-speak quickly starts to define the
uneven spatial and temporal access to previously ‘bundled’ and ‘public’ networks and services.
Strange new alliances emerge here as infrastructure firms seek to survive the turmoil of market
competition by connecting with other sectors like retailing and financial services (see Table
6.2).
In the process, individual infrastructure services are likely to become individually packaged
with other services to tempt the loyalty of the most profitable users. In the UK utility industry,
for example, ‘a well-known brand need not be an existing utility; it could be Virgin, Tesco
[supermarket], the Halifax [financial services] or the AA [automobile services]. Single
diversified service providers could soon offer electricity, gas, water, telephony, cable TV,
home security, home shopping and home banking’ (Brooke and Nanetti, 1998, 56).
In short, multiservice ‘rebundling’ for selected affluent groups may replace the territorial
and socially equalising ‘bundling’ of social infrastructure monopolies during the modern
ideal. Infrastructure connections to profitable households here become a platform for more
advanced and profitable incursions into value-added services: ‘many see electricity and gas as
little more than a low profit, low excitement product whose main purpose is to serve as a “foot
in the door” for selling households a whole spectrum of more interesting and more lucrative
commodities’ (Brooke and Nanetti, 1998, 56).
In the case of energy services, for example, new technologies of virtual network competition
are likely to allow services to be much more precisely tailored to the individual needs of
affluent households. As Small argues, the key to maximising profitability for new market
entrants will be using the new control capabilities of information technology to deliver
carefully tailored energy, communications, financial, entertainment and security services,
geared precisely to the needs of the most affluent segments of the market:

by making it possible to monitor and control individual appliances, telecommunications will allow
energy tariffs to be tailored to an individual application, instead of being determined by the time of day.
Encouraging new energy demand means catering for households with special applications – be it orchid
houses, swimming pools, or applications yet unknown. Wireless technology is well suited to reaching
a small number of households with special needs.
(1996, 20)
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 238

Table 6.2 The alliances formed in the UK’s newly liberalised electricity market as previous territorial
monopolies form alliances with other sectors – newspapers, retailers, municipalities, charities, financial
services companies – and attempt to make inroads into each other’s markets, 1998

Company The situation so far Alliances/Offers

British Gas British Gas advertising dominates the opening of British Gas has launched
the electricity market. More than 400,000 Goldfish, ‘the fastest growing
customers have signed for electricity from British new credit card in Britain’. It
Gas, and, according to the company, a further has deals with Sainsbury’s
1.5 million have registered interest and Mencap

East Midlands Sterling Gas has been relatively successful in local No deals
(Sterling Gas) areas, with around 150,000 customers, but East
Midlands has not begun marketing electricity.
Campaigns to date have been in local areas only

Eastern Electricity Eastern claims 200,000 electricity customers. It Eastern has a green tariff –
was the most successful entrant in gas, with about Ecopower. It is offering
1 million customers. It is marketing nationally as Lionheart electricity in
areas open up, although the doorstepping it partnership with RJB Mining.
carried out in gas has been scaled down. It is Alliance with Barclaycard
carrying out more telesales for electricity

London Electricity London is about to launch a marketing campaign, London has a deal with Alliance
and announce tariffs for outside its region. Its & Leicester – the free energy
campaign will be in and around the Greater London mortgage
area. London Electricity Gas has just under
250,000 customers

Manweb See ScottishPower

Midlands Electricity Midlands’ offering is based around its ‘Save Midlands’ Save Your Energy
your energy brand’, a loyalty programme devised offers discounts on Orange
by MEB. Widespread advertising remains local, telecoms, and energy-efficient
but it is targeting groups of customers through equipment, for example
alliances with, for example, the Historic House
Association, retailer PowerHouse and CalorGas

Northern Electric Northern marketed its dual fuel deal aggressively Northern has alliances with
and has signed up 350,000 customers both inside Saga, the Telegraph, local
and outside its area. It is marketing nationally as councils, Vaux and Granada
areas open up Home Technology

Norweb (Energi) Energi has marketed around the north-east, Norweb/Energi has a deal with
plus national areas as they open up Tesco. It will announce another
at the end of the month

Scottish Hydro does not run a domestic gas business. It is Scottish Hydro-electric offers
Hydro-electric beginning to extend its campaign out of the Air Miles
Grampian region into the rest of Scotland but has
no plans to market widely south of the border
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 239

Table 6.2 continued

Company The situation so far Alliances/Offers

Scottish Power ScottishPower will not divulge figures. It is ScottishPower has alliances
marketing nationally as areas open up with Union Energy and Eaga.
It has its own credit card
Seeboard Seeboard is starting its campaign on 28 October. Seeboard has an offer of
(Beacon Gas) This will include television, local radio and stands money off First Choice
in shopping malls, stations, etc. It will concentrate holidays
on south-east areas, London, eastern and southern
Southern Electric Southern will not divulge figures
Swalec Swalec won around 400,000 gas customers, Southern offers Argos Premier
around 150,000 of whom were outside its area. Points. Its products will be
Many of them have signed up for both gas and promoted in Argos stores and
electricity. For those outside, gas was sold as catalogues
part of a dual-fuel package, so the company has
a foothold outside its area
Sweb Sweb has been concentrating on advertising to No deals
retain customers, although its tariffs, according to
Offer’s league table, are very competitive

Yorkshire Electricity Yorkshire has signed up about 100,000 Yorkshire has a deal with
customers ‘from Luton to the borders’ Tandy

Source: Moore (1998), 18, from Utility Week, 16 October 1998.

THE SUPPORTIVE ROLES OF GEODEMOGRAPHICS

Beyond the automobile, media and telecommunications, in many urban areas even more
prosaic infrastructural services such as energy and water suppliers are becoming open to a new
set of cultural aesthetics where consumers may choose from a range of ‘branded’ competitors.
Such firms now seek to differentiate themselves through the allure of lifestyle packages and
precise geodemographic targeting to defined users within and between cities. As part of the
shift from natural monopolies at urban, regional or national scales towards multiple,
superimposed, competing infrastructures, geodemographic techniques adapted from retailing
and financial services are providing the instruments to ‘unbundle’ user populations. Through
the construction of complex user profiles, within geographical information systems (GISs),
it becomes possible to disaggregate the social make-up of places (Goss, 1995; Pickles, 1995).
For infrastructure service providers the imperative, as Golding observes, is now to:

decide how to divide up the market. Segment, then organise your business physically or virtually around
that segmentation. Apply the principle right through the chain of activities surrounding a particular
customer so that each channel (let us say an energy service), segment (the elderly, dual income families),
or sector (utilities) receives an apparently seamless service.
(1998, 19)
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 240

Figure 6.4 Geodemographic targeting: the Acorn system used by UK utilities. Source: Winter (1995), 15

An example, the Acorn classification which is now commonly used by UK utilities, uses
seventeen categories to cover an entire city or region, from ‘wealthy achievers, suburban
areas’, through ‘skilled workers, home-owning areas’ to ‘people in multi-ethnic’ areas and
simply ‘low income’ (see Figure 6.4). The ways in which the metropolitan area of Washington
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 241

Figure 6.5 The segmentation of the

Washington DC Metropolitan Area into nine
discrete ‘lifestyle communities’ using a
geodemographic profiling system.
Source: Knox (1993c), 215–17

DC is segmented into nine distinct ‘lifestyle communities’ by a similar geodemographic

profiling package is outlined in Figure 6.5.
With such packages, census data can be combined with real information of infrastructure
consumption habits to support the direct classification of people and places according to the
rigid categories of geodemographic profiling software. As more and more consumption of
infrastructure is recorded using microelectronic devices, such ‘transactional generated
information’ (TGI) can be used to develop real profiles of individual behaviour, further
supporting the shift towards intensely personalised service and marketing (Crawford, 1996).
The integration of customer databases with call centres and Internet portals allows the creation
of automated mechanisms for subtly, and invisibly, treating consumers differently. A new
system at the South West Water utility in the United Kingdom, for example, means that:
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 242

when a customer rings, just the giving of their name and postcode to the member of staff [a practice
often now automated through call-line identification] allows all account details, including records of
past telephone calls, billing dates and payments, even scanned images of letters, to be displayed. This
amount of information enables staff to deal with different customers in different ways. A customer who
repeatedly defaults with payment will be treated completely differently from one who has only defaulted
once.
(Utility Week, 1995)

Infrastructure planning and the targeting of marketing and service delivery can then be tailored
as directly as possible to meeting the more lucrative needs of profitable market niches, whilst
supporting the reduction of cross-subsidies to unprofitable ones (Graham, 1997). The overall
rationale tends to be to ‘pinpoint concentrations of potentially high-spending customers’ so
that the costs of building or operating profitable infrastructure are minimised whilst the return
is maximised (Winter, 1995, 14).
Thus we see a ‘segmentation’ of consumer identities based on intense scrutiny and
surveillance, even though the categorisations used tend to be outdated, inaccurate and to
reduce people’s identity to a simple equation of anticipated consumption habits (Goss, 1995).
Such a prospect is especially attractive to newly privatised firms or operators in newly liberalised
markets, as the imperative of cost reduction and profit maximisation comes into play. Thus
new roads, telecom lines, and water and energy infrastructures can be built only where direct,
short-term profits are likely to ensue within the fragmented, decentralised terrains of the
polynucleated metropolis.
As Lawrence (1996) suggests, from the point of view of utilities competition, geographical
information and other expert systems offer powerful support for liberalised infrastructure
competition. They allow advanced warning when consumers fall into debt, more efficient fixed
asset management, more careful cross-selling of products and services to profitable market
segments, the building up of lucrative databases to sell in the information ‘market place’ to
other firms, and the tracking of incursions by competitors into the ‘home’ territory and of
the excursions of the firm into others’ ‘home’ territories. ‘When utilities were monopolies,’
writes Lawrence (1996, 20–1), ‘there were few business reasons to invest heavily in building
up intimate knowledge of the various types of customer. The main task to concentrate on was
getting the utility service to the delivery point. Now, if you want to compete in utility markets
across the country you must be in a position to understand what kind of organisations and
users your customers are.’
Such geodemographic strategies support ‘snuggling up’ to the spaces and uses that are
gaining through urban socioeconomic change and progressive distancing from those who are
losing out. They are, in short, ‘increasingly responsible for the spatial ordering of lifestyles’;
they ‘limit . . . individuality and offer . . . a limited number of spatially aggregated models
of identity’ within the city (Goss, 1995, 191). Such practices, in short, tend to ‘petrify social
inequalities’ (Kruger, 1997, 20).
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 243

C Y B E R S P A C E D I V I D E S : I N F O R M A T I O N A N D
C O M M U N I C A T I O N S T E C H N O L O G I E S A S
S U P P O R T S F O R U R B A N S P L I N T E R I N G

This is an informational world where increasingly our self is linked to the world (or divided from
it) through the screen – the glass pane of a car windscreen, the computer terminal or the television
set.
(Crang and Thrift, 2000, 9)

Which brings us to our final supportive trend: the ‘informatisation’ of the city and urban life.
It now seems very clear that new information and communications technologies like the
Internet and mobile communications tend to support broader logics of urban splintering
(see Castells, 1996, 1998). Three reasons can be identified why this is the case.

ACCESS CONTROL, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE

COMMODIFICATION OF INFRASTRUCTURE

First, as we saw in Chapter 4, information and communications technologies provide the

technological supports for the process of infrastructural unbundling itself. The ability to
monitor and charge for the complex transactional paths of individual consumers within
liberalised infrastructure markets is possible only because of linked computerised sensors,
memory banks and telecommunications links. Information and communications technologies
provide the technological means through which meaningful access to customised networks
becomes possible in complex urban situations, whether it be to local bypass networks, global
bypass networks or virtually competitive networks (Graham and Marvin, 1994).
The spread of electronic tracking and surveillance systems, in particular, enables access to
networks to be monitored and controlled with unprecedented precision (Graham, 1998b).
With electronic tagging already being applied to people, pets, babies, farm animals and cars,
and with a range of biometric scanning devices emerging (smart cards, fingerprints, iris or
retina scans, hand geometry scans, thumb scans, voice recognition, DNA testing, digitised
facial recognition, wrist vein recognition, even odour recognition), the potential for city-
wide, national, even international systems of intimate monitoring and control, classifying
individuals into the spaces and times where they are deemed to ‘belong’, is clearly of great
concern (Warf, 2000; Davies, 1995, 62).
In such circumstances Rose (2000, 22) worries about the emergence of a ‘new biology
of control’ which threatens that the worth of individuals will become closely linked with
technical judgements of their biological, genetic or reproductive fitness, or risk of aggression
or deviance, by essentially eugenically constituted science and practice. There is a particular
risk that generalised life and health insurance services will themselves become ‘unbundled’ in
a similar way to networked infrastructures, with premiums and cover based on individual
genetic diagnoses of future risk. After all, just as with infrastructure, ‘cherry-picking’ new
entrants will be able to undercut incumbent insurers by targeting the most profitable and
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 244

low-risk segments of the population, undermining cross-subsidy and mutuality in the process
(Martin, 2000).
But individual profiling is only one element within a burgeoning field of personal
surveillance and control. Biometric signatures, linked with large-scale personal databases, are
already widely embedded in computer systems which are attempts automatically to control
physical access and movement through spaces and infrastructure networks. Ann Davis (1997)
reported that iris-scanning cash machines (ATMs) had been in operation in Japan since 1997.
Inmate retina scanning was in operation in Cook County, Illinois, to control prisoner
movements. The states of Connecticut and Pennsylvania were practising digital finger
scanning to reduce welfare fraud. Frequent travellers between Canada and Montana were
using automated voice recognition for speedier throughput. Hand geometry scans were made
of immigrants entering San Francisco to check for illegal immigration. And Israel used hand-
print biometrics to regulate the flow of workers to and from the Gaza strip (Lyon, 2000).
‘The prospect of interoperable, even networked databases raises a frightening spectre,’ writes
Ann Davis. ‘Our body parts and prints could soon be bought and sold like Social Security
numbers by direct marketers, government clerks, or medical providers. One “harmless” little
retina scan, some ophthalmologists warn, could indicate that a person has AIDS or abuses
drugs’ (1997, 174; see Warf, 2000).

AFFLUENT SOCIOECONOMIC GROUPS, ICTs

AND THE CITY

The consequence of cyberspace may be unfettered movement for some, but for everyone else the
outcome is far less certain.
(Fred Dewey, 1997, 272)

Second, personalised ICT services like the Internet, electronic cash, and computerised banking
and shopping, tend still to remain the preserve of powerful, affluent minorities in nearly all
cities (UNDP, 1999). Whilst ‘new information and communications technologies are driving
globalization,’ writes the UN Development Programme, they are also ‘polarizing the world
into the connected and the isolated’.

T H E I N T E R N E T A S A ‘ G L O B A L G H E T T O ’

This process is creating, in a sense, a ‘global ghetto’ of affluent, largely metropolitan and
technologically integrated users linked to the Internet and other technological systems
(UNDP, 1999, 5). Whilst it is the fastest diffusing medium in history, the UNDP (1999, 63)
still characterise the Internet as a ‘global ghetto’ encompassing only 2 per cent, or 250 million,
of the most privileged and powerful of the the global population – over 80 per cent of whom
live in OECD countries. This global 2 per cent – expected to rise to 700 million by 2001 –
tends overwhelmingly to be relatively wealthy (90 per cent of users in Latin America come
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 245

from upper-income brackets; 30 per cent in the United Kingdom have salaries over
US$60,000). They are highly educated (globally 30 per cent have at least one university
degree – in China the figure is 60 per cent, in Mexico 67 per cent, in Ireland almost 70 per
cent). Male users dominate (62 per cent in the United States, 75 per cent in Brazil, 84 per
cent in Russia, 93 per cent in China and 94 per cent in the Arab states). Users tend to be young
(under thirty as an average age in the United Kingdom and China, thirty-six in the United
States). Finally, dominant ethnic groups tend to dominate Internet use, as do English-speakers
(in 1999 80 per cent of all global web sites were in English whilst only 10 per cent of the
world’s population spoke the language) (UNDP, 1999, 62).
Even in the United States, with one of the most ‘mature’ Internet diffusion patterns, only
40 per cent of all households had a computer in late 1999. However, only 8 per cent of those
earning less than $10,000 had a computer and only 3 per cent of that group had Internet
access (Lazarus and Marinucci, 2000, 3) (see Figure 6.6).
The overwhelmingly market-driven dynamics of the development of ICT networks and
services, a pattern that is dominated by the construction of highly customised and personalised
network solutions geared to the needs of mobile professionals, seems likely to exacerbate
such unevenness. Friedmann (1995) argues that the emergence of such groups in Western,
and increasingly in non-Western, cities needs to be seen as an integral element of a worldwide

Figure 6.6 The correlation between high income and access to the Internet, 1998. Note positive
correlation coefficients for incomes over US$50,000 and negative ones for incomes below US$50,000.
Source: Moss and Mitra (1998), 29
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 246

shift towards the emergence of global spaces of capital accumulation, dominated by

transnational corporations (TNCs), and their associated social elites (see Graham, 1994).
In effect, elite transnational groups are starting to experience interactive, empowering
models of electronic democracy as they strive to be ‘internally egalitarian and communitarian,
and externally effective in exercising political and economic power’ (Calabrese and Borchert,
1996, 250). In what is the closest contemporary approximation to the Habermasian notion
of the bourgeois public sphere, Calabrese and Borchert believe, the:

cosmopolitanism of the new class will be enhanced by its activity on the superhighway. The high spatial
mobility of its members will be mirrored by their high network mobility and activity in the formation
and maintenance of political alliances and economic relations on a highly privatised, translocal and
increasingly transnational basis.
(1996, 250)

P E R S O N A L I S E D I C T S Y S T E M S A S A

‘ P E R S O N A L B U B B L E ’

Increasingly, affluent transnational groups are starting to benefit from the development of
customised broadband ICT technologies through which tailored services are developed,
geared intimately to their intense communication, service and mobility needs (see Kopomaa,
2000). What Eli Noam (1992) calls ‘individually tailored network arrangements’ are already
developing, based on high-capability mobile and Internet services. These are geared to
supporting intensified mobility and combined control and security at home, at work and on
the move. Such systems:

will be packaged together to provide easy access to an individual’s primary communications needs:
friends and family; work colleagues; frequent business contacts, both domestic and foreign; data sources;
transaction programs; frequently accessed video publishers; telemetry services, such as alarm companies;
bulletin boards, and so on. Contact to and from these destinations would move about with the
individuals, whether they are at home, at the office, or moving about.
(Noam, 1992, 408)

The Finnish telecommunication company Nokia is already planning a ‘broadband’ personal

wireless communication system which acts as a:

‘personal bubble’. The customized data environment will follow you everywhere: check in at a hotel
and your Sony PlayStation™ games will be there, saved at the levels that you last played them. Your
address book, correspondence, and favourite movies, and the contents of your company intranet, will
be available anywhere there’s a phone network.
(Silberman, 1999, 148)
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 247

P A R A D O X E S O F C O N N E C T I O N W I T H D I S T A N C I A T I O N

For the groups that can benefit from such technology, access to telecommunication networks,
fast transport networks and cocooned, affluent urban spaces and neighbourhoods becomes
subtly combined. ‘Physically separated by roads and cars, en route from gated community to
enclosed shopping mall, telematics reinforce existing segregations by further reducing
unplanned encounters’ (Crang, 2000, 308). As Elwes puts it:

computer technology was designed to promote and speed up global communication. And yet the effect
is somehow one of disconnection and distance. Individuals increasingly locked into the isolation of
their own homes only make contact with the outside world through telecommunications and networked
computer systems. Not so much distance learning as living at a distance.
(1993, 12, cited in Crang, 2000, 312)

Information and communications technology, enrolled into the urban splintering process,
and backed up by the cocooning effects of cars, homes, offices and packaged leisure spaces,
can thus provide an ‘illusory escape into a private world. The tele-burbanite then is a villain
and victim of telematics at the same time. An isolated individual, cut loose from the sociality
of urban life, separated from the world by the pixilated screen’ (Crang, 2000, 312). To Mark
Dery (1999, 173) ‘the digerati’s clean-room fantasy of retreating into virtual worlds . . .
parallels the theme-parking of urban space’ because it, too, represents a search for risk-free
and sanitised urban life and consumption – a retreat from the unpredictable encounters and
exposures of the global metropolis.
As Richard Skeates (1997) suggests, we therefore need to maintain parallel perspectives
on the collapsing sense of coherence in the city, the growing use of ‘telemediated’ exchange
and the shift towards fragmented and privatised streets, highways and telecommunications
and energy grids. To him:

the more the old ordered world of modernity is represented as having changed into a turbulent and
dangerous postmodern place, the more the new world, represented as the virtual space of cyberspace,
becomes an attractive option. However, this metaphorical domain of order, refuge and withdrawal
manifests itself in the real world as an actual privatisation of space, a documentable removal of space
from what was previously perceived as public, multi-functional and open to space which is private,
monofunctional and closed. . . . Any withdrawal from the real streets of the real city will not be
accomplished through its substitution by a virtual city, but through the mechanisms of privatisation,
security and retreat into the mentality of the fenced and gated compound.
(1997, 15–16)

Christopher Lasch (1994) argues, from the point of view of the United States, that these
trends need to be seen against the wider context of the changing nature of the urban public
realm and labour markets discussed above. In the United States in particular, the mediation
of urban life by information and communications technology has major implications because
such processes may represent the disembedding of elite groups, not just from particular urban
spaces, but also from whole systems of public service provision, public space and national
consciousness:
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 248

at an alarming rate the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 per cent – have made
themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They
send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in
company-supported health plans, and hire private security guards to protect themselves against mounting
violence. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they can no longer use; many
of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s
destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – business,
entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many members of the elite deeply
indifferent to the prospect of national decline.
(Lasch, 1994, 47)

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES

AND ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS OF FINANCE AND
CONSUMPTION

Finally, we need to address the shifts towards polarisation in access to electronic financial
services. ‘As money becomes information etched into computer memories’, so favoured
groups are rushing headlong into a widening universe of electronic transactions (credit and
smart cards, electronic banking, telephone services, Internet retailing and share dealing,
personalised media, e-cash, etc.) that are less and less dependent on location (Thrift, 2000,
282). Excluded groups, meanwhile, risk being marginalised to the physical cash-only and
locally based economy (Kruger, 1997). These trends seem likely to support further the parallel
logics of splintering urbanism and unbundling infrastructures.
In the burgeoning universe of electronically mediated consumption and transactions,
driven by the credit card, the debit card, the smart card and the Internet, services are tailored
to incorporate only those with bank accounts, credit cards, access to information and
communications technologies, and the ability to extend their actions in time and space
electronically (Solomon, 1998). More affluent consumers can thus use their access to ‘virtual
money’ to extend their action spaces to achieve the best possible service and value for money
in retail, financial and other services. Fuelled by liberalisation, Internet-based energy markets
are also growing fast in some states of the United States and in the United Kingdom. As
Nigel Thrift (1996c, 20) suggests, from the point of view of the withdrawal of bank branches
from inner cities in the United Kingdom, a process of electronic ‘super-inclusion’ is occurring
for favoured groups and spaces. At the same time, however, poorer people and communities
face being further marginalised. He writes, for example, that for these groups:

information technology is not a panacea. Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) can only be used to obtain
cash. Telephone banking depends on access to a telephone, and, in any case, is specifically aimed at the
relatively well off; indeed it is being used as a way of ‘cherry picking’ customers. The personal computer
can only be used by the small (and affluent) percentage of the population with a PC and a modem.

In such circumstances banks, shorn of more and more of their physical branch assets, become,
in a sense, ‘nothing more than a conductor of transactions’ (Gosling, 1996, 59). This further
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 249

supports the interpenetration of finance capital and infrastructure and retail capital, within
liberalising, internationalising contexts, as this ‘facility might equally well be provided by
telecoms corporations or on-line service providers’ (ibid.).

S P A C E S O F S E D U C T I O N : T H E P R E M I U M
N E T W O R K E D S P A C E S O F T H E S P L I N T E R I N G
M E T R O P O L I S

With our three broad supportive trends sketched out we are now in a position to look more
closely at the premium networked spaces of the contemporary metropolis – at those sites and
networked spaces that are splintering off from the wider urban landscapes whilst connecting
intimately with international circuits of economic, social and cultural exchange.
In what follows, we explore a range of seven examples which illustrate the geographical
and social diversity of such trends across a broad range of urban contexts. First, we look at
the recent emergence of private, electronically tolled and ‘premium’ urban highways. Second,
we analyse the ways in which the Internet itself is being splintered as it is reconfigured as a
corporate entertainment, consumption and finance system. Third, we explore the proliferation
of ‘private public places’ in atria and skywalk systems. Fourth, we follow this by looking at
new ways of privately managing and regulating downtown street networks to maximise
commercial consumption. Fifth, we look at the growth of theme parks, leisure enclaves and
malls across a range of contemporary cities. Sixth, we examine the growth of gated residential
communities in the cities of both the ‘North’ and the ‘South’. And finally, we analyse the
emergence of the home as a ‘smart’ terminal on customised infrastructure networks.

A U T O M O T I V E S E C E S S I O N : E L E C T R O N I C A L L Y
T O L L E D ‘ S U P E R H I G H W A Y S ’ A N D T H E
‘ D I V E R S I F I C A T I O N ’ O F U R B A N H I G H W A Y
S Y S T E M S

We have already established that the construction of public networks of urban highways tends
to support splintering urbanism. Cities mediated by highways tend to reorient their urban
space towards the dominant logic of freeway access, car parks and the entry of cocooned
automobile users into urban spaces through strict hierarchies of ‘laddered’ flow. Albert Pope
terms this the ‘path to urban closure’ ‘which always terminates in an exclusive destination or
end point’ (1996, 189) – the mall, the corporate parking space, the suburban cul-de-sac, the
fortified house garage.
To Pope, freeways have supported the extension and polynucleation of the metropolis, as
new developments can ‘leap over [the] edge’ of the older urban order, to ‘begin new
autonomous nuclei of expansion’ (1996, 111). The spaces between highways often then
become urban interstices; they are residualised against the redeveloped nodes that the
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 250

highways connect. ‘For the inhabitant,’ he writes, ‘the city literally takes shape around the
path. Through these spiralling vectors, the bewildering complexity of the sprawl is directly
connected to the intimate center of countless private lives. Closure thus has a form, or at least
a mechanism to achieve exclusion’ (1996, 190).
But a new series of urban highways developing across the world in the 1990s take such
exclusionary logics much further, based on the principle of electronic road pricing (ERP). In
these, highway space has shifted from being ‘dead’, public and electromechanical; now it is
‘smart’, digitally controlled, privatised and sold as a priced commodity in a market for mobility
that is increasingly diversified in both time and space. Highway networks and telecom-
munications and computer networks are, in short, converging as the latter are laid over the
former. As a result, a vast process of industrial colonisation is under way as media, transport,
defence and technology corporations seek to position themselves within the burgeoning
global markets for ‘road transport telematics’ (Branscomb and Keller, 1996).
The capabilities of transport telematics technologies now mean that previously homo-
geneous highway networks can be splintered into diverse channels of customised lanes, from
high occupancy vehicles (HOVs) to dedicated bus lanes and lanes only for transponder-
equipped cars (Figure 6.7). Virtual electronic networks of automated sensors, CCTV, tracking
and charging devices and computers are laid over such highways, controlling access and
enforcing financial payment for each use.
This allows private firms, which are increasingly trying to gain political approval for the
development of premium urban road spaces across the world’s major metropolitan regions,
to operate them profitably. Road networks, with all their complexity of flow and pattern,
increasingly become computerised systems supporting new practices of commodification,
control and exclusion. Such practices provide the basis for strategies which differentiate groups
according to the power over space they are seen to warrant, within the new urban political
economy. As Erik Swyngedouw puts it, ‘road pricing, or other linear methods of controlling

Figure 6.7 An unbundled highway, offering many types of lanes for specified classes of user. Source: Toll
Roads Newsletter, March 1998, 1
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 251

or excluding particular social groups from getting control over space, equally limits the power
of some while propelling others to the exclusive heights of controlling space, and thereby
everything contained in it’ (1993, 323).
Developed entirely by private firms to service only the most lucrative nodes within the
urban fabric, these new premium urban highways are thus entirely commodified. Sometimes
the price of the journey varies in real time with demand in the same way as the charges for
telephone calls. This allows developers to guarantee the free flow of traffic, even in the most
congested rush hours when surrounding public highways are gridlocked. Thus affluent
commuters can, in effect, completely bypass the wider public street and highway network by
using their purchasing power to enjoy premium networked connections within the metropolis
(Solomon, 1996) (see Figure 6.8). In Box 6.2 we review a few leading examples of
electronically tolled private highways in North America and Australia.

S P L I N T E R I N G T H E I N T E R N E T : T O W A R D S
A C O M M E R C I A L A N D S O C I A L L Y
S E L E C T I N G M E D I U M

While many still assume the Internet to be an intrinsically egalitarian and democratic medium,
it is being remodelled as a corporately dominated communications medium, as part of a
frenzy of network construction. Between 1990 and 2000, for example, the miles of optic fibre
laid in the United States rose from 2.8 million to 17.4 million. As Dan Schiller argues, ‘the
web is rapidly being redeveloped as a consumer medium. This process is bound up with a
triad of overarching trends within the media economy: multimedia diversification, trans-
nationalization, and the extension of advertising and marketing’ (1999b, 35). Increasingly
these processes mean that the very physical and software architecture of the Internet is being
redesigned so that it can subtly but powerfully discriminate between users, based on their
perceived profitability as users of commercial entertainment and communications services
(see Lessig, 1999). Emy Tseng (2000) argues that this is happening in three ways.

‘CHERRY PICKING’ LOCATIONS FOR BROADBAND

INVESTMENT

First, as we shall see in further detail in Box 6.5, massive investment is creating a broadband
Internet infrastructure that is (at least in the first instance) connected only to more affluent
users and spaces. Because optic fibre access networks cost between US$6,000 and US$10,000
per home passed, access to new broadband Internet services is being carefully deployed only
in more affluent neighbourhoods. New network technologies and protocols are emerging that
allow faster speeds than ever for those connected. But, reflecting its commercialisation, these
new network technologies tend to offer more bandwidth ‘downstream’ (for commercial
entertainment and marketing) than ‘upstream’ (for interaction between citizens). This is
known as ‘the asymmetry of vendor and customer’ (Tseng, 2000, 3).
Figure 6.8 ‘Wormholing’ through the gridlock: the bypassing effect of electronically tolled private
highways. Source: Solomon (1996), 42
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 253

B O X 6 . 2 E L E C T R O N I C A L L Y T O L L E D P R I V A T E
H I G H W A Y S I N N O R T H A M E R I C A A N D
A U S T R A L I A

To understand the ways in which computer- around the world. Here we take a quick tour
ised and electronically tolled highways support of some of these highways, stopping off en
urban splintering, it is necessary to explore the route at Los Angeles, Toronto, San Diego and
leading examples of such highways from cities Melbourne.

LOS ANGELES: THE RIVERSIDE SR 91 FREEWAY

Our first example of the private electronically everything on the freeway at 15’ (Solomon,
tolled ‘premium’ highway is the Riverside SR 91 1996, 42). Tariffs vary according to traffic
Freeway in Los Angeles, developed in 1995 by conditions, from 25c to $2.50 a trip. A much
the company California Private Transportation. wider network of private tolled highways is
This offers an express lane accessible only currently being planned in Los Angeles to
to users with fitted electronic transponders, ‘bypass the congestion that is inevitable on
who receive itemised monthly bills for use of untolled LA freeways’ (Toll Roads Newsletter,
the highway. The route enjoys extra speed, August 1999, 1). Three major new toll roads are
reliability, maintenance and security over the to be developed across main bottlenecks; a
public highways in the city. On it, in rush hour 220 km network of toll roads entirely for trucks
‘you’re doing 65 miles an hour, passing was announced in January 1998.

TORONTO: ELECTRONIC TOLL ROAD 407

In Toronto an even more sophisticated around $1 per 11 km trip, without requiring

highway is now in operation: the 70 km, C$800 them to stop. Tariffs vary automatically, to
million Electronic Toll Road 407 around the peak around main commute periods (at
northern edge of the city. Built to ease around 7c per km in 1997), so ensuring that
congestion on one of the world’s busiest public the use of the highway never exceeds pre-
highways, to which it runs parallel, in-car defined limits, so allowing moving traffic to
transponders automatically charge all users be guaranteed.

SAN DIEGO: THE 1–15 HIGHWAY

Our third example – the 13 km San Diego 1–15 notified on large electronic signs to drivers
highway – is the world’s first to use fully auto- entering the highway. Drivers, in effect, are
matic, real-time, dynamic congestion pricing. buying the right to drive 13 km with guaranteed
Charges for the highway actually vary between flowing traffic, saving twenty to forty minutes
50c and $8.40, according to traffic conditions. per commute. This right is defended by the Toll
Charges change every six minutes and are Roads Newsletter, which argues against the
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 254

‘dogmatic egalitarianism’ of objectors who highways are clearly exclusionary. They tend
‘deny people the option to buy their way to be used much more frequently by higher-
through congestion, and deny everyone the income than by lower-income groups, as
benefits of the kind of flexible pricing that we the example of SR 91 in Los Angeles shows
use to social advantage in producing our (see Figure 6.9). In that case, just over 10
foods, our fuel, our housing, and indeed most per cent of the lowest income groups used
of our goods and services’ (4 April 98). the highway for more than 40 per cent of
The social impacts of such networks on their trips along the urban corridor whilst
mobility patterns in the city are fairly easy to over 50 per cent of the higher-income group
predict. Not surprisingly, electronically tolled did so.

>

<

Figure 6.9 The social bias of the SR 91 highway, showing how it is used largely by wealthier
socioeconomic groups. Source: SR 91 Web site at
http://airship.ardfa.calpoly.edu/~jwhanson/sr91main.html

MELBOURNE: TRANSURBAN CITYLINK

Some of the wider linkages between suburbs and the city centre with a direct link to
electronically tolled ‘superhighways’ and the city’s international airport. David Holmes
splintering urbanism are illustrated in our final argues that the project ‘normalises and legiti-
example of an e-highway: Melbourne’s private mates new tolerances for what the broad
Transurban CityLink network. This highway, base of the population may be prepared to see
which opened in 1999, offers a 22 km elec- being commodified’ (1999, 1). It also creates
tronically tolled road system linking affluent ‘the conditions for even greater cycles of
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 255

dispersal, concentrating shopping and con- street ‘is replaced by the heightened private
sumption into fewer and fewer zones – the consumption of media of all kinds’ (ibid.).
mega shopping malls’ that the highway directly In effect, these examples suggest that we
connects. are gradually starting to see new technology
Holmes goes on to suggest that in ‘by- and privatisation combining to force through
passing the traditional agora-like markets and the unbundling of integrated public highway
parking-based streetscapes’ CityLink ‘further systems. Extrapolating such trends forward,
privileges the superregulated private spaces we can envisage the emergence of what Toll
of shopping complexes – another cocoon Roads Newsletter calls ‘a diversified highway
to which the freeway is the link’. To him this system’ where ‘operators can provide lanes
‘cocooning’ of Melbourne’s geography, now to meet the needs of its customers . . . road
backed up with traffic restrictions on old streets operators will be able to give you weather
parallel to CityLink, to force motorists on to the reports, make or change motel reservations
commodified highway, threatens to support that suit your route, and give you spoken
an ever more fragmented and dispersed city directions to the destination of your choice’
where embodied association on the open (1998, 1).

MEDIA CONGLOMERATES AND THE CONSTRUCTION

OF PRIVATE OVERLAY NETWORKS

Second, major media conglomerates are effectively building their own parallel Internet
infrastructures so that they can offer their customers a portfolio of Web sites and services that
they control and profit from. In order to overcome bottlenecks encountered on the Internet,
companies like Akamai and iBeam are developing systems that allow large corporate customers
effectively to bypass the public Internet infrastructure (Tseng, 2000). The new private
networks deliver much faster services to selected users through local cacheing (that is, storing
high-demand content on a range of servers distributed near metropolitan markets). They
also allow media conglomerates and large content providers to offer integrated packages
of services, products and e-commerce platforms to more lucrative consumers whilst
subtly excluding access to the services and Web sites of competitors. As Emy Tseng argues,
‘looking at the deployment maps of the Akamai content delivery network and InterNap’s
P-Naps [two major recent private Internet systems], it is apparent that these companies are
deploying this private infrastructure at the same select group of highly connected US cities
[that dominate Internet use]. Thus the private infrastructure serves to further the advantage
these “global cities” have over other cities and regions’ (2000, 6).

PRIORITISING ‘PACKETS’: USING NEW INTERNET

PROTOCOLS AND ROUTERS TO DISCRIMINATE SOCIALLY

Finally, a new range of Internet protocols – the software codes and algorithms that route
‘packets’ of information around the system – are emerging which actively discriminate between
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 256

different users’ packets. This is especially so at times of congestion. Only recently all packets
were treated equally on the Internet; now, at times of congestion, ‘smart’ routers can sift
‘priority packets’, allowing them passage, whilst automatically blocking those from non-
premium users. Thus, in a striking parallel to the case of e-highways, high-quality services can
be guaranteed to premium users irrespective of wider conditions. This further supports the
unbundling of Internet services, as different qualities can be packaged and sold at different
rates to different markets. As Emy Tseng suggests, ‘the ability to discriminate and prioritize
data traffic is now being built into the system. Therefore economics can shape the way packets
flow through the networks and therefore whose content is more “important”’ (2000, 12).

S P L I N T E R I N G S T R E E T S C A P E S ( I )
S K Y W A L K C I T I E S , P L A Z A S A N D A T R I A

Broadly similar processes of infrastructural splintering are now apparent in the streetscapes
of many metropolitan areas. Paralleling the emergence of specialised, premium freeways and
bypass Internet systems, we are seeing the development of premium, privately managed street
spaces that are increasingly secured off from the wider metropolitan fabric.
Urban streets, writes Trevor Boddy, ‘are as old as civilisation’. They ‘symbolize public life,
with all its human conflict, contact and tolerance’ (1992, 123). Grady Clay believes that the
street is nothing less than ‘the great carrier of information for a democratic society’ (1987,
99, cited by Drucker and Gumpert, 1999). Across North America, however, ‘downtown
streets are now subject to attack, a slow, quiet, but nonetheless effective onslaught under-
ground and overhead, by glittering glass walkways above the street, or tunnels beneath them’
(Boddy, 1992, 123). Albert Pope argues that such trends are closely interconnected with the
broader impact of urban freeways. ‘As the freeway erodes the gridded urban fabric,’ he writes,
‘the discrete space of the conventional urban street begins to disappear’ (1996, 125).

SKYWALK SYSTEMS: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NORTH

AMERICAN DOWNTOWNS AS ‘ANALOGOUS CITIES’

In some North American cities downtown areas are being effectively remodelled as ‘analogous
cities’ (Boddy, 1992; Bednar, 1989). Corporate and consumption enclosures containing
upscale retailing, theatres, convention centres and luxury housing are being directly interlinked
with private, air-conditioned walkways, tunnels and ‘skyway’ bridges. Such networks are
superimposed three-dimensionally below, above and within the traditional street system,
whilst connecting with it only through limited numbers of highly surveilled and secured
entrances. This is the strategy of ‘building cities in the sky’, a solution where ‘the street is only
for driving on, and parking under; where drivers and passengers move from house to office,
shop or theatre without setting foot on the street’ (Hamilton and Hoyle, 1999, 32). As Alan
Waterhouse suggests, such trends amount to ‘a suburbanisation of the centre’ which,
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 257

‘sanctioned by the state, brought an ambiguous landscape in its wake . . . as architecture

turned upwards and inwards, retreating from the old civic thresholds’ (1996, 300).
The best-known skywalk and atria complexes in the United States were the result of publicly
sponsored downtown ‘revitalisation’ projects between the 1970s and 1990s. Such
developments are secured from the wider urban fabric whilst being provided with customised
connections elsewhere. They have dedicated slip roads and large car parks as well as ‘fibre optic
cables, private branch exchanges, satellite dishes, and other state-of-the-art transmission and
receiving equipment’ (Reich, 1992, 271). Steven Flusty, writing about the new Bunker Hill
downtown complex in Los Angeles, tells the story of trying to reach the complex from the
streets below by foot:

the Hill’s designers are not too keen on pedestrians coming up from below (except janitors). . . . The
entire Hill is . . . separated from the adjacent city by an obstacle course of open freeway trenches, a
palisade of concrete parking garages and and a tangle of concrete bridges linking citadel to citadel high
above the streets. Every path we try confronts us with the blank undersides of vehicular overpasses,
towering walls studded with giant garage exhausts, and seating cleverly shaped like narrow sideways tubes
so as to be entirely unusable. We could attain the summit from the south, but only by climbing a narrow,
heavily patrolled stair ‘plaza’, studded with video cameras and clearly marked as private property.
(1997, 53)

Isolated corporate enclaves across metropolitan cores thus become interlinked into enclosed
systems. These draw on modernist principles of separating pedestrian and highway traffic,
but take such ideas to their extreme application. Tunnels also link directly with car parking
garages and the nodes of public transit systems without recourse to the street. In some cases,
for example Detroit, ‘people-mover transit systems glide above the scuffling passions of street-
bound cities’, interconnecting plazas, corporate hotels and atria but completely bypassing the
public street (Boddy, 1992, 124). In this case, however, the monorail runs virtually empty
– a victim of the continued decline of Detroit’s downtown (Vergara, 1997, 210).
Some of the most comprehensive examples of skywalk cities can be found in the downtowns
of Minneapolis, Dallas, Montreal (see Plate 11) and Charlotte in North America (Bednar,
1989). Smaller parts of other downtowns, such as Battery Park City in Manhattan, have been
rebuilt along similar lines but with the greater exclusivity of integrated winter gardens and
upscale marinas (Grava, 1991, 11; see Plate 9). Similar developments have also been observed
in some Asian cities, particularly Hong Kong (Cuthbert, 1995) and Tokyo (Tschumi, 1996).
In Tokyo, Bernard Tschumi finds classic examples of urban ‘bundling’: ‘multiple programs
scattered through the floors of high-rise buildings; a department store, a museum, a health
club, and a railway station, with putting greens on the roof. . . . Airports simultaneously
integrate amusement arcades, athletic facilities, cinemas and so on’ (1996, 42).
But it is probably in Houston, Texas, that this development logic has reached its extreme.
Here 6.2 miles of mostly below-surface tunnels link 26 million ft2 of city-centre office spaces
with their car parks and hotel and retail malls (see Figure 6.10). Entry is policed by CCTV
cameras and private security guards who work to suppress any ‘inappropriate’ entrants or
‘threatening’ behaviour – i.e. those which are seen to contradict the tight, normative ecology
that the premium networked space is for middle-class consumption and formal work alone.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 258

Plate 11 The interior of Montreal’s Underground City, an interconnected complex of plazas, shopping
centres, office complexes and civic buildings in the downtown core, served directly by the metro system.
Photograph: Stephen Graham

Figure 6.10 The 6.2 mile skywalk and

tunnel system linking 26 million ft2 of
office space in downtown Houston, Texas.
Source: Pope (1996), 114
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 259

Within such networks, amid the ‘isolated empire within’, suggests Boddy, ‘we are inside,
contained, separate, part of the system’ (1992, 123). In this closure of the protected urban
‘inside’ from the wider ‘outside’ of the urban fabric the traditional, integrated street system
– that legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal – becomes marginalised, a place of exclusion
for those unable to enjoy access to the skywalked enclaves. Robert Reich’s famed ‘symbolic
analyst’ is thus able to ‘shop, work, and attend the theatre without risking direct contact with
the outside world – in particular, the other city’ (Reich 1992, 271).

THE RESIDUALISATION OF TRADITIONAL STREET

NETWORKS

Such secessionary networked spaces are, in a way, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those inside the
networked, secured enclaves increasingly fear the traditional street as a place of crime, disorder,
poverty, insanity and danger. This, in turn, justifies their further social and technical distancing
from the traditional street in their work and leisure lives. Retailing, and other spending within
the downtown, becomes progressively internalised within the secessionary system. Not
surprisingly, those high-income residents who make their homes in the condominium
developments that are increasingly connected to enclave complexes – developments that are
often now provided with customised and secured schools, health care, fitness suites, pools and
commercial services – have been shown to ‘have a lower level of civic concern than non-
enclavers’ (Bayne and Freeman, 1995, 419).
The traditional street system is thus often ‘left to casual visitors, desultory shoppers,
hangers-on, the young, the restless’ (Boddy, 1992, 125). It, in turn, tends to fragment and
be rendered marginal as sealed corporate enclaves erupt within it, eroding its connectivity and
seamlessness. Remaining streets emerge as the ‘fallen city’ of the poor pedestrian unable to
enter the corporate enclave via the normalised passage of automobile and freeway – the entry
point to which buildings increasingly orientate (Pope, 1996, 1114). As Pope writes, the
impact of the parallel skywalk and tunnel city is:

to drive the remaining pedestrian activity into an interior world of skybridges, atriums and tunnels. These
elevated or subterranean pedestrian passages directly link freeways and garages to vast corporate interiors.
. . . Against such a massive reorganisation of urban activity – the effect of turning the city outside in –
the centrifugal fabric of the streets and sidewalks implodes. . . . An alternative city emerges as the closed,
exclusive reorganisation of the urban sphere. No longer a presentation to or representation of the city
as a whole, the centre of Houston is scarcely relevant to the surrounding city.
(1996, 114–15)

PLAZAS AND ATRIA

Within such parallel downtowns, massive new developments are emerging which bundle
together offices, hotels, leisure activities, retailing and residences into giant, atriumed plazas
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 260

under the control of single developers and private security. Many US cities now display such
celebrated postmodern centres – the Peachtree Center, in Atlanta, Georgia (see Figure 6.11),
Battery Park City in New York, the Renaissance Center in Detroit (complete with a monorail
linking it with the rest of the downtown), the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Each is
directly linked to urban freeways with dedicated links. Addressing the Peachtree Center in
Atlanta (Figure 6.11), Hamilton and Hoyle argue, the Center’s major attraction is its:

isolation from the street: once you have entered the Center, it is possible to negotiate the whole complex
without once having to set foot on a public street. This means that one could work in one of the many
offices, eat in one of the many restaurants, shop in one of the many retail outlets for food, clothes, gifts
or sport equipment, sleep in one of the several five-star hotels, and move between each, all in private
space. And to make one feel extra secure, there are armed guards posted regularly throughout the
Center.
(1999, 32)

Such spaces mimic the traditional iconography and semiotics of the urban street, even though
their connections of tunnels and skywalks bypass the traditional street fabric (Bednar, 1989).
‘Double-loaded corridors become “streets”, interior partitions become “storefronts” which
lead into a hotel lobby swollen to the proportions of a “plaza”’ (Pope, 1996, 127). Above
all, ‘the “outside” is aggressively denied’ (ibid., 127) – a ‘hermetic tour de force’ designed to

Figure 6.11 A cross-section of John Portman’s Westin Peachtree Center in Atlanta, Georgia, opened in
1976. Source: Pope (1996), 130
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 261

maximise profits from tourists and corporate workers whilst excluding the poor. As Sze Tsung
Leong suggests, such spaces are therefore ‘entirely different from the intertwined and mutually
dependent totality of the classical city’ in that:

the success and proliferation of interiorized activity, and the fact that its nodes can be placed anywhere
as islands whose connective tissue is a sea of formlessness and nothingness, has left the outside amputated,
mostly inhabitable, and quite often a space of threat.
(1998, 196)

S P L I N T E R I N G S T R E E T S C A P E S ( I I ) B U S I N E S S
I M P R O V E M E N T D I S T R I C T S ,
T O W N C E N T R E M A N A G E M E N T A N D C C T V

It seems as if our best middle-class vision of the city today is that of an entertainment zone – a
place to visit, a place to shop; it is no more than a live-in theme park. . . . This amounts to
Urbanism Lite.
(Bender, 1996, cited in Soja, 2000, 247)

Even where traditional streetscapes remain economically successful or are gentrified,

splintering tendencies are also in evidence as the regulators of such spaces try to compete with
proliferating enclosed malls, plazas and atria for the custom of shoppers and tourists.

BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICTS

One notable innovation which amounts to the splintering of a carefully selected system of
traditional streets from the wider metropolitan fabric is the Business Improvement District
(or BID). Originating in the United States, where there were over 1,200 in 1998, Business
Improvement Districts are also diffusing widely around the world. By 1998 they were to be
found in Europe, the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa (Hannigan, 1998a, 139). In the
year 2000 they were starting operations in central London.
A tailor-made form of local government, Business Improvement Districts, essentially,
involve the collaboration of local property capital to take control of a range of local municipal
functions for their own private urban ‘patch’. Such services encompass street cleaning, street
lighting, public space management, garbage removal, public works, private policing,
environmental improvements and marketing.
Business Improvement Districts have been characterised as ‘cities in cities’ or ‘micropolises’
(Vallone and Berman, 1995). Even though they are unelected bodies, BID boards are able
to impose property taxes, which are enforced by law, and use them in a direct example of ‘fiscal
equivalence’ – that is, all revenues are spent within the district. Free riders, and social or
geographical cross-subsidies, are thus avoided. Richer Business Improvement Districts, as
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 262

can be seen in Box 6.3, are increasingly active in controlling, managing and developing high-
quality infrastructure networks and services, to tie in with the premium demands of those who
control them.

B O X 6 . 3 ‘ M A L L S W I T H O U T W A L L S ’ :
B U S I N E S S I M P R O V E M E N T D I S T R I C T S A S
S E C E S S I O N A R Y S T R E E T S C A P E S

In a clear fragmentation of both urban street- the city (Zukin, 1995, 35). A report to the City
scapes and regimes of public service provision of New York concluded that the Business
and planning, richer Business Improvement Improvement District’s security staff ‘used
Districts like some of those in midtown excessive force against homeless individuals’
Manhattan are, not surprisingly, starting to (Vallone and Berman, 1995).
undertake extensive public works and modify Crime and homelessness thus often move
street systems, transport routes and utilities to to the interstitial spaces between Business
the exact demands of BID members (Parenti, Improvement Districts – poorer areas which
1999, chapter 5). Central retailing districts, cannot develop their own improvement
in particular, are using BID strategies to try initiatives – or to the urban periphery (Smith,
and create ‘the downtown as a mall’ (Mallett, 1999; see Box 6.7). As a result, ‘the rich BID’s
1993a, 282). Such ‘malls without walls’ offer opportunity to exceed the constraints of the
secure, privately managed spaces which strive city’s financial system confirms the fear that
to support the confidence of middle-class the prosperity of a few central spaces will stand
shoppers and tourists. in contrast to the impoverishment of the entire
As with skywalk cities and atria, Business city’ (Zukin, 1995, 36).
Improvement Districts are an explicit attempt Many Business Improvement Districts are
to manage marginalised socioeconomic carefully themed, with uniform street furniture
groups out of the urban scene. In the unevenly and streetscapes, signifying their secession
revitalised hearts of US cities they are a direct from the wider city, whose ‘inability to gen-
response to the fact that ‘both the use of public eralize improvement strategies’ is widely cited
space by the impoverished casualties of by BID boards as a reason for seceding
the post-industrial political economy and the (Zukin, 1995, 36). Private police forces are
crumbling, often dirty, public infrastructure often engaged by both commercial and mixed
threaten to frighten away corporate clients, Business Improvement Districts as security
gentrifiers, and suburbanite workers and becomes tailored to higher-income communi-
shoppers’ (Mallett, 1994, 277). ties. ‘The new community of like incomes,’
The Grand Central Business Improvement writes Reich, ‘with the power to tax and the
District in New York, for example, has closed power to enforce the law, is thus becoming a
streets to make outdoor eating spaces for separate city within the city’ (1992, 271).
rich commuters, and has employed private In the longer run it is not difficult to envisage
security companies and ‘outreach’ workers to such Business Improvement Districts growing
ensure the immediate removal of homeless more powerful. It seems possible that they will
people or vagrants from the BID boundaries – eventually be able to take control of the wider
part of the wider strategy of ‘zero tolerance’ in development and management of both urban
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 263

spaces and the infrastructure networks that street and public transport systems it is likely
connect and underpin them. They may even, that Business Improvement Districts will
in the long run, be able to secede completely get involved in negotiating or constructing
from public taxation systems, ‘replacing the customised transport, energy, water and
city government’ (Zukin, 1995, 36). As well as telecommunications services for users within
managing and customising their own private their boundaries.

CONSTRUCTING DEVIANCE WITHIN CONSUMPTION

SPACES: TOWN CENTRE MANAGEMENT AND CLOSED
CIRCUIT TELEVISION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Even without the formal cession of tax-raising powers to Business Improvement Districts,
other management strategies for the commercial and retailing cores of towns and cities in
Europe are starting to replicate certain parts of BID strategies. In 1998, for example, the
private managers of the Covent Garden market centre in London decided to ‘exclude vagrants’
from the piazza (Daly, 1999). Around the United Kingdom, private town centre management
(TCM) strategies, similarly, try to harness corporate finances and aspirations to the cleansing
of the ‘inappropriate’ behaviours and individuals from retailing streets (Reeve, 1996). Street
theming, private policing, careful management and public CCTV are the usual tools here as
competition intensifies between out-of-town malls and town and city centres for higher-
income consumers. Users seen to be ‘unaesthetic’ or ‘antisocial’ are carefully managed out:
‘junkies’, ‘down-and-outs’ or others who, in the words of one town centre manager, ‘make
the town degraded’ are not welcome (cited in Reeve, 1996, 70).
In practice, TCM schemes have been found to ‘discriminate actively against [beggars and
street people] in order to massage the social space of a town centre into something more
socially conducive to consumers’ (Reeve, 1996, 78). Moreover, in the United Kingdom,
CCTV schemes, which back up such street management programmes, have been widely
found to target people for ‘no particular reason’ other than ‘belonging to a particular
subcultural group’ (Norris and Armstrong, 1998). Black people, in particular, ‘were between
one and a half and two and a half times more likely to be surveilled than one would expect
from their presence in the population’.
In a detailed study of surveillance practices in CCTV control rooms, Norris et al. (1998)
found that people targeted by CCTV were selected on the basis of the prejudices of CCTV
operators, particularly their ideas as to which types of people ‘belonged’ in which spaces
and times within the city. Through CCTV people and behaviours seen not to ‘belong’ in the
increasingly commercialised, and privately managed, consumption spaces of British town and
city centres tended to experience especially close scrutiny. Operators of current, non-digital
CCTV ‘selectively target those social groups they believe most likely to be deviant. This leads
to an over-representation of men, particularly if they are young or black’ (Norris et al., 1998).
CCTV control rooms were shown to be riddled with racism and sexism. Certain types of
young men, targeted with socially constructed suspicion, were labelled as ‘toe-rags’
‘scumbags’, ‘yobs’, ‘scrapheads’, ‘Big Issue scum’ (after the magazine for the homeless),
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 264

‘homeless low-life’ and ‘drug-dealing scrotes’ and were scrutinised, followed and harassed.
Malign intent was equated with appearance, youth, clothing and posture (Norris et al., 1998;
see Norris and Armstrong, 1999).
Thus CCTV operators are already attempting to impose a ‘normative space–time ecology’
on the watched parts of the city, stipulating who ‘belongs’ where and when, and treating
everyone else as a suspicious ‘other’ to be disciplined, scrutinised, controlled (Graham et al.,
1996). ‘For operators, the normal ecology of an area is also a “normative ecology” and thus
people who don’t belong are treated as “other” and subject to treatment as such’ (Norris
et al., 1998, 43).
Taking this logic further, the latest digital CCTV system, the so-called ‘Mandrake’, in the
east London district of Newham, even attempts to use computerised facial recognition
techniques to target and track specified individuals through the main commercial centres. In
sum, as Norris and Armstrong (1998) suggest:

the gaze of the cameras does not fall equally on all users of the street but on those who are stereotypically
predefined as potentially deviant or, through appearance and demeanour, are singled out by operators
as unrespectful. In this way youth, particularly those already socially and economically marginal, may
be subject to ever greater levels of authoritative intervention and official stigmatisation.

S P A C E S O F S E D U C T I O N : T H E M E P A R K S ,
S H O P P I N G M A L L S A N D U R B A N R E S O R T
C O M P L E X E S

The assemblage of car/credit card/shopper is the hypodermic of the shopping stream.

(Lerup, 2000, 5)

Economic and social inequalities remain as gross as ever, yet the global shopping mall renders
them curiously invisible. Those without the passport of money are simply in absence. . . .
Invisibility is a crucial feature of modern inequality.
(Wilson, 1995)

Such instrumental practices of attempting to ‘sanitise’ urban space, for the purposes of trouble-
free consumption and paid leisure, are taken to further extremes by another range of fast
emerging ‘bundled’ urban environments: the ‘invented street’ systems within shopping malls,
theme parks and urban resorts (Banerjee et al., 1996; Goss, 1995). Typically, such devel-
opments are strongly branded with tie-ins to leading sports, media and entertainment
transnationals (Disney, Time-Warner, Sega, Sony, Nike, etc.). They make the most of
merchandising spin-offs and ‘synergize the sale of consumer products, services and land’
(Zukin, 1995, 64).
Such developments cover larger and larger ‘footprints’ as the massive developers
undertaking such projects attempt to bundle together the maximum number of ‘synergistic’
uses within single complexes (retailing, cinemas, IMAX screens, sports facilities, restaurants,
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 265

hotels, entertainment facilities, casinos, simulated historical scenes, virtual reality complexes,
museums, zoos, bowling alleys, artificial ski slopes, etc.). One of the largest malls in the world,
the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, added a live-rounds ‘Family shooting centre’
to complement its rooftop golf course, triple-loop roller coaster, artificial lagoon (complete
with real dolphins), six night clubs, casinos, virtual reality centres, themed pirate area, forty
restaurants and 700 shops.
Such major ‘bundled’ developments tend to be notably ‘solipsistic; isolated from
surrounding neighbourhoods physically, economically and culturally’ (Hannigan, 1998a, 4).
They use modular design approaches which ‘mix . . . and match . . . an increasingly standard
array of components in various configurations’ (Hannigan, 1998a, 4). And they rely on major
public subsidies for land acquisition and development costs.
As Hannigan (1998a) suggests, such ‘entertainmentisation’ developments are fast
emerging as archetypal examples of splintered urbanism in North America, Europe, Asia,
Australasia and Latin America. This ‘new breed of entertainment centres [is] intended to
anchor the “fantasy cities” of the future where tourism, entertainment and retail development
are to be bundled together in a “themed” environment’ (Hannigan, 1998b). Whilst US
complexes have, once again, led the growth of these forms of urban development, they are
rapidly diffusing across the globe, and some of the largest such developments are emerging
in Australia (Sydney’s Darling Harbour and Melbourne’s Crown Entertainment Complex),
Canada (with Toronto’s $450 million Destination TechnoDrome complex), Europe (with
the United Kingdom’s MetroCentre and Blue Water), South East Asia (with Malaysia’s new
thirty-two-acre Star City and SunWay Lagoon complexes, and many other tourist mega-
projects – see Cartier, 1998) and Japan, where a whole ‘archipelago’ of resort complexes have
recently been developed across the country (see Rimmer, 1992).

RECONSTRUCTING CORPORATE LEISURE SPACES

IN OLD URBAN CORES

Increasingly, however, transnational media conglomerates are also trying to take the
attractions of theme parks and put them into cities. City core media complexes are a crucial
part of the efforts of such corporations to stimulate higher returns and greater out-of-house
consumption by the middle classes. This, in turn, increasingly ties themed city spaces seam-
lessly with in-home consumption in what is termed an ‘inside/outside strategy’ (see Davis,
1999). The result is a proliferation of reconstructed and privatised public spaces that are
saturated by media content in old urban cores: ‘entertainment-oriented retail’ centres, mini
theme parks, stores housing giant video walls, simulator rides, small water parks, IMAX
cinemas, corporately constructed sports museums, converted traditional theatres, and movie
and virtual reality centres (Davis, 1999).
Developers of such spaces face a dilemma. Whilst employing the latest surveillance
techniques and careful entrance and exit control, to discourage ‘undesirables’ such as low-
spending teenage boys or the homeless, such spaces must simultaneously encourage a feeling
of urban vibrancy and (threat-free) social mixing. They must create a sense of destination by
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 266

overcoming ‘the sameness of the suburbs and the dispersal of the automotive city’ (Davis,
1999, 46). As Susan Davis suggests:

at the heart of the location-based entertainment projects is this paradox: within the context of themed
space, they aim to reproduce a sense of authentic space, and this means evoking the diversity and
unpredictability of the older city using carefully calibrated recipes. The projects aim to reproduce a life
and liveliness that look like the older commercial town centre. But in order to do this profitably, in order
to turn out the right sort of crowd, they must control mixing and reduce real unpredictability.
(Ibid.)

CONTROLLING BOUNDARIES: MALLS AND

LEISURE COMPLEXES AS ‘LARGE URBAN
CONTROL ZONES’

Whilst carefully controlling the relationship between their strictly controlled and carefully
themed environments and the immediately adjacent cityscape, malls, theme parks and resort
complexes increasingly also strive to shape their infrastructural connections with the wider
urban region through customised highways, communications and water and energy
infrastructures. Such developments thus provide a:

strongly bounded, purified social space that excludes a significant minority of the population and
so protects patrons from the moral confusion that confrontation with social difference might provoke
. . . and reassures preferred customers that the unseemly and seamy side of the real public world will be
excluded.
(Goss, 1993, 26–7)

Like skywalk cities and Business Improvement Districts, then, the very appeal of these types
of development is achieved ‘by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the
poor, of crime, of dirt’ (Sorkin, 1992). In fact, the very fact that such spaces are not truly
‘public’, and do not interconnect with public street systems, becomes an attraction to many
middle-class consumers, because of the dangers now implicit to them in the term ‘public
street’.
Themed places are therefore what John Hannigan has labelled ‘large-scale urban control
zones’ (Hannigan, 1998b, 36). They ‘provide safe, secure environments where people can
interact. [Such space] looks very much like public life, but in fact really isn’t, because the
environments are owned and controlled and heavily regulated by, generally, very large global
corporations’ (Dewey, 1994, quoted in Channel 4, 1994). Defensiveness, predictability and
perceived safety are the watchwords here: ‘what’s missing is a sense of serendipity, diversity and
the humanity of traditional street life’ (Goldberger, 1996, 144, cited in Hannigan, 1998a, 6).
As an example, the largest mall in Europe, Bluewater, on the outskirts of London,
announced that its 350 camera digital CCTV system would digitally record the face and car
number plate of every visitor, heralding the prospect of computerised face and car recognition
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 267

in the near future. As complex IT and surveillance practices are closely combined with the
design and production of built space, Roger Burrows (1997, 41) even contends that ‘buildings
themselves become increasingly sentient as computerized systems of recognition include the
new rich and exclude the new poor’ (cited in Lyon, 2000, 81). Box 6.4 looks in detail at the
mechanisms through which the operators of malls, theme parks and resorts attempt closely
to manage their relationship with the surrounding cityscape.

INTEGRATING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INTO

CONSUMPTION SPACES

Of course, within the new entertainment complexes of the city, huge efforts are also made to
offer only the most sophisticated information infrastructures to the affluent and mobile target
visitors and users. Hotel developers, in particular, now liaise closely with telecom and media
firms to package the entertainment, security and communication applications that will give
them a cutting edge in attracting high-tech clients. Leading-edge hotels in Los Angeles, for
example, offer ‘cybersuites’ where computerised voice and face recognition systems mean
that the ‘entry system automatically recognises the guest and opens the door’. Environmental
control systems ‘can adjust lighting, temperature and draperies at the sound of a voice; with
a phone call, it can even draw a bath’ (Wolff, 1997). In the Clark Special Economic Zone
north of Manila in the Philippines, meanwhile – a disused US military base – efforts to develop
a massive consumption space have been bolstered by the distribution of 130,000 optical laser
cards to selected middle-class shoppers which offer benefits to visitors who spend above
defined limits.

F O R T R E S S S P A C E S : M A S T E R - P L A N N E D ,
G A T E D E N C L A V E S A C R O S S T H E W O R L D

Secessionary tendencies are taking over places of residence, too. To parallel the global
diffusion of theme parks and malls, access-controlled, gated residential communities are now
a feature of many large cities across the world. Such tendencies are vital in reshaping
the configuration of cities because ‘when the wealthy spatially segregate themselves within
cities in exclusive suburbs and exurbs, they can replicate high-quality public services through
private means’ (Clarke and Gaile, 1998, 29). In the process, such transformations also
tend to undermine the public service and infrastructure monopolies that were the legacy of
the modern infrastructural ideal. Whilst such developments vary across the world in detail
and context, they all tend to bring with them what McKenzie has called a ‘privatopia’ ‘in
which the dominant ideology is privatism; where contract law is the supreme authority;
where property rights and property values are the focus of community life; and where
homogeneity, exclusiveness, and exclusion are the foundation of social organization’ (1994,
177).
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 268

B O X 6 . 4 S T R A T E G I E S O F S E C E S S I O N :
H O W M A L L S , T H E M E P A R K S A N D U R B A N
R E S O R T S W O R K T O W I T H D R A W F R O M T H E
W I D E R U R B A N F A B R I C

A shopping mall is like a prison reversed: access control are widely used by developers
deviant behaviour is restrained outside. and operators of malls, theme parks and urban
(Mäenpää, personal communication) resorts to withdraw from the wider urban
fabric, whilst connecting as seamlessly as
A variety of common techniques of design, possible to wider middle-class markets. Six, in
infrastructure development, disciplining and particular, can be identified.

PRICING ENTRY

First, when admission charges are in operation, provides an effective instrument of social
as in theme parks, the price mechanism filtering.

PROACTIVE POLICING

Second, proactive and private policing, backed stipulated as explicit rules which deny access
up by sophisticated surveillance technologies, to specified groups in space and time. For
is often geared to deterring users who are not example, in 1996 one of the world’s biggest
seen to ‘belong’ within the spaces and times of malls, the Mall of America in Minneapolis,
the mall (Dovey, 1999). Target groups include introduced a curfew preventing people under
groups of youths, or poorer consumers, or sixteen years old from entering the space
those with an appearance and demeanour after 6.00 p.m. unaccompanied by an adult
that power holders judge transgress their own (Drucker and Gumpert, 1999). Many other
normative codes of ‘acceptable’ behaviour US malls have instituted similar curfews
(Norris and Armstrong, 1998). In some cases (Poindexter, 1997).
these forms of disciplinary exclusion become

URBAN DESIGN PRACTICES

Third, practices of urban design, which place of signs they stimulate consumers to traverse
new, inward-looking developments within a the space of the parking lot quickly and enter
cordon of car parks and highways, tend to within’ (1997, 138). To him ‘the problem with
exaggerate the sense of social and spatial this kind of architecture is the way it ruptures
separation from the wider urban fabric. To the urban fabric by isolating buildings from both
Mark Gottdeiner malls, in particular, rely on a the surrounding landscape and the street’
form of ‘fortress architecture’: ‘through the lack (ibid.).
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 269

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTANCING AND BIASED

INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT

The fourth practice is the traditional instrument internalising the energy, circulation patterns
of geographical distancing and the biased and financial circuits that used to be tied closely
design and development of transport, street
and highway connections. Very often devel-
opments ‘are consciously situated beyond the
geographic and financial reach of minorities
and the poor in the exurban fringe’ (Hannigan,
1998a, 190). Those built on the exurban fringe
are often impossible to reach without a car, as
developers try to connect such complexes as
seamlessly as possible with major interurban
highway networks in search of maximum
middle-class spending power. By developers
of such complexes easy access to major traffic
arteries is considered absolutely vital.
Moreover the widespread absence of
pedestrian sidewalks or pavements in sub-
urban malls furthers the sense of atomisation
and isolation. ‘Without sidewalks, malls [are]
accessible only by automobiles. In this environ-
ment of access roads, off ramps and parking
spaces, traditional design elements such
as scale, facades, and detailing become
irrelevant’ (Crawford, 1999a, 46). As at the
Deira City Center complex in Dubai (see Plate
12), access for pedestrians without cars
becomes all but impossible in many malls, not
just because of the lack of public transport
connections but because entry points are
configured entirely for the car, the highway
and the parking garage, without any pedes-
trian connections to walkable streets. In
Asia’s largest hybrid mall, the Ngee Ann City
in Singapore, for example, ‘nightclubs are
entered through parking lots on the eighth
floor’ (Turnbull, 1997, 229, cited in Cartier, 1998, Plate 12 Deira City Center Mall, Dubai, United
172). Arab Emirates, which is virtually impossible to
access except by car or taxi. Pedestrian exits lead
As with atria and skywalk complexes, then,
only to the car park and the complex is entirely
malls and urban entertainment complexes surrounded by multilane highways. Photograph:
often rupture traditional street patterns, Stephen Graham
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 270

to the fabric of such street patterns. Turnbull buses, thereby making it difficult for residents
comments that ‘as the traditional street pattern of the inner city not only to shop there but also
was violently displaced, folded, compressed, . . . to work there’ (Gottdeiner, 1997, 134).
and replaced’ by the Ngee Ann City complex, But even within the city centre new theme
‘the heterogeneity of the street – its energy – parks and entertainment complexes can be
was captured, contained and accelerated’ equally car-oriented, as they are often located
(1997, 229, cited in Cartier, 1998, 172). in revitalised waterfront districts, far from public
As we saw in the Prologue, the death in transport infrastructures. Poorer groups may
1995 of Cynthia Wiggins as she clambered even be forced away from parts of the city
across a multilane freeway between a public that they formerly utilised (Hannigan, 1998a)
city bus stop and Buffalo’s Walden Galleria mall in the creation of what Muschamp (1995) calls
illustrates that peripheral malls often even work a ‘business class city’ centre. John Hannigan
to exclude public transit buses from the (1998a) believes that this process may amount
dedicated highway infrastructures. In this case to ‘an attempt to reinscribe secure, middle-
of ‘bus route discrimination’ the investigation class values within the urban center’ as
into the death found that ‘the plan for the suburbanites start to expect controlled,
immense suburban shopping complex predictable and socially sanitised consumption
intentionally avoided accommodating city spaces right across the metropolis.

DEDICATED PREMIUM INFRASTRUCTURE LINKS

The fifth practice is the careful customisation developing customised ‘people movers’ to
of dedicated infrastructure links that allow enhance their economic prospects.
entertainment complexes, malls, sports stadia, In North America, as elsewhere, multimillion
resorts and theme parks to withdraw from dollar subsidies are received from local
the immediate public city, whilst linking closely and central government to make ‘road and
with target middle-class and upper-income transit additions and reconfigurations which
markets. For example, the new stadium of the are deemed necessary in order to make an
New England Patriots American football team, entertainment complex accessible from the
at Foxboro in the suburbs of Boston, will freeways which encircle and bisect many
be equipped with a new access road for the American cities’ (Hannigan, 1998a, 135). For
exclusive use of corporate box holders. the Philadelphia Central Waterfront complex,
‘Ensuring easy access is a crucial element in for example, state and federal governments
the team’s marketing strategy as it continues spent $58 million ‘to build three major on/off
to hawk luxury suites to Boston’s corporate ramps from the I-95 expressway to the newly
community’ (Boston Globe, 14 October 2000, emerging entertainment area along the
A24). In Sydney the Darling harbour complex Central Waterfront to Penn’s Landing’ (ibid.,
was equipped with its very own publicly 134). Similar practices are common in Europe,
financed monorail system linking it with the Asia, Latin America and Australasia, as
other key corporate and consumption nodes municipalities compete to redevelop their
in central Sydney. The new Getty museum redundant spaces and new consumption
in Los Angeles has its own light rail system. megaprojects.
And many other tourist and ski resorts are
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 271

PRIVATISED GOVERNANCE REGIMES

Finally, at the most extreme level, theme parks Creek Improvement District, set up in 1967,
and entertainment complexes can effectively ‘has the power to levy property taxes, issue
run their own private governments – as Disney bonds to borrow money, organize and
do in Orlando – to ensure that financial and manage its own police and fire departments,
infrastructural supports are tailor-made to their develop and manage an airport, and provide
needs (Archer, 1995). In the Disney case a utilities (including the ability to build a nuclear
wholly private political structure, the Reedy reactor if Disney sees fit)’ (Archer, 1995, 326).

Developers of gated communities and condominium complexes in such diverse cases as

North America (Zaner, 1997), Istanbul (Sandercock, 1998a), Mumbai (Bombay) and Delhi
(Masselos, 1995; King, 1998), Jakarta (Dick and Rimmer, 1998), Johannesburg (Lipman and
Harris, 1999), Manila (Connell, 1999), Shanghai (C. Smith, 1999), Tokyo (Waley, 2000)
and São Paulo (Caldeira, 1996, 1999) are starting to take advantage of infrastructural
consumerism and liberalisation by developing and ‘bundling’ their own customised utility,
street, telecommunications and even transport services. In such spaces, once again, the
promise of filtering local connectivity to the wider city (through walls, gating, closed circuit
television and private security) is closely combined with enhanced local or ‘glocal’ connectivity
(through direct highway connections to airports, premium water and power connections, and
enhanced telecommunications).
Even nations that have not known the once widespread private gated streets for several
generations are seeing their return. In the United Kingdom, for example, private streets for
highly affluent groups have recently re-emerged in Buckinghamshire. In these examples,
electronic gates recognise the transponders of residents’ cars and burglar alarms. Video entry
phones monitor all doors. And infrared motion detectors are directly wired to the local police
station (Thomas, 1996). Redevelopment of inner city sites for secure, upscale, condominium-
style housing in central London, meanwhile, is also increasingly common, fuelled by a rampant
housing market and a cultural shift among urban professionals towards city-centre ‘loft living’
(Zukin, 1982). A recent analysis of this process found that it creates ‘rich enclaves’ which
‘reinforce divisions between rich and poor’ (Ballast Wiltshier, 1999).
To explore the scale and breadth of the global shift towards affluent, secessionary living
spaces it is necessary to take a range of international examples. In what follows we analyse
processes of secessionary residential development in condominium complexes and master-
planned communities in North America; the development of new towns and planned
‘communities’ on the fringe of megacities in Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines and post-
apartheid South Africa; and the construction of fortified enclaves within the centres of São
Paulo in Brazil and Mumbai (Bombay) in India.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 272

MASTER-PLANNED, GATED COMMUNITIES IN NORTH

AMERICA

Americans during the second half of the twentieth century focused their energies on preventing
democracy in the built environment.
(Sennett, 1999, 278)

Although connectedness is the spirit of the city, and will probably remain so, the American version
has always harbored a tendency to explode, to atomize and to spread itself as far as possible.
(Lerup, 2000, 80)

The US experience of suburban fortification is the best-known (see Blakeley and Snyder,
1997a, b). In the United States corporately constructed, gated and master-planned ‘common
interest developments’ (CID) now account for up to 50 per cent of house construction
around cities in the south and west (Pope, 1996, 178; see McKenzie, 1984). Figure 6.12 high-
lights for selected US cities the growing frequency of gating on new residential developments.
Albert Pope calls this process the emergence of ‘city-size corporate nuclei’ (1996, 96). Such
spaces are overwhelmingly geared to affluent and largely white groups seeking the ontological
security that, for them, comes with living in ‘communities’ whose essential foundation rests
on the regulating out of ethnic and social difference, diversity and chance encounters (see
Dumm, 1993).

Figure 6.12 The gating of American residential developments: Luymes’ (1997) analysis of the growing
incidence of gating in advertised real estate developments in selected US cities. Source: adapted from
Luymes (1997), 193
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 273

On a broader scale, the ‘edge cities’ within which most US gated residential developments
are embedded operate as a form of ‘shadow government able to raise taxes, legislate for, and
police their communities’ (Dear and Flusty, 1998, 55). In trying to meet the direct needs of
the high-income residents for residences, recreation and retirement, common interest
developments are taking over ‘many municipal functions for those who can pay the price,
offering a competing sector of pay-as-you-go utilities’ (Lockwood, 1997, 62).
Their most obvious function is to restrict access tightly by maintaining and policing the
strict, gated, cordon with the rest of the city’s highway and street system. Internally, road
networks branch in cul-de-sac, ‘laddered’ fashion, with each strand leading to a singular
destination, to ensure the maximum closure of the social landscape (Pope, 1996). Common
interest development responsibilities also extend to the construction and maintenance of
internal roads, the enforcement of speeding and their own traffic regulations, landscaping,
private security, CCTV and street lighting. For example, the gated community at Embassy
Lakes in Cooper City, Florida, requires residents’ cars to carry bar codes to allow entry.
Visitors must show an identity photograph and wait for the entry guard to phone their friends
or relatives inside before entering. Other spaces require a security key or code number to allow
passage (Brunn et al., 2000). Gumpert and Drucker note that, in one such development on
Long Island, New York, the home owners’ association has:

incorporated a rotating television monitoring system that watches and tapes activities on the street. The
location of the twenty-six cameras is known only by the family on whose property it is mounted – not
even the security guards employed by the home owners know the location. This way, if unknown visitors
are not here for a legitimate reason, they are asked to leave by security guards. If they refuse, they are
arrested, and the civic association will prosecute them.
(1998, 433)

As well as enforcing boundaries, common interest developments are starting to develop

premium network spaces within those boundaries to tempt residents in and retain them. Even
energy, water and telecommunications services are now being offered, in partnership with
utility firms, as developers try to take advantage of utility liberalisation. In addition, direct
highway connections to the gates of common interest developments are a common aspiration,
often with favourable subsidies from local governments. The 10,000 population development
at Weston, near Fort Lauderdale, for example, built by the Arvida corporation, has been
furnished with dedicated expressway links straight to Miami and its airport (Lockwood, 1997).
In 1988 the Florida state government passed the Community Development District Act to
help developers of common interest developments pay for the high costs of dedicated
transport and water networks by offering low interest rates and tax-exempt bonds issued by
community development districts (Lockwood, 1997). Meanwhile, one common interest
development on the edge of Phoenix, Arizona, has acquired its own fleet of electric vehicles
for use within its boundaries; the vehicles cannot be legally used on the rest of the city’s
highway network (Kirby, 1998). But the most pronounced current intervention of
the developers of gated communities and condominium complexes in infrastructure devel-
opment is emerging in information technology and telecommunications. This we explore
in Box 6.5.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 274

B O X 6 . 5 P A C K A G I N G A D V A N C E D
I N F O R M A T I O N T E C H N O L O G Y A N D
T E L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S I N T O R E A L E S T A T E
D E V E L O P M E N T S : ‘ S M A R T ’ C O N D O M I N I U M
C O M P L E X E S A N D ‘ T E L E C O M M U N I T I E S ’ I N
N O R T H A M E R I C A

‘SMART’ CONDOMINIUMS

Condominium developers in North America who are keen to benefit from the exploding
are seeking fresh income streams from possibilities of highly advanced infrastructure
diversifying into newly liberalised information, services. One developer, GE Rescom in Los
security, entertainment and utility markets. Angeles, reported that ‘our plan is to bundle
In this process ‘alternative incomes may products in such a way that virtually everything
be[come] more important than rent’ (Zaner that someone would need would be provided
1997, 65). Zaner (1997, 63) argues that: “with lease”’ (Zaner, 1997, 63). Services will
extend to automatic credit checks, insurance,
enhanced telephone services, movies on utilities, telecommunications, cable and broad-
demand – even Internet access – are taking band Internet, all designed and bundled to
their place alongside pools, fitness centers, meet the needs and desires of a captive and
and party rooms, as standard amenities in affluent audience. ‘One day,’ Zaner continues,
today’s multifamily [and CID] communities. ‘every building will have its own high speed
Thanks to technological innovations and local area network within the community, every
the deregulation of telecommunications, building will have its own energy conservation
these ‘electronic amenities’ are offering a equipment, and a great deal more money will
new level of service to apartment residents be spent on sophisticated security equipment’
as well as significant revenue generating (quoted in Zaner, 1997, 62). Bulk-buy deals
opportunities for apartment developers, from utilities and telecom firms allow devel-
owners, and investors. opers to make considerable profits from such
value-added services whilst offering enhanced
The key here is that developers house an IT services at below standard rates to their
affluent, relatively captive, market of people residents.

‘BANDWIDTH IS LIKE A DRUG’: CONFIGURING ‘FAT’

INTERNET PIPES FOR ‘LOFT LIVING’

Apartment developers in New York, a T-1 Internet trunk is proving a major draw for
Washington, Seattle, Boston and San IT professionals for whom broadband Internet
Francisco, meanwhile, are now offering trunk access is increasingly crucial to their multi-
Internet connections to their highest-priced media work. ‘Already, some of the bandwidth-
apartments, delivering speeds of between 100 obsessed are making decisions on where to
and 150 times that experienced by Internet buy their homes based on the availability of
users over the traditional phone system. high-speed access’ (Harmon, 1999, 2). Evans
Having a direct connection in the apartment to argues that ‘bandwidth is like a drug; once
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 275

you’ve experienced speed, you don’t have the have benefited from such high-speed Internet
patience to download’ (1999, 42). By February connections in the United States (Boston
2000 1.4 million consumers were estimated to Globe, 2 February 2000, F4).

FROM PRIVATOPIAS TO ‘TELECOMMUNITIES’

Meanwhile, on a larger scale, the developers of Community intranets are also being devel-
peripheral common interest developments oped within common interest developments.
of thousands of homes are also trying to These offer everything from remote energy
develop themselves as ‘telecommunities’. Like management and home security to liaison with
condominium developers, the developers local medical centres, receiving homework
of places like Playa Vista in Los Angeles, assignments from schools, booking slots on
Desert Ridge in Phoenix and Montgomery the CID golf course or teleshopping from local
Village in Toronto are attempting to attract shops. Community bulletin board systems,
highly communications-intensive professionals meanwhile, advertise babysitting vacancies.
by carefully packaging dedicated broadband As Pamela Blais (1998, 61) argues, ‘IT infra-
communications links into their communities structure can support the growing trend for
(offering home local area networks and residential developments to offer a variety of
front-end services like ADSL and ISDN services along with the bricks and mortar
services). of houses, streets, parks and shops’.

DISNEY’S CELEBRATION: BROADBAND MEETS

NEOTRADITIONALISM

At Celebration near Orlando, Florida, finally, each other’ (Hayman, 1996, quoted in Robins,
the Disney Corporation is developing an 1999, 50). In fact, a whole suite of private
idealised 1950s US townscape, replete with communications, road, street, water, fire and
advanced telecommunications and a com- security infrastructures are provided on a
pletely privatised governance structure (Dery, simply fiscal equivalence basis. The rationale
1999). In the town ‘a firehose bandwidth of of the Disney Corporation is that ‘much of
fibre links every home to the Net, offering a the unique infrastructure sought by Celebra-
quaintly familiar-sounding list of futuramas: tion was either unavailable through normal
home security, linking each resident to a government channels, or simply too expensive
central monitoring point, interactive banking, for local government’ (quoted in Drew, 1998,
voting from home, virtual office, easy access to 181).

Of all secessionary network spaces, the risk of common interest developments prompting the
collapse of the overarching municipal tax system is perhaps strongest. ‘Those paying for and
receiving the private services can be expected to resent paying for and receiving public services
that they do not want’ (Reich, 1992, 182). This is likely to create conflicts between private
common interest developments and elected local governments. ‘The result,’ according to
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 276

Robert Reich, ‘could be a gradual secession from the city that could leave it stripped of much
of its population and resources’ (1992, 183). Already many common interest developments
are pushing for favourable tax rebates from local government property taxes, arguing that their
residents do not use the full complement of local services (Luymes, 1997).

PERIPHERAL URBANISATION: ‘BUNDLED’ NEW TOWN

COMPLEXES IN INDONESIA, TURKEY, THE PHILIPPINES
AND POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Our second set of examples takes us to the exploding peripheries of Asian and South African
‘megacities’: specifically to Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, Turkey’s ‘global’ metropolis, Istanbul,
Manila in the Philippines, and South Africa’s commercial capital Johannesburg. In all four
cities, broadly parallel trends are under way towards the construction of private residential
and leisure complexes for elite and upper-middle income groups on the urban periphery,
which are carefully networked with the best available infrastructures whilst being secured off
from surrounding urban spaces.

J A K A R T A

In Jakarta, as in many South East Asian ‘mega’ cities, massive urbanisation and urban
expansion are taking the form of giant speculative and oversupplied new town developments
on the fringe of the city. Within them, elite, gated communities are being packaged together
with ‘bundled’ retail, leisure and commercial complexes and strung together by public or
private tolled highways geared entirely to the car-owning middle classes (Dick and Rimmer,
1998). A completely new urban landscape is being fashioned for the growing upper- and
middle-income groups that allows them to secede in an absolute fashion from the central city
with its poor infrastructure, pollution, perceived danger, contact with the poor and traditional
street system.
There are clear fractures between this new city and the old Jakarta. Whilst ‘most of these
new towns are located close to toll roads, other links with the road network and with the public
transport system remain tenuous’ (Dick and Rimmer, 1998). Again, geographical distance
is combined with the publicly supported construction of highly capable highway links that
mean that spatial dispersal is no longer a barrier to distant integration. The elevated highways
support vertical segregation, too, as:

driving through the elevated highways suggests an experience of flying over the top of the [old] city,
escaping from its congested roads and leaving behind the lower classes who are routed through the
crowded streets at ground level. From this suspended driveway, the details of the urban fabric are
transformed into a series of blurred sketches, giving a sense of detachment from the ‘worldly’ streets
below. [They allow] certain forms and spaces to be visualised and others concealed.
(Kusno, 1998, 163–4)
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 277

Thus urban life for middle-class car owners and new town residents in Jakarta becomes the
negotiation of an interlinked complex of private, air-conditioned and secure spaces (home,
office, leisure space) laced together by car travel (again air-conditioned) on private tolled
highways. ‘Gated residential communities, condominiums, air-conditioned cars, patrolled
shopping malls and entertainment complexes, and multi-storeyed offices are the present and
future world of the insecure middle class in south east Asia’ (Dick and Rimmer, 1998).
To Dick and Rimmer (1998) this process represents a ‘rebundling of urban elements’ as
ever more grandiose developments start to encompass previously discrete ranges of functions
within single, secured, air-conditioned complexes: offices, housing, shopping, leisure activities,
restaurants, hotels and, of course, multistorey car parks (see Figure 6.13). ‘What has emerged,’
they argue, ‘is a pattern of new town developments integrated with industrial estates, toll
roads, ports and airports,’ in effect ‘turning the city inside out. The innovation of the 1980s
was the recognition by some of the richest South East Asian businessmen that enhanced
profitability would flow from bundling as many as possible of these discrete facilities into
integrated [air-conditioned] complexes’ (1998).
In this process, which has been substantially impacted by the Asian financial crash of 1998,
huge sums of risk capital were combined with massive speculative land acquisitions around
the outskirts of Jakarta. The total area of speculative fringe development proposed or planned
for self-contained private new towns, kota mandiri (90,000 ha) actually dwarfed the area of
old Jakarta (66,000 ha) (see Figure 6.13). ‘Driving around Jakarta’s highways,’ wrote Deyan
Sudjic in 1995, ‘clumps of high-rises crop up almost overnight at random’ (35). Many,
however, now lie empty or half built, as the financial collapse revealed a huge mismatch
between the high-cost housing supplied and what the market could actually support (Firman,
1999).

I S T A N B U L

Broadly similar processes of new town urban ‘bundling’ with dedicated infrastructures are
emerging in the fast expanding periphery of Istanbul, Turkey’s global ‘megacity’. Asu Aksoy
and Kevin Robins (1997) have provided a powerful critique of the splintering logics
underpinning the Esenkent and Bogazköy new towns on the western edge of the city. These
are separated off from the surrounding informal settlements ‘by the cordon sanitaire of the
main highway’ (ibid., 21). To Aksoy and Robins these starkly dualised but geographically
adjacent places demonstrate that the ‘modernisation’ of Istanbul’s periphery is based on
‘moving towards an ever greater segregation of the urban scene along class-based and identity-
based lines’ (ibid.).
On the edge of Istanbul techniques of modern urban planning, ostensibly designed to
support order and coherence, are clearly implicated in fragmenting the metropolis into
packaged, fortressed spaces for the growing middle class, on the one hand, and the
surrounding landscapes of self-constructed squatter settlements on the other. ‘For most
Istanbulians,’ they write, the latter are ‘terra incognita, a place too far (almost extraterrestrial)’
(ibid., 23). Just across the highway, the purpose-built satellite towns of Esenkent and
Bogazköy, on the other hand, are a ‘new world of seemingly luxurious apartment blocks with
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 278

Figure 6.13 Peripheral new towns, or rebundled cities, planned or under construction around the edge
of Jakarta, 1998. Source: Dick and Rimmer (1998), 2313

familiar, pattern-book postmodern design features, and of spacious and comfortable villas with
large gardens and swimming pools’ (ibid.).
Huge investments in infrastructure have supported the emergence of these fortified spaces:
a new highway straight to central Istanbul, some of Turkey’s best ‘intelligent’ telecom-
munications links and dedicated water, sanitation and energy networks. ‘These new
developments,’ writes Leonie Sandercock, ‘are marketed as having all the amenities of “a small
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 279

and modern American village”, including private utilities and services, private buses into the
city, private security and surveillance systems, electronic shopping facilities connected to the
supermarket on site, sports, health and entertainment facilities, and schools’ (1998a, 176).
These new infrastructures, especially the highly symbolic highway, were, according to the
city authorities, designed to ‘carry the lifeblood of commerce, communication and culture’
(quoted in Aksoy and Robins, 1997, 27). The highway’s slogan was ‘the route to
contemporary life’ (ibid., 29); in practice it ‘turned out to be an exit route for what came to
be an increasingly disillusioned modernising vision’ (ibid., 27). The urban plan was largely
ignored and the new infrastructures were remodelled effectively to seal off the new towns from
the wider squatter settlements, while linking them into wider circuits of exchange.
Middle-class Istanbulers arrived in the new towns and realised that they ‘could accom-
modate a purified modern lifestyle, in retreat from everything that Istanbul had become as a
consequence of its actual modernisation’ (ibid., 31). Homogeneous, safe, orderly spaces
offered a sense of social purity and retreat from the turmoil of metropolitan modernisation
outside, with its perceived pollution, crime, danger, discomfort, poverty and ethnic mixing.
Thus a new ‘kind of self-contained, self-sufficient and self-regarding community’ was created
within which modern identities could be maintained in seclusion and isolation (ibid., 33). As
in so many other cities, then, the modern infrastructural ideal was remodelled as a logic of
splintering urbanism.

M A N I L A

In Manila in the Philippines, too, suburbanisation ‘has produced new middle class consumer
landscapes of exclusive suburbs – alongside tower blocks, offices, residential estates, shopping
malls and golf courses – linked by freeways and flyovers’ (Connell, 1999, 417). Gated
suburban spaces, often constructed literally on the sites of forcibly demolished informal
settlements, are ‘designed and marketed as fragments of Europe in a global era’ with
‘enhanced security, exclusivity and isolation’ (ibid.). These new developments have names like
‘Little Italy’, ‘Harvard Avenue’, ‘Greenhills’ and ‘Britanny’. Huge efforts and investments are
made to ensure that privatised, customised infrastructure networks – roads and kerbs, water
supplies, drainage systems, highway links, power and telecommunications links – are available
which befit the construction of such spaces as secure and exclusive ‘islands of Europe or North
America’ within the peripheries of Manila (ibid., 426) (see Figure 6.14).
At the same time, tolled freeways and flyovers, such as the billion-dollar Metro Manila
Skyway, are being completed between the new enclaves, malls and office complexes – often,
once again, after the forced demolition of the squatter settlements in their path. Such freeway
networks, developed by private–public partnerships, are routed and planned to ‘tie together
islands of affluence’ (ibid., 435). In a classic example of the socially regressive splintering
of circulation systems, such freeways are designed and regulated to exclude the vehicles of
the poor – jeepneys, buses and tricycles – which cram on to the residualised, congested street
system.
The cocooned, mobile isolation of the middle-class car driver is thus splintered off from
the chaotic, risky openness of the street for the poor. ‘When people with cars are stuck in traffic,
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 280

Figure 6.14 Advertisement for the Jestra Villas complex in Manila, the Philippines. Source: Connell
(1999), 426

they can roll up the windows and turn on the air-conditioning. When the [relatively poor]
get stuck in traffic, it is in an open-air jeepney with the sun beating down, fumes belching
all around, a dozen passengers squeezed in, and the cacophony of horns and engines every-
where’ (McGurn, 1997, 35–6, cited in Connell, 1999, 435). Thus, like Jakarta, Manila is
being reconstructed as ‘a decentralised spatial system resembling an archipelago whose islands
are interconnected by [highway] bridges’ but where the ‘islands’ are ‘the exclusive, walled-
in neighbourhoods where the upper strata are ensconced’ (Tadiar, 1995, 298, quoted in
Connell, 1999, 435).
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 281

J O H A N N E S B U R G

Our penultimate example comes from the processes of urban restructuring that have followed
the overthrow of the apartheid system in the major cities of South Africa. All South Africa’s
cities have since seen increasingly violent clashes between extremes of poverty and wealth
(Lipman and Harris, 1999). Globally, South Africa is now ranked first in the number of
murders, rapes, robberies and violent thefts per capita (New York Times, 15 May A10). Most
startling is the case of the commercial capital, Johannesburg, where there has been a rapid
growth in extremely violent militarised crime, especially in the areas of the city that previously
were largely insulated from serious crime by the pass-law system: downtown and the middle-
class white suburbs (Bremner, n.d.).
With the removal of the bureaucratic machinery of pass-law segregation, many poor
blacks have moved from the appalling conditions in the townships to make their homes
informally in the ‘public’ spaces of the city centre, in search of better prospects. At the same
time, affluent whites, and increasingly the industries they work for and the services they use,
are retreating to fortified spaces on the urban periphery to the north. Many planned
‘communities’ are being constructed there with bucolic-sounding names like High Meadow
Grove and Brentwood Estate which emphasise security above all else (ibid., 62). In response
to both real crime and the spiralling fear of crime, households are increasingly employing
armed response teams, security firms and even armoured vehicles to back up the spontaneous
or planned gating and walling of their living spaces. Often residents simply close off their own
roads, destroy their systems of sidewalks, wall off their spaces, and bring in armed security
companies – all without municipal permission. Almost overnight ‘anything from a street to
an entire suburb is excised from the public network’ (Bremner, n.d., 58). To complement
the closure and partitioning of previously relatively public networks:

households install ever more sophisticated security measures. They raise their low, picturesque garden
walls by two, three or sometimes four metres, and top them with spikes or glass chips; they unfurl razor
wire along the perimeters; they add electric fencing; they install automated driveways and intercom
systems. Entry into houses and passages is barred by layer upon layer of metal security gates. Security
has become a way of life.
(Bremner, n.d., 56)

A mushrooming range of speculative malls, consumption spaces and decentralised office parks
– also located well way from the old city centre – are also emerging to cater for the perceived
security needs of the white middle classes. To support such spaces, the state has given property
owners broad legal powers to privatise the public realm through gates, CCTV and versions
of the US Business Improvement District idea. Some new business spaces offer private
schooling for employees’ children. The South African stock market has also decided to
abandon the old downtown core and move to a more secure developed enclave farther north.
Together, these trends amount to the effective collapse of spaces and networks in the new
South African metropolis that offered at least limited hope of supporting the mixing of the
nation’s highly segregated ethnic and income groups. In contemporary Johannesburg,
Bremner writes, the:
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 282

spaces between are simply movement channels along which the body must pass in moving from one
insulated enclave to another. . . . A new security aesthetic dominates: walls, wire, barbs, locks, gates,
intercoms, fortifications . . . fading into fantasy and pastiche. Combine this with signs of poverty, with
squalor, irregularity, clutter, leaking sewer pipes, leaning corrugated walls, broken windows, and you
have the image of the emerging South African city.
(Ibid., 63)

For our third and final set of examples of the construction of secessionary residential spaces,
we turn to the global cities of São Paulo and Mumbai (Bombay), both of which demonstrate
how urban bundling and the secession of the socioeconomically affluent can also go on within
older urban centres of developing ‘megacities’. These are discussed in Boxes 6.6–7.

B O X 6 . 6 C O N S T R U C T I N G A F F L U E N T E N C L A V E S
W I T H I N T H E C E N T R E O F D E V E L O P I N G W O R L D
‘ M E G A C I T I E S ’ ( I ) T H E C A S E O F S Ã O P A U L O

‘FORTING UP’ IN SÃO PAULO

In São Paulo fortified enclaves have grown up created further tensions. ‘The most visible
since the early 1980s within central favela social difference used to be between a
(shanty town) districts, particularly around the Volkswagen Beetle and some locally made
Murumbi district to the south and west of the sedan,’ recalls São Paulo’s top official of
city core. Such complexes are designed to security. ‘Now it’s between the same old
meet the demand from the growing middle Beetle and an imported Ferrari. Globalization
class for perceived security, whilst support- has brought new models of consumption,
ing their withdrawal from public street and relentlessly pushed on TV.’ At the same time,
infrastructure systems (Caldeira, 1996, 1999). crime levels are soaring: the city now has 8,500
They ‘appeal to those who are abandoning murders per year, a rate ten times that of New
the traditional public sphere of the streets to York (Cohen, 2000).
the poor, the “marginal”, and to the home- São Paulo’s condominium enclaves offer
less’ (Caldeira, 1996, 304). Displaying armed integrated spaces for residence, work and
guards, high walls, electric fences, CCTV and consumption to middle- and upper-income
automatic gates, the ostentatious wealth groups. They are ‘private property for collective
of such enclaves contrasts starkly with the use; they are physically isolated, either by walls
extreme poverty that, in many cases, literally or empty spaces or other design devices;
surrounds their walls. In few other cities do they are turned inwards and not to the street;
such extreme cheek-by-jowl contrasts of and they are controlled by armed guards
wealth and poverty exist. and security systems which enforce rules of
These contrasts have intensified with the isolation and exclusion’ (Caldeira, 1996, 309).
increasing income polarisation that has come Their reliance on veritable armies of service
with the ‘opening up’ of Brazil’s economy to personnel, on the time–space flexibility of the
the forces of globalisation in recent years. automobile, on dedicated energy and water
Conspicuous consumption by the socio- connections, and on the most sophisticated
economic elites that have most benefited has telecommunications links available in Brazil,
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 283

mean that they are locationally flexible within irrigated gardens, reliable power and highly
the metropolis. ‘They possess all that is capable telecommunications. As well as net-
needed within a private, autonomous space worked infrastructures, the common facilities
and can be situated almost anywhere, in enclaves include drugstores, tanning rooms,
independent of surroundings’ (Caldeira, 1996, psychologists, gym trainers, gardening, mas-
309). sage, cooks, food preparation, car washing,
As with the US gated communities, the transport and shopping (Caldeira, 1996, 211;
developers of condominium complexes are see Silva, 2000).
exploring the newly liberalising utilities and tele- As with the other examples in the United
communications markets to make the most of States and Indonesia, all these processes
their highly favoured market position (Schiffer, together mean that the public street is
1997). With the collapse of public planning for rendered problematic and is residualised. The
energy, water and telecommunications infra- relationship the enclaves establish with the
structure, and the concomitant withdrawal wider city is
of cross-subsidies, there is a ‘supply of sophis-
ticated infrastructural services for top income one of avoidance . . . public streets
groups in São Paulo’ (ibid., 10 ). become spaces for elite circulation by car
This trend is focusing network development and for poor people’s circulation by foot
and service innovation on the new fortified and public transportation. To walk on the
enclaves – which have ‘high concentrations street is becoming a sign of class in many
of the infrastructure services – particularly cities, an activity that the elite is abandoning.
telematics, optic fibre, cable TV and mobile . . . Public space is increasingly abandoned
telephone central stations’ (ibid.) – whilst to those who do not have a chance of living,
neglecting the wider city of the poor. Whilst working and shopping in the new, private,
the poorest districts suffer water and power internalized, and fortified enclaves.
shortages, these enclaves benefit from (Caldeira, 1996, 314–19)

THE ULTIMATE BYPASS: THE HELICOPTER COMMUTE

The most visible and powerful symbol of the any developing world city (Romero, 2000, 1).
secession of the rich from the immediate ‘Like a fleet of airborne limousines, the
space–time in São Paulo, however, renders helicopters are increasingly used by privileged
the street and highway entirely avoidable. For Paulistanos to commute, attend meetings,
the exploding use of personal helicopters even run errands and go to church. Helicopter
enables the very wealthiest Paulistanos to fly landing pads are now standard features
between affluent enclaves and work spaces, of many of São Paulo’s guarded residential
in a bizarre parody of the predictions of Fritz compounds and high-rise roofs’ (ibid.). In
Lang or Frank Lloyd Wright that mass individ- effect, personal helicopters are the logical
ual air transport would be realised within the conclusion of all other secessionary processes
twentieth century. Over 400 personal heli- in that they finally release users from depen-
copters existed in the city in late 1999; 100 dence on sharing the city’s highways and
were in the air at any one time; the market for terrestrial surface with the rest of its 16 million
them was the fastest growing and largest of inhabitants.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 284

B O X 6 . 7 C O N S T R U C T I N G A F F L U E N T
E N C L A V E S W I T H I N T H E C E N T R E O F
D E V E L O P I N G W O R L D ‘ M E G A C I T I E S ’ ( I I ) T H E
C A S E O F M U M B A I ( B O M B A Y )

Very similar processes of enclave formation the liberalisation of India’s economy and
are emerging in Mumbai (Bombay) – a cause Mumbai’s key role in articulating that economy
of violent social disturbance in 1993 (Masselos, with the rest of the world.
1995; King, 1998). Faced with growing vio- Building work and public subsidy have gone
lence, population and the inability of urban overwhelmingly to serve the living, working,
planning and improvement programmes to leisure and transport needs and desires of
provide basic services for the city’s swelling these groups. ‘The new arrivals to the city have
population, socioeconomic elites have, as in had to survive by living on the city’s pavements
São Paulo, benefited from the construction or else shanties on whatever unbuilt land
of modern, highly serviced and heavily forti- was available’ (Masselos, 1995, 210). As we
fied condominium complexes. These are saw with the example of water networks in the
equipped with pools, jogging tracks, tennis and Prologue, these processes are starkly woven
badminton courts, croquet lawns, golf courses into the material fabric of the city, with large
and multiservice retail and leisure malls (King, water mains, threaded between high-rise
1998, 28). Again, however, the new spaces, enclaves, actually going through the shanty
with their pseudo-aristocratic and Euro- settlements. Whilst these give no access to
American names, are surrounded by squatter the water that flows within to people living
settlements (or zopadpatti). ‘Between them in the shanties, ironically, they provide walking
are walls and security guards but they inhabit routes in spaces where bitumenised roads are
the same locality, the one on the ground and extremely rare.
the other in the air’ (Masselos, 1995, 211). Shanty residents, meanwhile, have to make
Mumbai, long a symbol of India’s hoped-for do with highly inadequate stand pipes or,
progress towards emancipation, has, in effect, worse still, private water vendors, who charge
become deeply dualised. All aspects of exorbitant rates for water on a per litre or gallon
consensus between rich and poor, and their basis (see Swyngedouw, 1995b). Above all,
political groups, have broken down (Masselos, as in all the above examples, development
1995, 206). Carefully networked high-rise processes in Mumbai mean that ‘a sense of
structures provide a three-dimensional land- interconnectedness between the differing
scape of exclusion and polarisation. They sections of the city’s population as a whole’ is
create ‘localities of the ultra-wealthy and the being replaced ‘by a sense of intercon-
upper middle class’ (Masselos, 1995, 209), nectedness with certain parts only of the
groups who have benefited enormously from population, not all of it’ (Masselos, 1995, 210).

‘ S M A R T E N I N G ’ T H E H O M E : D O M E S T I C S P A C E S
O F S E C E S S I O N A N D C O N T R O L

Our final exploration of the premium networked spaces of the contemporary metropolis
brings us to our smallest scale of analysis: the level of the domestic home. Here, too, affluent
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 285

Figure 6.15 The ‘smart home’ concept in the late 1990s. Source: Schoechle (1995), 443

residences are being increasingly equipped with the highly capable networked infrastructures
that allow them to secede from their immediate urban environments, particularly within the
contexts of liberalising infrastructure market places (Lorente, 1997). In fact, such residences,
and the developments within which they lie, are increasingly being integrated into the global
spaces of exchange via telecommunications, transport, airport and, to a lesser extent, energy
and water infrastructures (see Figure 6.15).
As their residents extend their communication spaces outwards to the international sphere
they often simultaneously turn their homes away from public life through increasingly ‘smart’
security infrastructures. ‘The more we detach from our immediate surroundings, the more
we rely on surveillance of that environment,’ suggest Gumpert and Drucker. As a result,
‘homes in many urban areas around the world now exist to protect their inhabitants, not to
integrate people with their communities’ (1998, 429) (see Figure 6.16).
New media, transport and utility infrastructures support these parallel processes of local
secession and securitisation and international interconnection, allowing the residents of
detached homes to ‘reach out through complex communications’ to an ‘emancipated
disconnected world’ (ibid.). The emphasis now falls on the ways in which living spaces are
relationally connected with the ‘right’ infrastructures that link them into required circuits of
flow and exchange across the wider urban region and the wider world. The house – Le
Corbusier’s ‘machine for living in’ in the modern infrastructural project – emerges as a terminal
on myriads of carefully selected sociotechnical networks. Martin Pawley calls the contemporary
house ‘a single arterial service loop from which sewage, clean water, optical, data and
telephone links can be accessed at any point required’ (Pawley, 1997, 196).
Increasingly, then, the homes of more affluent socioeconomic groups are being transformed
into secured sanctuaries and hubs for infrastructurally mediated exchange, communication,
work and transaction. Purpose-built local area networks (LANs), home security systems,
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 286

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Figure 6.16 IBM advertise a ‘smart home’ system, emphasising intelligence and security for the mobile
professional. Source: IBM Home Director

personal CCTV, motion detectors, automatic utility metering, energy management

applications and domestic broadband Internet connections are some of the fastest growing
industries across the advanced industrialised world. Some commentators even argue that ‘every
[high-income] new home built today without an internal [telecoms] network is obsolescent
and represents a missed opportunity’ (Gumpert, 1996, 41). And, as with the condominium
and CID developments discussed above, newly liberalised utilities industries are increasingly
keen to diversify into bundled services addressing many of these needs simultaneously.
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 287

Here we see utility providers ‘snuggling up’ to chosen households of the market, by
offering loyalty discounts, extra services and ‘bundled’ packages, to ‘cherry-pick’ and maintain
the most lucrative market segments (Marvin and Guy, 1999). As Jane Summerton suggests,
‘a clear trend is to differentiate and individualise within previously anonymous consumer
collectives, identifying specific categories of customers and giving them identities, needs and
interests’ (1995, 12).
For affluent consumers, in particular, ‘utilities are realising that advanced services provide
ready access to the home, its appliances and electronics. Data collected from these resources
could lead to the development and provision of a host of new customer services’ (Kirby,
1998, 28). In St Louis, for example, Union Electric has teamed up with Honeywell and
CellNet data systems to test wireless home management systems. These allow ‘customers to
purchase off-peak electricity, authorise payments of utility bills, monitor energy use and,
eventually, programme lighting and security systems’ (Kirby, 1998, 28).
Elsewhere, utilities offer financial services, Internet and free local and long-distance calls
in an attempt to keep affluent customers loyal. Other utilities in the United States, the United
Kingdom and Sweden attempt to gain new customers by offering ‘green electricity’
guaranteed as generated from renewable sources, in effect ‘matching individualised customers
with individualised electrons’ (Summerton, 1995; see Hirsch, 2000).

B E Y O N D S P A C E S O F S E C E S S I O N :
M A R G I N A L I S E D S P A C E S , N E T W O R K G H E T T O E S
A N D T H E ‘ P O V E R T Y O F C O N N E C T I O N S ’

Whilst ghettos and slums are by no means new components of urban structure, [today’s]
landscapes of the excluded are unprecedented in the intensity of combined poverty, violence,
despair and isolation.
(Knox, 1993b, 231)

What, then, of the zones and spaces beyond and between the premium network spaces of the
contemporary metropolis? How do people and places that are not so favoured experience the
logics of splintering urbanism? What, more specifically, happens to those people and places
that are being socially and economically marginalised within contemporary processes of urban
development?
As we have seen already, most notably in the discussions of Bombay, Istanbul and São
Paulo, these spaces tend to be bypassed by new trends in networked infrastructure devel-
opment. They tend to be largely ignored in investment strategies and rendered marginal
within practices of geodemographic targeting. And they are often relationally severed from
secessionary network spaces by urban design and security practices.
Such ‘disfigured’ urban spaces thus tend to remain excluded and largely invisible within
the contemporary metropolis, beyond the secured, well designed and carefully networked
premium or ‘figured’ spaces of the premium-networked metropolis (Boyer, 1995, 82). For
example, deindustrialised neighbourhoods of deepening social and economic marginalisation
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 288

emerged in many large and medium-size Western cities in the later twentieth century (Massey
1996; Mingione, 1995; Law and Wolch, 1993; Doron, 2000). To Schwarzer such ‘ghost
wards’, especially in US cities, are ‘torpid remains of a market-oriented culture of speed, half-
digested leftovers from a culture of plenty’. In such places ‘history is heavy with departure.
. . . Dreams have been replaced by nightmares and danger and violence are more common-
place than elsewhere. Nonetheless in decay there is meaning’ (1998a, 11–16). In the
Developing World, meanwhile, shanty towns and favela districts, with improvised or
rudimentary connections to paved street systems, water supplies, and power and com-
munications networks, often encompass between a third and two-thirds of the entire urban
population.

‘ADVANCED MARGINALITY’ IN NETWORK

SOCIETIES

Loïc Wacquant (1996) terms the condition of such zones and spaces one of ‘advanced
marginality’. To him ‘the resurgence of extreme poverty and destitution, ethnoracial divisions
(linked to the colonial past) and public violence, and their accumulation in the same distressed
urban areas, suggest that the metropolis is the site and fount of novel forms of exclusionary
social closure’ (1996, 121). Although Wacquant focuses on advanced Western cities, the
words apply equally to many developing and post-communist cities (see Potter and Lloyd-
Evans, 1998).
Within today’s ‘network societies’ (Castells, 1996, 1997a, 1998a), then, we need to
recognise that, in developing, developed and post-communist cities alike, marginalisation
from the ability to use and configure networked infrastructures and technologies is as central
to the experience of poverty as lack of food, money or formal employment. Not only are
networked infrastructures configured in highly biased ways within and between the social
architectures of places, but they often tend to work together in compound and mutually
reinforcing ways. Service restructuring or technological innovations that enrol some people
and places to premium status – like those discussed above – often simultaneously work system-
atically to marginalise and exclude others from access to even basic services (Swyngedouw,
1993).
As the UK think-tank Demos put it, ‘the poverty that matters is not so much material
poverty, but rather a poverty of connections’ (1997, 6). Such a ‘poverty of connections’ limits
a person or group’s ability to extend their influence in time and space, often condemning them
to local, place-based ties and relationships. It prevents them from connecting socially and
technologically with the premium networked spaces of the modern metropolis (which tend,
as we have seen, to be actively distancing themselves from the wider urban realm). It adds
major transactional and logistical burdens to the basic tasks of daily life like washing, cooking,
securing food to eat, moving around the city, communicating and securing a decent place to
live (Speak and Graham, 1999). And it works against people sustaining relations with the
people and institutions that may help them to access services, markets, knowledge, skills,
resources and employment opportunities.
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 289

Such a situation is especially problematic as many cities, or at least the premium network
spaces of those cities, become remodelled largely as landscapes of consumption, enter-
tainment, commodified pleasure and market-based housing, configured precisely through
electronic financial systems, credit registers, geodemographics and transport, security, urban
design and state practices for those who can pay. For, as Paul Knox suggests, ‘If consumption
has become the means by which people give existential meaning to their lives, it follows that
low-income households do not exist! Unable to participate in the existentialism of the market
place, they have become invisible to retailers, advertisers and, indeed, the rest of society’
(1993a, 27). Marginalised spaces have thus become ‘spatial gaps in our metropolitan
narrations’ as we fail to look beyond the ‘well designed nodes of the [urban] matrix’ analysed
above, at the ‘blank, in-between spaces of nobody’s concern’ (Boyer, 1992, 118). Such spaces
often provide homes for countercultural movements of many sorts where lots and buildings
can be appropriated relatively cheaply and beyond the intense disciplinary practices of
premium network spaces (Doron, 2000).

THE RESTRUCTURING OF PUBLIC AND WELFARE

SERVICES

To this context we must add the restructuring processes that are under way in systems of social
welfare provision, particularly in Western cities, as the ideals of universal access are replaced
in many cities by marketisation, cost cutting, minimum safety nets and active labour market
policies (Pinch, 1989, 1997). One can add the tendency of many urban labour markets to
polarise between the advanced service and knowledge-oriented professionals at the ‘top’ and
the routine service employees or unemployed at the ‘bottom’. Finally, we should stress the
reorganisation or withdrawal of many social and public housing programmes or rent control
systems under the impact of wider welfare restructuring and neoliberal attacks (Musterd and
Ostendorf, 1998). Combined together, such processes of urban marginalisation become even
more debilitating for the poor (Sassen, 1991, 2000b).
In their isolation in ‘network ghettoes’, marginalised groups often remain heavily
dependent on whatever public, welfare and social services exist (see Thrift, 1995). But, under
the influence of wider shifts away from universal, Keynesian welfare regimes to neoliberal,
individualist ones, these, in turn, may be ‘reconverted into instruments of surveillance and
policing of a surplus population that is housed in the degraded enclaves where it has been
relegated’ (Boyer, 1996, 132). Such ‘public institutions often thus tend to accentuate the
isolation and stigmatization of their users, to the point where they effect a de facto secession
of the ghetto from broader society’ (ibid.). This is especially so for those social groups that
‘appear to challenge the image of the clean citadel plazas’ constructed in the revitalised urban
cores and consumption districts: squatters, beggars, the homeless, ‘squeegee merchants’,
mentally ill people and illegal street traders (Mayer, 1998, 68).
In the United States, for example, a widening lexicon of special districts provide a parallel
institutional infrastructure of ‘geographical patchworks’ to the Business Improvement,
common interest and Transport Improvement Districts that are, as we have seen, supporting
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 290

the emergence of premium networked spaces (see Mitchell, 1997). Here land use regulations
and criminal and civil controls merge in attempts to contain the social problems caused by
urban spatial polarisation within formalised ‘antigraffiti districts’, ‘antired light zones’,
‘homeless containment zones’ and ‘drug control zones’ (Boyer, 1996).

THE FORTRESSING OF MARGINALISED SPACES

All these processes, of course, tend to work together and interact in complex ways. In extreme
cases, as with the US ghettoes of the Bronx or south Chicago, marginalised spaces can
effectively secede from the wider urban fabric, supported, as powerfully as any mall, theme
park or skywalk city, by combined marginalisation trends in urban design, financial
restructuring, technological innovation and institutional practices. In US cities, suggests
Boyer, ‘marginal [people] are left outside the protected zone of the shopping mall, the
campus, the walled community’ whilst also being excluded from ‘the Internet and the credit
card/ATM system. . . . It is these outsiders that haunt and invade the interior’ (1997, 6).
In many cases these ‘outsiders’, like the fortified and secessionary enclaves of the rich and
powerful, are also ‘forting up’ (Blakeley and Snyder, 1997a, b). They are adding their own
secessionary forces to the splintering of the metropolis (Vergara, 1995, 1997). In US ghettoes,
European ‘inner cities’ and the barrios of Southern megacities alike, road closures,
fortification, CCTV and security practices are increasingly being mobilised as people,
households and institutions try and insulate themselves from the drugs, crime and dangers
that often inhabit their ‘public spaces’ (see McGrail, 1999).

FOUR CASES

Within the space constraints here, we cannot hope to document the diverse social experiences
of network ghettoes, addressing the full range of infrastructures and the full range of cities
across the world. Instead, we aim in what remains of this chapter to provide a series of
illustrative vignettes of the processes at work. We focus, in particular, on four cases: transport
in the splintered metropolis; neighbourhood exclusion from information technologies; water
poverty in developing cities; and two very different examples of disconnection from essential
power and energy supplies drawn from the United Kingdom and Russia.

U N M O V E D : T R A N S P O R T A N D T H E S P L I N T E R I N G

M E T R O P O L I S

First, let us turn to the multiple ways in which the reconfiguration of transport networks
supports the splintering of the metropolis. For, as David Hodge writes, ‘if the raison d’être
of cities is to provide the opportunity for interaction’, it follows that ‘few aspects of urban
infrastructure match the importance of the provision of urban transportation’ (1990, 95).
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 291

We have already encountered in this book several examples of how urban transport systems,
particularly urban highways, are being configured in ways that underpin the splintering of the
metropolis. Rising car use, for example, helps turn the street from a place of personal meeting
to a place of automobile traffic, rendering it denuded of people (and often therefore
‘dangerous’ from the point of view of drivers) (Hamilton and Hoyle, 1999). As automobiles
have, in turn, become the de facto mode of urban transport across the world, the production
of streets – and then highways – becomes biased towards car owners. As in the peripheral new
towns of Istanbul and every out-of-centre mall ever built, highways are used as intentional
or unintentional cordons sanitaires which tend to limit access to premium networked spaces
for poorer and less mobile communities and people. Highways connect some places but work
to sever the communities and places they pass through. Highways, in addition, tend to support
the polynuclear decentralisation of cities. This makes public transport less viable and useful.
Somehow, ‘collective transportation networks, designed for the dense city, must be adapted
to the diluted periphery’ (Burgel and Burgel, 1996, 316).
What, then, of the mobility of those at the other end of the scale from those who inhabit
the secessionary network spaces and mobility systems of the splintering metropolis? What of
those people – often disproportionately the old, the female, the poor, the disabled – without
the automobile in the motorised, splintered metropolis? What of those unable to access
airports (with their fast-track immigration systems for the powerful), airlines (with their
dedicated video screens, customised services, in-flight Internet access, satellite phones,
masseuses, manicurists and, from 2000 onwards, first-class double-bed compartments) or
fast trains, glitzy new toll roads or customised rail and ‘people-mover’ links? What of those
places where the glossy ideologies of globalisation implying the universal ‘death of distance’
seem little more than science fiction?
The key point, of course, is that speed and mobility, as always in human history, are relative
(Hamilton and Hoyle, 1998, 13). In stark contrast to the portrayals of power, mobility and
the ubiquitous transcendence of time and space barriers that saturate our culture, media and
dominant ideologies in these times of ‘globalisation’, for many low-income people the social
experience of life in marginalised places is one of being tightly confined by time and space
barriers rather than being liberated from them (Mitchell, 1997). In such places ‘the space of
flows comes to a full stop. Time–space compression means time to spare and the space to go
nowhere at all’ (Thrift, 1995, 31). As Doreen Massey puts it, ‘these areas and groups tend
simply to be on the receiving end of time–space compression’ (1993, 62). In Box 6.8 we
explore the particular experience of one such group: the relatively large population of homeless
people in US cities.

U N W I R E D : P E O P L E A N D P L A C E S B E Y O N D T H E

I N F O R M A T I O N T E C H N O L O G Y ‘ R E V O L U T I O N ’

Which takes us to our second example – the experiences of places and people beyond the
so-called IT ‘revolution’. In the marginalised spaces of all cities – North and South, newly
industrialising and post-communist – there are disadvantaged groups living in poverty and
structural un- or underemployment who remain, and seem likely to remain, altogether
excluded from electronic communications networks. In such places, poverty and
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 292

unemployment mean that access to any electronic network, from the phone upwards, is
financially or technologically problematic. In Box 6.9 we start by looking at those excluded
from access to the most basic and essential entry point into the ‘information society’: the
humble telephone. Box 6.10 explores the urban ‘digital divides’ that surround the Internet.

B O X 6 . 8 ‘ Z E R O T O L E R A N C E ’ A N D T H E
‘ A N N I H I L A T I O N ’ O F T H E S P A C E S O F T H E
H O M E L E S S I N U S C I T I E S

As in all cities, homeless people in the United Mitchell believes that the harsh new ‘zero
States tend to be largely immobile and tolerance’ legal regimes of many US cities,
vulnerable, with access to limited forms of brought in as their authorities attempt to
transport. In the wake of the spread of ‘zero ‘sanitise’ their urban landscapes for the
tolerance’ and ‘quality of life policing’ initiatives, construction of premium networked spaces,
aimed explicitly at their removal from US city are effectively outlawing ‘just those behaviours
streets, homeless people face challenges to that poor people, and the homeless in
the few basic rights they have left: using their particular, must do in the public spaces of the
foot power and bodies to try and occupy the city’ (‘loitering’, urinating, camping, sleeping on
street space necessary for their very survival the street, just being in the street) (1997, 305).
(see Wodiczko, 1999; Smith, 1993). Don

EXAMPLES OF ANTI-HOMELESS INITIATIVES

Examples of such policies abound. One of over parks as a useful expedient to exclude,
forty US municipalities to have deployed legal creating what Davis and Moctezuma term
statutes specifically to repel homeless people ‘corporately privatized recreation space’ (1997,
to other spaces, Santa Ana, in California, has 37). And in 1999 Cleveland Mayor Michael
developed a package of policies designed, in White, following the lead of Mayor Guiliani in
the words of the mayor, explicitly ‘to move all New York City, sparked a major protest by
vagrants and their paraphernalia out’ (quoted simply directing the city’s police to move the
in Smith, 1999, 102). Other wealthy com- growing number of the city’s homeless people
munities such as San Marino, also in California, beyond city limits, arguing that it would improve
have simply imposed user fees on ‘public’ ‘safety for shoppers’.

PERIPHERALISING HOMELESSNESS

Such practices, in effect, are efforts to street spaces of postindustrial, consumption-

‘annihilate the only spaces the homeless have oriented city cores. Such strategies do little or
left’ (Mitchell, 1997, 305). Above all, they are nothing to address the root causes of poverty
driven by a cosmetic ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and homelessness. With the reconstruction
approach to the ‘sanitisation’ of the premium of downtown Manhattan through Business
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 293

Improvement Districts and privatised corpor- pushed to places offering the last secluded
ate plazas, for example, New York’s still shelter on the urban margins: coastal
growing population of the homeless has scrublands, boardwalks, highway onramps
increasingly been pushed to the social margins in the outer boroughs, the fenced-in
as to its physical margins. Neil Smith points desolation around airports, or the wooded
out that: bluffs of the Palisades in New Jersey. The
political geography of eviction became
As the 1990s progressed, homeless an outer-borough phenomenon – out of
people – driven from the spaces of the Manhattan, out of the news.
central city, ever more desperate and no (1999, 101)
longer commanding the headlines – were

B O X 6 . 9 U R B A N P O L A R I S A T I O N A N D T H E
‘ U N P H O N E D ’

Even in the age of the Internet, it has been of those in the lowest income bracket (less
estimated, 60 per cent of people in the world than £50 per week) had no phone in 1992,
have never made a phone call (Graham, compared with only 1 per cent in the highest
2000b). As the phone becomes the crucial income bracket (over £500 per week) (Oftel,
electronic medium of most information flows, 1994).
communications and transactions in the In addition, within liberalised markets,
modern metropolis, those without access to infrastructure providers are unlikely to target
one will face increasing relative marginalisation new investment, marketing and innovation on
(Milne, 1990, 365). In a world where meaningful marginalised spaces, which also tend to face
connection to services increasingly means stark exclusion from formal financial services,
negotiating an extending web of telephone insurance, retailing investment and other
help lines, call centres, direct welfare services, utilities (Speak and Graham, 1999). As Hallgren,
electronic transactions, phone shopping, a US community activist, has found, ‘many
mobile telecommunications and the with- communities and areas are not perceived as
drawal of human-staffed offices scattered having a large enough customer base to
across the physical spaces of cities, to be attract a [telecommunications or Internet]
without even a basic phone becomes ever company to offer a service, let alone multiple
more disabling (see Loader, 1998). This is companies’ (1999, 1). As marketing and infra-
especially so given that, in many Western cities structure development strategies tend to
in particular, home access to the phone is now reflect ever more the patchwork geographies
mistakenly assumed to be a universal entry of the splintered metropolis, the situation of
point into the ‘information society’. In the Bell Atlantic in New Jersey, reported in the
United States, for example, whilst 94 per cent Cybertimes in 1997, is typical. By then the
of all households had a phone in 1994, only 64 company, the report argued, had rolled out
per cent of black households earning less than high-capacity optic fibre links with ‘suburban
$5,000 had (Schement et al., 1997). In the business parks and large corporations’ as
United Kingdom, meanwhile, over 40 per cent well as ‘setting a schedule for suburban
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 294

neighbourhoods’. But it had ‘not yet made airports, hospitals, shopping malls, train
specific plans for the thousands of poor people stations and other busy city centre locations’
who live in the state’s largest cities’. Worse still, with new public phone boxes (Warwick, 1999,
it had ‘let its network deteriorate in parts of 44). This often leads to the progressive
Brooklyn and the Bronx, where corroded wires deterioration of public phone services away
led to scratchy lines and service outages’ from the highly connected nodes of the
(Schiller, 1999a, 56). Physical offices, used by splintering metropolis, in the spaces where,
many poor people without bank accounts to ironically, access is most important.
pay bills, have also been routinely closed by US Often, in UK and North American cities,
telecommunications firms, whilst charges for being ‘unphoned’ tends also to mean being
directory assistance and local calls have been ‘unbanked’, as financial restructuring pulls
dramatically hiked to reflect ‘cost-reflective away the financial infrastructure of poor
pricing’ and the withdrawal of social cross- communities (Dyer, 1995). In places like south
subsidies (ibid., 57). central Los Angeles, for example, only a couple
For those without home access to a of miles from the highly networked premium
telephone, public phones on the street space of the downtown, access to branches
become crucial. But here, again, investment is and ATMs is in decline. This is forcing
concentrating on equipping the premium inhabitants ‘back on the informal system of
networked spaces of the city, at the expense cheque-cashing services, mortgage brokers,
of network ghettoes and marginal spaces. credit unions and cash’ (Thrift, 1995, 31) – a
Telecommunications liberalisation, in particular, process which further splinters this place off
allows entrants to the pay phone market to from dominant circuits of exchange and
‘cherry-pick’ ‘commercially attractive sites in transaction.

B O X 6 . 1 0 B R I D G I N G ‘ D I G I T A L D I V I D E S ’ ?
M A R G I N A L I S E D U R B A N S P A C E S A N D
T H E I N T E R N E T

As the Internet starts to parallel the phone as the Internet is creating parallel com-
an increasingly pervasive urban medium, the munications systems: one for those with
prospects of enrolling marginalised people and income, education and – literally –
places into ‘cyberspace’ remain severely connections, giving plentiful information
problematic. The key concern here is the at low costs and high speed; the other
polarising logic with which the global and for those without connections, blocked by
disembedded medium of the Internet relates high barriers of time, cost and uncertainty
to the cultures, civil societies and landscapes and dependent on outdated information.
of local spaces, cities and regions. This rela- With people in these two systems living
tionship tends to be one of extending the and competing side-by-side, the advan-
power of the powerful whilst further margin- tages of connection are overpowering.
alising the less powerful within the same The voices and concerns of people
geographical spaces – a logic of intense already living in human poverty – lacking
polarisation. As the UNDP suggest: incomes, education and access to public
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 295

institutions – are being increasingly the like would be in a position to fully engage in
marginalised. consumer society’. Such people seem likely to
(1999, 32) be left with the poor, expensive services of
incumbent monopolies, or beyond the reach
For those without access to global electronic of infrastructure services at all.
consumption and communications systems This is so at precisely the time when being
there are few opportunities to enter the world on-line is becoming ever more critical to
of customised infrastructure and services – access key resources, information, public
even if you are lucky enough to live in a part of services and employment opportunities.
a city that benefits from the roll-out of these Goslee (1998) estimated that, by the year
services (Pahl, 1999). ‘The reliance on cash, or 2000 in the United States, ‘60 percent of jobs
even cheques, helps to condemn individuals will require skills with technology. Moreover,
to life at the bottom end of the spending scale 75 percent of all transactions between indi-
and can help keep them there,’ suggests viduals and the government – including such
Kruger (1997, 21). Moreover ‘the approach services as delivery of food stamps, Social
of electronic cash (or e-cash)’, supporting Security benefits, and Medicaid information
renewable smart cards and Internet and – will take place electronically. People without
telephone-based ‘spending’, ‘presents a technology skills or access to electronic
possible scenario in which only those judged to communications will be at a considerable
be appropriate by banks, credit companies or disadvantage.’

THE CHALLENGES OF SECURING ON-LINE ACCESS

FOR MARGINALISED COMMUNITIES

In marginalised spaces, efforts to get lower- problem, or who has no idea where to begin’
income groups on to the Internet will (Rockoff, 1996, 59). Jones argues that ‘con-
continually face difficult issues. At the very least nection to the Internet does not inherently
there are likely to be competing priorities, make a community, nor does it lead to any
costly training needs, crime problems, rela- necessary exchanges of information, meaning
tively low levels of literacy, issues of tech- and sense-making at all’ (Jones, 1995, 12).
nological intimidation, the rapid obsolescence Even when marginalised spaces of cities do
of technologies, the high cost of continually gain electronic access, telecom and media
upgrading software and hardware to meet the firms are tending to offer much less capable
latest industry standards, and often, especially electronic infrastructures and services than
in developing nations, simply paying for those being bundled into the packaged urban
electricity (Sparrow and Vedantham, 1996). spaces, configured for affluent socioeconomic
However, the relevance of Internet access groups. Moreover, services for lower-income
can often be questioned for those facing groups are more likely to be configured largely
the most severe social crises. ‘Just giving for the passive consumption of corporate
someone time at a terminal with Internet entertainment and services. As Calabrese and
capabilities – or, by extension, at a a kiosk in a Borchert argue, from the point of view of the
public place – will not benefit anyone who feels United States, the worry is that, as a result,
confronted with a seemingly insurmountable ‘wage earners, the precariously employed and
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 296

the unemployed will interact infrequently on the and hierarchically structured, and controlled for
horizontal dimension, except primarily in commercial purposes, such as games and
commercial modes which are institutionally shopping’ (1996, 253).

U N W A T E R E D : D U A L I S E D S Y S T E M S O F W A T E R C O N S U M P T I O N

I N D E V E L O P I N G C I T I E S

Our third example addresses the highly dualised systems of water provision developing in the
‘megacities’ of the Developing World. We saw above how infrastructure services in cities like
Jakarta, São Paulo and Bombay tend to be oriented to the new middle-class enclaves that are
being constructed on their peripheries or within their shanty districts. The inevitable side
effect of this process is a perilous infrastructural situation for those millions of people living
in informal settlements beyond the reach of the formal street, highway, power, water and
communications infrastructures of the city. Such people, very often, provide the economic
dynamism that makes megacities grow. As Aldrich and Sandu suggest, ‘the people living in
slums and squatter settlements actually subsidise the formal economy (and perhaps the world
economy) by not requiring large amounts of capital for housing and infrastructure services’
(quoted in Baird and Heintz, 1997, 13).
Whilst processes of infrastructural dualisation in developing cities are far from new, the
shifts towards privatisation, liberalisation and ‘structural adjustment’ often render the position
of informal settlements even more perilous than under the regimes of developmentalist states
and the (highly biased) infrastructural monopolies that characterised the Developing World’s
experience of the modern ideal. In most developing cities, water utilities, with inadequate
financial, technological or political resources to extend their water grids to cover burgeoning
urban peripheries, have therefore, in a sense, faced their own individual collapse of the modern
infrastructural ideal (see Box 3.7). In the face of international constraints on borrowing and
strict debt repayment conditions from the IMF, prospects for major extension seem bleak.
Remaining resources and network infrastructure tend to concentrate overwhelmingly on the
needs of social and economic elites, spaces for foreign direct investors and the emerging
modern consumer spaces that are being packaged out of parts of the metropolis (Jaglin,
1997).
As Lee points out, the risk is that, far from moving piped water and sewerage services
towards ubiquity, the ‘extent of actual coverage [of infrastructure services] may actually shrink
after privatisation’ as loss-making parts of networks are withdrawn to cut costs and improve
profitability (1999, 153). In a series of case studies of waste, water and transport privatisations
in Asian cities he found that ‘the target groups were invariably middle and high income
neighbourhoods. The fact that private firms will only service richer communities may actually
make the job of many municipal authorities more difficult’ (ibid.).
In South Africa, of course, such extreme infrastructural inequalities were explicitly
configured by the apartheid system. The issue now, in a post-apartheid context, is how
universal, essential, networked infrastructures can be rolled out to the majority black
population in the townships. This must happen at the same time as finances are secured to
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 297

ensure that economic development areas also have the ‘world class’ networked infrastructures
seen to be necessary to bring in foreign investment. However, Patrick Bond argues that,
under the neoliberal pressures of the IMF, the post-apartheid South African state actually risks
engineering a ‘neo-apartheid’ infrastructure policy in the country. This is because the target
standards for networking the townships are excessively low. They include ‘pit latrines (not
water-borne sanitation), yard taps (not inside the house), 5–8 A electricity supply (not 20 A
or 60 A, as in formerly white areas), untarred roads, no stormwater drainage etc.’ (1999, 45).
For basic water needs informal settlements beyond the limits of piped water usually have
to rely either on highly inadequate stand pipes or, worse still, on private vendors selling water
as a commodity door to door by truck (Swyngedouw, 1995b). By the year 2000, it was
estimated, 450 million urban dwellers would be deprived of potable running water across the
world (UNCHS, 1991). In Jakarta, for example – the city of gleaming new toll roads and
(often half built) packaged landscapes for the rich explored earlier – over half the population
still obtain their water from vendors, at as much as thirteen times the cost of the piped water
used to irrigate the golf courses and landscaped gardens of the extending new town complexes
(Yeung, 1997, 99). In the city of Onitsha, Nigeria, meanwhile, private sector vendors
distribute twice as much water as the public pipe system but make twenty-four times as much
revenue (Kessides, 1993b, 37; see Lee et al., 1999).
The result, commonly, is rapidly deteriorating sanitary conditions in many informal
settlements. As Eric Swyngedouw found in his analysis of Goayaquil in Ecuador, ‘the absence
of water, and the exclusionary practices through which the urban water supply is organised,
tell the story of the urban deprivation, disempowerment and repressive social mechanisms that
turn slum life into the antithesis of modern urban life’ (1995b, 388). In Goayaquil 400 water
tankers serve over 600,000 people. The water retailers buy the water from the municipal
water company at a highly subsidised price (Su 70/m3 in 1993); they then sell it on at rate
of Su 6,000/m3 or Su 7,500/m3. ‘The price they charge is up to 400 times higher than that
paid by low-volume consumers who receive their water from the public utility’ (Swyngedouw
1995b, 389; see Box 3.7).

U N W A R M E D : M A R G I N A L E N E R G Y S P A C E S

Our final two examples demonstrate how contemporary trends help to push people and places
who are socioeconomically marginal further away from the fuel and power resources they need
to live.
The first example of this phenomenon is the recent experience by low-income people of
utility liberalisation in the United Kingdom. We saw earlier in this chapter how newly
entrepreneurial utilities in the highly competitive UK market are striving to ‘snuggle up’ to
socioeconomic elites, who can choose all manner of new services from the comfort of their
homes. But a very different experience of liberalisation is emerging at the other end of UK
utility markets, as we see in Box 6.11. Here, in a classic case of the socially biased configuration
of technology, very similar IT technology is being organised very differently effectively
to distance suppliers from lower-income, and unprofitable, users, who often now have to
travel considerable distances physically even to maintain their consumption.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 298

B O X 6 . 1 1 T H E D U A L C O N F I G U R A T I O N O F
‘ S M A R T ’ E N E R G Y C O N S U M P T I O N S Y S T E M S :
T H E U R B A N S O C I A L E F F E C T S O F
‘ P R E P A Y M E N T ’ M E T E R I N G I N U K U T I L I T I E S

For more marginal consumers of energy 6.17 shows, whilst smart meters for affluent
services in the United Kingdom, utilities install users use IT capabilities to help establish dense
electronic ‘prepayment’ meters. Through and reciprocal relations between utility opera-
these, consumers electronically ‘top up’ smart tors and consumers, prepayment smart cards
cards, at post offices, in advance of utility allow utilities to withdraw from having any direct
use. Such smart cards must be inserted into contact with poorer users at all.
the meter to allow the use of the service to
continue (Drakeford, 1995). Over 3 million UK
households used prepayment meters for
electricity by 1994; the figure was expected to
grow to 6 million by 1998 (Marvin and Graham,
1994). By 1994 330,000 British Gas customers
had prepayment meters. And prepayment
metering is also being increasingly pushed
by some water firms on to marginal water
consumers. Over 15,000 water users even
had compulsory prepayment meters by 1996,
a practice that has since been outlawed.
Prepayment meters provide utilities with
a convenient and simple solution to the
difficulties raised by poor and marginal
consumers. They reduce the high transaction
costs and bad publicity associated with utility
disconnection (Speak and Graham, 1999). The
technology uses much the same embedded Figure 6.17 Contrasting configurations of more
affluent utility users with smart meters (upper)
microchip technologies as ‘smart home’
and poorer users with prepayment meters
systems and ‘smart meters’, but in very differ- (lower). Source: Marvin and Guy (1997), 126,
ent ways and for very different ends. As Figure 128

PROBLEMS OF PREPAYMENT METERING

Whilst prepayment meters may help low- Second, users of prepayment meters face
income people to manage consumption, they higher charges. Users can be ‘locked in’ to
also lead to three worrying problems. expensive incumbent suppliers. They fail to
First, users, often the most immobile people benefit from the discounts accessible to those
in society, must travel, often considerable paying direct from bank accounts. And ‘the
distances, to ‘top up’ their tokens at recharge expense of meters and other devices is
points. passed directly on to the consumer in the
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 299

electricity industry’ through higher-than- 0.1 per thousand in 1992. For, at precisely
normal tariffs (Drakeford, 1995, iv). the same time, rate of prepayment meter use
Third, prepayment meters effectively in the gas sector rose from 0.1 to 0.5 per
hide or disguise the issue of low levels of thousand consumers (Ernst, 1994, 67).
access to energy and water services, and National water disconnections, meanwhile,
the associated problems of water and fuel fell from 10,047 in 1994/95 to 5,826 in 1995/96
poverty, in marginalised urban communities. It at the same time as the number of water
is no surprise, for example, that the number of prepayment meters grew from a few hundred
official gas disconnections fell dramatically to 15,077.
from 0.4 per thousand consumers in 1985 to

‘SELF-DISCONNECTION’ AND THE PRIVATISATION

OF SOCIAL COSTS

Two-thirds of households using prepayment circumstances, incur additional commercial

water meters experienced ‘self disconnection’ costs – or back to the public arena in terms
during the first year but none of these ‘self of social services, housing and environ-
disconnections’ was recorded in national mental problems.
disconnection statistics (which record only the (Drakeford, 1995, 69)
physical disconnection of non-payers from
networks). Despite the politically attractive Examples of the microsocial effects of
decline in official disconnections, millions of prepayment metering are accumulating. In
households cannot afford to ‘top up’ their 1992, for example, two young girls died in a fire
smart cards and access the fuel services they at a house in Essex because their single parent
need to heat their homes and cook their food. had ‘self-disconnected’ from the electricity
In effect, prepayment metering has allowed network and was forced to use candles. Fire
a public, national policy issue to be quietly services in South Wales have reported being
translated, through the use of consumerist called out to fires caused by families who,
rhetoric, into one based on the individual’s or unable to afford charging up their electricity
household’s right to ‘choose’ which utilities to prepayment meters, light a fire even when
access when. As Mark Drakeford argues: there is no fireplace. And, in the water sector,
Harrison (1996, 3) reports that ‘on some roads
the social costs of their decisions have on estates in South Wales, and the south-west
been removed from the calculations of and the north-west [the areas with highest use
the commercialised utilities. These costs of prepayment water metering], more than half
are then transferred elsewhere – either the households have prepayment meters.
by ‘privatising’ them, too – by loading People have to go round begging from
disadvantages on to those who, by acci- neighbours for water for the kettle, the bath or
dent of geography, ill-health or personal the washing.’

continued
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 300

LONG-TERM IMPACT OF ‘SOCIAL DUMPING’ BY

UTILITIES

By extrapolating current trends, it is no exag- council estate in [the north-east industrial

geration to imagine whole urban zones which town of] Middlesbrough? Not a lot of utility
no longer fully benefit from social access to managers are going to want to retain
the distributive network grids painstakingly those customers. They won’t want to buy
developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth added-value goods and services, and
centuries. Even the utility industries themselves their addresses on mailing lists won’t be
have highlighted these likely eventualities. worth much when you sell them on. Neither
A utility executive has written that: will they respond very well to direct mail.
Everyone, unsurprisingly, is going to be
When, in the new competitive market for after the ‘ABC1s’ [the professional and
electricity and gas, all the best consumers skilled social classes].
have been cherry picked, who supplies (Garrett, 1995, 16)
the won’t-payers on Income Support on a

The collapse since 1989 of many of those paragons of the communist version of the modern
infrastructural ideal – the rigidly standardised power and municipal heating systems developed
in the cities of Russia and Eastern Europe – provides our second example of marginalised
network spaces of energy and power (see Box 6.12).

B O X 6 . 1 2 T H E ‘ C R A S H I N G D O W N O F
T E C H N O L O G I C A L S Y S T E M S ’ : P O S T -
C O M M U N I S T R E S T R U C T U R I N G A N D T H E
C O L L A P S E O F E N E R G Y S Y S T E M S I N R U S S I A

The withdrawal of maintenance and invest- centralised municipal heating systems that the
ment, growing corruption among state elites, citizens relied on (Bowcott, 2000, 3).
and the incursions of criminal gangs and mafia What is left of Russia’s power and com-
operations have all led to the fragmentation munications networks is also rapidly being
and collapse of many power and energy sys- undermined, as they are stripped by looters
tems in post-communist Russia (see Castells, and sold as scrap on the black market by
1998). The social, economic and ecological criminal gangs and people in desperate
impacts of such collapse have been dramatic poverty. More than 15,000 miles of power lines
and immediate. In January 2000, for example, were pulled down between 1998 and 2000
it was revealed that, since 1989, over 100,000 alone, yielding 2,000 tons of high-quality
people have left the Russian city of Murmansk aluminium and even more copper. This haul,
on the Arctic Circle, partly because the turmoil mostly exported to gain hard currency, was
surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union worth more than US$40 million. As a sign of
has led to the effective disintegration of the the desperate poverty that afflicts so many
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 301

Russians, over 500 people died of elec- system’ (quoted in Tyler, 2000, A10). In
trocution in 1999 alone attempting such theft in response, many of the newly affluent enclaves
what has been termed the ‘Copper Rush’ in housing those who have prospered in Russia’s
some parts of Russia. Such theft is especially predatory new economy, along with the
common in the coal-mining region of the growing number of foreign firms and nationals,
Kuznetsk basin, where all the mines have have started to benefit from the construction
recently shut down owing to World Bank- of private and customised energy, telecom-
induced reorganisation of the traditional munications and water systems that are
industries. built for their spaces only (see, for example,
As a result of these collapses, large swathes Berlage, 1997). Thus a developing country
of Russia have been plunged into power model is emerging of protected, fortified and
outages for weeks or months at a time in what heavily networked enclaves, surrounded by
the mayor of the town of Kiselevsk called the spaces of infrastructural collapse and jarring
‘crashing down of the whole technological poverty.

C O N C L U S I O N S
S P L I N T E R I N G U R B A N I S M A N D T H E S P A C E S
O F D E M O C R A C Y

In this wide-ranging chapter we have sought to trace the parallel social worlds of the
splintering metropolis. Our broad coverage has allowed us to explore how the production of
premium networked spaces is being combined with the configuration of infrastructure
networks to support the urban splintering process.
For those enrolled into the premium networked spaces of the splintering metropolis,
unbounded bounties seem to await. Seductive spaces of domesticity, leisure, consumption,
travel and work jostle for attention. These are partitioned off from spaces of (perceived)
danger, difference and poverty whilst being ever more seamlessly linked into the customised
transport, energy, water and communications that allow users to extend the action spaces to
distant elsewheres. Beyond the reach of these networks, however, in the places abandoned
by the modern infrastructural ideal, there are worlds of intense localisation and largely invisible
confinement and exclusion, where participation in the benefits of modern networked urbanism
is ever more problematic.
This chapter has shown how geographical barriers, network configurations, software codes,
sociotechnical assemblies of built spaces and built networks, and the new access control
capabilities of electronic technologies, are increasingly configured to try and sever these two
domains. The practices of designers, developers, operators and infrastructure firms seem
intent on increasingly hermetic separation as the relatively open channels of flow and
interconnection laid out under the modern infrastructural ideal close up and are patchily
packaged into the emerging premium spaces of the metropolitan fabric.
Premium networked spaces anchor a city’s formal participation in the globalising capitalist
economy. They dictate the city’s dominant ‘image’ and its representation in the media. They
increasingly stipulate the experience of place for most visitors, travellers and those residents
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 302

who are enrolled into the hermetic process. And they represent a wholehearted search by the
rich and privileged for solutions to the anxiety, uncertainty and mistrust they feel when
confronted by the exploding metropolitan fabric of many cities across the world.
Clearly, these new urban forms have major implications for the democratic possibilities of
the city. They seem to signal the collapse of the coordinated public enterprise of interlinked
infrastructural monopolies and comprehensive ‘public’ city planning. They mean the effective
abandonment of the (always problematic) ideal of the cohesive, integrated and open city
that can be characterised as having some organic unity. We are clearly losing the ‘ideal of the
city as a special place: the center of democratic exchange and a place where every person can
do well and even expect certain basic social services’ (Boyer, 1997, 82). Highly uneven
commodified competition of the production of both networks and spaces becomes the single
dominant ethos of the city; increasingly you are what the market dictates for you.
The urban forms of the splintering metropolis thus tend to undermine the principles of
free openness and circulation ‘which have been among the most significant organising values
of modern cities’ (Caldeira, 1994, 314). They utilise modernist design principles, along with
new technologies, postmodern theming, high-tech security and customised transport, energy
and communications, to articulate a new urban vision. This is based on sealing, closure,
privatism and internalisation rather than on openness and free circulation. Arguably, in some
cities, private enclaves and premium network spaces are becoming ‘so pervasive that they
effectively starve the life of public space in metropolitan regions’ (Luymes, 1997, 201).
Above all, though, premium networked spaces and their customised arrays of technology
and infrastructure threaten to feed off each other in a positive feedback spiral of interlinked
secession (Graham, 1998b). The experience of urban life for the socioeconomically affluent
increasingly becomes an interlinked, cosseted choreography where the networked
interconnections of mobile phone, Internet, satellite television, electronic highway, air-
conditioned car, parking garage, airport, airliner and glocal bypass rail link become ever more
seamlessly fused into the rebundled plazas, atria, malls, resorts, gated communities and
business parks that they increasingly orient towards. Overseeing all is an increasingly
interlinked array of social and technological practices supporting surveillance, control, social
purification, and allaying the ambient fear that pervades contemporary cities. As Mike Davis
suggests, from the point of view of Los Angeles:

inevitably the workplace and shopping mall video camera will become linked with home security systems,
personal ‘panic buttons’, car alarms, cellular phones and the like, in seamless continuity of surveillance
over daily routine. Indeed yuppies’ lifestyles soon may be defined by the ability to find electronic guardian
angels to watch over them.
(1992, 5, original emphasis)

Finally, practices of urban splintering, and the urban landscapes which result, serve to
undermine established notions of social and spatial redistribution across the metropolis. More
and more effort goes into simply making the poor and marginalised people and spaces of the
metropolis less and less visible (and threatening) to its interlinked constellation of premium
networked spaces. This explains why the contemporary sense of the urban in many cities
entails the experience of being geographically close to other social worlds whilst feeling
 SOCIAL LANDSCAPES OF SPLINTERING URBANISM / 303

technologically distanced from them. As Fred Dewey suggests, again, for the case of Los
Angeles:

In Los Angeles, heavily secured and encased environments can be found a block away from intensely
vulnerable areas; sophisticated communications technologies rise amid communities without telephones;
trains for edge city ‘information age’ riders zip by overcrowded, filthy, and virtually unsubsidized buses
for the laboring poor.
(1997, 270)

It follows that the key challenge is to imagine and construct an urban politics and a spatial
imaginary for resisting the extremes of uneven development within the splintering metropolis.
It is to this challenge that we turn in the last chapter, where we will explore the limits of
splintering urbanism and begin to imagine how splintering cities might be rendered more
democratic and equitable. In the next chapter, however, we complete Part Two of the book
by turning our attention to the relationship between splintering urban economies and
constructions of ‘glocal’ urban infrastructure.
 7 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE
SPLINTERING OF URBAN ECONOMIES

Plate 13 ‘Glocal’ transoceanic optic fibre networks connecting the major metropolitan regions
of Europe, the east coast of the Americas and Africa, 1997. Source: Vedel (1997), 34

National borders have ceased being continuous lines

on the earth’s surface and [have] become nonrelated
sets of lines and points situated within each country.
(Andreu, 1997, 58)
 C I T I E S A N D T H E ‘ A R C H I P E L A G O E C O N O M Y ’

It has been widely argued that, as urban economies integrate internationally, they are, in a
sense, ‘disintegrating’ (Lovering, 1988, 150). In the old industrial cities of the North, for
example, the tight, local interdependence between production units that characterised the
earliest phase of industrialisation has, in many cases, largely unravelled. It has been replaced
by an often largely disconnected series of economic and corporate spaces and spheres, many
of which are increasingly oriented towards powerful connections elsewhere. Accelerated
concentrations of growing industries in dynamic metropolitan zones contrast increasingly
starkly with bypassed intervening spaces. As Pierre Veltz suggests, ‘one increasingly has the
impression of an “archipelago economy” in which horizontal, frequently transnational,
relations increasingly outmatch traditional vertical relations with the [city’s] hinterland’ (2000,
33). Speaking about Northern industrial cities, particularly those in the United Kingdom,
John Lovering uses a rather different metaphor. To him:

If the local economy of the ‘Old Model’ was a skeleton in which each part was connected to all the others,
under the new post-Fordist model it is more like a pile of bones. The bigger cities and towns are now
centres of administration rather than production. The smaller ones are centres for a whole set of unrelated
production activities . . . The ‘local economy’ is now a thing of fragments.
(1988, 150)

Such fragmentation, according to Manuel Castells, is a tendency in virtually all contemporary

city economies as they become enmeshed in what he calls the ‘variable geometry’ of the
internationalising ‘network society’ (1996, 145–7). Within this logic – which tends to
transcend traditional notions of scale and separation, ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, ‘North’ or ‘South’
– technological and economic integration is taking place in virtually all cities, but in extremely
partial, uneven and diverse ways (see Sassen, 1991, 2000a, b). A logic of intense geographical
differentiation is under way, within which people and places are enrolled in very different ways
into the broadening circuits of economic and technological exchange (see Veltz, 1996).
The clear worry here, as the French communications scholar Armand Mattelart has written,
is that ‘the dynamic of the economic model of globalization now unfolding risks leading
to a “ghettoized” world organized around a few megacities in the North, but occasionally
in the South, called on to serve as the nerve centres of worldwide markets and flow’ (1996,
304). Ricardo Petrella (1993), an ex-EU commissioner, is even more pessimistic. To him,
current logics, based on the centralisation of wealth and power on key cities in the tech-
nological cores of the global economy, risk little less than a ‘new Hanseatic phase in the world
economy’ riddled with a ‘stark techno-apartheid’.

THE ‘STICKY’ PLACES OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM;

GLOBAL AND SECOND-TIER CITIES

Very broadly, those global and second-tier cities, parts of cities, and the socioeconomic groups
involved in producing high value-added goods, services and knowledge outputs, are tending
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 306

to become intensively interconnected internationally (and sometimes even globally) (Sassen,

2000a, b; Markusen et al., 1999). Using the capabilities of high quality information, transport,
power and water infrastructures, zones of intense international articulation – business spaces,
new industrial spaces, corporate zones, airports, new cultural or entertainment zones, logistics
areas – are emerging in such cities, albeit to highly varying degrees.
Within some such ‘sticky’ spaces (Markusen, 1999; Markusen et al., 1999) – global financial
capitals like Manhattan or the City of London, ‘high-tech’ industrial districts like Silicon Valley,
Cambridge, Seattle or Bangalore, government complexes like Washington DC, cultural
production centres like Hollywood (Scott, 1997) or the emerging digital innovation clusters
like New York’s Silicon Alley – a tight degree of interaction on the ‘industrial district’ model
may survive and prosper. In such places, flexible, continuous and high value-added innovation
continues to require intense face-to-face learning and co-location in (the right) place, over
extended periods of time (see Storper, 1997; Veltz, 1996; Markusen, 1999).
Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (1992) have termed this the logic of ‘neo-Marshallian nodes
on global networks’. In their view, highly valued local production systems like the City of
London or the ‘Third Italy’ manage to maintain their competitive advantage within the
broader shift to pervasive, dominant, corporate networks. They argue, however, that it is
extremely difficult, if not impossible, to generate ‘artificially’ such self-sustaining international
economic nodes if the basic structures, production conditions and institutional cultures that
make them grow organically are not already in place. To them it follows that ‘the majority of
localities may need to abandon the illusion of the possibility of self-sustaining growth and
accept the constraints laid down by the process of increasingly globally integrated industrial
development and growth’ (ibid., 585).

ROUTINE PRODUCTION, SERVICE AND EXTRACTION

CENTRES AND THE COMPETITIVE SCRAMBLE FOR
INVESTMENT

A second layer of spaces in developed, developing or newly industrialising countries is also

able to attain some sort of economic position within circuits of internationally integrated
industrial and economic development. These spaces may be global nodes for the production
of high-volume manufacturing goods and services; places that can deliver routine services on-
line or via telephone links to the core city regions; or sources for the extraction and production
of various types of raw materials. Here we see the familiar scramble of entrepreneurial and
increasingly internationally oriented localities for foreign direct investment (FDI) in routine
manufacturing, mobile services and resource extraction.
Because of their overwhelming external orientation, economic and technological
connections elsewhere in many of these spaces – for example, the burgeoning clusters of call
centres and back offices in North American, Caribbean and European cities – now tend to
far outweigh connections with the local ‘host’ space.
The economic development of such urban spaces, and the splintering of infrastructure
networks that reflects and supports their development, therefore bring new tensions between
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 307

favoured parts of cities and their wider metropolitan areas. Customised spaces, linked into
splintered infrastructure networks, increasingly tie global production chains and filières
together, in telecommunications, transport and logistics, and even energy and water. New
patterns of ‘hubs’, ‘spokes’ and ‘tunnel effects’ are emerging as infrastructure networks link
up ‘cherry-picked’, favoured spaces across widening territories, whilst excluding and bypassing
intervening spaces deemed to be less profitable. In fact, it could be argued that, in the context
of regional trading blocs, global capital freedom and the growing dominance of transnational
corporations (TNCs), such infrastructural chains, tying together corporate filières, made up
of customised urban spaces, effectively constitute the dominant spaces and practices of the
global economy.

SUBORDINATE AND BYPASSED TERRITORIES

Manuel Castells argues that the ‘territories surrounding these nodes play an increasingly
subordinate function’ (1996, 380). Indeed, in some extreme cases, what he calls the
‘redundant producers, reduced to devalued labour’ (ibid., 147) that inhabit such spaces may
become little more than ‘irrelevant or even dysfunctional’ as the labour or assets they possess
are ignored or bypassed by the logics of the ‘network society’. Neil Brenner has observed, for
example, that ‘world cities like London can become “delinked” from declining cities and
regions’ (1998a, 444; see Deas and Ward, 2000).
Complex patterns of relations emerge here. As the global financial networks linking
London, Paris and New York, or the train à grand vitesse (TGV) rail networks connecting
Paris and the French provincial capitals demonstrate, the infrastructure networks that support
distant linkages, whilst always local and always embedded in space and place, may actually
provide ‘tunnel effects’ which bring valued spaces and places closer ‘together’ whilst
simultaneously pushing physically adjacent areas further ‘apart’ (Graham and Marvin, 1996).
The global divisions of labour and telecommunications networks of transnational corporations
provide another perfect example. For, as Paul Adam states, ‘in this milieu of globalization,
the buildings housing the various functions of a transnational corporation, although dispersed
around the globe, are intimately connected, yet they may have little or no connection with
offices or housing that are directly adjacent’ (Adams, 1995, 277).

INTENSIFYING UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT:

WHY INTRAREGIONAL DIFFERENCES ARE STARTING
TO MATCH OR EXCEED INTERREGIONAL ONES

The key result of these trends is that all cities, whether they be ‘global’ cities like London
and New York, ‘mega’ cities facing ‘structural adjustment’ policies in the Developing
World, cities in post-communist Eastern Europe that are ‘opening up’ to foreign capital, or
others, seem to be facing variations of the same broad logics of development. Everywhere,
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 308

it seems, ‘intra-regional differentiations are often bigger than inter-regional ones’ (Keil and
Ronnenberg, 1994, 143).
Patterns of intensely developed and interconnected nodes are thus emerging which are
increasingly attempting to secure themselves off from surrounding spaces of marginalisation
and bypassed exclusion. This is not to deny, of course, the stark differences which exist
between the situations faced by different cities. Each is embedded within a different economic,
cultural, social and geopolitical context and history. The marginal spaces in cities like Tokyo
tend to be much less extreme than those of, say, Johannesburg.
Of course, patterns of intense disconnection between internationally networked urban
spaces and surrounding neighbourhoods are not new, either. As we saw in Chapter 2, they
have, in particular, long been characteristic of developing and colonial cities, and the highly
segregated cities of the United States. So it is very important to re-emphasise that we are not
claiming complete convergence between contemporary cities. Nor do we claim some clean
break in a binary transition model between more integrated and less integrated cities
everywhere in the world. Rather, we suggest that the intersections between globalisation,
liberalisation, new technologies and infrastructural practices have crucial implications for the
development of urban economies in developed, developing, newly industrialising and post-
communist cities alike. As a result, whilst major variations continue to differentiate individual
cases, virtually all cities are starting to display intensifying unevenness based on the partial
integration of their most valued elements towards global circuits of economic exchange,
whilst their more peripheral and informal economic spheres face increased marginalisation at
the very same time (see Hoogvelt, 1997).

THE AIMS OF THIS CHAPTER

In this chapter we seek to demonstrate how the construction of unbundled, ‘glocal’

infrastructures is intimately bound up with the splintering of urban economies in a wide
variety of contexts. We analyse this question by undertaking an analytical journey across the
most privileged and valued spaces and times of the splintering metropolitan economic
landscapes of a wide range of cities.
The chapter has three parts. First, we explore the ways in which nation states,
entrepreneurial urban agencies, infrastructural capital and corporate firms are all working to
support the construction of ‘glocal’ urban infrastructures.
Second, we take a selective tour of those places that are emerging as highly valued and
intensively connected ‘glocally’ within the splintering city. These are the spaces that are
benefiting most from the erosion of the modern infrastructural ideal around the world, as they
are being equipped with highly capable infrastructures on an increasingly private and self-
contained basis.
We encounter seven such types of place on this journey: the enclaves in dominant ‘global’
financial service cities like London and New York; development enclaves in ‘megacities’ in
the Developing World; emerging urban enclaves of innovation in multimedia; new industrial
spaces for ‘high-tech’ innovation and production; spaces configured for inward investment
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 309

in manufacturing; ‘back office’ enclaves for data processing and call centres; and, finally,
spaces customised as logistics zones (airports, ports, export processing zones and e-commerce
spaces). In each category we explore a range of current examples to analyse precisely how the
production of dedicated spaces for these valued economic activities is bound up with
the customisation of infrastructure networks that allow them to extend their influence
internationally whilst carefully filtering the degree to which they connect with their host city.
We round off the chapter by looking once again beyond the favoured worlds of glocal
infrastructure at those space–times of the urban economy which seem to be facing
marginalisation from infrastructural connection and investment. Here we explore the
economic fortunes of the urban ‘peripheries’ that are facing infrastructural and sociotechnical
disconnection from the favoured ‘glocal’ spaces of the metropolis. In developed cities such
spaces were the main beneficiaries of the cross-subsidies and universal service obligations that
were inherent in the modern infrastructural ideal. In developing cities they are often the
burgeoning unserviced, informally constructed economic spaces on the fringe of the
metropolitan core. Here, too, we argue, networks are splintering, but for different reasons.
In such spaces, micro-level entrepreneurship is emerging to try and address the failings of the
infrastructural legacy of the modern ideal. In other words, rather than wait to be equipped
with modern ‘glocal’ infrastructure, people and firms are trying to secure essential
infrastructure themselves.

E C O N O M I C P L A Y E R S I N T H E C O N S T R U C T I O N
O F ‘ G L O C A L ’ U R B A N I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

A central argument of this book is that the broad logics of ‘unbundling’ urban infrastructure
are working to provide the crucial material and sociotechnical underpinnings to these wider
processes of urban splintering. Four key supports for this in the economic arena warrant
further analysis here: the changing roles of nation states, urban municipalities, infrastructure
capital and corporate capital.

NATION STATES

First, nation states in the developed, developing and post-communist worlds have largely
abandoned the project of the modern infrastructural ideal with its ostensible goal of ‘equalising
life conditions on a national scale’ (Brenner, 1998a, 445). Instead, they have tended to shift
to ‘the promotion of urban regions as the most essential level of policy implementation’
(ibid.). Nation states have thus ‘substantially rescaled their internal institutional hierarchies
in order to play increasingly entrepreneurial roles in producing geographic infrastructures for
a new round of capitalist accumulation’ (Brenner, 1998, 476).
As we have seen earlier in the book, this process has meant a widespread shift
to privatisation, liberalisation, opening up public infrastructure monopolies to private invest-
ment and allowing private capital the freedom to develop limited, customised infrastructures
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 310

in specific spaces, without worrying about the need to cross-subsidise networks in less
favoured zones.

URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING AGENCIES

Second, and relatedly, entrepreneurial urban economic development planning is everywhere

emerging as the key imperative of urban governance (Clarke and Gaile, 1998). City authorities
are struggling to project their cities, or at least favoured parts of them, into internationalising
circuits of exchange. The latest innovations in urban economic development strategies are
concentrating on ‘integrating local economies into global markets’ through the provision of
infrastructure, the development of customised spaces for global capital, place marketing and
the assistance of training and human capital development (Clarke and Gaile, 1998, 181).
Within the context of the collapse of meaningful notions of comprehensive urban planning
in many contexts, ambitious real estate packages and project-oriented infrastructure
improvements form essential elements within the wider packaging of sites and places to be
enrolled into the uneven logics of the ‘network society’ (along with the customary place
marketing and financial inducements). Neil Brenner suggests that:

Today municipal governments . . . are directly embracing this goal [of mobilising territory] through
a wide range of supply-side strategies that entail the demarcation, construction and promotion of
strategic urban places for industrial development – for example, office centres, industrial parks, telematic
networks, transport and shipping terminals, and various types of retail, entertainment and cultural
facilities.
(1998a, 446)

Thus urban agencies, too, are helping to support the practice of building ‘glocal scalar fixes’
by configuring infrastructural and urban spaces to the precise needs of valued spaces within
the metropolis. This is what Shearer calls the apparently pervasive ‘edifice complex’ within
contemporary urban politics, which tends to ‘equate progress with the construction of
high-rise office towers, sports stadiums, convention centres, and cultural megapalaces, but
often ignores the basic needs of most residents’ (1989, 289). Such ‘glocal’ urban economic
strategies entail configuring spaces and infrastructures to connect seamlessly with dominant
international circuits of exchange. Special-purpose private or quasi-private infrastructure
development bodies are an increasingly popular policy option here, as they can be tasked
with equipping strategic economic spaces with high-quality infrastructure without facing
onerous political challenges or the imperatives of cross-subsidies and territorial equalisation
(Foster, 1996; Mallett, 1993a, Nunn, 1996).
At the same time, however, ‘there appears to be a paradoxical tendency towards the
enforcement of local boundaries’ (Ezechieli, 1998, 3). Fine-grained economic segregation
within virtually all cities is increasing (Hack, 1997). Roger Keil asks if ‘the only counterforce
to the convergence of global capital interests [is] the tribalist fragmentation of diverging
communities: guarded and fenced off from one another, crammed in between the barriers of
high-speed traffic and humming to the deafening sound of electronic highways?’ (1994, 132).
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 311

INFRASTRUCTURE AND REAL ESTATE CAPITAL

Third, in response to global moves towards liberalisation and/or privatisation, infrastructure

and real estate capital is itself increasingly withdrawing from rolling out general networks
across cities and regions to focus on ‘glocal’ infrastructural articulations for strategically
favoured places and users, largely within metropolitan areas (Crilley, 1993; Logan, 1993).
This is a reaction to the growing demand for, and profitability of, seamless glocal links that
transcend national and municipal boundaries, to tie in with the wider development logics of
interconnecting valued spaces at the expense of less valued ones. It also reflects a shift away
from notions of universal service and towards a greater proactivity among utilities and
infrastructure operators in ensuring the most profitable economic development of the spaces
they serve (Graham and Marvin, 1995).
It is more and more common, then, for infrastructure operators to act as ‘growth statesmen’
for the valued spaces that they serve (Logan and Molotch, 1987, 74). They are increasingly
eager to become involved in the growth politics and policies of their host cities or localities
(Guy et al., 1996). As Cox and Mair put it, ‘public infrastructure networks are highly capital-
intensive, and realizing the values locked up in fixed gas lines, power stations etc. requires the
reproduction of a particular spatial pattern of customers who will provide the infrastructure’s
value inputs’ (1988, 2).
At the same time, though, operators are developing international portfolios of mergers,
alliances and strategic acquisitions, and aspiring to become ‘global network firms’ in transport,
telecommunications, power, water or, increasingly, combinations thereof (Rimmer, 1998).
Such firms are able to offer international corporate clients a ‘one-stop shop’ service, for
example with global logistics solutions, ‘flat rate’ telecoms tariffs to anywhere on earth or
CCTV surveillance or a single energy package for multiple sites. Figure 7.1 provides Peter
Rimmer’s analysis of the ‘glocal’ infrastructural configurations that such global network firms
are aspiring to provide.
To infrastructure capital, serving a range of valued locations across a wider area helps to
‘reconstitute local dependence at some broader geographical scale’ (Cox and Mair, 1988, 3).
But the most important point for our purpose here is that the geographically embedded nature
of infrastructure networks is inevitable and impossible to avoid. Ways thus have to be found
to minimise the risks it entails, either through careful targeting of the most profitable markets
within a territory, extending it to serve an international portfolio of profitable spaces or
diversifying into less vulnerable markets and sectors.

CORPORATE CAPITAL

Finally, it is clear that corporate capital is increasingly intervening directly to encourage the
production of the infrastructural network spaces that most suit its internationalising and
‘glocal’ needs (Schiller, 1999a). Lobbying of states and providers perceived to be inadequate
in opening up restrictions on the provision of customised corporate infrastructure, or of those
who are deemed to offer inadequate infrastructural price, quality or reliability, is increasingly
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 312

Figure 7.1 Glocal infrastructure requirements of global network firms, focusing on transport and
communications. Source: Rimmer (1998), 85

intense. Mobile corporations are also not slow to exploit the leverage they command to coerce
entrepreneurial and ambitious municipalities and nation states to customise and configure
infrastructural arrangements to their precise needs at little or no cost to them (Peck, 1996).
With this context in mind, we are in a position to explore the ways in which our seven
chosen examples of premium infrastructural spaces are being ‘globally’ constructed in a range
of cities across the world. The first example comes from the world’s dominant ‘global cities’
(see Sassen, 1991, 2000b).
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 313

G L O B A L C O N N E C T I O N S , L O C A L
D I S C O N N E C T I O N S : C U S T O M I S I N G
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E F O R G L O B A L F I N A N C I A L
E N C L A V E S

Any cursory examination of the dominant ‘hub’ positions of London, New York, Tokyo or
Paris within their respective countries will quickly reveal that ‘global’ cities have long been
central articulation points for all manner of networked infrastructures: rail, metro, water,
power, airline, freight and telecommunications. But the combined processes of liberalisation,
globalisation, technological change and the application of new urban design techniques are
not only reinforcing the centrality of global city cores in global infrastructure networks. They
are also, paradoxically, working carefully to secure the highly valued segments of global cities
from their surrounding cityscapes. As Manuel Castells suggests:

the few nodal functions still located in central cities, around Central Business Districts (CBDs) and high
quality urban spaces, can be bridged to national and global hinterlands via telecommunications, fast
transportation and information systems, without needing to renovate their surrounding urban areas.
Thus the central city’s islands of prosperity and innovation can further isolate themselves from the city,
whilst integrating into the space of flows and delinking themselves from their social and territorial
environments.
(1999b, 31–2)

COMBINING GLOBAL CONNECTIONS AND LOCAL

DISCONNECTIONS IN GLOBAL CITY CORES:
THE CASE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS

It is increasingly clear that the most highly valued spaces in global city cores are being provided
with their own dedicated, high-quality infrastructural connections. These are configured
to maximise the ease of connecting to other global city cores around the world. At the same
time they are increasingly organised carefully to filter out unwanted connections with the
surrounding metropolis – those that are judged to be ‘threatening’ or deemed to be irrelevant
to the direct needs of the glocal enclave.
As we see in Box 7.1, the case of telecommunications presents perhaps the most potent
illustration of how seamless connections can link powerful spaces and users ‘glocally’ with
other powerful spaces and users, whilst helping them simultaneously to disconnect from
the wider social and economic worlds of the surrounding metropolis. These processes,
as Barney Warf suggests, show how telecommunications are being used to allow space to
be ‘stretched, deformed, or compressed according to changing economic and political
imperatives’ (1998, 225).
In global cities the most sophisticated, diverse and capable electronic infrastructures ever
seen are being mobilised to compress space and time barriers in a veritable frenzy of network
construction. Global city regions are heavily dominating investment in, and the use of, such
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 314

B O X 7 . 1 D E D I C A T E D U R B A N O P T I C F I B R E
G R I D S A N D T H E C O M P E T I T I V E S T R U G G L E
B E T W E E N ‘ G L O B A L ’ C I T I E S

In the telecommunications field, the result gap between the best and worst of infra-
of the combination of concentrated demand structure is narrowing, particularly in the
and customised infrastructure provision is the middle ground, it is still very wide’ (Finnie, 1998,
superimposition of many high-capacity optic 20).
fibre grids within the valued cores of global The five US cities included in the sample
cities right across the world. The presence, ranked highest and most competitive. New
or absence, of these networks, and the ser- York led the way, with nine separate optic
vices which run on them, strongly defines the fibre infrastructures. London was the most
communications ‘competitiveness’ of global ‘competitive’ city outside the United States,
cities, an important consideration as they with six separate optic fibre grids. Cities that
struggle to establish themselves as hubs of are experiencing a proliferation of urban fibre
telecommunications traffic. infrastructures, following liberalisation, came
A survey by the Yankee Group, a US tele- next (Stockholm, Paris, Sydney, Hong Kong,
communications consultancy, and Com- Frankfurt and Amsterdam – which has
munications Week International, attempted constructed its own municipally supported
to rank the competitiveness of telecom- urban fibre ring called CityRing® in partnership
munications provision in early 1998 in twenty- with the Dutch PTT – see Figure 7.2).
five global cities encompassing 5 per cent
of the world’s population (see Finnie, 1998).
Their scored rankings, shown in Table 7.1, were
based on technical definitions of the pricing
of services, the choice of physical infrastruc-
ture connections available, and the availability
of the most advanced and sophisticated
connections (for example, ‘dark fibre’, which
is uncommitted to other users) and very
broadband services.
Their results give a revealing portrait of
the degree to which intense competition
is focusing on the small number of global
cities. Such cities concentrate particularly
high demand, are located within the core
geo-economic regions of the world, and are
placed within nations that have enthusiastically
embraced telecommunications liberalisa-
tion. The researchers concluded that ‘cities
large and small around the globe are integral
to the fortunes of the world’s economy,
Figure 7.2 The Amsterdam CityRing® initiative.
yet the [telecommunication] infrastructure Source: PTT Telecom Netherlands promotional
in each can vary greatly. . . . Although the brochure
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 315

Table 7.1 Ranked scores of global cities by the competitiveness of their telecommunications
infrastructure, 1998

Rank city Total score Tariffs Choice Availability

1 New York 438 148 182 108

2 Chicago 428 154 166 108
3 Los Angeles 428 152 168 108
4 San Francisco/San Jose 425 149 168 108
5 Atlanta 409 141 160 108
6 London 391 131 161 99
7 Stockholm 386 129 149 108
8 Toronto 361 123 148 90
9 Paris 337 118 129 90
10 Sydney 331 123 118 90
11 Hong Kong 328 107 149 72
12 Frankfurt 321 78 135 108
13 Amsterdam 308 100 118 90
14 Tokyo 300 77 133 90
15 Brussels 294 97 107 90
16 Mexico City 283 93 118 72
17 Zurich 276 100 86 90
18 Milan 267 101 94 72
19 Kuala Lumpur 256 90 94 72
20 Tel Aviv 230 110 66 54
21 Singapore 206 108 44 54
22 Johannesburg 161 76 50 36
23 São Paulo 135 44 55 36
24 Moscow 134 26 72 36
25 Beijing 105 48 39 18

Maximum possible score 500 171 221 108

Source: Adapted from Finnie (1998), 21.

Note: Scores are based on a technical assessment of tariffs, choice of networks and availability of services.

The rest trailed further behind because structures as the ‘silver bullet’ to such cities’
of insufficient network competition, relatively lack of ‘competitiveness’, arguing that:
high tariffs and lack of access to the most
sophisticated services. Eleven of the twenty- the ‘poorer’ cities in our survey – defined
five cities only had one optic fibre network, as such in terms of GDP per capita –
tying firms into sole, monopoly suppliers. trail far behind, victims by and large of
Interestingly, though, the researchers believed local reluctance to allow competition.
that, such was the rate of the shift towards Of these five ‘poorer’ cities – Mexico City,
global archipelagoes of competitive global city Johannesburg, Beijing, São Paulo and
optic fibre grids, all global cities would have Kuala Lumpur – only Mexico City makes
‘at least five’ optic fibre grids ‘in the near future’ a reasonable showing, mainly because
(Fillion, 1996, 22). it has been efficiently colonized by foreign-
Global cities in the ‘Developing’ World owned telecoms operators taking
tended to be at the bottom of the table advantage of Mexico’s liberal regulatory
because of their nation states’ general reluc- structure. The others still have a long way to
tance to privatise and/or liberalise their go before they can join the global elite.
telecommunications regimes. The authors (Finnie, 1998, 22)
portrayed foreign-owned telecom infra-
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 316

technologies (Graham and Marvin, 1996). A survey by the Yankee Group and
Communications Week International, for example, found that around 55 per cent of all
international private telecommunication circuits that terminate in the United Kingdom do
so in London. About three-quarters of all advanced data traffic generated in France comes
from within the Paris region (see Finnie, 1998).
But the ‘wiring’ of cities with the latest optic fibre networks is extremely uneven. It is
characterised by a dynamic of stark dualisation. On the one hand, seamless and powerful
global–local connections are being constructed by private communications operators within
and between highly valued spaces of global cities – the downtown cores and newly constructed
‘intelligent’ corporate plazas and data processing areas (see Sassen, 2000b).
On the other hand, intervening spaces populated by poorer communities – even those
which may geographically be cheek-by-jowl with the favoured zones within the same city –
are often largely ignored by telecommunications investment plans. Such spaces threaten to
emerge as ‘network ghettoes’ – places of low telecommunications access and social dis-
advantage. As with many contemporary urban trends, uneven global interconnection via
advanced telecommunications becomes subtly combined with local disconnection in the
production of urban space (see Amin and Graham, 1998). Moreover, such a situation seems
likely to characterise developed countries (which are now fully liberalising telecom-
munications), developing and newly industrialised countries (which are increasingly
liberalising telecommunications under structural adjustment pressures) and post-communist
countries (where dedicated city networks are being built to bypass the obsolescent telecoms
infrastructure left behind by communist regimes – see Berlage, 1997).

L A S T M I L E C O N N E C T I V I T Y : T H E ‘ M E S S Y ’ M A T E R I A L

B A S I S O F T H E ‘ D E A T H O F D I S T A N C E ’

It is paradoxical, then, that an industry which endlessly proclaims the ‘death of distance’
actually remains driven by the old-fashioned geographical imperative of putting physical
networks in trenches and conduits in the ground to promote market access. The greatest
challenge of the multiplying telecommunications firms in global cities is what is termed
the problem of the ‘last mile’: getting satellite installations, optic fibre ‘drops’ and whole
networks through the expensive ‘local loop’. In other words, the challenge is to thread fibre
under the congested roads and pavements of the urban fabric, to the ‘smart’ buildings, dealer
floors, headquarters, media complexes and stock exchanges that are the most lucrative target
users.
Without the expensive laying of hardware in the financial and business districts of global
city cores it is not possible to enter the market seriously and win lucrative contracts. Fully
80 per cent of the cost of a network is associated with this traditional, ‘messy’ business of
getting it into the ground in congested, and contested, urban areas. There is a strong
connection between the internal information infrastructures of the ‘smart’ buildings of global
city cores – with their security, energy and communications management systems – and the
global grids of fibre, satellite and transport infrastructure that link the buildings up across the
planet.
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 317

Massive investment is planned to try and overcome the problem of the ‘last mile’ through
the construction of fleets of ‘flying base stations’ which hover over major metropolitan cores
twenty-four hours a day. Specially designed low-speed planes flying ten miles above the city,
high-altitude airships and balloons, even dedicated geostationary satellites for major cities are
all being planned to offer broadband connectivity over wireless links to the lucrative corporate
markets in major city cores.

C O N N E C T I N G G L O B A L C I T Y C O R E S : I N T E G R A T I N G G L O B A L

A R C H I P E L A G O E S O F M E T R O P O L I T A N F I B R E N E T W O R K S

Such is the pull of global city cores that they are strongly shaping the global geography of
telecommunications investment. One of the world’s fastest growing firms, for example,
WorldCom (which incorporates MCI) is emerging as a global player by constructing dedicated
fibre networks for ‘global’ city cores and few other places. This completely ‘unbundled’
solution avoids the costs of building networks to serve all but the most lucrative spaces.
WorldCom have built over sixty fibre optic infrastructures in major city centres across the
world, in carefully targeted, financially strong city centres (forty-five of them in the United
States). A hundred and thirty WorldCom city grids are eventually planned – eighty-five in the
United States, forty in Europe and the rest in Asia, Latin America and the Pacific. Each is
carefully targeted on ‘information-rich’ global cities and parts of global cities which have a
sufficient concentration of large corporate or government offices to ensure high levels of
international revenue relative to miles of network constructed.
But WorldCom is also building the transoceanic and transcontinental fibre networks to
tie the urban grids together into global archipelagoes – a global market which absorbed
US$22 billion between 1988 and 1998 and which is expected to attract a further US$27
billion between 1998 and 2003 – largely on direct city-to-city global links (Communications
International, July 1999, 47). As well as constructing a transatlantic fibre network known as
Gemini between the centres of New York and London, WorldCom are building their own
pan-European Ulysses network linking their city grids in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels
and major UK business cities beyond London. The strengthened importance of direct city-
to-city connection is not lost on telecommunications commentators. As Finnie (1998) argues:

it should be no surprise . . . that when London-based Cable & Wireless PLC and WorldCom laid the
Gemini transatlantic cable – which came into service in March 1998 – they ran the cable directly into
London and New York, implicitly taking into account the fact that a high proportion of international
traffic originates in cities. All previous cables terminated at the shoreline.
(Finnie, 1998, 20)

T H E I N C R E A S E D ‘ F I L T E R I N G ’ O F L O C A L C O N N E C T I V I T Y :
R O A D P R I C I N G A N D ‘ R I N G S O F S T E E L ’

Thus the operations of global cities simultaneously ‘reach out’, extending their influence
further across the globe via dedicated global fibre optic networks, whilst withdrawing into
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 318

their ever larger, mixed-use corporate plazas. These ‘electronic superbanks’ are not skyscrapers
but ‘groundscrapers’: ‘huge nine-to-eleven-storey buildings with immense floor plates’ to
accommodate the remarkable IT needs of global financial institutions today (Pawley, 1997,
59).
Such processes are also supported by the growing shift towards filtering out ‘unwanted’
road traffic in the heart of global cities, either through police cordons and the electronic
surveillance of car number plates (as in London – see Box 7.2), or electronic road pricing (as
in Singapore). The Singapore scheme, which started in 1998, levies electronic tolls on car
drivers commuting at peak periods into the core of the central business district (Soo, 1998;
Seik, 2000). Obstensibly, this initiative is aimed at reducing traffic congestion. But the scheme,
and others like it, also works as another form of local disconnection, as the toll mechanism
filters out relatively ‘cash-poor/time-rich’ commuters, releasing space and improving the
speed for wealthy ‘cash-rich/time-poor’ business commuters. Beneath the rhetoric that such
road pricing is aimed at achieving environmental sustainability, the real objective is often
therefore to create fast-flowing premium downtown road spaces as a boost to interurban
competitiveness. Hong Kong, for example, is implementing a similar scheme to Singapore’s,
based on the fear that corporate head offices will select the uncluttered roads of central
Singapore over Hong Kong’s regular gridlock. High-profile cases of CEOs having to leave
their air-conditioned limousines to walk the ‘last mile’ to meetings in searing heat and
humidity are being explicitly used to justify the initiative (Khan, 2000).

B O X 7 . 2 G L O B A L C O N N E C T I O N S A N D L O C A L
D I S C O N N E C T I O N S I N G L O B A L C I T Y C O R E S :
T H E C A S E O F T H E C I T Y O F L O N D O N

Few places exemplify how unparalleled global Express rail link opened in 1998 connecting
connectivity can be combined with highly central London with Heathrow – the world’s
selective local connectivity as well as the City best connected international airport – non-
of London. This space has the most powerful stop in fifteen minutes. This link is due to be
global telecommunications connectivity out- extended direct to the heart of the City early in
side North America. Access to the world’s the new century, further supporting the ‘glocal’
airline networks is also exceptionally good, connectivity between the City and global airline
especially since the dedicated Heathrow networks.

GLOBAL CONNECTION: TELECOMMUNICATIONS

The overall telecommunications market for corporate). As a result of global telecom firms
London was estimated in 1999 to be over scrambling to access this highly concentrated
£1,300 million, around the same as that for market, the City of London now has at least six
Paris and over four times that of Frankfurt overlaid fibre optic grids rolled out beneath the
(£253 million) (COLT communications, Web Square Mile and the rest of the main business
site, http://www.colttelecom.com/english/ areas of the City. They are operated by BT,
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 319

Mercury, City of London Telecommunications Another of London’s six optic fibre infra-
(COLT), WorldCom, Energis and Sohonet. structures has been developed since 1994
Roads, canal pathways, old hydraulic power by WorldCom/MCI. This network has been
ducts, Underground railway tunnels, sewers particularly successful, providing a potent
and other utility pipes provide the conduits for reminder of how powerful but geographically
this massive concentration of electronic highly focused infrastructures in global cities
infrastructure. can be at articulating large portions of the
Increasingly, such urban networks link electronic flows of whole nations, even con-
directly into transatlantic and international optic tinents. With only 180 km of fibre constructed
fibre grids, maximising the quality and reliability within the City, the London WorldCom network
of transglobal connectivity. Detailed informa- has already secured fully 20 per cent of the
tion on the urban geographies of these com- whole of the United Kingdom’s international
peting infrastructures is not easy to come by telecommunications traffic, which is, in turn, a
(Kellerman, 1993). But details are available good proportion of Europe’s (Finnie 1998).
of one of the networks – that operated by COLT WorldCom has been especially successful at
(Figure 7.3). The geographies of the other five building its own fibre networks across oceans
are unlikely to vary considerably. Figure 7.3 and interurban corridors to link up its archi-
thus shows how dedicated fibre networks tend pelago of global city networks. Direct and
to be tightly focused, at least at first, on the seamless glocal connections emerge which
central areas with the greatest concentration support the global interoperable operations of
of communications-intensive activities. In the transnational finance and corporate capital
COLT network fibre is laid especially thickly in whilst totally bypassing the old public phone
the City of London financial district. A broader systems laid out during the modern ideal.
grain of network coverage exists in the West ‘Bypassing incumbent carriers on both sides
End. An extension runs out to the new of the Atlantic, WorldCom’s newly established
international business spaces in the Docklands. transatlantic submarine cable facilities and

Figure 7.3 The optic fibre network in central London run by City of London Telecommunications.
Source: COLT Web site at http://www.colttelecom.com/english/corporate/mn_corp13.html
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 320

urban business networks will allow it to link Europe with 27,000 such buildings in the
directly some 4,000 business buildings in United States’ (Schiller, 1999a, 63).

LOCAL DISCONNECTION: THE ‘RING OF STEEL’

At the same time as the City of London is being

equipped to connect with ever greater power
to (highly valued parts of) the world, however,
it is also withdrawing from free-flowing and
public local connections with the rest of
London. This strategy ‘guards the City [of
London] so that it might continue to negotiate
its path towards the increasingly cosmopolitan
requirements of being a “global city”’ (Jacobs,
1996). It is designed specifically so that the
global financial core of the City of London can
‘delineate its space and signal its exclusivity’ as
a centre of global, immaterial power (Power,
2000, 12).
This strategy applies especially to road
connections and vehicular traffic. Since the two
major IRA bombings in the early 1990s, the City
Corporation has developed a strategic plan
to protect what it calls ‘the world’s leading
financial capital’ by, effectively, erecting ‘a
modern version of the medieval Wall with
security gates’ (The Times, 27 April 1993, Plate 14 The ‘ring of steel’ in the City of
quoted in Jacobs, 1996). This is the so-called London. Photograph: Stephen Graham
‘ring of steel’ which carefully manages and
scrutinises all incoming and outgoing vehicular been reduced from thirty to eight (Power,
traffic (Jacobs, 1996; Power, 2000). Electronic 2000). Car number plates are automatically
road blocks and armed guards now scrutinise recorded and a database has been created of
every vehicle entering or leaving the City of all vehicles entering the area. Any vehicle not
London, as part of the corporation’s efforts to leaving the area after a specified time causes
‘make the City less vulnerable as an economic an alarm to ring, leading the suspect vehicle to
target’ (Jacobs, 1996) (see Plate 14). As part be investigated.
of the process, entry points for vehicles have

ATTEMPTS TO DISCIPLINE URBAN

BOUNDARIES ALGORITHMICALLY

More recently this computerised CCTV system search for any stolen vehicle reported in the
has been upgraded so it can proactively United Kingdom. This takes four seconds
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 321

between the car passing the CCTV camera vehicles had been triggered by this proactive
and the computerised database being computerised scanning system.
checked. In 1997–98 over 114,000 daily checks In addition, an initiative called Camerawatch
were made and 26 million checks were made has been pursued, encouraging all private
against the national police computer for stolen businesses in the City to install their own CCTV
vehicles (Power, 2000). Facial-recognition systems to monitor public areas of the City on
software has even been tested on the system. a continuous basis. Over 90 per cent of the
As Norris et al. argue, ‘technology perfected Square Mile is covered, involving 385 schemes
during the Gulf War in 1991 has been utilised to and 1,280 cameras. A record of all the images
track vehicles coming into the City of London captured by the cameras allows police to trace
and trigger an alarm when a car travels in the the movements of any suspected persons
wrong direction on the one-way system’ (Norris and Armstrong, 1999).
(1998, 8). By 1998 340 arrests and 359 stolen

‘B U N D L E D ’ C O M P L E X E S A N D S U P E R B L O C K

D E V E L O P M E N T

Finally, there is an architectural dimension to the selective local disconnection of global city
cores from their immediate urban contexts. For, with the growing integration into enormous
mixed-use urban redevelopment schemes like London’s Broadgate and New York’s Battery
Park City (shown on p. 217), global cities are increasingly providing all the uses business
executives need within single, bundled complexes or ‘superblock’ developments: state-of-the-
art work space, upscale housing, retailing, schools, fitness centres, skating rinks, car parks,
dedicated links to rail networks, etc. As Robert Reich observes in the US context:

Public funds have been applied in earnest to downtown ‘revitalization’ projects, entailing the
construction of clusters of postmodern office buildings (replete with fibre optic cables, private branch
exchanges, satellite dishes, and other state-of-the-art transmission and receiving equipment), multilevel
parking garages, hotels with glass-enclosed atriums rising twenty storeys and higher, up-scale shopping
plazas and gallerias, theaters, convention centers, and luxury condominiums. Ideally, these projects are
entirely self-contained, with air-conditioned walkways linking residential, business, and recreation
functions. The fortunate symbolic analyst is thankfully able to shop, work, and attend the theater without
risking direct contact with the outside world – in particular, the other city.
(1992, 271)

COLONISING THE PERIPHERIES OF GLOBAL CITIES:

CONFIGURING GLOBAL CONNECTIONS AND LOCAL
DISCONNECTIONS FOR NEW FINANCIAL ENCLAVES

But the customisation of international links for highly valued parts of global financial capitals
now extends far beyond the traditional central business district in the urban core. Increasingly,
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 322

spaces are being redeveloped and configured for global financial services industries elsewhere
in the metropolis (Crilley, 1993). In New York, for example, Longcore and Rees (1996)
observe a ‘doughnut’ shape, with a restructured core remaining for headquarter functions and
routine back offices and dealer floors moving to cheaper, more spacious locations further
towards the urban periphery. ‘As highly competitive major financial firms retreat to secretive,
security-conscious structures and a building technology that stresses large horizontal over
vertical spaces,’ they write, ‘the traditional tightly focused financial district and market has
finally demonstrated geographical flexibility’ (ibid., 368).
The development of new ‘packaged’ landscapes for decentralising financial services is
particularly intense in the triumvirate of truly global financial centres: New York, London and
Tokyo.

N E W Y O R K

In New York major new complexes have been constructed on the lower western tip of
Manhattan (the World Financial Center at Battery Park City), and away from Manhattan, at
Jersey City and Brooklyn, to accommodate the changing needs of financial services companies
– especially for high-quality, lower-cost, relatively low-density space for headquarters and
data processing functions. Each such ‘smart building’ is configured with new suites of
infrastructure and high-security design and surveillance features, to secure them from the
perceived risks of adjacent lower-income districts. Automated heating, cooling and humidity
controls are tailored for the electronic equipment; back-up water tanks and air conditioning
are provided. Three or four separate electricity grids are bundled together with emergency
generators with at least three days of fuel. Building footplates are at least 40,000 m2, to
accommodate the needs of global financial institutions. And extremely generous conduits and
spaces are provided for IT infrastructure – again with redundancy and several connections to
the fibre networks of competing local providers (Longcore and Rees, 1996).
Across the Hudson river from Manhattan, in Jersey City, for example, public authorities
have underwritten a major 6 million ft2 complex of offices, elite condominiums, hotels, shops
and a marina, to tempt major finance companies across the river from Wall Street. New rail,
road, power and information infrastructures have been explicitly packaged to the needs of the
complex. Merrill Lynch have moved a major back office facility there, as the site is only three
and a half minutes from their Manhattan headquarters by commuter train (Longcore and
Rees, 1996, 364). On the other side of Manhattan, in Brooklyn, meanwhile, at the new ten-
block MetroTech development for corporate migrants from Manhattan, the utility Con
Edison offer high-quality and individual utility connections to incoming companies.
On the one hand, all these developments exhibit a combination of highly regulated, policed
and internalised ‘public space’ for corporate workers (with winter gardens, a marina and
‘European’ design features for the 30,000 people who work at the World Financial Center)
(see p. 217). On the other, they are carefully removed from surrounding traditional streets.
Instead, they articulate with integrated parking garages, skywalks linking them with other
valued nodes, direct tunnels to transit systems, and malls (Crilley, 1993).
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 323

T O K Y O

In Tokyo, a 1,100 acre artificial island known as Tokyo Teleport Town is the most obvious
glocally connected reclaimed space (Obitsu and Nagase, 1998). The initiative is an attempt
to construct an ‘intelligent business centre’, to ‘prepare Tokyo to become a twenty-first
century international metropolis for the future’s advanced information oriented society’ (Web
site http://www.tokyo-teleport.co.jp/english/ttc/0-b.html). Centred around a massive
twenty-four-storey dedicated satellite ground station complex, the site has its own highway
network, light rail system, centrally controlled power and water infrastructures and, of course,
a sophisticated suite of cable and telecommunications networks. ‘The whole complex is a
“smart building” with a fully integrated electronic facility management system relating energy
supply, security systems and computer networks’ (Riewoldt, 1997, 44). Over 70,000 workers
are expected to be employed in the area; ‘the land is gradually filling with exhibition centres,
hotels, and office buildings for broadcasters and communications-intensive businesses’ (World
Teleport Association, 1999).
The urban nexus between state-of-the-art telecommunications and real estate speculation
is increasingly forging similar ‘teleport town’ style urban enclaves, fuelled by a roving band
of teleport consultants, real estate speculators and the World Teleport Association (WTA).
Such spaces are designed to ‘attract transnational corporations, international financing, trade
and other international business activities’ (Kim and Cha, 1996, 541), and are being
developed in such diverse locations as Seoul, Korea (ibid.), Osaka (the ‘technoport’ project),
and Rio, Brazil (Amborski and Keare, 1998).
Even more grandiose than the Teleport Town island are the ‘artificial platform cities’ that
are planned in Tokyo by the Obayashi real estate firm. These are 1 km2 platforms raised 31m
above the existing cityscape, supporting all necessary modern infrastructures and super-high-
rise mixed-use buildings (see Figure 7.4). Taking the logic of the ‘packaged city’ to its logical
extreme, an 800 m tall ‘millennium tower’, a 1 million m2 ‘building city’ ‘with enough space
to accommodate the entire central area of a large city’ (ibid., 328) has also been suggested
on a reclaimed space in Tokyo Bay.

L O N D O N

In London, finally, the development of new packaged landscapes for the global financial
services industries has been just as dramatic. As the Thatcher government in the United
Kingdom sought to establish a wholly new space for global finance capital in the London
Docklands in the 1980s it adopted what Shane calls a ‘free-market, deregulated, hyper-
developmental enclave’ model of urban development (1995, 63). This fuelled intense
speculative development, supported by major public subsidies and tax breaks. Later, following
the bankruptcy of the main developers, the government realised that only an immense amount
of both private and state-backed infrastructure (to the tune of $2.7 billion) could make the
project work (Crilley, 1993; Foster, 1999).
Docklands has now emerged with a carefully customised light rail system, a short take-off
and landing (STOL) airport, two teleports, six competing fibre optic grids and dedicated
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 324

Figure 7.4 Artificial platform cities as envisaged for Tokyo: 1 km2 urban platforms imposed on the
cityscape to support new infrastructure and super-high-rise development. Source: Obitsu and Nagase
(1998), 327

power, water, logistics and highway links. These allow high-income Docklands inhabitants
and investors to connect with value spaces elsewhere whilst allowing them at the same time
to secede relationally from the poor communities that geographically surround them (a
strategy reinforced by the use of the old docks literally as moats (Avendano et al., 1997)).
(See Figure 7.5.)
Very notably, the Docklands light railway initially connected Docklands with the financial
spaces of the City of London whilst avoiding most of the lower-income communities in the
surrounding districts of Newham and Tower Hamlets. The United Kingdom’s liberalised
energy market allowed competing companies – for example, London Underground – to build
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 325

Figure 7.5 The carefully configured ‘glocal’ infrastructure connections of the London Docklands
development. Source: adapted from Chevin (1991), 47

new electricity networks for Docklands, offering cheaper tariffs to the major companies located
there. The highway link allowed commuter motorists to access Docklands seamlessly from
professional housing spaces in the rest of the City. The newly built STOL airport provided
direct connections with other European business capitals on the doorstep without having to
access London’s other airports. And a brand-new £1.3 billion Jubilee Tube line, completed
in the year 2000, further improves the public transport to the West End of London and
Westminster.
Particularly after the IRA bombing campaign of the early 1990s, access by road to the heart
of Docklands, Canary Wharf, was carefully controlled by a so-called ‘mini ring of steel’
comprising CCTV cameras, a police cordon, a worker identity card scheme and a dedicated,
patrolled tunnel road for approved goods deliveries (see Plate 15). All in all, Docklands was
a paradigm example of how urban design approaches can be combined with security practices
and highly selective infrastructural connections to configure a built space for certain users
(global finance capital, allied industries and elite professional residents and workers) at the
direct expense of others (adjacent multi-ethnic and low-income communities) (see Brownhill,
1990).
In Docklands customised infrastructural configurations are backed by intense electronic
surveillance, ‘fortress’ architecture and private policing strategies in the new corporate
enclaves. ‘The rejection of a design framework for the area led to islands of development
insulated from each other by security fences, stretches of open water, and the remnants of a
derelict Docklands landscape’ (Edwards, 1999, 23). Resulting commercial developments are
‘inward looking and insular with “public” spaces on the inside. Externally they are forbidding’
(ibid.). The emphasis is on securitisation and boundary control, to maintain and police the
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 326

Plate 15 London Docklands: a classic defensive glocal enclave with police cordons, digital CCTV
surveillance, dedicated roads for goods access, defensive elite housing spaces and customised rail, air,
energy, water and satellite connections. Photographs: Stephen Graham
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 327

stark social divides between wealthy and powerful and the marginalised and displaced. ‘The
landscapes of advantage and disadvantage are often only a security wall apart’ (ibid.). The
‘telehouse’ development in Docklands, for example, boasts a ‘sound-sensitive external fence
which can detect a sparrow landing on it, infrared and videophone surveillance and cameras
everywhere. Inside, customers [need] PIN numbers to head from chamber to chamber’
(Quillinan, 1993, 14).
The ‘mini ring of steel’ around Docklands was, in fact, a direct echo of the strategy built
up after the IRA’s 1993 Bishopsgate bomb in the central financial core of London to partition
carefully the core financial spaces of central London from the wider metropolis (Pawley,
1997, 153). In fact, as we show in Box 7.2, the global financial landscape of the City of
London also represents something of a paradigm example of splintering urbanism. Whilst it
is as electronically connected with far-off parts of the globe as any place on the planet, the
City of London Corporation is simultaneously attempting to manage and remodel local
connections by remodelling the ‘public’ streets inherited as part of the legacy of the modern
infrastructural ideal.

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A N D E C O N O M I C E N C L A V E S
I N D E V E L O P I N G C I T I E S

The linked construction of business and consumption enclaves and the networked
infrastructures to sustain them are also a prevailing model of development in our second
range of examples: aspiring ‘global’ cities in the Developing World. Many factors have
combined to support this process: infrastructural liberalisation; the shift towards the
construction of large, mixed-use ‘superblock’ enclaves in urban design; the shift towards
extended, polycentric urban structures; a general process of social polarisation; and the
predilection of local policy makers for large development projects to symbolise their
modernising ambitions (so-called ‘teleport’ advanced telecommunications and satellite
complexes, World Trade Centres, retail and commercial centres, new university precincts and
the like).
In the largest ‘megacity’ in Latin America, São Paulo, for example, newly modernised and
gentrified spaces of the city centre have been heavily supported by intense infrastructural
investment by the state and private firms. As a result, there has been:

a remarkable increase in the gap between the areas where the advanced ‘global’ activities are located
and the peripheral areas. Internally, the implementation of sophisticated systems of infrastructure
[like optic fibre, cable television and mobile telephony] have been concentrated either on existing
business districts or on new business developments, generating new centralities for the whole urban
complex.
(Schiffer, 1997, 15)

In Bangkok, meanwhile, as we show in Box 7.3, this logic of interconnecting urban enclaves,
at the expense of the wider city, is also taken to extremes.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 328

B O X 7 . 3 I N T E R C O N N E C T I N G E N C L A V E S O F
N E W D E V E L O P M E N T I N A N E X T E N D I N G
M E G A C I T Y : T H E C A S E O F B A N G K O K

As the city of Bangkok explodes in a carpet of (ibid., 8). The partial liberalisation of tele-
urbanisation stretching over 50 km from the communications – formerly the city’s greatest
original centre, all efforts to use infrastructure infrastructural deficiency – has allowed new
to integrate the city in a comprehensive entrants to meet the unsatisfied demand for
manner have been abandoned. Instead, wiring up and servicing the new middle-class
concessions are being offered for private spaces of the expanding city.
developers to put in highways, metros and Outside the core area, the installation of
telecommunication lines connecting the fibre optics along the so-called ‘intelligent
places they most want to serve without real corridor’ round the major outer ring roads is
efforts to coordinate or integrate the resulting reinforcing the linear expansion of the city into
networks. Massive new private toll roads and exurban areas (Hack, 1997, 11). A ‘leapfrog’
expressways complement those operated by strategy is being encouraged, ‘providing
the state. These are oriented to the business households and firms with fibre optic services
enclaves and affluent residential spaces of
growth corridors like those stretching out to
the second Bangkok International and Don
Muang airports at Chonburi. Until the Asian
financial crash in 1998 separate, competing
commuter and metro rail systems were
being constructed, again by private firms seek-
ing to cover the most lucrative spaces. Such
networks will be ‘uncoordinated in terms of
fare structure and physical connection’
(Kaothien et al., 1997, 5).
Property companies are already taking
‘advantage of high accessibility where the lines
intersect to develop thematically oriented
mixed-use “new towns in town”’ comprising
office, retail, leisure and housing spaces
geared to the needs of affluent commuters –
see Figure 7.6 (Kaothien et al., 1997, 5). Over
50,000 low-income residents have been
displaced over the past few years from shanty
towns to clear the way for such ‘mega-
development’ projects. Such people are
expelled to the periphery, where they are
poorly served by transit and infrastructure
Figure 7.6 The four ‘new towns in town’
(Hack, 1997, 8). ‘This process is being further development: enclaves built on key infrastructure
fuelled by private redevelopment of inner city nodes in Bangkok. Source: Kaothien et al.
areas for high income residents and offices’ (1997), 6
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 329

in high-income, educational, knowledge and coordination either within or between

high value industrial areas’ at the expense of networks. The result, combined with the
the wider city (Kaothien et al., 1997, 14). Overall, pattern of large-scale packaged development
the pattern of infrastructure in Bangkok, as in and market-oriented infrastructure providers,
many other ‘megacities’ in the Developing is ‘oversupply in some areas and lack of
World, shows a notable lack of horizontal services in others’ (ibid., 14).

C O N S T R U C T I N G ‘ H O M E ’ D I S T R I C T S F O R
C Y B E R S P A C E : N E W M E D I A E N C L A V E S
I N G L O B A L C I T I E S

Our third type of emerging economic enclave, like the global financial cores, tends to be
located in the ‘global’ cities of North America and Europe: the gentrifying ‘cyber’ district.
Such spaces are now driving the production of Internet services, Web sites and the whole
digitisation of design, architecture, gaming, CD-ROMs and music. The cities that are
developing such enclaves tend to be those with very great strengths in the arts, cultural
industries, fashion, publishing and computing: New York, San Francisco and London, to
name but three (see Braczyk et al., 1999; Zook, 2000).

THE ‘INTERNETTING’ OF MANHATTAN AND SAN

FRANCISCO: CONSTRUCTING ‘SILICON ALLEY’ AND
‘MULTIMEDIA GULCH’

Manhattan, for example, now provides one of the highest concentrations of Internet activity
anywhere on earth, as the Internet and digital multimedia technologies weave in to support
every aspect of the functioning of the city. According to Moss and Townsend (1997),
Manhattan now has twice the ‘domain density’ (i.e. concentration of Internet hosts) of the
next most ‘Internet-rich’ US city – San Francisco – and six times the US average.
In fact, the metropolitan dominance of the Internet in the United States is actually growing
rather than declining, despite its association with rural ‘electronic cottages’ (Graham and
Marvin, 1996). The top fifteen metropolitan core regions in the United States in Internet
domains accounted for just 4.3 per cent of the national population in 1996. But they
contained 12.6 per cent of the US total in April 1994; by 1996 the figure had risen to almost
20 per cent as the Internet was becoming a massly diffused and corporately rich system. As
Moss and Townsend (1997) suggest, ‘the highly disproportionate share of Internet growth
in these cities demonstrates that Internet growth is not weakening the role of information-
intensive cities. In fact, the activities of information-producing cities have been driving the
growth of the Internet in the last three years’ (emphasis added).
Manhattan is home to a booming set of interactive media industries. In particular,
Manhattan’s so-called ‘Silicon Alley’ – roughly the area south of Forty-first Street – is emerging
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 330

as a dominant global provider of Internet and multimedia skills, design and high value-added
content of all sorts. As in San Francisco’s so-called ‘Multimedia Gulch’ district, several
downtown urban neighbourhoods have been refurbished and gentrified to sustain the
clustering demands of interlocking micro, small and medium-size firms in digital design,
advertising, gaming, publishing, fashion, music, multimedia, computing and communications.
In Manhattan, over 2,200 firms now provide over 56,000 jobs in these sectors, up 105 per
cent between 1996 and 1998 (Rothstein, 1998).
Here, as with global financial service sectors, the need for on-going face-to-face contact
to sustain continuous innovation is closely combined with exceptionally high use of advanced
telecommunications to link relationally and continuously with the rest of the planet.
Increasingly, too, certain downtown spaces are being constructed as the ‘in’ spaces of Internet
innovation, places with a ‘creative’ urban ambience and ‘milieu’ that contrasts starkly with
the sanitised campus landscapes of technopoles.

CYBERDISTRICTS, GENTRIFICATION AND URBAN

SOCIAL CONFLICT

Such processes have set off spirals of gentrification, attracting considerable investment from
restaurants, corporate retailers, property firms, ‘loft’ developers and infrastructure companies,
and leading to the exclusion of lower-income groups from the newly ‘high end’ space (see
Zukin, 1982). Rents have exploded and, somewhat ironically for an industry whose products
can be sent on-line anywhere on earth, parking shortages have become critical.
In both New York and San Francisco major urban social and political conflicts have
emerged as ‘dot-commers’, with their extraordinary wealth, along with real estate speculators
and service providers, have colonised selected districts. This has, not surprisingly, dramatically
driven up rents, leading to the eviction or exclusion of many poorer residents and to growing
efforts at disciplining those who are not tapped into the high-tech, consumerist gentrification
(in this case the poor and the black). As Dolgon (1999) suggests, the reconstruction of urban
neighbourhoods as chic districts for young professional ‘digerati’ is often portrayed on the
surface as the ‘celebrating [of] a diverse and plural community’ manifest in diverse ethnic
restaurants, art spaces and shops. In reality, however, it tends to ‘reinforce a class hierarchy
that includes only those with access to new markets’. Furthermore the ‘new landscapes of
power’ created in the process tend to ‘further marginalize those whose downward mobility
places them outside the marketplace of democracy, diversity, and identity except in their
invocations as the hungry, the homeless, panhandlers, and the other “rude rabble”’ (ibid.).
In San Francisco’s ‘Multimedia Gulch’ district, centred on the SOMA area of the city,
political coalitions such as the ‘Yuppie Eradication Project’ are already fighting back against
the ‘dot-com invasion’ from Silicon Valley to the south (Solnit, 2000). Their campaign
operates under the banner ‘The Internet killed San Francisco’ (see Figure 7.7). Paul Borsook
(1999) outlines the symptoms of what he calls the ‘Internetting’ of the city: commercial real
estate rates rose 42 per cent between 1997 and 1999; the median-price apartment was
$410,000 by August 1999; the median rental for an apartment was over $2,000 per month;
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 331

Figure 7.7 Backlash against the colonisation of San Francisco neighbourhoods by affluent Internet and
multimedia companies and their employees: lobbying by the San Francisco Bay Guardian

homelessness rates were rising fast. Landlords, backed by the relaxation of rent controls and
tenant protection laws by the City Council in the 1990s, have instigated a huge rise in
evictions. The rising stress levels which have resulted for older residents of gentrifying
neighbourhoods have been linked with rapid rises in the death rates of elderly seniors (Nieves,
2000, 12). The result is a severe housing crisis, the expulsion of poorer people from the city
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 332

(as many cannot afford to remain) and accentuating landscapes of social and geographical
polarisation as pockets of the city are repackaged as places of work, leisure or living for
Internet-based businesses and entrepreneurs.

‘ULTIMATE GLOBAL CONNECTORS’: CONSTRUCTING

INTERNET-READY REAL ESTATE

Within such so-called ‘digital districts’, new types of work spaces, often with integrated living
quarters, are also being configured. Within these, new infrastructural connections are closely
combined with highly flexible and carefully configured office suites. Labelled ‘Internet-ready’
real estate by its inventors, a series of new complexes for interactive media firms is now
emerging at the heart of the ‘cyber districts’. The New York Information Technology Center,
for example, a thirty-storey, 400,000 ft2 building, sells itself as ‘Manhattan’s hottest wired
building’ and ‘the ultimate global connector’. To its tenants of CD-ROM developers, Web
companies, digital design consultancies and virtual reality artists it offers a dazzling suite of
global telecommunications connections, from seven competing companies, direct from the
desk, at bandwidths that few other buildings in the world can handle. Emergency power
back-up, twenty-four-hour security and training, all-important meeting space, secretarial
services and advanced fire suppression systems are also provided. The full suite of high-power
electrical systems is especially important, as ‘most buildings today are equipped with only 10
per cent of the necessary requirements’ of an e-commerce or Web company (Bernet, 2000).
The city of New York has supported the emergence of the new media enclaves with tax
holidays, grants, loan funds and financial support for the ‘Plug ’n’ go’ programme to convert
properties into Internet-ready real estate (see Figure 7.8). By 2000 millions of square feet of
older commercial property across mid town Manhattan were being converted and customised
for the new media industry (New York Times, 21 March 2000). To match the imperative of
twenty-four-hour-a-day, year-round electric and electronic connections, these spaces are
being equipped with ‘massive quantities of electric power, advanced back-up power and
security systems, and generator farms that allow tenants to install and manage their own
generators’ (New York Times, 21 March 2000, 6).

DIGITAL MEDIA CLUSTERS AND ‘BYPASS’ ELECTRONIC

INFRASTRUCTURES: THE CASE OF LONDON

London, too, is extending its cutting-edge, customised telecommunications networks into

its booming digital cultural and media industries. In Soho, for example, a tightly constructed
media enclave is benefiting from dedicated infrastructure allowing it to extend to global
markets in ‘real time’. Called ‘Sohonet’, this system links the tight concentration of film and
media companies, television broadcasters, publishers, Internet providers, graphic designers
and recording studio headquarters in the West End directly with Hollywood film studios via
seamless transatlantic fibre connections (see http://www.sohonet.co.uk).
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 333

Figure 7.8 Advertisements for Internet-ready real estate in Manhattan, New York: the ‘Plug ’n’ go’
workspace programme and the New York Telecom Exchange. Sources: New York City Economic
Development Corporation; New York Telecom Exchange

Sohonet allows on-line film transmission, ‘virtual studios’ and editing over intercontinental
scales via highly capable, digital, broadband connections (see Plate 16). The network is seen
as a critical boost to the broader global ambitions of the UK film and cultural industries.
Other connections are planned with other global cities, leading to the possibility of a
dedicated, global, interurban system for digital film and media production in the near future.
Thus, once again, it is clear that patterns of tight geographical clustering, relying on intense,
on-going, face-to-face innovation and contact, linked globally and locally through
sophisticated telemediated networks, are a feature of many of the industries which concentrate
in global cities (not just financial services and corporate services).

T E C H N O P O L E S A N D T H E C O N S T R U C T I O N O F
H I G H - T E C H I N N O V A T I O N C L U S T E R S

There is a great deal of interest in technopoles as economic growth engines, some interest in them
as new forms of cultural representation, and practically no interest in their political governance,
that is, addressing [them] as sites of political power, and their residents as citizens.
(Mosco, 1999a, 40)
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 334

Plate 16 The Sohonet under

construction in the Soho district
of London, a centre of media
activity. Source: Sohonet Web
page www.sohonet.co.uk

Our fourth example of carefully networked emerging urban enclaves encompasses the new
spaces of ‘high-tech’ production and innovation that are emerging in new or renewed spaces
of production in the North (such as southern California, Baden-Württemberg, and the Rhône
Alps region of France); in the campus-like technopoles surrounding reconfigured global cities
(such as London, Paris, Berlin); and in the newly constructed high-tech production and
innovation spaces of the South (in places like Bangalore in India and the Multimedia Super
Corridor south of Kuala Lumpur).
Such is the litany of imitators of Silicon Valley that virtually every region of the world now
boasts a ‘Silicon’-prefixed space or district, an alleged home to clusters of new high-tech firms
and corporate research and development complexes, working (supposedly) in complex
interdependence. The Siliconia Web site, which tracks the global diffusion of silicon or cyber
prefixes to place marketing and urban boosterist strategies, listed fifty-one such sites in June
1999 worldwide, ranging from Silicon Prairie (Kansas City), Silicon Glacier (Kalispel,
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 335

Montana) and Silicon Glen (central Scotland), to Silicon Island (Taiwan), Silicon Plateau
(Bangalore, India), Silicon Wasi (Tel Aviv, Israel), Silicon Plain (Kempele, Finland) and
Silicon Beach (Santa Barbara, California) (available at http://www.tbtf.com/siliconia.html).
However, it must be stressed that a much smaller number of spaces can be genuinely classified
as ‘new industrial spaces’, in the sense that self-sustaining high-tech clusters of innovation are
emerging there. Countless others are merely attempts symbolically to turn round the fortunes
of ailing or peripheral spaces through decidedly optimistic place marketing.
In all these ‘technopole’ spaces, which Castells and Hall (1994) label the ‘mines and
foundries of the informational economy’, highly customised and packaged ‘edge city’-style
landscapes are emerging. Within these, produced space is carefully combined with customised
infrastructure whilst design practices, ‘filtering’ local infrastructures, surveillance and simple
geographical distance are often used to connect selectively with only more prosperous parts
of the host city or region. In fact the produced spaces, the customised infrastructures, the
secure withdrawal and the supporting institutional and financial infrastructure of local agencies
are seen to be central in supporting or nurturing the appropriate ‘innovative milieux’ or
‘clusters’ to create self-sustaining growth and development (Castells and Hall, 1994, 8).
These are the spaces, often distributed around the polycentric metropolis, where flexible
production techniques flourish, where biotechnologies and information technologies are at
the cutting edge, and where continuous research and development are necessary for non-stop
innovation (Storper, 1997). We do not intend here to explore the technological dynamics of
new industrial spaces (for reviews see Castells and Hall, 1994; Storper, 1997). Rather, we
maintain our analysis of the central theme of this chapter, namely: how the new packaged
landscapes underpinning technopoles and new industrial spaces are being produced in tight
relationship with carefully configured, highly selective infrastructure networks. Whilst the
binary distinction is a massive oversimplification, in what follows we divide our discussion of
technopoles broadly between those in the Developed World and those in the Developing
World.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE GROWTH OF HIGH-TECH

CLUSTERS IN THE CITIES OF THE NORTH

The burgeoning new industrial spaces surrounding dominant Northern cities – the
quintessential Silicon Valley, Route 128 to the west of Boston, Massachusetts, the Cambridge
growth area north-east of London, Baden-Württemberg in Germany – are born out of a
potent fusion of intense, on-going innovation, supportive finance capital, world-class labour
market skills and universities, a little bit of serendipity and sophisticated, but highly partial,
infrastructural links: state-of-the-art digital telecommunications, dedicated highway networks,
excellent links with global hub airports, uninterruptible power supplies and, inevitably,
generous water systems, both to fuel the water-hungry production processes and to irrigate
the corporate lawns and atria.
In the United States, for example, real estate developers now routinely customise spaces
with ‘global connectivity’ to try and lure in computing, multimedia, biotechnology and new
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 336

materials companies, especially in the booming group of ‘high-tech’ cities like Boston, Austin,
Silicon Valley, Seattle, Dallas, and Denver (Grogan, 1998). The ‘Infomart’ development in
Dallas, for example, bundles unprecedented communications bandwidth into highly flexible
office and production suites within a 1.6 million ft2 complex catering to the needs of 120
small firms. Small, high-quality, flexible spaces with short leases are backed by many shared
amenities, shared services and a high degree of infrastructural redundancy within such
complexes. Such ‘flex-tech’ architecture is finding its expression in larger real estate strategies
for whole innovation parks such as the Spectrum development in Irvine, California, which
supports five major development clusters in computers, software, biomedical technology,
medical devices and automotive engineering (ibid., 92). Custom-built high-tech office
complexes have also emerged at major railway stations on the outskirts of major cities in
Switzerland (Lehrer, 1994).
Strategies to generate new industrial spaces and clusters artificially on urban peripheries
have long been supported in dirigiste countries such as France, Singapore and Japan, where
vast new infrastructures have been combined with new urban complexes and universities in
the ‘technopole’ and ‘technopolis’ programmes of national and regional governments. The
Japanese technopolis concept, in particular, relies on a modular model encompassing a range
of physical developments (R&D centres, higher education buildings, universities, etc.), tightly
integrated with airport links, Bullet train connections, high bandwidth telecommunications,
cable networks and dedicated water and power supplies (Rimmer, 1991; Markusen et al.,
1999).

I N T E R I O R I S E D C O N S T R U C T I O N S A N D E X T E R N A L

D E L I N K I N G

Carefully configuring the infrastructure networks of new industrial spaces allows such places
to extend their links to global markets and connections. But that also helps the innovation
cluster itself to develop highly filtered links with its adjacent city. Whilst the ‘clustering’ of
innovative firms encourages dense relations within new industrial spaces, they often have a
semi-detached relationship with the wider urban landscape. The architecture of technopoles
like Silicon Valley ‘is shaped by land costs, parcel availability, road access, and business
expansion and contraction rates’ (Schwarzer, 1998b, 16). Resulting developments
tend to be inward-looking. ‘The real landscape of Silicon Valley,’ writes Rebecca Solnitt,
‘seems wholly interior, not only in the metaphor of the maze and the terrain of offices
and suburbs, but in the much promoted ideal of the user never leaving the well-wired home
or office and the goal of eliminating the world and reconstituting it as information’ (1995,
231).
Typically, supporting infrastructures, services and labour are drawn in to such new industrial
spaces, whilst connections with the poorer socioeconomic and sociotechnical spaces of
the metropolis are neglected or undermined (often through the instrument of explosive rises
in housing and living costs) (see Mosco, 1999a). ‘Just across Highway 101’ from the
university–industrial complex of Silicon Valley, for example, ‘is East Palo Alto, a ghetto in
which chronic poverty and unemployment among its black residents seem beyond remedy.
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 337

. . . But for those in the white, self-actualizing utopia of Silicon Valley, the poor and black
are of little concern’ (Winner, 1992, 49). A whole network of hostels have emerged in the
valley even to house the working poor – those who do crucial but relatively low-skill jobs but
have no way of affording the rents or purchase prices for housing. (Median house costs in
early 2000 were $410,000; median one-bed apartment rents were $1,700 per month.) Many
caretakers and cleaners, unable to afford market rents, are squeezed into converted garages
in overcrowded conditions. In addition, high-tech companies use the method of subcontract-
ing to absolve themselves of responsibility for such workers’ welfare. A spokesman for the IT
firm KLA-Tencor, for example, when challenged to pay the company’s janitors a living wage,
stated that ‘the janitors are not our employees, and we don’t comment on other companies’
employees’ (Greenhouse, 2000, A12).

‘ISLANDS WHERE EVERYTHING WORKS’:

CONSTRUCTING ‘TECHNOPOLES’ IN PERIPHERAL
AND DEVELOPING WORLD CITIES

As microelectronics and software production plants are also gradually shifted ‘offshore’ to
lower-cost locations in the newly industrialising and developing countries, technopoles and
‘high-tech’ spaces are increasingly a feature of cities in those countries – the products of
increasingly elaborate development strategies by cities, regions and nations (see Van Grunsven
and Van Egeraat, 1999).
Policy makers in Japan, for example, eager to secure the land, natural resources and cheap
labour denied them at home, have even developed concepts of ‘packaged’ cities which are
fully self-contained innovation and production spaces ready to be implanted in newly
industrialising or developing nations (Rimmer, 1991). The Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
developed a programme in the 1980s to export prepackaged technopolis cities to the main
urban corridors of South East Asia (ibid., 253) (see Figure 7.9). In 1987 the Japanese Ministry
of International Trade and Industry (MITI) also produced a grandiose vision of a
‘multifunction polis’, a ‘high-tech’ city of 100,000, with carefully customised infrastructure,
which was proposed for a site to the north of Adelaide, South Australia.

B A N G A L O R E : A P A R A D I G M A T I C D E V E L O P I N G W O R L D

T E C H N O P O L E

In Developing World new industrial spaces, however, the precise configuration of

infrastructure is even more important than in the North because the quality and reliability of
the existing networks are often so poor. A good example is India’s fifth largest city, Bangalore,
an internationally important centre of software engineering and electronic commerce which
sells itself to the world as ‘India’s Silicon Valley’ (Wetzler, 2000). Here, extensive efforts
have been made by real estate developers and local planning agencies to configure special
software and technology campuses and enclaves to the needs of fast-growing inward investing
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 338

Figure 7.9 Mitsubishi Electric Corporation’s concept of a modular technopolis, complete with cus-
tomised infrastructural connections. Source: Rimmer (1991), 259

and indigenous software and IT firms that deliver services and products to global markets.
The city’s 300 high-tech companies employed over 40,000 people in early 2000 (ibid., 154).
The heightened wealth inequalities resulting from high-tech growth in Bangalore have
created an extremely fragmented and polarised urban structure. It is based on ‘participation
in the information-intensive global economy by a core elite, and non-participation by the
masses’ (Madon, 1998, 232). At the Electronics City complex, for example, three-quarters
of a mile from the centre, several hundred acres of ‘offshore’ technology campus have been
configured to house companies like Texas Instruments (undertaking circuit design), IBM,
3-M and Motorola. The Indian firm Wipro, another major presence, exploits advanced
communications to use India’s cheap software programmers to service many of the world’s
computers remotely. All these firms ‘are insulated from the world outside by power generators,
by the leasing of special telephone lines, and by an international-style work environment’
(ibid., 234). With their on-site ATMs, soaring postmodern buildings and multiple redundant
infrastructures, such parks, in effect, are ‘islands where everything works’ within surrounding
spaces where modern facilities and networked connections are both very limited and extremely
unreliable (Dugger, 2000, 12).
Singaporean capital has also constructed an Information Technology Park on the
outskirts of Bangalore, equipping it with dedicated satellite ground stations, broadband
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 339

telecommunications, uninterrupted power supplies, back-up generators and international-

standard private water, sanitation and waste disposal services (Wetzler, 2000). Because of the
poor quality of the regional telecoms infrastructure, the park also serves a regional role as a
hub linking global markets: ‘companies within 30 km of the park can simply point their
microwave antennae and connect by satellite link to clients anywhere in the world’ (Rapaport,
1996, 105). Celia Dugger argues that most businesses within the new technology parks
‘don’t need decent roads: they can deliver their products via satellite links of fibre optic cables’
(2000, 12). The Information Technology Park is also integrated with luxurious residential
and leisure facilities, separating them even further from the prevailing poverty in the shanty
towns which house the bulk of the city’s in-migrant population (over 50 per cent of whom
are illiterate). ‘You won’t see many Horatio Algers leaping from the shanty towns to
workstations in Bangalore’s infotech forms’ (Wetzler, 2000, 166).
Indeed, whilst the bulk of public and infrastructural investment centres on linking the new
parks globally and securing them locally, the local municipality has actively worked to bulldoze
‘illegal’ self-built housing areas in the name of a civic modernisation ‘clean-up’ programme.
Thus it is clear that ‘the recent internationalization of Bangalore has had a negative impact
on the poor’ (Madon, 1998, 236). The condition of shanty town areas is deteriorating and
many have very poor access to mains water, communications, energy or metalled roads and
motorised transport – a sharp contrast to the glocally configured modern landscapes of the
new technopolis parks that they surround. In fact, a broader infrastructure crisis is emerging
for the poorer majority of the city: shortages and interruptions of power are common, a water
shortage is looming and the city authorities are desperately trying to attract private sector
investment into the poorer districts.
The technology parks in Bangalore, however, are tiny compared with the most ambitious
attempt to customise an entire metropolitan corridor to the needs of the international IT and
multimedia industries: Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). We explore the case
of the MSC in more detail in Box 7.4.

C U S T O M I S I N G I N F R A S T R U C T U R E F O R
F O R E I G N D I R E C T I N V E S T M E N T I N
M A N U F A C T U R I N G

In our fifth range of examples, strikingly similar processes of customising infrastructure to the
precise needs of export-oriented foreign direct investors are also widely established in an area
where the race between cities and regions to lure in new investment is even more intense –
the struggle for mobile routinised manufacturing (Dunning and Narula, 1996; Chan, 1995).
Across the emerging urban and regional development strategies of North America, Europe,
Asia, South Africa, the Middle East, Australasia and Latin America, there is one broadly
consistent feature: intensive efforts to configure built space and infrastructure needs in parallel
to the detailed desires and wants of manufacturing inward investors. This reflects the global
mushrooming of flows of foreign direct investment from $77 billion in 1983 to $644 billion
in 1998 (Robinson and Harris, 2000, 33).
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 340

B O X 7 . 4 C U S T O M I S I N G A N E W U R B A N
C O R R I D O R T O T H E N E E D S O F G L O B A L
I N F O R M A T I O N C A P I T A L : M A L A Y S I A ’ S
M U L T I M E D I A S U P E R C O R R I D O R

Giant among the emerging generation of KUALA

LUMPUR
urban planning initiatives that attempt to
engineer new industrial and multimedia spaces
is the US$20 billion Multimedia Super Corridor
in Malaysia (see Figure 7.10). Here, in effect, at
the heart of the ASEAN bloc in South East Asia,
a whole national development strategy has
effectively been condensed into a single,
grandiose urban plan for a vast new urban
CYBER
JAYA PUTRA
corridor. The aim of the MSC is nothing less JAYA
than to replace Malaysia’s manufacturing-
dominated economy with a constellation of
services, IT, media and communications
industries by turning a vast stretch of rain forest
and rubber plantations into ‘Asia’s technology
hub’ by the year 2020 (see Bunnell, 2000). The
MSC starts at the centre of the capital, Kuala
Lumpur – itself a city symbolised by ambitious
plans for a string of megastructure develop- Kuala Lumpur
ment projects, including ‘GigaWorld’ (a 2 km International
long, fourteen-level tube structure encom-
Airport
passing office, retail and housing spaces and
a ‘themed water park’) and the Petronas twin
towers (momentarily at least, the world’s tallest
buildings) (Marshall, 1999). The MSC project
ends thirty miles south at an immense new Figure 7.10 The Multimedia Super Corridor in
international airport strategically placed on the Malaysia. Source: Allen (1999), 207
route to Singapore.
Driven by the dominating presence of
the Prime Minister of nineteen years, Dr M. incoming multimedia transnationals, provide
Mahathir, the MSC is one of the world’s the infrastructural matrix for the plan, at a cost
largest-ever planned urbanisation projects. Its of US$10 billion to the state.
scale and comprehensiveness are remark- The key elements of the MSC plans include
able. Thirty miles long and ten miles wide, the a network of ‘smart schools’, a new multimedia
corridor has an area of 750 km2. In effect it is a university, with surrounding research and
greenfield site as big as the whole of Singapore development clusters, ‘paperless’ electronic
island. Massive new highway grids, rail net- government offices and campuses, on-line
works, utilities and a very high capacity optic medicine and distance learning centres,
fibre web, all configured to the demands of advanced manufacturing centres, and tele-
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 341

services and back office zones for inward the investment costs of providing things
investors. Each is associated with its own plans on-line.
for new urban districts, carefully integrating A specially built ‘Intelligent capital’ for
the IT spaces with a strategic planning frame- Malaysia, twenty miles south of Kuala Lumpur
work providing associated housing (inevitably – known as PutraJaya – is being built to
labelled ‘cybervillages’), parks, leisure, trans- spearhead the whole MSC dynamic. The city,
port and retailing uses. with a planned population of 570,000, will be
By May 1997 more than 900 companies, designed along ‘garden city’ lines and located
both foreign and Malaysian, had bid to par- on a newly created lake. Again, high-tech infra-
ticipate in the MSC (Corey, 1998). As well structures and services – from building
as tax incentives, favourable cost structures monitoring and control, traffic management,
and high-quality customised infrastructure citywide information services and on-line
for the space, Malaysia has even developed government transactions and information – are
customised laws for the MSC. Incoming being designed integrally with the physical,
transnationals will have free in-migration for architectural and social aspects of the new
‘knowledge workers’ from all over the world. capital. The movement of the entire administra-
And a special set of new ‘cyber laws’ sur- tive apparatus of the Malaysian government to
rounding intellectual property rights has been the new city is a symbolic gesture of the impor-
created to make sure that firms can recoup tance of MSC to Malaysia’s development.

PROBLEMATISING THE MULTIMEDIA SUPER CORRIDOR

STRATEGY

The MSC will, according to a promotional hand-outs and burgeoning ASEAN markets?
brochure, be ‘a global community living on Will Malaysia’s work force really make the
the leading edge of the information society’. hoped-for ‘quantum jump’ in skill levels if
It will be a dazzlingly modern ‘world of Smart corporations can bring in their own unlimited
Homes, Smart Cities, Smart Schools, Smart supplies of knowledge workers?
Cards and Smart Partnerships’ (quoted in Second, there are dangers that the MSC
Allen, 1999, 209). But there are signs that the will entrench a two-tier society, with Malaysian
relationship between the MSC and the rest of workers providing the low-value-added sup-
Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia may become port for hermetically sealed corporate zones
highly problematic. operating on global networks. In particular,
First, as John Allen suggests ‘the mere there are major question marks over the fate of
presence of state-of-the-art infrastructure Malaysia’s peripheral regions, and marginal-
guarantees nothing’ (1999, 21). The advan- ised urban spaces, outside the MSC. Despite
tages of existing global cities, with their subtle, the implication in the prevailing discourse
embedded networks of ties, connections and that the whole of the national space will
ideas, are far more extensive than the simple benefit equally (Bunnell, 2000), the construc-
accomplishment of infrastructure. Will trans- tion of the MSC is displacing plantation
nationals genuinely transfer advanced R&D communities whilst configuring new spaces
functions there rather than mere ‘screwdriver’ overwhelmingly for the elite corporate and
operations, keen to profit from government IT professionals and their families who will
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 342

be able to afford the new privately developed Urban utopia?

‘wired’ homes (Bunnell, 2000). Low-skill, low-
Will quality urban living be
wage service staff – cleaners, security guards, privatised to the highest bidder?
Will the new dream cities of
gardeners – are being brought in from outside Malaysia become the domain of
the privileged?
the corridor. Such concerns about the Section 2 looks at how
community democracy can help
construction of a privatised, hyper-clean city ordinary citizens stake a claim to
clean air, city parks and good
public transport.
for socioeconomic elites, gated off from the • See pages 2 - 4

chaotic and polluted world of the rest of Kuala

Lumpur, have emerged in criticism in the
national press, as shown by the image in Figure
7.11.

Figure 7.11 ‘Urban utopia?’ A critical reflection

on the Multimedia Super Corridor from Kuala
Lumpur’s Star newspaper. Source: Tim Bunnell
(personal communication)

Once again, the provision of new glocal connections that connect new plants into wider
circuits of trade and exchange are dominating inward investment strategies here. Such a trend
is part of a broader situation where ‘localities compete to offer private investors ever speedier
development approvals, ever larger tax concessions, ever weaker environmental regulations,
and ever friendlier business environments’ (Foster, 1996, 13). Indeed, in a world of liberalising
trade flows and increasing locational freedom, supply-side inducements between competing
local agencies often become a critical factor in shaping the specific patterns, and urban effects,
of mobile manufacturing investments.
The logic is exemplified by South Africa’s ‘Spatial Development Initiatives’. These are a
series of spaces across the country which are targeted for customised, glocal connections,
‘aimed at setting up world class industries in regions of theoretical potential for high economic
growth. These regions have been chosen because of their raw materials or underutilised
infrastructure’ (Hafajee, 1999, 52). Once designated, a Spatial Development Initiative offers
fast-tracked development permissions, gives major financial incentives to investors, and offers
state funds for major infrastructure investments. Efforts are being made to link Spatial
Development Initiatives within ‘development corridors’ stretching into Namibia, Angola,
Mozambique and Zimbabwe (ibid.).
In what follows we explore three examples of infrastructure-led strategies to tempt in
manufacturing investment. First we look at the ‘war’ between federal states in Brazil to secure
major automobile plants. Then we analyse more recent efforts to ‘reindustrialise’ old industrial
cities in the north-east of England. Finally, we address the manufacturing-led ‘hyper-
urbanisation’ now under way along the eastern seaboard of China and in the cross-border
SiJoRi region around Singapore.
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 343

‘CAR WARS’: USING CUSTOMISED INFRASTRUCTURE

TO ATTRACT MAJOR AUTOMOBILE PLANTS IN BRAZIL

Our first example takes us to the remarkable ‘bidding war’ which emerged in Brazil in the
1990s as federal states and development agencies representing cities and regions fought
ruthlessly to lure major Western automobile manufacturers into Brazil’s newly liberalised
and, at least up to the crash of 1999, relatively stable economy (Rodríguez-Pose and Arbix,
1999).
Between 1980 and 1999 over US$25 billion flowed into Brazil from major global car
makers, to build plants to serve the expanding Latin American market. Territorial competition
to receive such plants is often portrayed as a panacea for major social and economic problems
locally. Auto companies do everything in their power to encourage and exploit the already
intense competition between cities and states, as politicians fight desperately against the
worsening local unemployment brought on by liberalisation and structural adjustment. With
urban and regional planning and coordination often largely abandoned, cities and states go
to extraordinary and often financially crippling lengths to offer customised infrastructure and
spaces that will tempt auto manufacturers to locate within their jurisdictions (ibid.).
Huge efforts are being made to combine financial inducements with extremely high-quality
private infrastructure networks, configured along glocal lines, that often contrast starkly with
the rudimentary networked infrastructures of the surrounding cityscape. In the state of Rio
Grande do Sul, for example, the government succeeded in tempting General Motors to locate
a major plant near the capital, Porto Alegre, in 1997. The $600 million plant, whilst an
obvious local boost in terms of its 1,300 local jobs and possible multipliers, aimed to benefit
from the free provision of land, a deferred $310 million loan at below-market rates, and
fifteen-year tax breaks on fifteen local and thirty different state taxes. The plant was also to
be equipped, at the cost of the local municipality and the federal state, with ‘all the necessary
infrastructure, including all utilities, sanitation, and links to the road system. Electricity,
natural gas, telecommunications and sewerage disposal are to be subsidised (or as stated in
the protocol “supplied at international costs”)’ (Rodríguez-Pose and Arbix, 1999, 20). Even
more remarkably, however, ‘it was agreed that the state was to build private port facilities for
GM and to dig out an access canal to a minimum depth of twenty feet. . . . Finally, the
protocol also includes a series of measures designed to reinforce security at the site and provide
public transport to the factory’ (ibid., 21). A dedicated railway link is also being provided.
Similar deals have been struck throughout Brazil’s coastal strip (Mercedes-Benz in Minais
Gerais, Renault and Chrysler in Paranà, etc.). What they effectively do is tie up scarce municipal
and state resources in upgrading tiny portions of local space to meet the intense glocal
infrastructural demands of rich and powerful transnational automobile firms. Secure ‘islands’
of powerful and gleaming infrastructural connection emerge, set apart by intense security
and boundary enforcement from the surrounding context where even basic social access to
sanitation, water, telephony or transport is often increasingly problematic (ibid.).
In fact, so unsustainable is the cost to local public sector institutions in configuring spaces
in this way that basic social infrastructures are often withdrawn from the poorer sections of
wider cities and regions to pay for servicing the transnational enclaves. Thus a logic of extreme
uneven development emerges, with resources withdrawn from efforts to use infrastructure
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 344

to equalise collective benefits across space, and piled into efforts to allow transnationals to
connect glocally with extraordinary ease, cheapness, security, power and public subsidy from
privileged sites. Worse still, the economic spin-offs of such investment are unlikely to be
anything but ‘a pure waste from a national perspective’ as they allow transnational corporations
to connect with external suppliers rather than sourcing from local ones (Rodríguez-Pose and
Arbix, 1999, 25).

GLOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROVISION AND PARTIAL

REINDUSTRIALISATION IN THE URBAN PERIPHERY
OF THE NORTH:
THE CASE OF THE NORTH-EAST OF ENGLAND

Our second example comes from the north-east of England, one of the world’s oldest urban
industrial regions, and one which is widely seen as a success story in terms of bringing in foreign
direct investment in manufacturing as a spur to (partial) reindustrialisation after the collapse
of the traditional industries of shipbuilding, coal mining and heavy engineering. Frank Peck
(1996) has shown how here, reflecting broader practice in Britain and Europe, the customising
of spaces with the tailored transport and utility infrastructure demanded by large transnational
investors is increasingly sophisticated (see also Phelps et al., 1998). With many locations offering
similar grants, financial incentives, training packages and built space, the ‘real internal
competition’ between regions is now, according to the chief executive of Invest in Britain
Bureau, in the customisation and subsidisation of transport, energy, water and communications
infrastructures (cited in Phelps et al., 1998, 121). Thus the local elements of production are
becoming heavily subsidised, as are the infrastructural chains necessary to tie global production
sites into complex spatial divisions of labour across the globe.

T H E R O L E O F U T I L I T Y C O M P A N I E S

In the north-east of of England, Peck further argues, ‘the utilities are now significant actors
in the promotion of regions and the attraction of foreign investment, and their autonomy
enables them to respond flexibly to any specific demands made by inward investors’ (1996,
330). Thus:

it is increasingly untenable to regard infrastructure as an independent variable influencing the regional

distribution of mobile investment. Although the presence of certain basic infrastructure may be
significant in attracting the initial interest of potential new investors, success in winning inward
investment projects depends increasingly on the ability of pubic authorities to produce spaces which
are customised to the changing needs of key firms.
(Ibid., 327)

The provision of infrastructure to inward investors is not new, of course. What is new is the
way in which publicly funded infrastructure projects are configured to the needs of inward
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 345

investors on an individual basis, within the context of increasingly fragmented physical

development patterns of the region (Peck, 1996, 329). In particular, newly privatised utilities
are now significant actors in configuring spaces to the specific needs of inward investors.
Development agencies work on a site-by-site basis without worrying unduly about regional
coordination or planning (as was the ethos in the 1960s). As Peck states:

large investors can exercise considerable control over the physical environment. . . . In some cases,
public investment in infrastructure may create the ‘collective’ and ‘integrative’ basis of economic activity,
but some forms of expenditure can become ‘individualised’ and ‘exclusive’ to a very narrow range of
users. Inward investors may be interested not only in the general modernity of the infrastructure in a
region, but also in the degree to which they can exercise control over its present and future development.
(Peck, 1996, 337)

During the production of a major site for Nissan in Washington, Co. Durham, for example,
Sunderland City Council not only assembled the site, took it out of Green Belt planning
restrictions and helped finance development. They also improved the local highway to handle
‘just in time’ logistics flows, removed the threat of the development of a major football
stadium (which would have disrupted such traffic) and configured over 430 acres of extra land
to be developed as a ‘private industrial estate’ by the company (ibid., 333). In addition, a major
private port facility, with dedicated highway access to Nissan, was constructed on the nearby
river Tyne to facilitate the export of motor cars to European markets.

W A T E R A S A F A C T O R I N T H E C U S T O M I S A T I O N O F

G L O C A L N E T W O R K S P A C E S

Similar customisation of both built space and networked infrastructure is common in the
strategies to secure further inward investment in the region. The abundance and high quality
of the region’s water supply, drawing from Europe’s biggest human-constructed lake at
Kielder, was used as a major selling point for bringing in the Fujitsu microchip manufacturing
plant in the early 1990s (which has since closed). The region, especially the chemicals
and petrochemicals concentration in the metropolitan area of Teesside, is directly targeting
heavy water-using sectors as regions elsewhere in the United Kingdom start to experience
water shortages. Here water services are being customised along with transport and built
space under the banner ‘Teesside: first choice for water in industry’.
But this picture of customising water services to the needs of inward investors is
complicated by early moves towards liberalised competition for large users of water in the
United Kingdom. Water companies are starting to compete in each other’s areas, as with
energy and telecoms. Large water users are also actively exploring ways of reducing costs and
improving services for their sites by customising their own infrastructure. Larger hospitals,
for example, are developing their own private water services, backed up by specialist firms like
Enviro-Logic (Stedman, 1999). Many, including thirty to forty major hospitals in London,
and some major pharmaceutical manufacturers, are exploring the possibility of sinking their
own boreholes to bypass the urban and regional water infrastructure altogether.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 346

CUSTOMISED INFRASTRUCTURE, MANUFACTURING

INVESTMENT, AND ‘HYPER URBANISATION’ IN EAST AND
SOUTH EAST ASIA

Our final example takes us to the unprecedented urbanisation under way along the eastern
coast of China and in the so-called SiJoRi growth triangle centred on Singapore, much of it
induced by an explosive in-migration of international manufacturing capital. Both regions
demonstrate forcefully how manufacturing-oriented urbanisation is increasingly centred on
the production of carefully customised glocal infrastructure packages. Our discussion of China
follows directly here; the SiJoRi growth triangle is discussed in Box 7.5.

B O X 7 . 5 ‘ G L O C A L ’ I N F R A S T R U C T U R E
I N V E S T M E N T A N D T H E E X P L O S I V E
U R B A N I S A T I O N O F T H E
S I N G A P O R E – J O H O R – R I A U G R O W T H T R I A N G L E

The ‘SiJoRi’ (Singapore/Johor/Riau) growth

triangle exemplifies the role of uneven and
carefully customised infrastructure packages
in fuelling the growth of manufacturing and
broader processes of urbanisation in South
East and East Asia (Figure 7.12). Here the
Singapore government is explicitly using tar-
geted infrastructure investment to construct
a manufacturing growth region around it in
the adjacent parts of Malaysia and Indonesia,
to create a transborder urban region with
a sophisticated division of labour (Yeung, 1999;
Parsonage, 1992).
Figure 7.12 The SiJoRi growth triangle. Source:
Parsonage (1992), 308

SIJORI AS A REGIONALISED DIVISION OF LABOUR

FOR SINGAPORE

Through persuading the Malaysian and connections are being strengthened. Trade
Indonesian states to liberalise investment and customs restrictions are being removed.
restrictions, in line with the wider shift towards Special ‘fast track’ immigration systems are
the ASEAN trade bloc, Singapore capital is now being put in place at airports and land
flooding in to exploit the relatively abundant borders to allow frequent business travellers
and cheap land and labour in the surrounding to use ‘smart cards’ to move seamlessly
region. New causeways, airport, rail and ferry across international borders. Singapore is also
links are being constructed to link Singapore cooperating in training specialist technical
with its new regional ‘hinterland’. Water supply workers.
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 347

Most important, however, investment is also packages to valued nodes of manufacturing,

moving in from Singapore and elsewhere to leisure, tourist and luxury housing investment
customised export-oriented ‘flagship’ manu- (Van Grunsven, 1998). The involvement of
facturing enclaves in Johor (Malaysia) and the Singapore engineering firms in new business
Riau islands of Batam and Bintan (Indonesia), and technology estates in the wider region
each of which is being equipped with the ‘illustrates their expertise in establishing
requisite ‘glocal’ packages of infrastructural infrastructure for transnational manufacturing
connections. ‘Each of these investment capital’ (Parsonage, 1992, 312). The Batam
enclaves offers linkage to the Singaporean park in Riau, for example, contains 500 ha of
economy whilst minimising dependence on factories and dormitories for 8,000 workers,
the . . . wider Indonesian environment,’ write and is configured with high-quality water,
Grundy-Warr et al.; the parks are ‘conceived as energy, telecommunication and transport links
self-contained industrial townships’ (1999, with the ‘hub’ of Singapore which totally
310). For example, direct links are being made outclass the infrastructure of the surrounding
into Singapore’s state-of-the-art telecoms regions (ibid., 312). The ability of Indonesia
infrastructure, allowing Indonesia’s poor-quality to use these developments to ‘tap into
telecommunications infrastructure to be Singapore’s infrastructure, expertise and links
completely bypassed. As a result, telephone with transnational corporations’ is being heavily
calls from the enclaves across the national stressed, with an especially strong focus
border to Singapore are classed as ‘local’; on telecommunication links (ibid., 313). ‘The
those beyond the enclave walls to the rest provision of telecommunications and other
of Indonesia, however, are classed as infrastructures has long been a problem for
‘international’ (ibid., 317). investors in Indonesia and the involvement of
Johor and Riau are both being rapidly Singaporean [infrastructure capital] has been
urbanised in a polynuclear pattern charac- a main actor in attracting investment in the Riau
terised by the provision of ‘glocal’ infrastructure islands’ (Parsonage, 1992, 313).

BATAM ISLAND: SPACES OF SPLINTERED

SEGREGATION

Transnational corporations like Philips, which Overall, the Batam and Bintan islands
are maintaining corporate headquarters are emerging as places of ‘sharp residential
and R&D centres in Singapore, are taking up segregation between pockets of sparsely
space in Batam for routine manufacturing, occupied, or even abandoned, executive
functions for which land and labour are virtually housing and ruli [squatter] settlements’
impossible to find in Singapore itself. Such (Grundy-Warr et al., 1999, 323) for the mass of
industrial parks are being combined with in-migrants which are frequently cleared by the
‘mega-resort’ complexes, like the one at authorities, who are keen to provide the ‘clean’
Bintan, which has twenty hotels, condominium modern spaces that are seen to be required to
complexes, a golf course and marinas, devel- bring in Singaporean capital and tourists.
oped under the auspices of an Indonesian and
Singaporean joint venture (ibid., 313).
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 348

‘S M A L L R O A D W A Y S B R I N G S M A L L R I C H E S , B I G R O A D W A Y S

C R E A T E B I G R I C H E S , A N D E X P R E S S W A Y S E N S U R E F A S T

R I C H E S ’: C H I N A ’ S P E A R L R I V E R D E L T A

On the eastern Chinese seaboard, arguably the most awesome process of urbanisation ever
seen on the planet is taking place. The Pearl River Delta, for example – the most spectacular
example of all China’s rapidly urbanising areas – will eventually reach a population of 34
million and is growing at a rate of 500 km2 per year – the equivalent of Paris, doubled
(Koolhaas, 1998b, 183) (see Figure 7.13).

Figure 7.13 The Pearl River Delta megalopolis. Source: Woo (1994), 332
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 349

This ‘hyperurbanisation’ (Wu, 1998) is both fuelled by, and reflected in, a shift from the
developmentalist tradition in community infrastructure planning to local entrepreneurialism
led by newly powerful municipalities, working in partnership with international infrastructure
and consultancy corporations and real estate developers (Zhang, 1996). Through joint
ventures and ambitious efforts to enrol their spaces into the huge processes of export-oriented
urbanisation and modernisation, municipalities are working to secure the high-quality energy,
transport and communications infrastructures deemed necessary if they are to emerge as
favoured zones within China’s polycentric urban geography.
During the Mao years China’s municipalities were ‘reluctant to systematically invest in
new infrastructure’ (Zhang, 1996, 100). This was because the development of infrastructure
was dictated by the central command economy. Now, however, under the influence of fierce
intercity and intermunicipal competition, vast local investments are being made in showpiece
infrastructure projects geared to the needs of local and international capital. This investment
encompasses major airports (twenty-two in the Pearl River Delta alone) (Eng, 1996, 558),
high-speed tolled highways, satellite ground stations, power infrastructures, ports, metro and
light rail networks, and new dams and water management systems. Between 1981 and 1990,
for example, ‘the city government of Nanhai invested over 1.2 billion yuan (US$150 million)
in infrastructure projects, resulting in the construction of about 300 km of roads, twenty new
bridges, four power plants, and an imported telephone system of over 30,000 lines’ (Eng,
1996, 558). The philosophy is exemplified by the words of a municipal official in Qingdoa
city: ‘To get rich, first build roadways. Small roadways bring small riches, big roadways create
big riches, and expressways ensure fast riches’ (quoted in Zhang, 1996, 100).
In China, loose-knit sprawling spaces like the Pearl River Delta megalopolis and the Yangtse
corridor, up-river from Shanghai, are growing at the astonishing rate of 20 per cent per year.
Widely scattered cities, business and technology parks, financial centres, resort complexes
(newly owner-occupied), housing cocoons for the new-rich and leisure spaces are all laced
together unevenly by gleaming new webs of infrastructure. ‘Most developed are the facilities
and amenities catering to foreigners’ needs in investment and consumption, which to a great
extent are also utilized by well-to-do locals’ (Eng, 1996, 555).
The resulting urban landscape is one of disjointed and widely dispersed ‘packaged’
developments orientated more to infrastructural connections than to their immediate
environment. ‘Currently municipalities are putting a great deal of effort into site-clearing for
packaged development’ (Wu, 1996, 660). This reflects the widespread use of ‘policy enclaves’
and ‘enclave estates’ to shape development (special industrial districts, technology zones,
tax-free havens, special development zones, affluent housing enclaves, and the like).
Such spaces are specifically built for foreign capital, foreign people and local new-rich.
Eager to construct a new financial centre of global importance, Shanghai municipality, for
example, has invested over US$3 billion in new infrastructure – bridges, tunnels, roads and
subways, electricity and telecoms networks – specifically geared to the new Pudong
development zone on the eastern banks of the Huangpu river. At US$80 billion Pudong is
the largest construction project in the world (Wu, 1998, 154). With 150 skyscrapers sprouting
‘out of the grey fields and smog-choked factories’ of the old city, Pudong will include the
US$460 million World Financial Centre – a mini city in itself containing a hotel, art gallery,
fitness centre, shopping mall and restaurants, as well as offices and financial dealership spaces
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 350

(Tan and Low, 1998, 145). At the same time, the city is working hard to establish itself as
the key connection point between global optic fibre grids and China’s fast-developing
telecommunications infrastructures (see Plates 8 and 21).

U R B A N M E G A L O P O L I S A N D N O N - C I T Y :
B E Y O N D F U N C T I O N I N G W H O L E S

Overall, the result of these processes of development, as Keivani and Parsa (1999, 14) suggest,
are extending regional patterns of polycentric growth corridors which are intricately, but
highly unevenly, interconnected. This new urban form, which Piper Gaubatz labels the ‘great
international city’, is modelled in Figure 7.14 (1999, 265). Within this type of city ‘relational
linkages are more horizontal than hierarchical’ (ibid.). To Rem Koolhaas these startling new
urban spaces mean that:

we are confronted with a new urban system. It will never become a city in the recognizable sense of the
word: each part is both competitive with and has a relationship to each other part. Now these parts are
being stitched together by infrastructures, so that every part is connected, but not into a whole. . . . In
this model, infrastructures which were originally reinforcing and totalizing are becoming more and
more competitive and local. They no longer pretend to create functioning wholes, but now spin off
functional entities. Instead of network or organism, the new infrastructure creates enclave, separation,
and impasse.
(1998b, 188)

Overcoming infrastructural bottlenecks and reliability problems for the mushrooming

manufacturing belts, upper-income housing areas and the resort, leisure and shopping districts
of the booming cities and Special Economic Zones is a central priority of China’s urbanisation
policy. Zhang outlines how city officials in Shandong Province sold municipally owned land
to foreign developers in order to invest ‘primarily on improving and constructing
infrastructural facilities in the newly opened high-tech industrial park’ in the city (a space
that was forcibly evacuated of rural peasants beforehand) (1996, 102). Qingdoa, meanwhile,
is ‘building an economic and technological development zone, a tax-free zone (boashui qu),
a high-tech industrial park with low tax rates, and a national-level zone for tourism and
vacations’ – all configured with state-of-the-art infrastructure built at municipal expense
(Zhang, 1996, 107).

M A R G I N A L I S E D G R O U P S A N D S P A C E S : ‘ F R O M

V U L N E R A B L E T O T R U L Y V U L N E R A B L E ’

But these infrastructures are being starkly configured to meet the needs and spaces of the
powerful; lower-income and poorer spaces within the emerging cityscapes remain very poorly
served. Infrastructural tariffs are rising and new projects like highways (for example, the
Hopewell highway between Hong Kong and Guangzhou) tend to be tolled to allow the
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 351

Figure 7.14 Schematic representation of the emerging urban form in China’s networked megacities on
the eastern seaboard. Source: Gaubatz (1999), 265

debts incurred in construction to be repaid quickly, and profits to be shared between

municipalities and foreign investors (Wu, 1998, 76). A whole grid of such toll roads is now
planned to lace together the whole of the Pearl River Delta area.
Meanwhile, however, collectively provided basic improvements in road, water, electricity
and communications infrastructures that are widely accessible as public goods lag far behind
privately and municipally configured connections for elite cocoons and enclave spaces (Eng,
1996). In the new context ‘the vulnerable have become truly vulnerable’ (Wu, 1996, 661,
original emphasis). But there are signs that social resistance to this strategy is growing: ‘some
question the wisdom of conceding the best business areas to “foreigners”’ in the region
(Zhang, 1996, 103).
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 352

‘ B A C K O F F I C E ’ S P A C E S A N D
D A T A - P R O C E S S I N G E N C L A V E S I N T H E
G L O B A L P E R I P H E R Y

Away from the dominant cores of global cities, or the ‘technopoles’ of corporate innovation,
our sixth range of examples demonstrate that other urban landscapes are being produced or
reconfigured to take their allotted roles within the ‘variable geometry’ of Castells’ (1996)
‘network society’. These are the spaces of routine electronic transactions, communications
and commerce, the blossoming landscapes of back offices, call centres and ‘e-commerce’ that
are emerging in cheap-labour cities both on the periphery of rich countries of the North
(Sunderland, Newcastle, Milwaukee) and in the newly constructed digital enclaves of the
South (Jamaica, Mexico, the Philippines) (see Bristow et al., 2000; Freeman, 2000).
Such spaces can be acutely disarticulated from the surrounding economic fabric of the
wider host metropolis. After all, the only outputs of such spaces are often the streams of
digital zeroes and ones that carry voice, data and transaction traffic on corporate computer
networks to distant places and markets. A portal of optic fibre or a satellite link connecting
the development with distant markets can, literally, articulate a back office or call centre’s basic
economic relationship with the rest of the world. Distant offices can thus be ‘electronically
integrated’ to work seamlessly together as ‘virtual single sites’, delinking from the cities where
they happen to be located in the process (Richardson and Marshall, 1996; Dabinett and
Graham, 1994). Distance-independent phone tariffing for consumers, along with free phone
services, is reinforcing such dynamics, as is the construction of advanced corporate networks
integrating phone, data and database traffics. Back office spaces thus tend to exemplify very
powerfully the glocal economic logics of splintering urbanism.
Very broadly, two types of back office space will be explored here: the back office spaces
in old industrial cities of the North and the data-processing enclaves emerging in parts of the
Developing World.

RECONSTRUCTING OLD INDUSTRIAL CITIES

AS ‘BACK OFFICE’ SPACES

Following the collapse of the traditional heavy industries that sustained their economic fabric,
urban development agencies in many old industrial cities in the North are working hard to
recycle redundant industrial spaces as gleaming new business parks for call centres and back
offices (Richardson, 1994; Richardson and Marshall, 1996). Such parks and spaces are being
customised very precisely to meet the needs of data-processing, telemarketing and consumer
service industries, which deliver services to far-off markets over highly capable telecommu-
nications networks, linked into sophisticated customer data bases.
This so-called ‘disintermediation’ effectively means that consumers and providers of services
no longer need to be located in the same place (OTA, 1995). Rather, electronic connections
are customised between the parts of cities where call centres are directed and the regional,
national and international markets that they serve. Office geographies distributing banks,
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 353

insurance offices, travel agents and other consumer service outlets across cities and regions,
roughly in line with population distributions, are thus being withdrawn, to be replaced by
fewer but much larger concentrations of call centres and back offices, located in carefully
customised zones of older industrial cities. The city of Milwaukee, for example, is developing
a specialism in the third-party processing of on-line and retail transactions through its
recruitment of major credit card and electronic commerce back offices.

B A C K O F F I C E S P A C E S I N T H E P E R I P H E R A L R E G I O N S O F T H E

U N I T E D K I N G D O M

Nowhere outside North America has seen call centres grow as rapidly as the United Kingdom.
Over 200,000 people worked in call centres in the United Kingdom in 1997 (45 per cent of
the European total); 5 per cent of the work force was expected to do so by 2005, as more
and more consumer services start to be provided over the telephone and, increasingly, the
Internet (Bristow et al., 2000). Overwhelmingly these centres are located in declining
industrial cities to the north and west, feted by the elaborate place promotion and attraction
packages that these places offer, as well as low labour costs, low accommodation costs, low
labour turnover and high-capability, customised electronic infrastructures.
Careful efforts are made by development agencies to customise back office spaces to the
precise needs of inward investors. Specific training in call centre working is delivered in
partnership with local colleges. Grants and loans are given to property developers to construct
tailored call centre buildings (along with large floor footprints and the ability to take the
latest technologies). Telecommunications operators are encouraged to provide state-of-the-
art connections emphasising the glocal configurations required by the export orientation of
the site. Unwanted incursions from the surrounding metropolis are managed out through
the combined use of landscaping, urban design, CCTV and security practices. Road connec-
tions are configured as closely as possible to meeting the commuting patterns of workers. Two
particularly good examples of how call centres contribute to the splintering of the urban
landscape can be found in the major cities of the north-east of England (see Box 7.6).

TOWARDS TRANSGLOBAL OUTSOURCING

B A C K O F F I C E E N C L A V E S I N T H E D E V E L O P I N G W O R L D

The scramble to configure spaces to support the needs of back offices and call centres has now
gone global (see Sussman and Lent, 1998). City and national governments throughout the
developing, post-communist and newly industrialising worlds are competing directly with
peripheral spaces in the North to attract highly mobile back office and call centre functions.
A global offshore labour force is emerging in such cities, paid per keystroke (often at 10,000
keystrokes per hour minimum), marshalled by intense workplace discipline, and delivering
services to distant markets and organisations instantaneously (Freeman, 2000; Wilson, 1998).
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 354

B O X 7 . 6 C U S T O M I S I N G C A L L C E N T R E
E N C L A V E S I N T H E N O R T H - E A S T O F E N G L A N D :
N E W C A S T L E B U S I N E S S P A R K A N D D O X F O R D
I N T E R N A T I O N A L B U S I N E S S P A R K

Development agencies in Newcastle and eering – have worked hard to install call centre
Sunderland – both old industrial cities facing the enclaves on the redundant riversides left by
collapse of traditional shipbuilding and engin- industrial collapse.

NEWCASTLE BUSINESS PARK

Newcastle’s Business Park, adjacent to one of inner-city areas in the United Kingdom, great
the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, is par- effort went into securing and filtering the space
ticularly notable for the way it supports the from its surrounding urban environment. When
connection of call centres with distant markets the idea of a large-scale development was first
whilst virtually severing its relationships with mooted, it was felt that big companies would
surrounding neighbourhoods. The park has a be unlikely to move to one of the poorest parts
work force of 5,000. Dedicated optic fibre grids of Newcastle to open up new offices. Even
from three companies support the major with the promise of grants and subsidised
call centres from British Airways, AA Insurance rents, the local crime rate presented a public
and IBM, allowing each to link seamlessly relations problem. The solution was judged
into its respective electronic universes of to be a ‘fortress’ approach, whereby the
planet-straddling ‘virtual single offices’, call Business Park attracted clients on the basis
management centres, customer assistance, of its high security. Defensive landscaping,
telemarketing, travel reservations and elec- a 3 m spiked fence, a state-of-the-art CCTV
tronic transactions. system, private security guards and highly
At the same time, however, because the restricted road and pedestrian access serve
park is located across a main highway from to withdraw the park from the surrounding
one of the most deprived and stigmatised neighbourhoods.

DOXFORD INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS PARK

Thirteen miles to the south-east an even larger security, fencing, urban design). In this case,
call centre enclave is under development on however, the global connectivity has been
the edge of the city of Sunderland: Doxford bolstered by the development of a teleport:
International Business Park (see Plate 17). a major telecommunications hub explicitly
Once again, the developers have attempted designed to connect Doxford’s call centres
to configure the space for call-centre investors with distant markets (whilst not serving the rest
by offering intense glocal connectivity (in the of the city at all). Dedicated fibre connections
form of state-of-the-art telecoms links) with from BT and Cable & Wireless connect all
intentionally filtered and compromised local buildings with national and international
connectivity (CCTV, landscaping, private networks as well as a proposed satellite
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 355

ground station. £10 million of public money has

supported telecoms infrastructure develop-
ments in the park (Southern, 2000). Further
boosts to the site came when it was
designated as a Enterprise Zone in 1990,
allowing investors a ten-year tax holiday on
all investments and enhanced flexibility in
planning regulations. These attractions have
led Doxford to be developed as the call centre
location for London Electricity, Barclay’s
teleshopping, One-2-One mobile phone
services, the National Lottery and Nike Plate 17 The Doxford International Business
sportswear UK. Park, configured for call centres and back
offices, on the outskirts of Sunderland. Source:
Twedco, 1999

In industries like airline reservations, insurance, data processing, animation, software

development, remote diagnostics, language translation, proof reading, computer-aided design
(CAD), telemarketing, logistics management, financial services, business information services
and database management, seamlessly integrated global flows are created by linking back office
enclaves around the world with dedicated, high-quality telecommunications (often islands of
connectivity in a surrounding sea of very poor infrastructure and access). And, as Bannister
writes, such dynamics are likely to grow significantly as telecommunications technologies
improve. ‘Once it becomes possible to transmit and switch video signals without overloading
networks,’ he writes, ‘a whole new range of opportunities open up for developing countries.
The World Bank, for example, has even trailed the idea of security cameras in American
shopping malls being monitored in Africa’ (1994, 1). The expected ‘bandwidth glut’ on major
transnational routes now means that such video-based back offices are a realistic prospect.
One notable characteristic of the development of back office enclaves is the way in which
time zone differences are used to create seamless working relationships, maximising the
efficiency with which spatial divisions of labour are managed and exploited. Mark Wilson
cites the example of an Ohio software firm which has maximised its use of a globally connected
set of back offices:

the software code starts its day in the US Midwest, and at the end of the day it is electronically transmitted
to a branch factory in Hawaii, where an additional six hours of processing by labor is performed. As the
sun sets in Hawaii, the job is forwarded to yet another branch in Bangalore (India) for another day’s
work, before being returned by dawn to Ohio. Around the world in twenty-four hours, with seventeen
hours’ work performed.
(Wilson, 1998, 41)

The perceived development prospects of whole regions – most notably the Caribbean, India,
Ireland and the Philippines – have been substantially boosted by the apparent opportunity to
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 356

insert themselves and their work forces into such instantaneous chains of informational service
production (Skinner, 1998). The imperative of forging electronic connectivity from the
economic margins of the world to the core is clear: ‘by staying out of telecommunications
networks, nations face the real prospect of being left to fester on the edge of the world system’
(Skinner, 1998, 64). The ‘veneer of high-tech sophistication’ also makes these services
especially attractive to policy makers in developing cities and countries (ibid., 64).

D E V E L O P I N G C I T Y B A C K O F F I C E E N C L A V E S A S ‘ P O R T S

O F C A L L F O R I N F O R M A T I O N P R O C E S S I N G ’

In this competitive rush between cities and nations, however, the collapse of spatial constraints
at the international scale is closely bound up with the production of new types of spatial
barriers at the local scale. On the one hand, telecommunications links are (unevenly) used to
annihilate spatial distance; on the other, the precise infrastructural capabilities of the back office
enclaves necessary to complete such labour become ever more important. This is especially
the case as the prevailing telecommunications infrastructure in developing nations is very
poor. ‘The network does not reach all parts of the country; there is a tremendous disparity
between urban and rural telecom availability, quality and variety’ (Chowdray, 1998, 261).
In addition, costs tend to be high, competition is limited, and reliability is usually poor (a
critical problem when constructing back office networks).
In addressing these weaknesses, great efforts are therefore made by the developers of
back office enclaves to construct what Skinner calls ‘installations which are ports of call for
information processing’, with carefully customised infrastructural connections ‘to the main
lines of international telecommunications circuits in the service of [the] metropolitan
economies’ of the North (1998, 65). Advanced telecommunications links support the con-
struction of local affiliate companies to control and operate back office spaces. As the case of
one such customised enclave, the Jamaica Digiport International, shows (Box 7.7), whilst the
greatest efforts here are concentrated on IT infrastructure, power, water and transport are also
carefully improved.

B O X 7 . 7 B A C K O F F I C E E N C L A V E S I N T H E
D E V E L O P I N G W O R L D :
T H E J A M A I C A D I G I P O R T I N I T I A T I V E

An effort to diversify a fragile and tourist- The Digiport was developed after it was
dependent economy, the Jamaica Digiport is recognised that the expanding data-process-
a classic example of a privately owned back ing industries could ‘make a major contribution
office space constructed in a Developing to Jamaica’s development if certain infra-
World city to service markets in the North structure requirements were met’ (promo-
through the provision of customised, dedi- tional Web site). It is part of an effort to bring in
cated infrastructure and services (see Wilson, 10,000 back office jobs to the island (Skinner,
1998, http://www.jadigiport.com/ main1.html). 1998, 67).
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 357

Located in Montego Bay Free Trade Zone, into the zone or exports to other countries
the Digiport space has customised port (Skinner, 1998, 72). The work force is low-
facilities, freight forwarding services and high- cost – US$0.34 per hour at 1991 rates – and
quality schools, office space, trained person- English-speaking. Wage rates are calculated
nel, medical services and water and electricity on a per-keystroke basis to stimulate
utilities. No taxes are due on profits, imports productivity.

J A M A I C A D I G I P O R T A N D ‘ E L E C T R O N I C L A B O U R

I N T E G R A T I O N ’

But it is the telecommunications infrastructure manage the telecommunications services that

of the Digiport which really distinguishes it from are specially designed to meet the data
surrounding spaces. A dedicated satellite earth processing needs of resident export-oriented
station, backed up by emergency power corporate clients. Tariffs are kept exceptionally
supplies, provides resident companies with low, with ‘virtually every AT&T type service kept
high-speed communications and information well below international rates. . . . Operators
processing links with over 200 countries that outside the zone must use the much more
far exceed those available in the rest of expensive Telecommunications of Jamaica
the island. Citing the initiative as a powerful services’ (Skinner, 1998, 71–2). Network
example of ‘electronic labour integration’, reliability is guaranteed at 99.95 per cent.
Edward Skinner notes that ‘voice, text and data Combined with low labour costs and low
handled by JDI are beamed to a satellite off the turnover, operating costs are roughly 40 per
African coast and then to clients in the United cent of those in the United States.
States, Canada and the UK’ (1998, 71). The Data entry, telemarketing and information
telecom facilities, developed jointly by AT&T of processing activities dominate the uses of the
the United States and Cable & Wireless of the Digiport enclave. Data entry tasks for the US
United Kingdom, also link the Digiport enclave market can be turned round in less than
directly with transglobal optic fibre networks. twenty-four hours. Telemarketing can directly
‘The geographic restrictions of the site have target US markets without major time zone
removed the need for JDI to invest in expensive problems. By 1992 there were 3,000
technology platforms’ (promotional Web site). Jamaicans employed in Digiport; the target
A dedicated company has been formed to was 30,000 (ibid., 72).

L O G I S T I C S E N C L A V E S , E X P O R T P R O C E S S I N G
Z O N E S , ‘ H U B ’ P O R T S A N D E - C O M M E R C E
S P A C E S

Our final encounter with the glocal infrastructural spaces of emerging urban economic
landscapes is with logistics enclaves. These are spaces within which the precise and rapid
shipment of goods, freight and people across the planet are coordinated, managed and
synchronised between various transport modes, along with supportive information and energy
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 358

exchanges (Rodrigue, 1999). There is a proliferation of such spaces across the world, driven
by the imperative of securing what we might term ‘economies of conjunction’ (Rondinelli,
2000). These are the efficiencies that arise when firms operate within premium network spaces
which seamlessly interconnect virtual and physical systems of movement, allowing the precise
and agile coordination of all forms of flow and transaction at the same time and space. Keller
Easterling believes in fact that virtually all contemporary urban developments – transport
interchanges, ports, airports, malls, economic franchises – can best be understood as dynamic
sites for organising logistical processes. ‘The primary means of making space’ in contemporary
America, she believes, they can be thought of as ‘a special series of games for distributing spatial
commodities’ (1999b, 113). However, she also notes that ‘the critical architectures of these
spaces are not visible’ but are woven into their extended technical and information systems
and often hidden infrastructure networks. ‘The real power of many urban organizations,’ she
continues, ‘lies within their relationships between distributed sites that are disconnected
materially, but which remotely affect each other – sites which are involved, not with fusion
or holism, but with adjustment’ (ibid.).
If the widening range of powerful ‘glocal’ infrastructures can be considered as amounting
to a widening set of ‘tunnel effects’, bringing distant sites into close relational proximity,
then these spaces are the points at which the ‘tunnels’ stop or interconnect: the global airports,
major seaports, teleports, railway stations, e-commerce hubs and so on. The challenge for the
developers and managers of such places is to make the transition from the ‘tunnel’ of the global
airliner, freight transporter, telecoms link or fast rail network, either to the next ‘tunnel’ or
to the selected, valued elements within the regional hinterland, as seamless an experience as
possible.
In such a context it is no surprise that ‘supply-chain management is moving to the top of
the corporate agenda’ (Bachelor, 1998, 1). Reflecting the shift towards extremely volatile,
international markets and production techniques for high value-added and relatively low-
weight logistics flows – microchips, scientific instruments, media products, technological
equipment – emphasis now falls on combining highly flexible production strategies with the
logistical ability to deliver goods quickly and accurately on a global basis from a series of
logistic enclaves (OTA, 1995). As such, logistics enclaves obviously require privileged and
high-quality infrastructural connectivity, especially for transport and telecommunications,
with the emphasis on global connectivity to strategic centres and distribution hubs (Andersson
and Batten, 1988). To the architect Paul Andreu the issue of ‘how to enhance the value of
such ruptures opens a huge field of reflection’ for developers and planners. He continues:

With cities coming undone and losing their coherence, such points of interchange constitute lively sites
full of energy and new possibilities. Projects abound in the field, whether they involve train stations,
subways, bus or airport terminals, or any combinations thereof. For cities, such interchange points
provide an occasion for reflecting upon and modifying themselves, for devising new models of
organisation and new spaces.
(1998, 43)

Using the latest information technologies, combined with advanced logistics management
techniques (notably ‘just-in-time’ and ‘zero inventory’ approaches), leading distribution hubs
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 359

for road, rail, sea and air logistics (and the crucial connecting flows between these different
modes) are emerging as mini cities in their own right. At the same time they have a tendency
to delink from the immediate spaces around them (Pawley, 1997). Such spaces and buildings,
in effect, are ‘one-stop shops’ which concentrate the service capabilities to help direct and
organise the trade flows of the entire planet. They have ‘ceased to be an investment and
are simply expandable containers, linked to a chain of networks’ (Bosma, 1998, 12). To
succeed, they require intense concentrations of highly capable, interlinked infrastructure
networks.
Here we touch on the four most salient types of logistical space emerging in the splintering
metropolis: multimodal logistics enclaves dedicated to freight, export processing zones,
passenger airports and fast rail stations, and teleport projects and e-commerce hubs.

MULTIMODAL LOGISTICS ENCLAVES:

CONSTRUCTING ‘FREIGHT EXCHANGE CITIES’

Teesside airport, a small-scale airport in the north-east of England, has long been used
primarily by a small flow of charter passengers. By 2004, however, it is likely to be transformed
into an international air freight hub covering 1,250 acres and costing £300 million. The
airport will be equipped with improved links to international motorways and rail networks,
as well as the tax breaks needed to make it a major ‘offshore’ location for international freight
distribution (Nicholis, 1999).
Reflecting the fact that 50 per cent of global trade by value now goes by air, a range of
specialist spaces are being constructed around the world to handle and organise the world’s
burgeoning aerial trade. Gethin (1998, 19) predicts that ‘the next century will see just a few
air cargo “superhubs” at strategic points across different continents’. Offering rapid freight
services to connect seamlessly with just-in-time production methods, major logistics nodes
offer direct links between air, land and sea transport. As Easterling suggests, ‘new airport
cities and superhubs that concentrate the intermodal transfer and storage of global or domestic
goods, and that act as centers of distribution, have helped relocate a set of exurban switches
for exchange between rail, highway, land and sea’ (1999b, 120). Centred on the United
States, for example, major international freight companies like Federal Express, DHL and UPS
already run their own networks of massive multinodal logistics centres on a global ‘hub and
spoke’ format, sometimes using freight-only airports. United Parcel Service employs over
13,000 at its Louisville base, for example, the central hub in a global operation network that
delivers 3.1 billion items per year to over 200 countries and 600 airports via 500 aircraft
(OTA, 1995, 155; Rodrigue, 1999). Such places are, in effect, ‘freight exchange cities’ and
they are ‘forming at critical junctures of the Interstate highway and global airline systems’
(Easterling, 1999, 120).
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 360

T H E ‘ D E L I N K I N G ’ O F M A J O R S E A P O R T S

Major seaports, like Rotterdam, meanwhile, are also gradually ‘delinking’ from their
surrounding hinterland in a struggle to emerge as global ‘main port’ hubs linking
transcontinental systems of road, rail and air freight seamlessly on to the world’s major
sea lanes (Drewe and Janssen, 1996). Such IT-intensive container ports are now being
‘transformed into largely silent and invisible operating environments’ with ever more
precarious relationships with their adjacent cities and immediate hinterlands (Taverne, 1998,
85). ‘The hinterland from which the port draws its cargo or sends it is not secure. Ports on
one side of a continent are in competition with ports on the other side as they both try to
serve the shipping needs of inland areas’ (McCalla, 1999, 248). Such tenuous links are likely
to become more unstable with the latest developments ‘that will use jet boats to guarantee
on-time international cargo delivery in any weather, imposing just-in-time manufacturing
from Houston to Kuala Lumpur’ (Mau, 1999, 204).
Massive new port systems, laced with the latest electronic management infrastructures and
meshed in close alliances with major shipping and inland transfer firms, are the way in which
major ports are attempting to project their competitive power. The objective is to emerge as
a node of seamless and ultra-cost-effective intermodal transfer between sea, land and,
increasingly, air. Some cities have already developed logistics complexes, and the specialised
infrastructures that underpin them, that far exceed the scale and sophistication of Teesside’s
plans. Seattle, for example, has built a dedicated sea–air logistics hub which now organises
23 per cent of the entire world’s sea–air shipments (Kasarda and Rondinelli, 1998).

T H E G L O B A L T R A N S P A R K P H E N O M E N O N

But it is the municipalities and development agencies of North Carolina that have developed
perhaps the most ambitious project of all – the North Carolina Global Transpark (Kasarda et
al., 1996). It integrates sea, road, rail and air within a single 15,000 acre complex (see Figure
7.15, http://www.ncgtp.com/). Its dual long-range airport runways offer twenty-four hour
access to the world’s freight aircraft fleets which can offload efficiently on to highway, rail and
sea transporters. Customised information systems, telecommunications grids, water and
energy services are designed, through service agreements with chosen operators, to meet the
highest specifications for global business operators. Internal operations are supported by
dedicated monorail, electronic point of sale, and IT and back-up power systems. Local tax
breaks and reduced import duties apply.
The ultimate aim of the Transpark is to be ‘connected to the world through state-of-the-
art communications, utilities and transportation infrastructure’ (promotional Web site). The
end result, developers hope, will be a ‘seamless environment’ for manufacturing and inter-
national distribution (ibid.). Through imitation of the concept, it is hoped to develop a
network of transparks throughout the economic ‘hot spots’ of the world. Already the
developers have reached agreement to develop similar facilities in the Subic Bay area of the
Philippines, in Thailand and in Germany (Kasarda et al., 1996, 39).
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 361

Figure 7.15 Customised interchanges between networked infrastructures and transport modes at the
North Carolina Global Transpark. Source: Kasarda et al. (1996), 38

EXPORT PROCESSING ZONES AND THE

INFRASTRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE

The Third World has always existed for the comfort of the first.
(Klein, 1999, xvi)

As Kessides suggests, ‘the exigencies of modern logistical management in developed industrial

countries pose similar requirements on developing countries wishing to compete in these
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 362

markets’ (1993, 13). The second emerging logistics enclave, long a mainstay of the
development strategies for developing and newly industrialising cities, is a reflection of
widening efforts to attempt just this: the export processing zone (EPZ) or free-trade zone
(FTZ).

E X P O R T P R O C E S S I N G Z O N E S A N D F R E E - T R A D E

Z O N E S

Essentially a low-tax and reduced-regulation haven for global trade and rudimentary
production and processing, export processing zones – of which there were around 850 in 1999
– are attempts to equip cities, and parts of cities, with the high-quality infrastructural
connections necessary to position them within global flows of trade and transaction (Dunham-
Jones, 2000; Chen, 1995). Export processing zones and free-trade zones are also being
adopted by cities in the Developed World, as the Transpark example above demonstrates
(see Lee, 1999). Thirty of the US states now have export processing zones, for example
(Chen, 1995, 587). In fact, there exists a whole typology of export-oriented trade spaces, from
free ports to the advanced manufacturing spaces and technopoles covered elsewhere in this
chapter (see Figure 7.16).

Figure 7.16 A typology of export-oriented trade spaces. Source: Chen (1995), 599
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 363

R O U T I N I S E D P R O D U C T I O N I N E X P O R T P R O C E S S I N G Z O N E S :
‘ W O R K B O I L E D D O W N T O A B R U T A L E S S E N C E ’

As with customised spaces for foreign direct investment in manufacturing, export processing
zones are generally constructed to combine low costs and minimised regulations and taxes,
with an adequate supply of (cheap) labour and the best possible infrastructural connections,
to allow the space to be integrated within global trade flows (Klein, 1999). It is in such spaces,
far away from the corporate logos and postmodern style battles of consumption markets in
the North, that many leading transnationals locate their subcontracted manufacturing work.
Such ‘distant grey sheds in the Far East and Central America offer work boiled down to a
brutal essence’ (Beckett, 2000, 17). In 1999 over 27 million people, usually young unmarried
women, worked in such ‘closed-off places across the world, where taxes and unions and
regulations and the attentions of local politicians barely reach’ (ibid.). In South East Asia
‘hundreds of workers burn to death every year because their dormitories are located upstairs
from firetrap sweatshops’ (Klein, 1999, xvi).
Such spaces are therefore emblematic of the use of corporate networks to exploit spatial
separation and geographical division. Talking to a seventeen-year-old woman in an IBM CD-
ROM plant in Manila, for example, Naomi Klein told her she was impressed at the woman’s
skill in making such intricate machines. ‘We make computers, but we don’t know how to
operate computers,’ was the reply. Reflecting this, Klein urges us to debunk the corporate
fetishism of ‘globalization’ that brings the endlessly repeated ideologies of the ‘global village’
and ‘collapsing world’. ‘Ours,’ she writes, ‘is not such a small world after all’ (1999, xvii).
Whilst the poor infrastructural connections of many developing and newly industrialising
cities often act as a deterrent to investment by global trade operators, the concessions and
publicly supported infrastructure in export processing zones works to enrol them into the
multinational locational decisions of shippers, transnational corporations and manufacturers.
Export processing zones are therefore logistics enclaves whose high levels of infrastructural
servicing, and connectivity elsewhere, tend to contrast sharply with their disconnection from
their surrounding city or region and its poor infrastructure (Brenes et al., 1997). This is
especially the case in export-processing sub-Saharan economies. In Ghana in 1995, for
example, international telecommunications infrastructure was limited to highly expensive,
glocal connections for a few key players in international business enclaves in the capital city:

There were only ten 14,400 kbit/s leased lines linked to the UK costing about US $7500 per month
each. One was used by the interbank clearing system, SWIFT, and another by the air traffic control
network, SITA. By early 1996, a private network computer systems host in the capital city had 140
subscribers paying US $1300 each a year – the annual income of a Ghananian journalist.
(Mansell and Wehn, 1998, 106)

The planning of export processing zones invariably emphasises the modernity and quality of
infrastructural connections, compared with the surrounding city (along with, of course, the
low operating costs and ‘flexible’ on-site labour force). In the new Jinqiao Export Processing
Zone, a 20 km2 zone near Shanghai’s port, for example, a whole suite of special advanced
infrastructure networks has been put in place to tempt foreign capital, and foreign business
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 364

people, to the enclave: a 500,000 line capacity telephone and optic fibre grid; a dedicated
satellite earth station; eleven dedicated electricity substations with back-up; customised water,
gas, road and public transport connections. Modern garden city-style residential and
commercial spaces are backed by intense security as living spaces for foreign executives and
business travellers.
As well as enhanced transport and infrastructure connections, export processing zones
tend also to be provided with extra services befitting a modernised enclave such as ‘twenty-
four-hour security, garbage collection, maintenance systems, and, in case of emergency, water
supplied from wells belonging to the EPZ administration’ (Brenes et al., 1997, 61).

PARTIAL ARTICULATIONS FOR THE ‘KINETIC ELITE’:

AIRPORT CITIES, FAST RAIL STATIONS AND THE
WIDER METROPOLIS

Our third type of logistics enclave has perhaps the most dramatic contrasts between intense
global connectivity and the increasingly careful filtering of local connectivity: the international
‘hub’ airport or rail terminal. These are customised spaces par excellence for organising and
housing global flows. In particular, such spaces are designed and regulated to meet the needs
of affluent business and leisure travellers: the 600 million or so airline arrivals per year; the
300,000 people that are in the air at any one time above the United States (Urry, 2000b, 50).
Borrowing from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Rem Koolhaas calls these people
the ‘kinetic elite’ (see Wolf, 2000). In configuring themselves to meet these people’s needs
for seamless flow and painless interconnection with distant elsewheres, global network spaces
like airports and fast rail stations start to show an ambivalent relationship with their host city.
Contemporary international airports concentrate a remarkable range of facilities and services
within a spatial setting that is ‘similar to that of an island connected with other distant regions
only through very selective specialized systems of transportation’ (Ezechieli, 1998, 18). Because
it articulates more closely with the global flight-path network than with the surrounding city
space, as Friedman suggests, ‘today’s airport is only partially connected to the environment
around it. It is directly connected with other airports with which it is linked in an increasingly
vital network’ (1999, 14). Reflecting on this trend, Hans Ibelings believes that:

nowhere is the process of enclave formation stronger than in the world of airport architecture. All over
the world, the major airports have grown into complex and multi-faceted mega-structures that not only
offer space for more terminals, piers and hangars than ever before, but also accommodate a growing
number of functions that have nothing whatever to do with aviation. In many cases, these other functions
make a bigger contribution to airport turnover than activities directly related to air travel.
(1998, 78)

As Markus Hesse suggests, the tendency for the new logistics nodes and airport complexes
to gravitate to the metropolitan periphery is helping to support a restructuring in broader
urban forms:
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 365

New transportation concepts prove to be new locational concepts. And where transportation becomes
the new bottleneck factor in regional development, those nodal points that promise frictionless
movement of traffic are booming. [As a result] urban structures are being shifted: The center is
wandering to the periphery, tertiary uses are moving magnetically to these locations.
(1992, 53)

In what follows we explore a few examples of how mega-airports are starting to emerge as
exemplars of secessionary and premium network spaces.

B Y P A S S I M M I G R A T I O N F O R P R E M I U M P A S S E N G E R S

In the first example, highly mobile and affluent business travellers can, increasingly, bypass
normal arrangements for immigration and ticketing at major international airports. This
allows them seamlessly, and speedily, to connect between the domains of ground and air, and
through the complex architectural and technological systems designed to separate ‘air’ side
and ‘ground’ side rigidly within major international airports (Virilio, 1991, 10). In fact, travel
on an international airliner, ‘with its portholes closed and movie screens on’, can itself now
be likened to a ‘travelling segment of a tunnel’ (Andreu, 1998, 59). The increasingly close
integration of the ‘air’ and ‘ground’ experience means that this ‘tunnel’ can, in effect, extend
right through the airport to highway or railway links with as little delay and as much comfort
as possible – for selected, generally powerful, people.
After a pioneering agreement, for example, biometric hand geometry scans are now in
operation for the most frequent business travellers at major airports linking the United States,
the Netherlands, Canada and Germany and other OECD countries under the INSPASS
(Immigration and Naturalisation Service Passenger Accelerated Service System). Selected
‘premium’ travellers are issued with a smart card that records their hand geometry. ‘Each time
the traveller passes through customs, they present the card and place their hand in a reader
that verifies their identity and links into international databases’, allowing them instant access
to the plane (Banisar, 1999). In 1999 the scheme had 70,000 participants and the INS were
already planning to extend the system globally. Such systems, of course, back up the extending
infrastructure of luxurious airport lounges and facilities that are accessible only to elite
passengers carrying special passes (see Figure 7.17).

L O C A L B Y P A S S A N D S E A M L E S S C O N N E C T I O N W I T H

D O M I N A N T C O N S U M P T I O N A N D B U S I N E S S S P A C E S

Second, major international hub airports are increasingly connected up seamlessly with the
major corporate and consumption spaces of the host city, many of which now tend to cluster
around them. ‘Thanks to all the offices, banks, hotels, restaurants, conference facilities, casinos
and shopping centres in the immediate vicinity, the airport has developed into a significant
economic centre that is sometimes so large that the airport starts to compete with the very
city it was intended to serve’ (Ibelings, 1998, 80). As Gary Hack suggests:
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 366

Figure 7.17 The Priority Pass programme: a fee-based system allowing access to luxury airport lounges at
every international airport in the world

new business centers which are evolving in many cities have the tendency to spur the creation of ‘elite
corridors’, with housing, entertainment uses and educational facilities oriented to high income groups.
Virtually every city has such a new center, and often they are located near regional airports. In Santiago
[Chile], such a cluster is emerging along the Amerigo Vespucci beltway. In the Randstad, the area
around Schipol Airport is beginning to take this form. In Manila, the Makati area is becoming a new
city center. . . . Often these new centers are the city’s window to the international economy, and the
preferred location for regional headquarters of multinational corporations.
(1997, 8–9)

As some key airports are developed on reclaimed islands (Osaka, Hong Kong) they
demonstrate an even greater tendency to bundle uses and functions and emerge as global
business cities in their own right. Rem Koolhaas’s studio, the OMA, for example, has proposed
the building of an entirely new airport city off the western coast of the Netherlands to replace
the increasingly congested Schipol airport at Amsterdam. Geared specifically as a home base
for high-frequency business travellers, the island would encompass the largest malls in Europe,
beach resorts, a theme park, a technology park and elite housing. ‘Walled off by the ocean,
connected by a bridge, and governed by a charter, the airport–island [concept] is both
futuristic and feudal’ (Wolf, 2000, 310).
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 367

Developers and operators of key ‘hub’ airports are also finding ways of connecting more
seamlessly with valued spaces farther afield across the metropolitan area. This is occurring in
three ways. First, in many cases, local trains to airports, which stop at intervening stations,
are being replaced by premium trains which connect airports directly with valued, downtown,
locations, without stopping on the way. Such local bypass is occurring in Paris, where SNCF,
the rail operator, has dramatically improved non-stop services between Roissy airport and the
Gare du Nord in the city centre. The declared aim is to prevent ‘train robberies’ by criminals
from intervening poor suburbs boarding trains packed with affluent tourists and business
people. But the reality is a classic example of urban bypass through network redesign. The
decrease in local trains has added to the isolation of the poor suburbs near the airport and has
made it particularly hard for residents of those places to access the abundant jobs created
around the airport space (Olivier Coutard, personal communication).
Second, we are seeing the construction of new traveller surveillance systems covering the
key transport links between valued city cores and airports. In 1997, for example, British
Airways tested a smart card system that locates passengers coming into Gatwick airport from
London’s Victoria railway station in real time. ‘The idea is to try to improve the smoothness
of flow through the rail transport system and the airport gate corridors,’ so improving the
seamlessness of the airport’s connection with the West End (Lyon, 2000, 20).
Finally, some airport operators are going further and are constructing private, dedicated
rail links that carry passengers much more directly between the premium city core and the
airport. Unlike previous generations of underground and surface rail connections these are,
almost literally, hermetically sealed from all intervening places, embedding a profound logic
of glocal bypass into their design and operation. An excellent example of this logic is the
privately developed Heathrow Express link, which opened in January 1998 (see Figure 7.18).
Developed by the operator of Heathrow, British Airports Authority, at a cost of £450 million,
this rail link offers an ‘airline style ambience’ with first-class space (complete with televisions
and telephones). It connects all four of Heathrow’s terminals direct with Paddington station
in west London – a journey of fifteen minutes compared with the hour or more on the
Underground – and offers a twenty-four-hours-a-day frequency of every fifteen minutes. No
stops exist between the airport and the West End of London, totally bypassing intervening
spaces. Automated baggage check-in at the stations allows seamless interconnection with the
airport for air travellers (Spark 1998).

T H E I N T E G R A T I O N O F A I R P O R T S W I T H F A S T

R A I L N E T W O R K S

In the longer run, BAA want to extend this logic of glocal bypass by connecting more distant
business enclaves seamlessly with Heathrow. Their first target is to extend the link to the City
of London, substantially adding to the glocal connectivity of the heart of London’s finance
district. Then they aspire to connect Heathrow with the growing European network of trains
à grand vitesse rail links (a connection that has already happened at Frankfurt and Paris Charles
de Gaulle airports). This, in turn, is all part of the wider project of selectively integrating
Europe’s ‘glocal’ infrastructures to support economic integration (see Johnson and Turner,
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 368

Figure 7.18 ‘Bringing Heathrow to the

centre of London’: the Heathrow Express
link, an excellent example of glocal bypass,
planned to link directly with the trans-
European high-speed TGV rail network

1997). The growing interconnection of fast rail and air travel promises an increasingly seamless
interchange for valued spaces and travellers between air and surface transport (with integrated
ticketing, ownership, marketing and baggage forwarding under development).
In fact, the trains à grand vitesse and fast rail infrastructures of Europe and Japan provide
our final example of how super-fast ‘glocal’ infrastructure networks only partially articulate
with the landscapes and socioeconomies of the cities through which they pass. This is because,
as John Whitelegg argues:

high speed rail developments pick out a few favoured parts of cities from a much larger number of
possibilities and confer on them additional advantages in terms of accessibility and investment. Any re-
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 369

sorting of the space economy which produces such a ‘rush’ of new investment inevitably leaves
somewhere else high and dry. Building high speed rail links is of little relevance to the vast majority of
women, the young, the elderly, the poor and the unemployed.
(1993, 10)

Such TGV networks tend to use massive public subsidies to benefit only small parts of a few
cities. They overwhelmingly benefit largely the affluent, white, male users of the network. They
underpin a polarisation of the space economy within and between cities because intervening
spaces remain unconnected and can actually experience worsening accessibility (because local
and regional trains are reduced to allow the fast ones to operate).
Not surprisingly, given the ‘stretching’ and ‘warping’ of space economies that accompanies
TGV construction, highly customised spaces are tending to emerge at key connection nodes.
The EuraLille complex in Lille, northern France, is perhaps the best example of the way in
which Europe’s growing fast rail network has provoked the customisation of adjacent business
enclaves (Newman and Thornley, 1995; Peizarat, 1997). Set at the heart of the network, at
‘the centre of gravity’ between Paris, London and Brussels (ibid., 248), the 120 ha site has
been equipped with ‘all the necessary infrastructures and developments which are naturally
implied by a communication interchange of this kind’ (ibid., 243): ‘intelligent’ office spaces,
a TGV station, luxury business and hotel accommodation, and dedicated telecoms, power
and water infrastructure with back-up facilities and advanced technical control. The design
of the space ‘has taken into account all the essential elements for the smooth running of
companies operating at a European scale’ (ibid., 244).

E-COMMERCE SPACES AND THE SPLINTERING

METROPOLIS

The final logistical zone we need to explore is that which inevitably burgeons with the
explosive international growth of on-line retailing and e-commerce: the digitally connected
Internet and electronic transaction facility. Such spaces are a reaction to the exponential
growth of Internet traffic and electronic commerce, which is projected to double globally every
year for the first decade of the new century. Three types of space are emerging here.

‘L O C A T I O N , B A N D W I D T H , L O C A T I O N ’: O P T I C F I B R E L I N E S

A N D T H E C U S T O M I S A T I O N O F U R B A N ‘ T E L E C O M H O T E L S ’

First, and against the rhetoric that the Internet is somehow ‘antispatial’ (Mitchell, 1995),
secure developments for the mushrooming telecommunications industry are proliferating,
clustered around the invisible terminals to super-high-capacity interurban optic fibre trunk
lines. These, in turn, tend to be laid alongside highways or railway tracks to minimise
construction costs. The select high-bandwidth access points for the Internet trunk network
run by the GTE company, which provide one set of high-capacity ‘points of presence’ used
by many Internet server farms and e-commerce operators, is shown in Figure 7.19.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 370

■ Higher Bandwidth
★
✩
} “Points of Presence”
Lower Bandwidth
Peering Point
■ Network Operations Department

Figure 7.19 The high-bandwidth access points of the US Internet trunk network run by the GTE
company. Source: http://www.bbn.com

As development concentrates around such optic fibre ‘points of presence’ the edges of
major global city cores are now being equipped with portfolios of anonymous, windowless
buildings – massive, highly fortified spaces which house the computer and telecommunications
equipment for the blossoming commercial Internet industry. Akamai, for example, one of the
world’s largest Web server management companies, operates ‘the largest, most global network
of servers in the industry, deployed across multiple carriers’. Its state-of-the-art server ‘farms’
are housed in highly secure building complexes located in the major global cities of the world.
This offers the ‘closest proximity to users possible’, a factor of continuing importance in the
location of heavily trafficked Web sites because of Internet congestion, bandwidth bottlenecks
and the dominance of global telecoms capacity by major metropolitan regions (see
www.akamai.com).
‘What’s critical to these companies is access to business centers, access to fiber routes, and
access to physical transportation,’ writes the New York Times (21 March 2000, 4). For
example, as in other major US cities, many ‘telecom hotel’ projects – centres for the telecom
switching and equipment of multiple competitors, housed in new or refurbished factory and
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 371

office buildings – are being built in and around Boston, Massachusetts. They house the
region’s fast-expanding Internet operators, Web providers and telecom and multimedia firms;
they cluster around the city’s major optic fibre terminals, such as the Prudential Center over
the Massachusetts turnpike. This reflects the new mantra of many real estate providers for IT-
intensive users, a slight variation on the one for the industrial age: ‘location, bandwidth,
location’ (Evans, 1999).
To occupying companies, the physical qualities of the chosen buildings (high ceilings,
high-power and back-up electricity supplies) need to be combined with nodal positions on
fibre networks. ‘Whose fibre (and what type of fibre, for that matter) will be a major
consideration in the site selection process. A perfectly built building in the wrong part of
town will be a disaster’ (Bernet, 2000, 17). In a frenzied process of competition to build or
refurbish buildings in the right locations, a New York agent reported that ‘if you’re on top
of a fiber line, the property is worth double what it might have been’ (ibid.).

E- C O M M E R C E D I S T R I B U T I O N H U B S

The wider explosion of e-commerce mediated by Internet or telephone transactions, and

underpinned by advanced logistics systems distributing goods to customers, is leading to the
proliferation of a second type of classic ‘glocal’ network spaces where connections elsewhere
are far more important than links with the local urban landscape. Across the Western world,
in fact, declining warehouse parks are being gradually reconstituted as ‘virtual’ warehouses –
automated spaces, close to mail and highway hubs, that are linked seamlessly into the just-
in-time logistics systems designed to serve national and even continental markets for Internet-
sold goods.
In the United States alone it has been estimated that 60 million ft2 to 100 million ft2 of
new warehouses, sited on major distribution hubs, will be needed between 2000 and 2003
to meet the exploding demand from business-to-consumer (‘B2C’) and business-to-business
(B2B) e-commerce companies (New York Times, 14 June 2000, 8). Often such spaces are
gravitating to ‘piggyback’ on existing UPS or Federal Express hubs. As with other digital
economy complexes, multiple fibre loops, high-capability electrical infrastructure and
back-up power are mandatory for e-commerce warehousing, both for major single-occupant
centres and for multi-tenant developments. Such demand for customised network spaces for
e-commerce seems likely to continue growing: by 2010, it has been estimated, one-third
of the world’s US$60 trillion B2B economy will operate on-line, mediated by Intra and
Internets, and organised through e-commerce warehousing and logistical systems (Lohse,
2000, 21).
E-commerce distribution hubs are also growing rapidly in Europe. Slough, in the south-
east of England, for example, is already emerging as a national and international e-commerce
distribution hub. The town houses the UK version of Amazon.com – the major e-commerce
bookseller. As e-commerce explodes with the mass diffusion of the Internet, and the growing
sophistication of ‘virtual malls’ and on-line grocery shopping, the physical, hidden support,
storage and transaction processing systems for virtually sold goods are likely to become an
ever more important example of urban space.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 372

D A T A H A V E N S : T H E E M E R G E N C E O F U L T R A - S E C U R E

E - C O M M E R C E E N C L O S U R E S

Finally, the imperative of security for data storage among many e-commerce and corporate
firms is such that a wide range of peripheral, isolated and ultra-secure spaces are being
configured for remotely housing the computer and data storage operations of major
e-commerce operators (a process known as ‘co-location’). There are several elements in this
process. In the first element a variety of ‘offshore’ small island states – Anguilla and Bermuda,
to name two – are packaging themselves as ‘free Internet zones’ – secure locations for Web
server platforms which conveniently minimise corporate taxation vulnerability to Internet
regulation, and operating costs.
In the second part of the process, old disused sea forts and oil rigs are being reconfigured
by e-commerce entrepreneurs in an attempt to secede from the jurisdiction of nation states
altogether. For example, the self-styled ‘Principality of Sealand’ – a disused World War II anti-
aircraft fort six miles off the coast of England – is being touted as an ultra-secure space for
corporate Web servers and e-commerce platform. Were the developers’ plans to be realised,
the platform would escape the intervention, taxation and regulatory powers of all national
and supranational bodies and states. It would also be beyond interference from any company,
pressure group or hacker whilst maintaining high-capacity 20 ms links with all the world’s
data capitals (Garfinkel, 2000; see www.havenco.com). The Oceania project, a much larger
island city-state in the Caribbean, is also being mooted, aimed at creating an unregulated e-
commerce space (see http://oceania.org/).
But perhaps even more bizarre is the third part of the process: the reconstruction of Cold
War missile launching sites to offer the ultimate in security against the risk of both electronic
and physical incursion (D’Antonio, 2000, 26). Developers of an old Titan facility at Moses
Lake, in Washington state, for example, are exploiting the old ICBM launching and control
bunkers to offer 166,000 ft2 of the most dependable and secure data storage space on the
planet. The buildings are ‘tremor proof, fireproof and impervious to even the most powerful
tornado. Their three-foot-thick concrete walls, reinforced with steel and lead, could withstand
a truck bomb the size of the one that brought down the Murray building in Oklahoma City
or a ten-megaton atomic explosion just one quarter-mile away’ (ibid.). All infrastructure is
backed up for guaranteed uninterrupted supplies. The space’s computers are separated from
the public Internet to deter hackers; the service and manufacturing firms that use the space
are required to have private intranets that offer the best electronic firewalls available.

T H E W O R L D S B E Y O N D G L O C A L
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

Our exploration of the seven ranges of premium networked space, characterised by glocal
infrastructural connections, is now complete. But, as with our discussion of the social
landscapes of splintering urbanism in the last chapter, the analysis would remain incomplete
without investigating the economic prospects of the urban worlds that lie beyond the reach
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 373

of these glittering new ranges of ‘glocal’ infrastructural connections. What economic fortunes
face those lower-income people and spaces in cities that are clearly being bypassed as the new
networks become tightly configured to the needs of powerful economic actors and the
socioeconomically affluent?
In a sense these multiple global ‘peripheries’ face a broadly similar prospect, whether they
be the sociotechnical and geographical peripheries of developed cities and spaces or the
burgeoning peripheries of developing ‘megacities’ or post-communist urban regions. All lie
beyond the increasingly isolated and secessionary enclaves that are connected like beads on
a string to the extended archipelagoes of glocal infrastructure nodes and networks.
In general terms there are two choices for the new geographical or sociotechnical urban
peripheries. The first is just to accept the (often deteriorating) legacy of the modern
infrastructural ideal. In the developed context this generally means basic and robust
connections with standard services (although often with rising costs of use, deteriorating
maintenance and an increasing gap between the local infrastructure and that equipping the
new glocal enclaves). In many of the poorest peripheral spaces of developing cities this may
mean little or no formal connection with any networked infrastructures at all. Even when
connections do exist, accepting the legacy of the modern ideal may mean accepting
deteriorating services and higher charges for basic services because of the effects of
liberalisation, privatisation and structural adjustment.
The second option is to take action to splinter oneself and one’s space away from the
modern, monopolistic infrastructure network, in the hope of achieving more suitable higher-
quality or more reliable connections that way. Let us briefly look at some examples of how
these choices are being made, from Developing and Developed World contexts.

OVERCOMING THE FAILURES OF THE MODERN IDEAL

IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD: SELF-PROVISION
OF INFRASTRUCTURE

In Developing World cities the infrastructural prospects of many economic spaces beyond the
glocal enclaves where infrastructure investment is increasingly concentrating remain bleak.
Networked services, when available, tend to be unreliable and of poor quality. Power and
electricity shortages and outages are common. Water pressures, when water is available at all,
are erratic. Road passability is unpredictable. And telephone calls and electronic connections
are frequently interrupted. The results are production delays, damage to electronic equipment
and the loss of perishable goods or outputs – problems which significantly constrain the
prospects of economic growth and development in an internationalising, network-based
economy (Kessides, 1993b, 10). One study of the economic impact of power shortages and
interruptions in the Pakistani economy, for example, concluded that the total effect was a 4.2
per cent reduction in manufactured exports and a 1.8 per cent reduction in GDP (ibid., 10;
see Lee et al., 1999).
In consequence, it is now common practice for large and small firms, as well as wealthier
households, effectively to splinter themselves off from the local legacy of the modern
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 374

infrastructural ideal through the development of their own private infrastructures. But such
options are very costly and inefficient. In Lima, Peru, for example, it was estimated in 1993
that private water storage facilities cost forty to eighty times more than services through the
public utility (Kessides, 1993b, 11). In Nigeria in 1988 92 per cent of firms had their own
electricity generators. More generally, ‘private infrastructure provision (for generators,
boreholes, vehicles for personnel and freight transport, and radio communications equipment)
constituted 15 per cent of total machinery and equipment costs for large firms, but 25 per
cent for small firms’ in that country (Kessides, 1993b, 12).
The costs, inefficiencies and problems involved in self-provision significantly damage the
prospects of peripheral economic spaces of the city ‘engag[ing] in international trade, even
of traditional export commodities’ (Kessides, 1993b, 13). This is particularly so as this trade
is increasingly mediated by complex information and logistics systems, which require high-
quality uninterrupted infrastructure networks and electronic systems in order to function.
Because of the poor infrastructure and utility systems of peripheral cities in Nigeria, for
example, it has been found that they are unable to support the crucial ‘seedbed’ of small new
firms. This is because such firms tend to locate near dominant urban spaces where
infrastructure is more reliable and available (ibid.).
In São Paulo, meanwhile, basic infrastructure connections are gradually becoming
much more widely available throughout the city. Mains water is now available to 88 per cent
of users. But connections are scarce and unreliable in the rapidly expanding informal
peripheries of the urban region. The core is thickly webbed with mains water arteries which
make it immune from shortages and interruptions; peripheral areas, at best, ‘are covered by
single branches derived from the periphery of the redundant subsystems’ (Silva, 2000, 11).
Such networks are ‘much more vulnerable to scarcity’ (ibid.). The distribution of advanced
telecommunications, meanwhile, is ‘very unequal within the urban structure’, with investment
concentrated overwhelmingly on glocal enclaves for internationally oriented businesses and
socioeconomic elites (ibid.).

BEYOND THE ‘DIGITAL DIVIDE’: INFRASTRUCTURE

AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE NON-FAVOURED
SPACES OF THE NORTH

Beyond the glocal nodes and enclaves of developed cities in the North, infrastructural erosion
and relative disconnections tend to be more subtle. But, in relative terms, they remain
powerful, especially as the wider infrastructural logics of the city start to support ‘bypass’
configurations that connect valued zones and spaces with each other within and between
cities, whilst at the same time pushing non-valued spaces relationally further away.
Thus intervening spaces between Heathrow and the West End and City of London have,
in effect, been relationally pushed away by the Heathrow Express link, a classic local bypass
or ‘tunnel effect’ which physically traverses west London whilst according no access. As we
have seen, similar ‘tunnel effect’ logics characterise fast rail and trains à grand vitesse, teleports
and glocal optic fibre grids within and between dominant metropolitan areas. The trend
towards carefully managed road connections, intense electronic surveillance practices and
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 375

defensive architecture and urban design serve further to distance and separate the valued
‘citadels’ of global cities from the interstitial, lower-income spaces that surround them (see
Dear and Flusty, 1998).

E C O N O M I C P R O S P E C T S I N T H E D I G I T A L E C O N O M Y B E Y O N D

B R O A D B A N D N E T W O R K E D S P A C E S

Many telecommunications companies and service providers, eager to reflect the splintered
geographies of contemporary cities in their investment plans, are cherry-picking only the
most lucrative business and professional customers in their plans to invest in broadband
infrastructures. In mid 1999 about 86 per cent of all Internet delivery capacity in the United
States was concentrated in the prosperous suburbs and business areas of the twenty largest
cities (Lieberman, 1999):

The private sector builds where the high volume and the money is. In most communities the fiber-optic
rings circle the business district. If you’re in a poor suburban neighbourhood or the inner city, you’re
at risk. What’s more, providers that have spent years building their infrastructures don’t come back and
fill in the underserved neighbourhoods. That may be a shrewd financial strategy. But the social impact
could be devastating.
(Lieberman, 1999)

In a context where bandwidth and connectivity are, quite literally, the lifeblood of ‘glocally’
organised electronic businesses, this works very directly to prevent new on-line and e-
commerce-oriented small businesses from competing within less prosperous, peripheral towns
and marginalised inner-city spaces. Quite simply, ‘the phone line is too small’ (Woodbury and
Thompson, 1999).
Many small firms in all sectors, faced with the growing expectation by customers of offering
the multimedia-based e-commerce services that only broadband connections can support,
are finding themselves in neighbourhoods that are simply on the wrong side of the ‘digital
divide’ (Lieberman, 1999). Phillip Burgess, president of the Center for the New West, a
telecommunications advocacy group, argues that ‘there is a growing digital divide’ between
the affluent enclaves, with their multiple, broadband glocal infrastructures, and other spaces,
with their threadbare, obsolescent and expensive telephone systems. This, he says, will have
‘dire implications for the social and economic fabric of many communities’ (quoted in
O’Malley, 1999, 22).
Figure 7.20 shows the extreme geographical unevenness of the ‘dot-com’ phenomenon
in central Boston, Massachusetts, in 1999. Domain name registrations of small and large
firms on the Internet are overwhelmingly concentrated in the central business district, in
upscale and gentrified neighbourhoods like Back Bay and the South End, and in high-tech
clusters around MIT and Harvard in Cambridge – all districts that are benefiting from several
competing broadband Internet providers. Poorer, African-American neighbourhoods like
Roxbury, meanwhile, remain almost totally absent from e-commerce and e-business and are
outside the build-out plans of broadband Internet providers.
 EXPLORING THE SPLINTERING METROPOLIS / 376

Figure 7.20 The uneven ‘dot-com’ geography of central Boston, Massachusetts, 1999.
Source: courtesy of Matthew Zook, University of California at Berkeley (personal communication);
see http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~zook/pubs/acsp1998.html

C O N C L U S I O N S

A broadly parallel logic seems to characterise the changing economic geographies of cities in
the so-called developed, developing, newly industrialising and post-communist worlds. It is
that of the increasingly defensive, self-contained and glocally oriented enclave, surrounded
by social and economic spaces from which it seems increasingly disconnected. In many cases
the divisions are increasingly salient and visible as walls, ramparts, fences, security cameras and
public and private police forces attempt to secure and police the intervening boundaries,
whilst at the same time maintaining the security and sanctity of the glocal infrastructural
connections that traverse such boundaries.
In a sense the glocal enclaves in both ‘global’ cities and those in new urban peripheries are
different results of the failure of the modern comprehensive infrastructural ideal. Global
enclaves are increasingly securing their own high-quality, customised infrastructures to
overcome the perceived inadequacies of the legacy of that ideal. The new urban peripheries,
especially in the cities of the Developing World, often have to splinter themselves from
the eroding and non-existent legacy of the modern ideal by paying heavily for smaller-
scale, private infrastructural solutions such as generators, boreholes and the like. Certainly,
 ‘GLOCAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN ECONOMIES / 377

our discussions in this chapter, which have engaged with an extremely wide range of cities,
infrastructures and types of development project, underline that such logics of global partial
interconnection, combined with growing local disconnection, seem to be a generic
characteristic of contemporary urbanism.
Within increasingly pervasive neoliberal contexts, supporting the shift from the modern
infrastructural ideal to project-based and ‘pepperpotted’ infrastructural improvements, geared
to favoured and valued users, it is strikingly clear that networked infrastructures of all sorts
are providing nothing less than the sociotechnical armoury which underpins and perpetuates
these highly uneven urban development logics (see Pryke, 1999). It is the subtle, invisible
but highly powerful configuration of the technologies and social practices of networked
infrastructures that allows glocal enclaves to reach out to seamless interconnection with each
other, across the polynuclear fields of the metropolis and the wider urbanising world. It is
the ‘bypass’ configurations of water, road, rail, airport, power and telecommunications
connections that allow the global city enclaves, the cyber districts, the manufacturing spaces,
the ‘technopoles’, the back office zones and the logistics enclaves to remove themselves from
the surrounding social world of the city with such apparent ease. And it is the erosion,
withdrawal or neglect of the infrastructural fabric of peripheral cities and spaces that further
undermines the economic prospects of such areas. This is the case even though such spaces
may, geographically, be cheek-by-jowl with the gleaming glocal enclaves of the splintering
city and the high-quality glocal infrastructures that interconnect such enclaves may actually
pass above, through, within or underneath them. Adding the apparently pervasive shift
towards private policing, the application of intense electronic surveillance and customised,
closed access roads, and a heady cocktail of attempted economic secession and local
disconnection emerges.
But the key word here is ‘attempted’. For, as we shall see in Part Three, cities continue to
be mixed economic and social spaces within which attempts at pure economic and
technological secession are ambivalent, contradictory practices that are open to resistance
and challenge. As we shall see then, such continued mixity and ambivalence offer a key hope
to any attempt at working towards the economic democratisation of the twenty-first century
splintering metropolis.
PART THREE
PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM

Plate 18 Armed security personnel manning a gated checkpoint at the entrance to a

South African suburb, 1996. Source: Bremner (n.d.)

8 Conclusion: the limits of splintering urbanism

Postscript: a manifesto for a progressive networked urbanism
[Technical networks] are not objects as
such, but projects, dreams, endeavours, or
even entire societies.
(Latour, 1992, 2)

Cities are embodiments of desire, they

are complex intersections of hopes and
fears. Multi-layered and multi-faceted, they
direct our attention to future and past.
They are expressions of the geography
of imagination; they are represented in
imaginary geographies. They are tapestry-
like fragments of past, present and future. It
is here – in cities, in daily metropolitan life
– that the unknown desires of anonymous
strangers mingle.
(Lipman and Harris, 1999, 729–30)

Urbanization is more than a demographic,

quantifiable phenomenon; it is civilization,
and civilization determines our ways of
living.
(Paquout, 2000, 86)

How is it possible to represent the networks

and systems that comprise the city in the late
twentieth century without a radical shift in
the terms of representation itself?
(Allen, 1990, 35)

We are in the epoch of simultaneity . . . of

the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the
dispersed. We are at the moment when our
experience of the world is less that of a long
life developing through time than that of a
network that connects points and intersects
with its own skein.
(Foucault, 1986, 22)
 8 CONCLUSION

The limits of splintering urbanism

Plate 19 Defensive office complex in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Photograph: Stephen Graham
 CONCLUSION / 382

This book has shown how we are starting to see a dramatic renewal in the physical, social,
political and discursive salience of urban networked infrastructures and the diverse
technological mobilities that they support and mediate. As a result, in many cities and parts
of cities across the developed, developing, newly industrialising and post-communist worlds,
networked infrastructures are, in a sense, being (re)problematised. The ‘black boxes’
surrounding them, built up through the uneven elaboration of the modern infrastructural
ideal, are being ‘reopened’. Certain powerful users are starting to look beyond the taken-for-
granted point of consumption – the phone or Internet terminal, the electricity socket, the
car ignition key, the water tap, the street – at the configuration of the whole technical and
mobility system that supports their transport, street, communication, power and water needs.
In particular, in these times of ‘globalisation’, those users demanding intense local and
global connectivity are starting, along with the internationalising infrastructure operators, real
estate developers and urban development agencies that struggle to meet their every need, to
pay considerable attention to how the whole of their networked urban infrastructures are
configured, managed and developed. At the same time, in search of absolute security, privacy
and control, local connections with the wider metropolis are being increasingly filtered
through a widening array of walls, ramparts, security practices and access control technologies.
In the process the relative infrastructural connections of less powerful users, and the spaces
in which they live, seem to become more and more fragile and problematic.
To describe the dialectical and diverse sets of processes surrounding the parallel unbundling
of infrastructure networks and the fragmentation of urban space we use the umbrella term
‘splintering urbanism’. In response to the increasing scrutiny of local and translocal
infrastructural connections, and to the parallel search for local closure, we have shown how
standardised public or private infrastructure monopolies, (at least ostensibly) laid out to offer
broadly similar services at relatively equal user charges over cities and regions, are receding
as hegemonic forms of infrastructure management. In a parallel process, the diverse political
and regulatory regimes that supported the roll-out of power, transport, communications,
streets and water networks towards the rhetorical goal of standardised ubiquity are, in many
cities and states, being ‘unbundled’ and ‘splintered’ as a result of a widespread movement
towards privatisation and liberalisation.
These forces are combining with strategies to secede from free and open mixing with the
wider metropolis to promote the widening construction of a wide range of premium and
secessionary infrastructure networks – streets, transport systems, power systems, water
networks and communications grids. These are customised to integrate and interconnect
affluent and powerful spaces and users, and are increasingly being built and configured to
bypass less valued intervening ones, where access to even basic networked services becomes
undermined. Our question, in essence, has been: what becomes of cities as a whole in the
context of the parallel dynamics of fragmentation and splintering that so often seem to
accompany globalisation?
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 383

T H E D A N G E R S O F S P L I N T E R I N G U R B A N I S M

It is very clear that, unopposed, practices of splintering urbanism threaten to support a vicious
cycle where attempts at sociotechnical secession lead to greater fear of mixing, so increasing
pressure for further secession, and so on. The risk is that strategies of building ‘defensible’
networked spaces may:

exacerbate, rather than reverse, processes of spatial segregation and social polarisation. There is a clear
redistribution of ‘risks’ involved in the entrenchment of ‘suspect populations’ in outcast, under-
protected, disordered ‘ghettos’, and of ‘innocent populations’ in over-protected, ordered consumerist
‘citadels’ and residential ‘enclaves’.
(McLaughlin and Muncie, 1999, 135)

The result, as Mike Davis (1992) has suggested for Los Angeles, may be the emergence of
urban landscapes made up of layers of premium network spaces, constructed for socio-
economically affluent and corporate users, which are increasingly separated and partitioned
from surrounding spaces of intensifying marginality – spaces where even basic connections
with elsewhere, and basic rights to access spaces and networks, are increasingly problematic.
In this understanding of contemporary urban change, dominant practices of urban design,
network configuration, electronic access control, and police, security and institutional
enforcement, are increasingly seen to be working in parallel to support the sociotechnical
partitioning of the metropolitan and, indeed, societal fabric.
To support and enforce such processes of change, electronic consumption and surveillance
systems, with increasing degrees of automation, threaten to provide silent, invisible and
pervasive networks which cybernetically police the boundaries between premium and
marginalised network spaces, with unprecedented potential for exclusion. David Lyon asks
the important question: ‘is what faces us a world of electronic technologies that classify us
clinically, include and exclude by consumerist criteria, and are backed up by police and welfare
departments? . . . will the new “non-persons”, segregated by surveillance systems, be failed
consumers?’ (1994, 211). As more and more network spaces in the city become commodified
and electronically monitored and controlled, within broader contexts of neoliberal
consumerism, Norris et al. (1998) warn, from a UK perspective, that:

those who cannot pay will be excluded from motorways; known troublemakers from football grounds;
the unsightly casualties of [neighbourhood mental health programmes] removed from the decorous
order of city streets and shopping malls; known shoplifters and fare dodgers excluded from shops and
transport systems. . . . If the growing divide between those who have and have not and those who are
included and excluded is intensified through the use of new technology, there is a real danger that our
cities will come to resemble the dystopian vision so beloved by futuristic film makers.

Much of the evidence in this book certainly lends support to these depressing interpretations
of the contemporary connection between infrastructure, technological mobilities and
metropolitan and societal change. We are in no doubt that, whilst they are mediated through
diverse cultural, historical and geopolitical contexts, dominant spatial practices across a very
 CONCLUSION / 384

wide range of cities seem to be underpinning variations within the whole gamut of trends that
we encompass by the term ‘splintering urbanism’.
This is not to maintain some easy similarity across the wide range of contexts addressed
in this book. Rather, we suggest that there are compelling reasons for attempting to
understand the restructuring processes that we have explored across Western, developing
and post-communist cities, in parallel. For example, in many Western and non-Western
nations, emerging ‘third way’ politics, which assert the need to move beyond welfare and
developmentalist states, seem to rest on a ‘politics of exclusion’ which brings shifts:

from the social welfare state to the social control (police) state, replete with the dramatic expansion
of public and private security forces, the mass incarceration of excluded population (dispropor-
tionately minorities), new forms of social apartheid maintained through complex social control
technologies, repressive anti-immigration legislation, and so on. It has also entailed, under the Third
Way’s deceptive discourse of ‘local politics’ and ‘community empowerment’, a shift in the responsibilities
for social reproduction from the state and society as a whole to the most marginalized communities
themselves.
(Robinson and Harris, 2000, 51)

But our story does not end here. For our many explorations of practices of splintering
urbanism constitute dominant, but by no means all-encompassing and hegemonic, practices
within the multiple social worlds of the contemporary urban condition. In this book we have
necessarily centred largely on the dominant practices of the powerful, in their attempts to
construct, manage and regulate secessionary and premium network and urban spaces. To
avoid an overly narrow perspective, then, we now need to place a series of caveats against this
book’s dominant narratives.
Two tasks, in particular, remain for us in this concluding chapter. First, we need to reflect
on practices of urban splintering by placing them within a wider, historical urban context.
Second, we need to understand the ways in which the essential nature of contemporary urban
life necessarily places limits on the degree to which practices of urban splintering can proceed,
without reaching limits and running into strategies of resistance and the mobilisation of
alternatives. It is to these two remaining challenges that we turn in this concluding chapter.
They provide the basis of the Postscript which follows. In this we round off the book by
exploring the broader implications of its analysis for urban theory, research, politics, and
practice.

P L A C I N G S P L I N T E R I N G U R B A N I S M :
T H E W I D E R C O N T E X T

Our first challenge is to place our explorations of splintering urbanism within the wider urban
and historical context. Four points must be stressed here.
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 385

AVOIDING SIMPLISTIC BINARY TRANSITION

MODELS

First, it is necessary to reiterate that this book does not argue that all networked infrastructures
in all places are somehow moving en masse from an era of standardised coherence to one of
splintered fragmentation. We cannot reduce our analyses of a wide range of infrastructure
networks and systems of technological mobility, within and between a broad diversity of cities,
to some simple, phase-based, transition model. Such an approach would clearly risk the twin
dangers of ethnocentricism and analytical reductionism. We would also be open to accusations
that our analysis simply reified infrastructure networks as agents of urban transformation in
their own right. And we would fall prey to simple functionalism by assuming that there will
be some simple, bidirectional ‘fit’ between the ‘needs’ of contemporary global capitalism and
the infrastructure networks that are now being constructed for it. In short, we are aware that,
as Wacquant puts it, ‘binary oppositions are prone to exaggerate differences, confound
description and prescription, and set up overburdened dualisms that miss continuities,
underplay contingency, and overstate the internal coherence of social forms’ (1996, 124–5).
It is therefore necessary to be wary of the risk of overgeneralisation and oversimplification.
As we stressed in Chapter 4, the many cases of splintering urbanism discussed in this book
involve a wide variety of related but distinct processes: from the construction of completely
new private infrastructures to the sociotechnical reconfiguration of old networks; from classic
cases of wholesale privatisation to public ‘reregulation’ and the changing practices of
continuing monopolies; from the combined secession of interlinked networks and built urban
spaces to the ‘virtual’ construction of infrastructure markets over the single networks that were
the legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal. The overarching notion of splintering urbanism
is, we feel, a useful heuristic device to grapple with this diversity. But we do not intend it to
be either a new urban ‘metanarrative’ or some reductionist analytical straitjacket.

INERTIAS AND CONTINUITIES WITH THE MODERN

INFRASTRUCTURAL IDEAL

Second, the cases explored in this book tend to represent only the most visible and ‘extreme’
examples of the construction of premium and secessionary networked infrastructures, and the
parallel marginalisation of less powerful users and spaces. The book has, for obvious reasons,
not been able to address all cities everywhere. Our examples have been drawn primarily from
UK, US, Asian, Australian, African and Latin American cities. We have said much less, for
example, about cities of continental Western and Eastern Europe.
However, in all the cases discussed, we need to remember that the territorial monopolies,
cross-subsidies and ‘bundled’ networks of the high modern period, along with the associated
political practices and normalised ‘black-boxed’ consumption practices, have not been
removed wholesale. In many cases they remain substantially intact; in a good many urban
contexts the shift from emphasising the sociospatial homogenisation of networks to the
‘unbundling’ of different practices for different users of streets, power networks,
 CONCLUSION / 386

communications, water and transport grids is in fact a good deal more subtle. Rather than
the spectacular emergence of wholly new premium networked spaces, it is manifest in
strengthened law-and-order practices on streets, in changed practices of marketing within
continuing public or private monopolies, in the subtle exclusions of call centre queuing
algorithms, or in the adoption of geodemographic targeting techniques (Graham, 1997;
Offner, 2000). In all cities, therefore, the trends surrounding splintering urbanism amount
not to some simple and wholesale urban ‘revolution’ but to:

a more complex patterning of old and new, of continuing trends and new forces. . . . New and old
processes join together in complex ways and do so in particular places at particular points in the history
of those places. . . . The spatial form of the city inhibits rapid and large-scale transformations. . . .
In sum, the contemporary city hardly reflects postmodernism or post-Fordism in a one-to-one
correspondence.
(Beauregard and Laila, 1997, 328–39)

HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS

Third, whilst they are no doubt in the ascendancy at present, it is also necessary to stress that
customised and unbundled urban infrastructure networks, and secessionary socioeconomic
enclaves geared to affluent groups, are not new. The dialectic of privacy and closure versus
openness and mixing has been played out since the very beginning of urban life (see
Waterhouse, 1996; Soja, 2000).
Users in social and economic enclaves for powerful groups have sought to construct
their own ‘closed’ infrastructures throughout urban history. Processes of splintering
urbanism seem to result in the kinds of fragmented and uneven infrastructure networks and
partitioned urban spaces that were characteristic of most Western cities before the emergence
of the modern infrastructural ideal (Graham and Marvin, 1995). Consider, for example, the
closed and private Victorian streets that were common in the West End of London. Remember,
too, the fragmented jurisdictions, privatised planning practices and secessionary tendencies of
countless twentieth century US suburbs and the infrastructure networks that supported them,
especially those which underpinned patterns of stark racial segregation (see Bayor, 1988).
Socioeconomic enclaves have also long been supported more subtly by uneven
development practices within the discursive and technological construction of the standardised
and ‘homogeneous’ infrastructural monopolies of the modern ideal (Cox and Mair, 1988).
Thus, as we stressed in Chapter 2, the modern infrastructural ideal was never materially
achieved in practice. It was always as much a symbolic and discursive construction as a
technological reality. It was closely bound up with the wider legitimation of modern national
and local states and urban professions, with the framing of particular cultures of urban
territoriality, and with the production of dominant notions of scale. Unevenness and bias in
the orderings of infrastructure networks – in terms of both quality and accessibility – remained
in all cities within attempts to work discursively and materially towards standardisation,
ubiquity and homogeneity.
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 387

The history of developing and colonial cities, in particular, as Balbo (1993) discusses, has
also long been one of the use of constructed built form along with customised infrastructure
to maintain the distant connections and local (dis)connections of socioeconomic enclaves. A
classic example was the International Settlements of early twentieth century Shanghai, each
of which had dedicated infrastructure networks serving dominant and elite spaces.
However, Noam Chomsky (1993, 8) has argued that intensifying globalisation and
international neoliberalism are leading to such practices being exported from the Developing
World to the Developed World, a perspective which supports this book’s efforts to develop
an integrated perspective on urban restructuring across such increasingly similar urban
domains. The processes analysed above, in cases like global financial enclaves, foreign direct
investment complexes and fortressed condominiums, represent a renewal and strengthening
of old and established practices of distant infrastructural connection and attempts at filtering
local connection, rather than something radically new. They simply do this with renewed
degrees of intensity and global reach and, often, without the discursive pretence of eventually
moving towards universal access or territorial ubiquity.

DANGERS OF ROMANTICISING THE MODERN

INFRASTRUCTURAL IDEAL

Finally, we should be cautious not to fall into the trap of romanticising the modern
infrastructural ideal, or the wider modern urban project within which it rose and fell (Bhabha,
1990). As we saw in Chapter 3, whilst in many cases it did succeed in overseeing the
democratisation and roll-out of infrastructure networks, this tended to be achieved through
masculinised, centralised and colonialist notions of ‘order’ and ‘coherence’ which were far
from emancipatory of women, the disabled, indigenous and colonised populations or other
marginalised social groups (King, 1996; Sandercock, 1998b). The normative concept of the
networked city that was at the root of the modern ideal was totalising and centralised and
driven by assumed and paternalistic notions of ‘order’ and (sometimes) redistribution. The
modern ideal’s great narratives of progress and emancipation for all tended to hide many
practices of subjugation, repression and marginalisation. And often its decidedly paternalistic
notions had little connection with the needs, desires or identities of the groups that were
supposed to benefit most from its strategic, modernist vision.

C H A L L E N G I N G H E G E M O N I E S : R E S I S T A N C E
A N D T H E L I M I T S O F S P L I N T E R I N G U R B A N I S M

Cities are a mess by definition.

(Dave Hickey, quoted in Allen, 1994a, 39)

Nobody gets away with wrapping the breathtaking complexity of city building into a simple
package.
(Waterhouse, 1996, xxii)
 CONCLUSION / 388

Whenever there is domination, there is resistance to domination. Whenever there is imposition

of meaning, there are projects of constructing alternative meanings. . . . While the space of flows
has been created by and around dominant activities and social groups, it can be penetrated by
resistance, and diversified in its meaning.
(Castells, 1999a, 297)

A tunnel, any tunnel, directly threatens the integrity of that which rests above it. Such a passage
erodes foundations from the bottom up, its presence rendering superstructures perilously heavy
with contradiction.
(King, 2000, 269)

The second challenge in this concluding discussion is to explore and understand what we term
the limits of splintering urbanism. For it is very important to realise that the sociotechnical
secession of premium networked spaces from the wider metropolis will never be some simple,
attainable, process. We can be certain that starkly polarised development logics are shaping
the socioeconomic landscapes of cities as far afield and as different as Tyneside, São Paulo,
New York, Istanbul, Guangzhou, Manila, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Jakarta or Bintan island. But
it is important to realise that these are resulting from strategies of coalitions of interests within
the contested and highly complex geopolitical, governance and socio-cultural contexts of
their respective cities. These strategies do nothing to guarantee simple, total or easy secession.
In fact, the dream of a totally purified, hermetically sealed world of splintered, premium
networked spaces for affluent or powerful users in the contemporary metropolis is exactly that
– a (modern or postmodern) urban dream which is just as unrealisable as the fantasies of
clean, functional and perfectly geometric order promulgated by modernist visionaries in the
early and mid twentieth century (see Castells, 1997a).
Take an example. In developing cities premium network spaces cannot entirely isolate
themselves from the public health externalities associated with the poverty, poor sanitation
and high rates of disease caused by poor or non-existent water and sewerage infrastructure
in surrounding shanty districts. Even with the proliferation of private boreholes, generators,
private medicine, supplies of bottled water and the usual techniques of geographic separation
and fortification, ‘the public health of one affects the other almost instantly’ (Baird and
Heintz, 1997, 13).
We therefore need to be wary of assuming the easy emergence of utterly separated premium
network spaces; of completely integrated, all-seeing and perfectly effective electronic
surveillance webs supporting the maintenance of urban social apartheid; and of completely
segregated cities where different socioeconomic circuits cease to have any meaningful overlap
or interconnection. Equally, we must be careful not to resort to cartoonish and deterministic
readings of the technological ‘impacts’ of new infrastructural innovations (Graham and
Marvin, 1996). The reality of technological innovation, the restructuring of urban landscapes,
and social and cultural changes in cities, are a great deal more ‘messy’, difficult, contingent
and open to contested interpretations and applications than such scenarios imply (Thrift,
1996b, c; Bingham, 1996).
There are at least six reasons why this is so, each of which deserves some discussion
here.
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 389

PREMIUM NETWORK SPACES AND GLOCAL ENCLAVES

AS CONTESTED URBAN ORDERINGS

First, the actual practice of attempting to configure infrastructure networks and urban spaces
to support glocal enclave formation, and the construction of premium or secessionary network
spaces, do not serve to insulate and separate such network spaces entirely from the social
and economic dynamics of the wider metropolis. The differentiation of urban space, whilst
often fuelled by efforts to use social power and technology together to create normative urban
‘orders’, is always uneven and porous. It is framed by wider efforts to manage and govern
urban complexity and conflict and wider power-laden and contested representations of what
constitute ‘order’, ‘chaos’, ‘progress’ and the ‘good city’ (Mooney et al., 1999).
The fragmented and polynuclear geographies of many contemporary cities can mean that
the social and technological worlds of the powerful and the marginalised are rarely far apart
in terms of geographical distance. This is the case even in relatively new cities, where much
of the urban landscape is actually made up of the tightly regulated architectures of secessionary
network spaces. It is certainly the case in many older cities in Europe, Latin America, North
America and Asia where the public street system, in particular, has maintained some
overarching structuring power. In these cities the diverse social worlds of cities continue to
intersect and cross-over each other, even if the relational connections between the rich and
marginalised may weaken through the processes of splintering urbanism and privatisation.
We must also remember, of course, that premium network spaces and socioeconomic
enclaves are not institutionally or politically unified as single actors. They, in turn, have their
own complex and contested politics and spatialities. Supportive coalitions of developers,
infrastructure operators, social and economic interest groups, politicians and their allies often
meet internal as well as external resistance. Some Business Improvement Districts in New
York, for example, have been plagued by conflict as store owners struggle against higher BID
taxes and the perceived negative effects of gentrification and self-governance (Schulman,
1999). Many residents, particularly the young, are likely to resist and transgress the sort of
strict restraints on behaviour now commonly imposed by the regulatory boards of gated
communities (for example, curfews and the notification of visitors) or the operators of malls
(Amin and Graham, 1998a; Poindexter, 1997). Dovey stresses the importance of this
resistance among ‘children who have not chosen such totalizing controls’ and, to him, ‘have
a right to grow up in a public community’ (1999, 153).
In fact, it is most fruitful to understand premium networked spaces and glocal socio-
economic enclaves as particular attempts at ordering urban space–times within the context
of what Mooney et al. call the ‘jumbled orderings of the city’ (1999, 346). Such attempts are
(internally contested) efforts by powerful coalitions of interests to use their global power to
try and construct purified and partial spaces. They are strategies to mobilise and enforce
disciplinary practices of boundary control which impose what Norris and Armstrong
(1998) call a ‘normative space–time ecology’ of who ‘belongs’ or can use the urban and
network space where and at what time. They can therefore be understood as attempts to
withdraw from the clashing social, economic and cultural differences that infuse contemporary
urbanism.
 CONCLUSION / 390

AMBIVALENT CONNECTIONS:
THE NEED TO MAINTAIN LINKS TO THE REST
OF THE METROPOLIS

The new enclosures cannot endure because they cannot sustain themselves.
(Dumm, 1993, 192, cited in Soja, 2000, 321)

Second, premium network spaces must continue to maintain connectivity with wider, public,
infrastructure networks and systems of technological mobility. Most require this in order to
function, as in the cases of the City of London, FDI enclaves, gated communities and malls,
the virtual utility services and e-highways. Despite the splintering of infrastructure networks,
connectivity with wider, public networks, and the so-called ‘network externalities’ that accrue
from such interconnection, remain absolutely central to supporting the overall functionality
of infrastructural connection (Offner, 2000).
Glocal enclave spaces – the spaces of transnational economic globalisation – thus need to
retain other connections with the wider city and beyond. They depend on labour inputs
of various skill levels. They require a wide range of servicing (cleaning, catering, security
guards, drivers, landscape staff). And they remain dependent on wider infrastructural inputs
of power, water and financial and physical investment. In the case of malls, resorts and theme
parks, premium networked spaces also need to draw on urban, regional, national and
international visitor markets. Glocal enclave spaces are also supported and legitimised by a
wide range of political actors and power bases within various scales of governance, from the
whole edifice of financial and economic policy in the World Bank and IMF, through
supportive nation states, to entrepreneurial and financial subsidies from municipalities and
urban development bodies. Secessionary network spaces also achieve considerable support
from the targeting strategies of aspiring international, as well as local, infrastructure companies
themselves.
Residential secessionary spaces, too, often maintain a huge reliance on all aspects of state
support and legitimation. Jennifer Light (1999), for example, has shown that US gated
communities, despite their private security systems, local government associations and
dedicated private police forces, continue to make disproportionate demands on public sector
law enforcement and emergency services.

‘SPILLOVERS’ AND ‘NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES’:

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ‘PURE’ URBAN BORDERS

To enter you pass through two security gates, each with its own intercom. The first lets you into
a courtyard, the second into the house. Despite the vigorous security measures, on January 13th
this year, the resident drove into his garage and, from his car window, found himself staring into
the barrel of an AK47.
(R. Simmonds, 5 June 1998, describing a robbery in Johannesburg;
cited in Bremner, n.d., 60)
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 391

Third, the sheer diversity of identities, social worlds and political pressures in contemporary
cities can quickly swamp crude efforts to impose simplistic notions of exclusion and purified
urban order. Contemporary cities remain as sites of jumbled, superimposed and contested
orderings and meanings; they are ‘points of interconnection, not hermetically sealed objects’
(Thrift, 1997a, 143). Multiple ‘spillovers’ can easily saturate and overwhelm simple attempts
at establishing and maintaining ‘hard’ disciplinary boundaries. Virtually all boundaries remain
to some extent porous. Perfect control strategies are never possible. ‘Public’ mixing can often
still overcome strategies of separation and control.
The wider social worlds of the city therefore tend to find ways of overcoming the barriers
erected around the ‘dominant rhythms’ of glocal enclaves (Pryke, 1999, 245). The mixity
and diversity of the contemporary city tends to remain far too pervasive and powerful to
be simply and starkly separated out through some simple construction of gleaming,
sociotechnically ‘pure’ enclaves of dazzling modernity, customised connectivity and stark,
secured boundaries. Very often ‘the juxtapositions, combinations, and collisions of people,
places, and activities’ in the contemporary metropolis ‘create a new condition of social fluidity
that begins to break down the separate, specialized, and hierarchical structures’ which
dominant coalitions strive to build into city form (Crawford, 1999b, 34). Under some
circumstances, such fluidity can help to encourage liberatory potential. As ‘chance encounters
multiply and proliferate, activities of everyday space may dissolve the predictable boundaries
of race and class, revealing previously hidden social possibilities that suggest how the trivial
and marginal might be transformed into a kind of micropolitics’ (ibid., 34–5).
We must also remember that the cost of enforcing space–time boundaries around premium
networked spaces can be hard to sustain. This was the case in 1995 when the policing cost of
enforcing a ban on street traders in central Mexico City – put in place to ‘sanitise’ the space
for international tourists – led, along with violent protests, to its removal. Instead, spaces were
allocated that traders could rent at reasonable levels from the city authorities (Harrison and
McVey, 1997, 323).
In newly industrialising, developing and some extremely dynamic Northern cities, glocal
enclaves must also often contend with the overwhelming scale and chaotic logic of social and
demographic shifts, with volatile economic cycles, and with spontaneous growth, all of which
are part and parcel of ‘hyperurbanisation’. Glocal enclaves, for example, often tend to become
the focus of spontaneous mass migration from among the urban millions of unemployed or
underemployed seeking work. They can simply be swamped within the wider processes of
informal urbanisation that this triggers off. And they are vulnerable to sudden economic
crises like those that afflicted many Asian cities in the late 1990s.
Grundy-Warr et al., for example, describe how the attempts to develop sealed-off ‘glocal’
tourist and manufacturing enclaves in the Indonesian islands within the SiJoRi growth
triangle, that we encountered in Box 7.5, have actually been overwhelmed by in-migration
and the spontaneous construction of squatter settlements (1999, 324). As they suggest, all
manner of attempts at boundary control in the new cityscapes have been effectively
undermined. ‘As well as the on-park housing and self-contained services [of the newly built
tourist and manufacturing enclaves], tight border protection was expected to prevent an
influx of job seekers and associated shanty town development. Residence was intended to be
restricted to employed persons’ (ibid.).
 CONCLUSION / 392

In this case, all manner of attempts at boundary control in the new cityscapes – erecting
barriers, building walls, stipulating who has access and who does not, employing private
security companies, customising premium infrastructure only to the needs of those inside the
enclave – have been effectively undermined and rendered useless. Infrastructure networks have
been ‘illegally’ accessed. ‘The island’s reputation as a booming economy has overwhelmed
official controls. As a consequence, it has not been possible to entirely separate [the enclaves]
from the surrounding development of the island. These processes draw attention to the
difficulty of securing growth through protected enclaves’ (ibid.).
It is also impossible to provide customised enclaves with high-quality environments that
are disconnected from wider urban and global environmental issues. Do what they may, local
enclaves cannot totally insulate themselves from all the scales of environmental problems and
risks that they attempt to transcend. They are dependent on wider infrastructure services and,
while these may be provided more ‘greenly’, and with less environmental impact, than
conventional networked technologies, they have to operate within a wider urban, national
and global environmental context. While the local enclave space may be high-quality, green
and clean, such enclaves can never be totally insulated.
Secessionary network spaces are also open to wider environmental risks: climate change,
sea level rise, chemical and biological pollutants, air pollution, noise, hazards, etc. Although
they may be able to provide high amenity ‘green’ landscapes, and efficient or autonomous
technologies, the wider urban environment of contemporary cities dominates and cannot be
resisted through green enclaves.

STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE AND THE POLITICS

OF REPRESENTATION

No matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance,
disobedience, and oppositional groupings.
(Foucault, 1984, 245)

Fourth, and perhaps most important, the continuation of public mixing in cities means
that spaces continue to exist within which strategies of resisting secession and urban
splintering can be constructed. The life of major cities cannot be simply programmed like some
computer by powerful socioeconomic or political interests, even within increasingly extreme
and uneven capitalist contexts. Urban life is more diverse, varied and unpredictable than the
common reliance on US-inspired urban dystopias suggests. This point deserves rather more
elaboration.
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 393

A S S E R T I N G T H E C O N T I N U E D ‘ P U B L I C N E S S ’ O F

C O N T E M P O R A R Y U R B A N I S M

As in so much of the literature on cultural hegemony, the social control of consciousness is alleged
but never proven.
(Ley and Mills, 1993, 258)

Conflict means danger, often it means injustice, but always it means life and human yearning,
human fascination.
(Merrifield, 2000a, 487)

Attacking the dystopian and noir portrayals of the likes of Mike Davis (1990) and Michael
Sorkin (1992), Andy Merrifield lambasts their assumption that the diverse social groups of
cities can simply be trammelled and controlled by all the accoutrements of postmodern
urbanism, even within contexts of growing commercialism and social polarisation. ‘It is
patronising,’ he writes, ‘to believe that citizens of cities are easily hoodwinked by a city
supposedly comprised of bits and bytes, texts and simulations, semiotics and CCTV systems’
(1996, 67).
Merrifield argues that spaces do remain in cities, especially those which have more or less
robust ‘public’ qualities and unified street networks, where difference and diversity can and
do still come together under relatively free conditions. This is especially so in cities like many
of those in Western Europe, which have not been subject to the massive construction of
tightly policed and self-sufficient premium network spaces for affluent groups; where well
financed (although rapidly restructuring) welfare states continue in some shape or form to
help soften polarisation; and where traditional ‘public’ street systems still anchor and configure
the overall urban experience, at least in the core (see Musterd and Ostendorf, 1998). To
Merrifield:

great cities, by their very definition, have enormous diversity of ingredients and people, and they aren’t
mere passive pieces on a chessboard that big capital can move around or exclude at whim. Invariably,
new forces of disintegration can be and are used as the medium for new forms of integration and
affirmation. That is how and why people survive in cities and rebuild their lives out of so much rubble,
injustice and disappointment.
(1996, 67)

T H E I N E F F E C T I V E N E S S O F M A N Y D I S C I P L I N A R Y E F F O R T S

Even in Western Europe, however, we must recognise that sharpened social and spatial
inequalities, combined with rallying cries to ‘urban competitiveness’, growing racial tensions,
the restructuring of welfare states, and growing experimentation with neoliberal management
models, are leading to strengthened attempts to discipline public spaces. In Berlin, for
example, as in so many other cities, the police and urban regulation and transport agencies
have sought tightly to manage and control ‘proper’ behaviour in the city’s increasingly
 CONCLUSION / 394

high-profile and recently redeveloped ‘prime spaces’ – a reaction to the growing number
of homeless and the efforts to relaunch Berlin as a ‘global city’ (Grell et al., 1998). The first
privatised public spaces have emerged in the city. As elsewhere in Germany, public CCTV is
being mooted. Anti-homeless measures are now very strong. The police have designated
thirty ‘dangerous zones’ within which they have intensified their powers of search and scrutiny.
And the formal banning of people from public spaces and transport systems has skyrocketed
(to 160,000 on the rail system alone in 1997) (ibid.).
However, as in most similar cases, the new regulatory packages are far from being ‘coherent’
and are of only limited effectiveness (Grell et al., 1998, 211). They have failed in their desired
aim of appropriating city-centre streets and spaces for their target ‘clients’: corporate office
users, tourists and middle-class professional people. This is for two reasons. First, as in a
wide range of cities, the initiatives have led to political resistance from such social movements
as Inner!City!Action! which have successfully exposed processes of social and spatial
polarisation in Berlin through highly publicised occupations, demonstrations and media
interventions.
Second, it is clear that ‘people are not willing, or able, to leave the central areas. People
tend to come back and “reclaim” public spaces because they critically depend not only on
the inner-city service structure but also on the inner-city spaces as places of income
(panhandling, street trading, etc.) and communication’ (Grell et al., 1998).

D E M O N S T R A T I O N S , S O C I A L A N D C U L T U R A L M O V E M E N T S ,
A N D U R B A N I N V E N T I V E N E S S

It is easy, in short, simply to forget ‘the creativity, the sheer inventiveness of the inhabitants
of cities’ (Thrift, 1997a, 143). We must remember that ‘human beings are not the unified
subjects of some coherent regime of domination that produces persons in the form of which
it dreams’ (Thrift, 1997b, 136). The practices of urban life, and the organising power of
social and cultural movements, offer channels through which logics of splintering urbanism
can be resisted and transgressed (see Castells, 1983; Bell and Haddour, 2000; Mayer, 1999).
Such practices tend to resist any normalising attempt by dominant power-holding organ-
isations; resistance practices are ‘integrated within the very relations and pathways produced
by a pervasive and subtle disciplinarity’ (Leong, 1998, 196, original emphasis). They can also
subvert the dominant ideologies of splintering urbanism, so closely woven as they often are
into ideological discourses of ‘globalisation’, ‘competitiveness’ and the supposed economic
and technocratic imperatives of ‘new technology’ and the so-called ‘Information Age’. And
resistance practices can help shape the creation of places in the interstices between the logics
of premium network spaces. These can often be fluid places which support counterhegemonic
cultures and identities which tend at once to be ‘spirited, threatening, dishevelled, dissenting,
dynamic’ and which help ‘celebrate the force of social being’ (Lipman and Harris, 1999, 733;
Crawford, 1999b; Millar, 1999; Harrison and McEvey, 1997).
In short, social unrest, social movements and sometimes violent incursion, fuelled by the
stark injustices as well as the complex identity politics of contemporary cities, constantly
threaten premium and secessionary network spaces (see Pile and Keith, 1997; Body-Gendrot,
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 395

2000; Castells, 1997a). This has been demonstrated by the struggles of coalitions of homeless
people and supporters against the enforced ‘sanitisation’ of public spaces and parks (as at
Tompkins Square park in New York; Smith, 1993). The increasing power of international
coordination in such protests was also shown by the powerful global ‘Action against capitalism’
demonstration in the City of London and thirty or so other ‘global cities’ on 18 June
1999 (see Slater, 1997). On that day financial districts were cordoned off and brought
to a standstill, stock exchanges were barricaded, corporate headquarters were deluged
with protest and parades and festivals were staged celebrating economic and ecological
alternatives to global capitalism. Global anticorporate protests against the World Trade
Organisation summit in Seattle in November 1999 and the IMF–World Bank meeting
in Washington DC in April 2000 were even more intense and well coordinated (Cockburn
and St Clair, 2000). Momentarily they succeeded in breaching what Beckett calls the ‘wall
of euphemism between the grey sheds’ of transglobal corporate production chains and
‘the grand corporate mission statements’ of the transnationals themselves (2000, 17; see
Klein, 1999).
We must be careful, at the same time, not to overromanticise or oversimplify the resistance
efforts of social movements, or to assume the easy coherence of low-income neighbour-
hoods and spaces. As Erhard Berner suggests, ‘the urban poor, in general, are not one
collective actor, but a multitude of groups’ who, in many cases, ‘are largely indifferent to
each other’ (1997b, 195).

T H E L I M I T S O F U R B A N P A N O P T I C I S M : R E S I S T A N C E A N D T H E

D A I L Y L I F E O F T H E C I T Y

There is a world of difference between minor transgressions of prescribed dress and behavior
codes in [premium network street spaces] and those larger acts of spatial subversion in which the
public had periodically reappropriated places of power for demonstrations of solidarity and
oppositional practice.
(Crilley, 1993, 158)

Most practices of resistance are more prosaic and quotidian. Many are playful, representing a
‘refusal to disappear beneath the imperatives of spatial regulation that favors select target
markets’ (Flusty, 2000, 156). Within malls, for example, groups of young people disrupt and
resist the attempted panoptic control of CCTV and security regimes. People most targeted by
CCTV in British town centre management strategies – for example, groups of young black men
– have been shown to develop elaborate practices to exploit system ‘blind spots’ to undermine
and transgress the attempts at social control that follow (Norris and Armstrong, 1998, 1999;
Toon, 2000). Many young people ‘develop strategies for maintaining their presence’ against
the disciplinary practices deployed against them, whether it be through asserting their rights
as consumers, directly dealing with conflicts from security staff, developing their own covert
spaces or coordinating through the Internet (Hill and Bessant, 1999, 46).
Similarly, Steven Flusty has shown how buskers, skateboarders and even poets in Los
Angeles work to exploit the impossibilities of real urban panopticism. One busker, for example,
 CONCLUSION / 396

says he ‘knows where to find every security camera on Bunker Hill’ (ibid., 152). All the people
Flusty talks to exploit the fact that ‘no matter how many “armed response” patrols roam the
streets, and no matter how many video cameras keep watch over the plazas, there remain blind
spots that await, and even invite, inhabitation by unforeseen and potent alternative practices.
Even in a totally rebuilt and totalizing environment like Bunker Hill panopticism fails’
(ibid., 157).

R E S I S T A N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F R E P R E S E N T A T I O N

There exists no privileged vantage point from which to attain panopticity in representations of
the city.
(Flusty, 2000, 157)

The politics of representation are a key aspect of many acts of resistance to the reconstruction
of parts of cities as premium network spaces (see Shields, 1995; Balshaw and Kennedy, 2000;
Bhabha, 1994). Sophie Watson writes that ‘cities are constituted in part by everyday
interactions and conflicts as well as by struggles around collective consumption (1999, 2).
But they ‘are also constituted by struggles that may be less immediately observable . . .
struggles around questions of representation, meaning and identity’ (ibid.). Normative
notions of the ‘good city’ become key here, as do representations and constructions of
particular notions of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ within the city, and representations of how
particular infrastructural or technological configurations might be crucial in leading a city
to such a future (Mooney, 1999; Bell and Haddour, 2000; Fainstein, 1999).
Many acts of resistance struggle not just against the actual material construction or
maintenance of premium networked spaces or glocal enclaves (and the concomitant marginal-
isation of poorer or informal settlements). The wider ideological and political representations
with which practices of splintering urbanism are associated are also a major focus. For example,
residents of the gecekondus informal settlements that surround the ultramodern new towns
on the edge of Istanbul have protested against the representation of their spaces by city
authorities as ‘backward’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘uncultured ganglands’ which are ‘run by the
mafia’ (see Chapter 6). They have struggled to resist the stereotyping by dominant power
holders which places them and their spaces at odds with the ideological construction of ‘the
new Istanbul’ that has been so instrumental in legitimising the construction of premium
networked enclaves like Esenkent and Bogazköy (Mooney, 1999, 67; see Aksoy and Robins,
1997).

U R B A N L I F E B E N E A T H T H E ‘ S C A N O F G L O B A L I S M ’

It follows that secessionary spaces and networks are not set in stone. Political and social
responses to attempts at secession, including social movements, protests and resistance, can
lead to the dismantling of premium network spaces and the instigation of more socially and
spatially equalising regulatory, governance and technological regimes. Democratic resistance
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 397

and social mobilisation can serve to balance the secessionary tendencies with more
redistributive design, development, regulation and governance strategies.
Recent movements against CCTV installation in Bradford and Manchester have attempted
just this (Lyon, 2000, 189). To some extent, it is also occurring in post-apartheid South
Africa as infrastructure and transport regulators and urban social movements seek to establish
norms for the basic networking of black townships (although see Bond, 1999, and Knosa,
1995, for critiques). São Paulo, too, has experienced a massive boom in social movements
since the 1980s, processes through which ‘excluded residents discover that they have rights
to the city’ (Caldeira, 1996, 324). Whilst largely failing to undermine the extension of guarded
condominium and mall complexes for the rich, they have, in many cases, significantly
improved the situation of many poorer neighbourhoods.
John Kaliski even believes that malls and privatised public spaces, in their own way, can be
‘ultimately as conducive to urban life, ritual, and surprise, as dense urban neighborhoods’
(1999, 94). Whilst this may be overstating the situation, he argues that processes of urban
life, ritual and surprise are generally just harder to spot among the secessionary network spaces
of contemporary cities, especially by urbanists brought up on Jane Jabobs and other idealised
portrayals of traditional urban neighbourhoods. Even in his home town of Los Angeles, the
favourite subject of urban noir dystopianists like Mike Davis, Michael Sorkin and Fred Dewey,
Kaliski suggests:

curiously, many of the social transactions that are shaping the tenor of culture occur in the very places
most subject to the scan of globalism. Shopping mall culture, gated enclaves (whether suburbs or rock
houses), omnipresent recording, and surveillance of every aspect of daily life do not seem to limit ever
new and evolving cultural expressions and mutations born of unexpected gatherings. The easy reduction
of these places to unitary theories or definitions of globalized space overlooks the physical workings of
their quotidian elements.
(1994, 7)

T H E C O N T I N U E D I M P O R T A N C E O F L O C A L A N D N A T I O N A L

R E G U L A T I O N

The complex institutional fabric of urban governance, meanwhile, may work to resist the
simple and easy secession of socioeconomically affluent groups, and their systems of
infrastructure and technological mobility, from taxpaying and governance systems (McKenzie,
1984). In most cases, scope continues to exist at the level of local and national state and
governance regimes to reassert and even strengthen leverage over the production and
regulation of premium networked spaces. Local municipalities and planning agencies can
renege on licence agreements and bring networks back into direct connection with public
network operations. They can also undertake proactive initiatives to develop and maintain
socialised and ubiquitous infrastructure and street networks for their cities (see McDowell,
2000; Southern, 2000; Offner, 2000, for examples).
Even Mayor Guiliani in New York tightened City Council control over the financing
and regulation of Business Improvement Districts, as reports mounted of their financial
 CONCLUSION / 398

abuses, unrepresentativeness and growing power to become ‘micropolises’ in their own

right (Schulman, 1999, 6). Another good example comes from the startling Labor victory
in the Federal state of Victoria, Australia, in 1999. It paved the way for the possible link-
age of Melbourne’s international airport to the city’s public transit system, even though
the developers of the CityLink e-highway had negotiated a contract with the previous
Conservative government that promised them exclusive connectivity to that most lucrative
of sites. With the right political backing, traditional policy intervention through the
construction of public duct space, public investment, leeway rights and planning instru-
ments can do much to (re)socialise benefits from premium networked infrastructure
investments.
Efforts have also emerged to regulate mall spaces to improve the degree to which they
support genuinely ‘public’ activities. For ‘the more the mall deploys the signifiers of public
space, the more it encourages democratic public use’ (Dovey, 1999, 136). Legal challenges,
admittedly tentative so far, have been mounted to mall owners in some US towns where
malls have all but taken over from downtown street systems, to demand citizens’ rights to
undertake political activity in malls (Gottdeiner, 1997). The New Jersey Supreme Court, for
example, has judged that citizens should have the right to distribute political leaflets in malls
(Drucker and Gumpert, 1999). Whilst such social and legal challenges can be small in scale
in relation to the overwhelming disciplinary power of the mall space, they are not to be
ignored. Nor is the recent spread of municipal responses to untrammelled globalisation:
blockages of corporate ownership of farms in the United States, resistance to ‘big box’
retailing, support for anti-sweatshop movements, and the emergence of a whole range of
coordinated collaborative networks between cities and municipalities, especially in Europe
(Graham, 1995).

R E C O G N I S I N G T H E C O M P L E X I T Y O F P R E M I U M

N E T W O R K S P A C E S

In sum, premium networked spaces like malls, Business Improvement Districts, skywalks, e-
highways, ‘fat’ Internet pipes, international airports or CCTV-surveilled atrium complexes
are far ‘too complex to be reduced to a mechanistic function of the imperatives of the market’
(Dovey, 1999, 135). Many practices of resistance, usually ignored by academic research in
its portrayals of simple Blade Runner-style dystopias, can open such spaces to different uses
and constructed meanings within and between cities, based on arguments and social
movements about justice and rights as well as social practices which undermine their power
to exclude socially (see Thrift, 1997a; Shields, 1989).
At the same time, it is important not to sentimentalise or romanticise such ‘resistance’
(Donald, 1999, 17). The ‘implicit David versus Goliath romanticism’ of such a view is, itself,
a dramatic oversimplification (Thrift, 1997b, 124). It means that ‘everything has to be forced
into the dichotomy of resistance or submission and all of the paradoxical effects which cannot
be understood in this way remain hidden’ (ibid.).
Such are the extremes of contemporary disciplining and surveillance in many work and
street spaces that we could ask, as Caroline Freeman does, whether ‘mere survival for many
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 399

people is not resistance’ (2000, 206). Consider an example. Many desperately impoverished
Nigerians are killed each year trying to extract petrol from overland pipelines around the
Niger delta – either by the shoot-on-sight policy of security guards, or by the huge explosions
and fires that often ensue. Such pipe vandalism – a practice known as ‘scooping’ – is clearly
a form of ‘resistance’ to the huge inequalities and environmental injustices surrounding
the operations of transnational oil companies in the delta. But, for the people involved, it
is simply an attempt at mere survival rather than some romantic stand against the powers
that be.

N E W M O N I T O R I N G T E C H N O L O G I E S : E X P O S U R E , S H A M I N G

A N D C R I T I C A L R E S E A R C H

As a last point in our discussion of resistance, we also want to stress that urban
social movements and activists can themselves utilise the geographical information systems,
CCTV and other surveillance technologies that are so central to the construction and
(attempted) maintenance of secessionary network spaces. Ramasubramian (1996), for
example, outlines how GIS techniques were used in Milwaukee to prove that an insurance
firm was redlining African-American census tracts in the city. Kevin Robins has argued
that, with the mass diffusion of consumer video, ‘the city now constitutes a mosaic of
micro-visions and micro-visibilities. With the camcording of the city we have the frag-
mentation and devolution of vision-as-control to the individual level’ (1996, 139).
Some have argued that citywide CCTV may, if properly configured and used, substantially
reduce the abuse of power by law enforcement agencies (usually taking the Rodney King
case in Los Angeles as an example of the democratising potential of widespread video
technology).

MOBILISING COUNTERHEGEMONIC CHANNELS OF

NETWORK PROVISION AND USE

Penultimately, other challenges are emerging to the construction of premium network spaces
based on water, power, transport, communications and urban street space networks. In
Developing World and postcolonial cities, in particular, many poorer urban communities
have developed sophisticated ways to resist the eviction and exclusion that so often come with
the construction of premium network spaces (Berner, 1997a, 111). They are also actively
tapping in to or accessing premium network spaces developed for affluent users only – streets,
transport systems, power lines, water pipes and phone networks (Chougill, 1999). Holston
(1998) terms these ‘spaces of insurgent citizenship’ which are constructed to resist the
normalising and dominant practices of confining infrastructure access to the premium network
spaces of the splintering metropolis. For example:

• Knosa (1995) shows how groups excluded from South Africa’s apartheid-based public
transport systems have undertaken a wide range of highly visible ‘transport resistance’
 CONCLUSION / 400

strategies against the high cost and appalling quality of services: bus boycotts, mobilising
alternatives and political mobilisation.
• Soja (1999, 2000) shows how a union of 30,000 or so inner-city residents of Los Angeles
joined forces within the Bus Riders’ Union to sue the city’s Metropolitan Transit
Authority. The expensive and decrepit bus system upon which they relied was being
ignored whilst the authority pumped $30 billion into a gleaming new light rail system
for the suburban middle class. What is more, they won.
• Manandhar (1999) demonstrates how women’s groups in Patan, Nepal, with support
from non-governmental organisations, have constructed drainage and sanitation systems
in their informal settlements which are directly designed to meet their needs rather than
being imposed by distant male technocrats.
• Breslin (2000) demonstrates how a coalition of non-governmental organisations, backed
by the Carvajal Foundation, have worked to arrest the vicious circles of poverty, violence
and despair in informal settlements in Aguablanca, Colombia. The settlement of 400,000
has been incorporated. Low-cost provisions, building materials and services have been
organised. Phones, metalled roads, drainage, sanitation, water and electricity have been
delivered through low-cost schemes. And microfinance, education, business support and
child care services, and parks, have been developed in partnership with existing small
business owners.
• Grell et al. describe how strategies against the privatisation of street spaces in Berlin have
sought to celebrate the notion that the management of urban street spaces should be
based on the ‘liberal idea of public space that the possibility of encounter is a positive
aspect in terms of confronting prejudices and inducing communication and learning
processes’ (1998, 210).

In places such as the Orangi district in Karachi, Pakistan, meanwhile, the obvious failure of
both the modern infrastructural ideal and the more recent elaboration of premium networked
spaces for socioeconomic elites has led to the emergence of alternative strategies of community
self-provision. Such community mobilising, backed up with finance and support from non-
governmental organisations, has successfully equipped whole urban neighbourhoods with
water and sewerage systems, which, in the case of Orangi, now have a 75 per cent connection
rate (Chougill, 1999, 295). Community efforts have been shown to be much more sensitive
to gender questions in the design and construction of network services than were the old
technocratic, centralised regimes of the modern ideal (Makan, 1995).

MOBILISING THROUGH THE INTERNET

Finally, a wide range of the strategies of poor or excluded urban communities, social
movements and unions are now directly mobilising the use of Internet applications in both
developing and developed cities, to support socioeconomic participation and collective
capacity building (Castells, 1999a; Schuler, 1996; Merrifield, 2000b). The hope is that
widespread experimentation with counterhegemonic uses of the Internet may ‘provide
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 401

channels through which knowledge and information can be democratised, dispersed around
the diversity of relational webs in urban regions. Could this . . . technology provide the basis
for dispersing power out of current nodes, and empowering and articulating diverse
democratic voices?’ (Healey et al., 1995, 277). There are certainly emerging positive signs.
As Castells suggests, the widening diffusion of the Internet, with its:

creative cacophony and social diversity, with its plurality of values and interests, and given the linkage
between places and information flows, transforms the logic of the space of flows, making it a contested
space. And a plural and diversified space. . . . Through a blossoming of initiatives, people are taking on
the Net without uprooting themselves from their places.
(1999a, 300)

This is especially so with the growth of informal and international alliances within the labour,
environmental, anticorporate and progressive communications movements, where the
Internet is allowing campaigns to coordinate around revealing the ways in which global capital
is, itself, exploiting the power of information and communications technology to intensify
extreme global divisions of labour, wealth and environmental quality (Kellner, 1999; see
Figure 8.1). As Michael Moore, the US anticorporate campaigner, argues, ‘corporate America
has inadvertently given us an incredibly powerful tool to reach one another cheaply and
quickly’ (1996, 304, cited in Merrifield, 2000b, 33). In his book Predatory Globalization
Richard Falk argues that ‘potentially, such networks are visionary and dedicated to
transformative political goals, offering the poor and vulnerable possibly their best hopes for
the future’ (1999, 6).
Efforts are also emerging to pluralise and democratise the content of electronic and digital
media, a crucial step within broader efforts to rebalance international systems of biased cultural
and economic power in this technologically mediated and increasingly commercialised and
internationalised age. As the UNDP suggests, ‘the information highway cannot be a one-way
street. Websites need to be created locally, adding new voices to the global conversation and
making content relevant to communities’ (1999, 65).
Alongside broader international movements to urge the global regulation of unfettered
global markets in information and communications technology and digital media, many local
instances are emerging to support the incorporation of excluded voices into electronic
domains. In Tamil Nadu, India, for example, keyboard standardisation and software in Tamil,
the local language, are being promoted. In the United States the Seniornet project is providing
applications, discussion space, services and support to the older population, usually so
underrepresented in information and communications technology. Across the complex
diasporas of the world, dedicated community networks such as Vietnet are emerging to allow
cultures to survive in the context of extreme dispersal and cultural volatility.
Developing local content, and spaces for local expression, can also feed into wider efforts
at incorporating marginalised voices into urban and local governance and the mainstream
economy. This is important because the first efforts by most cities to use information and
communications technology are in marketing and promotion to tourists and potential
investors (Graham and Aurigi, 1997). In the United States, the civic networking movement
has now matured into a powerful set of spaces which support citizen mobilisation and action
 CONCLUSION / 402

Figure 8.1 The use of the Internet in global protest movements: Wasserman’s view in the Boston Globe,
10 December 1999

(Schuler, 1996; Beamish, 1999). In Santa Monica, California, the Public Electronic Network
(or PEN) system has allowed homeless and street people their own e-mail addresses, allowing
them spaces of expression and contact points to support access to jobs, services and democratic
rights (Doctor and Dutton, 1998).
More broadly, the Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles initiative is directly challenging
the privatisation of local social, demographic and economic data in the city of Los Angeles.
Integrating previously fragmented knowledge and information sources about the condition
of at-risk neighbourhoods, NKLA offers bilingual services which help respond to social and
economic deterioration, support community awareness of the problems neighbourhoods
face, help challenge and expose ‘redlining’ by major firms and institutions, and democratise
access to digital and geographical information.
Across Europe, finally, ‘virtual’ town halls, community intranets and community telecentres
– from Amsterdam and Berlin to Athens, from Bologna and Barcelona to east London – are
allowing marginal communities to assert their democratic rights within structures of
governance, often for the first time (Tsagarousianou et al., 1998). Perhaps the best-known
example is De digitale stadt (‘Digital City’), an Internet space in Amsterdam, which now has
over 50,000 ‘residents’ (both locally and globally). Using an explicitly urban metaphor of
themed ‘town squares’ and ‘cafés’, De digitale stadt supports a vast range of specialist political,
 PLACING SPLINTERING URBANISM / 403

social, environmental and interest-based communities and discourses which, within the
constraints of biased social access to the Internet, support a ‘gigantic alternative and
underground world’ as well as ‘an official city on the surface and in the open’ (Lovink and
Riemens, 1998, 183; see http://www.dds.nl). To its founders, tellingly, ‘the city metaphor’
used as the web interface for De digitale stadt ‘stands for diversity. . . . What we have in mind
are all those different “places” and localities that are possible in a real as well as a virtual city’
(ibid., 185).
 POSTSCRIPT

A manifesto for a progressive networked urbanism

DSH/Interdictory Spaces Ethnoburb

Edge Cities Containment Centers

Theme Parks Consumption Opportunities
Gated Communities
Street Warfare Command & Control Centers
Corporate Citadels Spectacle

Plate 20 Michael Dear and Steven Flusty’s conceptualisation of the fragmented landscape of postmodern
urbanism, drawn from their work on US cities. Source: Dear and Flusty (1998), 61

We need to recapture the sense that a

different global is possible.
Urban theory proliferates whenever the (Smith, 1999, 105)
boundaries of the city are in flux.
(Waterhouse, 1996, 299) The tensions of heterogeneity cannot and
should not be repressed. They must be
liberated in socially exciting ways – even if
it means more rather than less conflict,
including contestation over the socially
necessary socialization of market processes
for collective needs. Diversity and differ-
ence, heterogeneity of values, lifestyle
oppositions and chaotic migrations are not
to be feared as sources of disorder. Cities
 POSTSCRIPT / 405

that cannot accommodate the diversity, the

migratory movements, the new lifestyles
and the new economic, political, religious
and value heterogeneity, will die either
through ossification and stagnation or
because they will fall apart in violent
conflict.
(Harvey, 1996, 437–8) The pattern of development of cities today
is subject to control, it is not the result of
uncontrollable forces, is not the result of
iron economic laws whose effects states are
powerless to influence.
(Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000, 272,
It is possible for the emergence of a politics original emphasis)
of deterritorialization and reconnection, a
politics in which arguments over space – its
enclosures, exclusions, and internments –
become subjects for debate and discussion,
and, more important, for resistances and
transgressions.
(Dumm, 1993, 192, cited in
Soja, 2000, 321)

T O W A R D S A S P A T I A L I M A G I N A T I O N F O R
T H E S P L I N T E R E D M E T R O P O L I S

It is clear that strategies and practices of urban splintering must negotiate complex
ambivalences: continued urban mixings, active resistance and the exploration of alternative
and more democratic ways of constructing urban and network spaces. Such are their
magnitude, pervasiveness and power, however, that it still seems likely that the processes of
splintering urbanism outlined in this book will work to underpin more and more starkly
polarised economic and social geographies of closely juxtaposed privilege and disconnection
within many – perhaps most – contemporary cities.
We would therefore expect social and political tensions within many cities to increase. A
central theme of urban politics and urban social movements in the first decades of the new
millennium will therefore centre on the struggle between the ‘glocal’ forces of attempted,
‘pure’ boundary control and the customisation of premium, commodified network spaces,
versus the imperatives of infrastructural, urban and technological democratisation and the
need for more egalitarian and democratised practices and principles of development (see
Sassen, 1996, 1998, 2000b). Kevin Robins asks the crucial question ‘What kind of city can
we imagine in this global context?’ His answer is both stark and bleak:
 POSTSCRIPT / 406

This global city is the place where the newly mobilized and displaced populations gather in their millions.
Each city contains within itself the dynamics of the new world disorder – its dramatic contrasts of rich
and poor, its polarizations and segregations, and its encounters and concentrations. It also constitutes
a new kind of city, as the coherent and ordered structure of the ‘modern city’ becomes overwhelmed
and superseded by the sprawling, chaotic mega-city or megalopolis (the information and
communications systems are ensnared and entangled in this urban anarchy).
(1999, 54)

The point leads us to the final task of the book: to establish some starting points for imagining
frameworks of politics, planning, and what we might call a ‘spatial imaginary’, to support the
challenges of addressing and researching the splintering metropolis. Rejecting the tendency
of postmodern theory to withdraw from practical policy suggestions on issues of socialisation,
urban planning and the desired nature of the state, the imperative here must be to explore
how, in Holston’s words, we ‘can develop a different social imagination – one that is not
modernist but that reinvents modernism’s activist commitments to the invention of society
and to the construction of the state’ (1998, 39).
Our starting point is that the required spatial imagination and politics need ‘to bridge the
multiple heterogeneities, including most emphatically those of geography, without repressing
difference’ (Harvey, 1996, 438). It must be conscious of the complex ways in which
networked infrastructure of all types, and the diverse technological mobilities they support,
become bound up in the production of space, identity and meaning in urban life at various
scales, within the context of globalisation and extending metropolitan regions (Graham
and Marvin, 1999). It must directly engage with the complex superimpositions of ranges
of sociotechnical connections and disconnections throughout the urban fabric that are such
a characteristic symptom of contemporary urbanisation (Roberts et al., 1999). Clearly, ‘the
emergence of new territories, which change the scale of understanding and intervention in
urban projects, and multiplies their complexity, demands new planning styles and instruments
and a new kind of architectural design’ (Ezquiga, 1998, 7). Finally, the new spatial imagi-
nation must be fully founded on an appreciation of the diverse processes underpinning trends
towards splintering urbanism in cities across the world: sociotechnical, geographical, political,
legal and discursive (see Lefebvre, 1984).

T H E C H A L L E N G E S O F U R B A N
D E M O C R A T I S A T I O N : A S S O C I A T I O N ,
D I F F E R E N C E A N D S T A T E S

The very idea of struggle against inequalities, which at the world level have never stopped growing
since the end of the nineteenth century, has now been called into question.
(Mattelart, 1996, 305)

If you want to change the city you have to control the streets.
(Protest poster, ‘Reclaim the Streets!’, London, 1997)
 POSTSCRIPT / 407

We believe that it is critical, above all, that any new urban spatial imaginary must actively seek
to work towards urban democratisation in its fullest sense and in all urban contexts (Painter,
1999). To achieve this, there is a need, first, to struggle against the forms of (attempted)
sociotechnical closure of urban network spaces of all kinds represented by strategies of
splintering urbanism. New compromises will be required between perceptions and experiences
of security and the perceived need for closure and the democratic ideals of openness and
interconnection. For, as Albert Pope suggests, there are, in a sense, understandable reasons
in contemporary cities ‘why the people who can afford it chose the security of closed corporate
development over the greater freedom and choices of the declining open city’ (1996, 185).
However, ‘what ought to be disparaged’, he believes, is ‘the fact that one must make a choice
between security and freedom at all’. To him:

The recent history of urban form tells us that such a compromise is not necessary, that cities have
traditionally provided both. Despite the fact that we cannot return to historical urban forms, we must
ultimately insist on cities that do not demand the surrendering of either security or freedom.
(Ibid.)

To some there is a sense in the contemporary metropolis of the uncontrollable in the

apparently pervasive shift to extended, polynuclear metropolitan landscapes marked by
deepening fragmentation, xenophobia and starkly uneven internal and external connec-
tivity. Alan Waterhouse, for one, speaking especially about peripheral Toronto, believes that
the price ‘is a solitariness we long to escape, but [we] cannot avoid getting caught up in the
centrifuge of modern urbanism as its spins other lives away from our own into inaccessible
zones’ (1996, ix).

ON THE MAINTENANCE OF MIXING: SUSTAINING

EMBODIED AND SITUATED COPRESENCE

In this context it is clear that our new spatial imaginaries must stress the critical importance
of the constitution – geographically, sociotechnically, politically, culturally and legally – of
urban spheres of heterogeneous interaction and continued mixing – the very essence of the
city. The dangers of the untrammelled commodification of networked spaces of mobility, of
the on-going reconstruction of urban landscapes as closed, premium spaces which attempt
to withdraw against the ‘other’ spaces of immobility and fear, must be recognised. The close
connection between changing urban landscapes and global shifts towards neoliberalism and
consumerism needs to be stressed. And all the associated financial and social costs, likely to
stem from rising fear of crime, social unrest, polarisation and spiralling securitisation and
fortification, must be underlined.
Rather, the new urban political imaginary must engage with, and actively support, the
piecing together of the ‘thousand tiny empowerments’ offered through network spaces of
resurgent citizenship (Sandercock, 1998a, 129) – from organised grass-roots mobilisations,
through local exchange and trading systems (LETS) to a whole range of everyday practices
 POSTSCRIPT / 408

that resist the simple secession of sociotechnical, commodified spaces from the wider metro-
politan landscape (Cooper, 1998; see Fincher and Jacobs, 1998). Such democratisation,
following Iris Marion Young (1990), must rest first on ‘the possibility of expressing difference
and “otherness” in unoppressive ways’ (Swyngedouw, 1998, 120). To do this it will need to
recognise and support the parallel construction of networked infrastructures and urban spaces
that more sensitively support the many dimensions of the ‘cultural politics of difference’ thrown
up by contemporary urbanisation, social and cultural change and migration: gender, age,
ethnicity and ‘race’, (dis)ability, sexual preference and spirituality (Sandercock, 1998a, b).
Clearly, the growth of fragmented spaces of expression mediated by the Internet and other
infrastructure networks will not suffice here. Successfully supporting an urban politics of
difference will continue to require embodied and situated presence, proximity and contact –
what (some) urban streets and spaces in certain cities have come to stand for and sustain. It
will therefore need to work to overcome the widespread construction of premium network
spaces – consumerised streetscapes, gated enclaves, electronically controlled highways, ‘virtual’
spaces – with their characteristic efforts at social, cultural or economic purification and
controlled withdrawal from difference (Robins, 1999, 51). ‘What is fundamental to urbanity,’
writes Kevin Robins, is ‘embodied presence and encounter. It is a question of . . . both the
“individual” body and the “collective” body of the city’ (1999, 52). Following some of the
arguments of Richard Sennett (1970), Robins urges us to ‘put a value on exposure [to
difference] and its discomforts’ (ibid., 54). Along the same lines, Jeremy Seabrook argues that
‘security, if it arises anywhere, must arise from the tenderness and vigilance of people
committed to the daily protection of one another’ (1993, 12).

BEYOND THE PUBLIC REALM: EXPOSING AND

REGULATING THE INEQUITIES OF GLOBALISATION

At the same time, however, such a politics of difference must be aware of the formidable
obstacles provided by the common experience of the contemporary, capitalist urban condition
in which ‘difference is expressed and experienced as exclusion, domination, and repression’
(Swyngedouw, 1998, 120). For this to happen, urban democratisation will need to look far
beyond the traditional ‘public realm’ and, in particular, the challenge of reinstating and
strengthening mixing in and on the street. It:

cannot be limited to protecting the right of individuals to participate equally in the public sphere,
because systematic inequalities in the ability of individuals to gain access to, and have a voice in, the
public sphere are produced in part outside the public sphere in civil society, the private economy and
the private sphere.
(Painter, 1999, 42)

In particular, hidden mechanisms of negative redistribution and the exigencies of corporate

power – practices like corporate tax breaks that are so closely bound up in the production of
premium network spaces and processes of splintering urbanism – need to be exposed,
 POSTSCRIPT / 409

including the many and diverse hidden public subsidies that go into the construction of
premium and secessionary network spaces.
Without exposing these, and directing the reclaimed resources into strategies aimed at
benefiting those places and people that are experiencing marginalised forms of network
urbanism, what Erik Swyngedouw calls ‘a humanized and just urbanization’ based on ‘a
global reach that champions commitment to a more socially and ecologically inclusive urban
life’ will be but a pipe dream (1998, 120). In the age of the Internet, especially, the extreme
difficulty of achieving real corporate regulation and transparency at the transnational scale is
likely to make tax avoidance an ever more central element of corporate operations. For,
increasingly, transnational corporations:

will install their web servers where taxes are lowest, disguise their trade in goods as a trade in services,
and even launch their own virtual currencies. The tax burden, in other words, is shifting to those who
are unable to move their assets offshore or out of the old economy into cyberspace. With little else to
offer, poor countries [and spaces] end up giving everything away in a desperate attempt to attract
‘investment’. If taxation is not to become wholly regressive, we will have to revolutionise the means by
which the rich are charged.
(Monbiot, 2000, 13)

CHALLENGES OF URBAN DEMOCRATISATION

As Amin and Thrift (2000) argue, democratisation must therefore go far beyond the simple
celebration of diversity and the recognition of the need for difference (associative democracy).
It must also transcend Richard Sennett’s (1970) and Kevin Robins’s (1996, 1999) notion of
the city as a creative clashing point of diverse social and cultural groups and identities (radical
democracy). Above and beyond these, new forms of intervention by state and public
institutions, at all geographical scales, are required directly to encourage democratic practices
through (re)working towards equality of access to spaces, infrastructure networks, public
services, opportunities of association, and systems for holding the wealthy and powerful
accountable to public taxation.
To Amin and Thrift, it follows that the ‘ideal city’ must be considered as ‘a place of equal
access, mutuality, freedom and fulfilment of potential. . . . The city, more specifically its social
and institutional set-up, must give us, all of us, the space and time to become something else,
the right and opportunity to experiment, to enable lines of flight, to forge solidarities’ (2000,
26, original emphasis; see Amin et al., 2000). This involves major political issues such as
reconstructing the balance between the state, the market and civil society, the need to nurture
more democratic ways of economically organising, resisting the replacement of discourses of
citizenship with those of consumerism, and connecting local and urban strategies with global
practices and debates surrounding international economic governance, in an age of what
Richard Falk (1999) calls ‘predatory globalisation’.
Such challenges, of course, infuse all domains of contemporary governance and politics and
are strictly beyond the immediate scope of this book (see Brecher and Costello, 1994; Mander
 POSTSCRIPT / 410

and Goldsmith, 1996). But they raise critical questions about whether new, progressive and
democratising relationships can be established in this ‘post-Fordist’ era between state social
and economic regulations and internationalising regimes of economic, cultural and social
governance, which are continuing to liberalise. In other words, can local activism and
democratic and socially inclusive policy experimentation really work to counter significantly
the broader shift towards a kind of global Social Darwinism that shapes the wider forces of
contemporary urbanisation, with its premium network spaces and intensifying social and
geographical partitions (Kipfer, 1998, 173)? How, moreover, can the multiple spatial scales
of strategies that strive to resist global neoliberalism and social polarisation – from the body
through to the street, the city, the region, the nation and the transnational – be brought to
work in synchrony, in line with the dominant glocal scales articulated by premium network
spaces themselves (Smith, 1993; Harvey, 2000)?

B U I L D I N G N E W C O N C E P T U A L
U N D E R S T A N D I N G S O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y
U R B A N L I F E

Globalization should not be fetishized and reified as a steam roller that rolls over ‘local places’.
(Keil and Ronnenberg, 2000, 228)

Such an agenda is both massive and daunting. But, in order to work towards a creative
imagination of practices of urban democratisation, it is also clear that a continued, thorough-
going reconceptualisation of the contemporary nature of the ‘urban’ will also be necessary.
Obviously, such rethinking must resist the totalising concepts of order, progress and
rationality inherent in modernist practices (and their legacies). It must simultaneously avoid
tendencies to glamorise or reify the supposed ‘global’ imperatives of urban entrepreneurialism,
imagineering and urban ‘competitiveness’ that were dominant obsessions among many
planners and policy makers for the last two decades or so of the twentieth century. Far too
often we still hear of ‘the city’ having to ‘compete’ globally as though it were some single
reified actor on the planetary (neoliberal) economic stage. We are endlessly told of the urban
and social ‘impacts’ of new technologies as though the Internet et al. were social meteors
hitting our planet from outer space. Or we are told of the supposed ‘dictates’ that stipulate
that socioeconomic elites must necessarily benefit from premium street, power, transport,
water or communications spaces, and intensified mobility opportunities, and any associated
real estate developments, public subsidies and discursive legitimations (Marcuse, 1997). The
constant danger of such discourses, both practically and theoretically, is that ‘we run the risk
of treating the city [as well as technology and globalisation] unproblematically as a subject
capable of action’ (Jessop, 1998, 80).
In fact, the simplistic and parallel reification of cities, neoliberal ‘market forces’ and ‘new
technologies’ often serves to obfuscate the broader power relations, political economies and
practices bound up with the reconstruction of (parts of) cities as premium network spaces.
Thus underlying ideas help to found and perpetuate policy, practice and the very imagination
of the possible (INURA, 1998).
 POSTSCRIPT / 411

There has been much progress in reimagining the nature of the urban (see, for example,
Ascher, 1995; Sandercock, 1998a; Healey, 1997; Douglass and Friedmann, 1998; Soja,
2000). But there remains a need to build further on the ‘relational’ conceptualisations of urban
place which we reviewed back in Chapter 5. Instead of seeing the city ‘as the stamp of great
and unified forces which it is the task of the urban theorist to delineate and delimit’, it must
be viewed, rather, as ‘a partially connected multiplicity which we can only ever know partially
and from multiple places’ (Thrift, 1997a, 143). ‘Perspective views are multiple now,’ suggests
John Friedmann (1998, 29). ‘The world cannot be lifted off its axis . . . the metropolis is
incapable of being seen as a whole.’

BREAKING THE ‘TYRANNY OF `SPATIAL SCALE’

Relational perspectives, in particular, suggest a need to break ‘the tyranny of spatial scale’ in
our imagination – the assumption that the urban scale must, necessarily, be the dominant scale
of action and organisation. As much as anything else, this is the result of urban disciplines
trying to bolster their own legitimacy in profoundly uncertain times. Instead, we must
recognise that real democratisation must be pursued ‘through the myriad connections in
different networks within and beyond the city’ (Painter, 1999, 43). Spatial scales, and
geographical levels (‘corporeal’, ‘local’, ‘urban’, ‘regional’, ‘national’, ‘international’, ‘global’),
are in a sense being continuously ‘telescoped’ within the contemporary networked metropolis
as premium networked spaces and new networked technologies are superimposed unevenly
upon the more standardised and dispersed networks of the modern networked city (Offner,
2000).
This demands a dynamic, relational and multiscalar perspective on the city’s multiple spaces
and times. The ‘city’ that emerges is ‘fluid, contingent and panoptically indescribable’ (Flusty,
2000, 150). It:

is constantly changing (even to stay the same), [it is] a city that does not necessarily hold together, a
city that is both little and large (since the idea of scale is replaced by the idea of partially connected
networks), a city that is . . . a set of diverse, interacting, practical orders in which the interaction is more
important than the order. This is the city in which the magic is still there.
(Thrift, 1997a, 143; see Sum, 1999)

Much planning practice and academic work by planners has, so far, failed to transform their
conceptualisations of time–space and the nature of the urban, from the legacies of the
modernist straitjacket of urban planning’s postwar history. Too often, urban space and scale
are themselves reified in these views; cities are still cast as ‘differentiated, bounded (perhaps
even organic) wholes’ (Painter, 1999, 13). Joe Painter calls this ‘the discursive construction
of urban coherence’ (ibid., 27). Such an objectified view of the urban leads, in turn, to the
common implication that ‘the city’ can be ‘impacted’ as an objective ‘thing’ by external
processes of economic, cultural or technological ‘globalization’.
 POSTSCRIPT / 412

BEYOND CLASSICAL ANALYTICAL TOOLS AND SINGLE

REPRESENTATIONS

A related problem is that architecture, planning and urbanism often still remain tied, however
implicitly, to the classical analytical tools of the perspectival plan, or the formal geometric
composition, even though awareness of the failings of such paradigms for representing
contemporary urban life is increasingly widespread. As Leong suggests, ‘the processes that
constitute urban configurations can no longer be adequately represented by a Cartesian
mapping system’ (1998, 201). That ‘the configuration of the contemporary city has
transcended the realm of idealized geometry is by now an obvious fact – yet, surprisingly, one
largely unheeded by an architectural and urban practice which still clings to the removed, visual
techniques of formal composition’ (Bell and Leong, 1998, 12).
The general result of this continuing reliance on single representations of urban coherence,
as we have seen throughout this book, is to allow the space–time demands of articulate and
powerful groups, who tend to have clear ideas about their (premium) space–time parameters
and mobility requirements, and who dominate the minds of urban planners and real estate
and infrastructure developers, to prevail utterly. Thus depictions of urban coherence tend to
be ‘always limited and partial’; they offer many ‘systematic silences’ (Painter, 1999, 28). Too
often the relational time–spaces of powerful, affluent, corporate economic and social interests
are presented as single, overriding imperatives for shaping the ‘value-free’ policy necessary for
some organically coherent city to ‘compete’.
The time–space demands of the powerful are therefore often used unproblematically to
capture, represent and characterise a ‘place’. The widespread enthusiasm for, and subsidy of,
the new glocal premium network spaces of attempted purity and withdrawal – whether these
be the ‘multibundled’ mini cities of the contemporary mall, the gentrified consumption or
tourist spaces, the ‘wired’ or ‘cyber’ villages or the premium spaces of ‘global mobility’ –
tend to be presented as naturalistic faits accomplis within urban politics and planning, as
though there is no other choice.
But, as David Harvey (1996) reminds us, attempts to suggest that single time–space
representations can somehow unproblematically capture the multiple space–time subjectivities
of a city will inevitably have major distributive consequences. This will be especially so for those
whose space–time parameters and relational orientations and aspirations are at odds with the
modernising ‘vision’ or representation proffered by planners and infrastructure and real estate
developers (see Shields, 1995).

CONSIDERING THE UNTHINKABLE? THE POSSIBILITY

OF RESISTING NETWORKED CONNECTIONS

Given this, under some circumstances, it might even be more profitable for some local civil
societies actively to resist incorporation into glocally configured premium network spaces,
rather than devoting substantial public resources to fostering furthering local integration into
such network spaces. Andrew Gillespie has argued that policy makers in peripheral or weak
 POSTSCRIPT / 413

urban economies might consider resisting opening themselves up through grandiose and
expensive ‘glocal’ infrastructure projects such as corporate telematics networks. He believes
that more appropriate solutions might involve building more modest network applications
up from the ‘grass roots’ within local economic and social spaces. He writes that we must:

face the possibility at least that the bias inherent in existing networks is unlikely, given the prevailing
balance of power within society, to be deflected and that, in consequence, rather than embracing such
networks with the intention of deflecting their deleterious impact upon local economies, such networks
should instead be resisted.
(Gillespie, 1991, 255)

W A Y S F O R W A R D F O R U R B A N P L A N N I N G A N D
P R A C T I C E : B E Y O N D U R B A N A N D
T E C H N O L O G I C A L D E T E R M I N I S M S

If one were to find a place, and perhaps there are some, where liberty is effectively exercised, one
would find that this is not owing to the order of objects, but to the practice of liberty.
(Foucault, 1984, 246)

A new ‘historic compromise’ between [infrastructure networks] and the regions must be found
which preserves the policy-making capacity of the political powers of urban organization and
regional development. To do this, greater attention must be paid to the occupation of public space
and to the idea of service nodes, whilst at the same time encouraging the emergence of users as
players in the regulation of [infrastructure networks].
(Offner, 2000, 167)

Penultimately, we would like to discuss the challenges thrown down by splintering urbanism
for attempts at struggling towards progressive and democratic architecture, urban design and
urban planning practices. For it is clear that urban design-based solutions often tend also to
crystallise narrowly the time–space requirements of dominant interests within the built form.
‘Given the ability of dominant interests to appropriate all architectural forms, there can be
no such thing as an “emancipating design”; only the activity of design has any such potential’
(King, 1996, 247, original emphasis). Rem Koolhaas (1995), lambasting the narrow
environmental determinism of much of the ‘new urbanism’ movement in the United States,
argues that any progress towards a genuinely ‘new urbanism’ must be centred on process
rather than form, on openness rather than closure, on flexibility rather than order. Such a new
urbanism, he writes:

will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty;
it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but the irrigation
of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling
 POSTSCRIPT / 414

fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer
be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying
boundaries; not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnamable hybrids.
(Koolhaas, 1995, 969)

This leads us to three pointers for practices of urban design, policy and planning as they
respond to and grapple with the challenges of splintering urbanism.

TOWARDS A FULLY NETWORKED URBANISM: BEYOND

URBAN AND TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISMS

We should not repeat the mistake of CIAM and expect more from architecture than it can achieve.
(Ley and Mills, 1993, 267)

First, such practices must emphasise relations and processes rather than objects and forms.
This is not to deny that changing urban form is a crucial product of processes of splintering
urbanism. It is certainly true that the landscapes of the splintering metropolis throw down
challenges to urban practice to ‘assemble a landscape from the fragments of design created
within individual developers’ projects’ (Fishman, 1990, 54). There is a desperate need, in
particular, to imagine ways of weaving secessionary and glocal network spaces into the finer-
grained fabric of the urban spaces and times that surround them. We must speculate as to how
airports, malls, theme parks and the like ‘may weave themselves into the local fabric to create
social interaction and acceptance as opposed to continually reinforcing barriers’ (Avedano et
al., 1997, 68).
But such attempts at ‘reweaving’ the urban fabric must be done in ways that recognise the
full plurality of highly unequal voices in contemporary cities. They must, as a starting point,
provide a range of supports for an ‘open’ set of network spaces to encourage heterogeneous
mixing rather than monofunctional and socially purified secession. Strategies to overcome the
disabling and exclusionary experiences of less powerful and lower-income groups, in accessing
the essential network spaces of contemporary cities – streets, transport systems, water,
communication and power networks – are also vitally required. Overcoming the interwoven,
disconnecting logics of superimposed modernistic planning, glocal networked infrastructures,
neoliberal infrastructure regimes and contemporary urban ‘megastructures’ will be a necessary,
if daunting, agenda.
A starting point here is the imperative to develop a dynamic understanding of the ways in
which infrastructure connections and nodes of all kinds can be creatively harnessed and
integrated within the metropolitan fabric (see R.L. Cowan, 1997, for an early example). How
can ‘disarticulated’ cities and city-regions be effectively integrated in democratic and relatively
equitable ways (McGee, 1998, 45)? We would not deny that ‘the conscious development of
nodes in the infrastructure as new urban spaces with a strong public domain should become
a key concern in our thinking’ (Hajar, 1999, 33). But the challenge is wider than the
imperatives of ‘urban reconnection’; it is necessary to reimagine how the regulatory and legal
 POSTSCRIPT / 415

treatment of all spaces of networked mobility (not just the traditional urbanist preoccupation
with streets and the corporeal networks of transport) translates into the concrete spatiality of
urban experience at the local scale (Offner, 2000).
In other words, a fully networked urbanism needs to be translated into ways of thinking
about urban practice, teaching, policy and activism (Dupuy, 1991). Such practices must resist
both technological and environmental determinisms. The complexities and contingencies of
the relationship between form, infrastructure, mobility and the time–spaces of urban life
suggest that the extent to which a proposed built or technological form – ‘compact cities’,
‘urban villages’ or ‘new urbanism’, ‘wired city’, ‘community intranet’ – will lead to particular
social, economic and cultural outcomes needs to be demonstrated in terms of the relational
dynamics of specific instances. They should not be assumed as universal generalisations.
Much of the vaunted ‘new urbanism’ movement in the United States fails, for example,
because it adopts the naive assumption that the creation of idealised urban forms appropriated
from history will inevitably lead to definitive social, cultural and institutional results. Whilst
it ‘capitalizes precisely on what many accept as being legible signs of community as they are
iconographically inscribed into urban and architectural form’, new urbanism says little about
how urban processes and practices will address crises of difference and inequality (Leong,
1998, 207). In so doing, it often inadvertently works to support further the secessionary
tendencies of socioeconomically affluent groups who can afford to access its neotraditional
(but broadband connected) housing units.

URBAN SOCIOTECHNOLOGIES AS CONTROL RIGHTS:

PROCESSES OF BUILDING AND MAINTAINING
AUTHORISATIONS

Much care therefore needs to be taken to avoid investing any particular built form or network
technology with some essential, reified capacity automatically to socially marginalise or socially
democratise. In fact, we need to be extremely wary of such simple black/white predictions;
of scenarios that assume totalised, geographic ‘impacts’ of new architectural, planning
or technological techniques. Analyses of contingent practices and dynamic processes must
finally triumph over deterministic and reified readings of static urban structures, forms and
architectures. As Bernward Joerges argues:

Built spaces always represent control rights. They belong to someone and not to others, they can
legitimately be used by someone and not by others. Variable control rights over built spaces constrain
what can pass in and around these spaces. [But] only rarely can one show that such constraints are
coupled to built form. . . . It is the processes by which authorizations are built, maintained, contested
and changed which are at issue in any social study of built spaces and technology.
(1999b, 424, emphasis added)

Thus generalisations about desirable urban forms or the configuration of infrastructure

networks and streets need to be replaced by polyvalent, plural and culturally sensitive
 POSTSCRIPT / 416

appreciations of the dialectic and non-generalisable relations between social process and urban
form. Once again, a similar challenge awaits in architecture, where the reification of urban
form tends to be axiomatic. As Alex Wall (1994, 11) suggests:

As for architecture . . . , its future will rest less on Le Corbusier’s dictum ‘the magnificent, skilful art
of pure volumes bathed in light’ than on the organisation of programmes and process; in a city which
depends equally on the programmatic activation of its voids as much as the maintenance of its built
volume; a city represented by an architecture that is less and less material; an architecture that is primarily
process and secondary fragments.

BEYOND SINGLE REPRESENTATIONS OF TIME

AND SPACE

It follows, second, that planning and urban policy and practice must stress the multiple
meanings of space and time. This requires careful attention to the representation of policies
and projects in map form, and the expression of time periods. Where two-dimensional
representation and fixed time periods (e.g. the ‘master’ or ‘five-year’ plan) are used, clarity is
needed with respect to whose space and time this is and why it is helpful to use the particular
form of expression. Project appraisal and policy development need to be informed by explicit
recognition of the range of spatialities and temporalities in which they may be inserted, or
which policy seeks to shape.
Within the complex terrains of superimposed connections and disconnections that emerge
within the splintering metropolis, physical adjacency cannot be used as a proxy for identifying
meaningful relationships and the impacts of a project or a policy. The time scale of a landowner
is different from that of a small builder. People’s spatial reach varies in daily, weekly, annual
and life-span time. Some companies may be committed to a locale for a year or two. For
others the locale is their permanent site of production, and they may be planning strategically
over a time span of decades. Ecosystemic relations tie places into planetary relations over long
time scales and into the micro-relations of species habitats. This implies the need for careful
assessment of the many spatial and temporal experiences of a city, and how these flow across
and into each other in shaping a place and filling it with value.

MOBILISING NEW CONCEPTS OF PLACES

Lastly, planning and urban policy practice need to represent places as multiple layers
of relational assets and resources, which generate the distinct power geometries of places
(Massey, 1993; Graham and Healey, 1999). This point emphasises the need to recognise
that privileging one experience of space and time (e.g. TGV stations, optic fibre grids, super-
highways, mega-airports, etc.) may necessarily undermine other, equally important but
less powerful, network spaces. The multiple layering is thus neither neutral nor value-free.
 POSTSCRIPT / 417

The rich, multiple time–space fabrics of dynamic urban environments need to be carefully
nurtured through fostering the development of relational exchanges across the layers,
reducing the blockages and exclusionary practices which seal dominant groups into narrow
relational networks and marginalise many others. This requires effort in imagining how
planning processes can engage with many spaces and times – for example, providing world-
class networked infrastructures and more basic community-level opportunities to engage and
act at a distance.

C H A L L E N G E S T O U R B A N R E S E A R C H

Which brings us to the final task of this book: to suggest ways forward for urban research.
This book has deliberately sought to bring together many debates, cases and examples into
a single narrative. But it has not been able to explore in detail the complex and diverse
processes of governance and politics that support, and resist, processes of splintering urbanism
in the range of cities mentioned. As a consequence, whilst necessarily lengthy, our discussions
in this book are still only a partial story, one where the general similarities of restructuring
trends, in a variety of cities across the world, have been emphasised. This has been at the
expense of an understanding of the detailed and contingent ways in which coalitions of actors
are working, in different ways and in different contexts, to restructure the physical and
sociotechnical fabric of cities.
This book suggests, then, that a central challenge for urban research is to undertake detailed
and comparative empirical investigations into the ways in which physical and sociotechnical
shifts towards splintering urbanism, and unbundled networked infrastructures, are being
politically and socially constructed in profoundly different political, cultural, economic and
historical contexts. Such research needs to encompass developed nations, newly industrialising
nations, developing cities, and post-communist metropolitan areas embedded within different
state, political, cultural and urban traditions. This is a huge research agenda which transcends
many disciplines. We would like to round off the book by pointing to three particular
questions which arise here.

THE CHANGING ECONOMIC TERRITORIALITIES

OF STATES

First, there is the broad question of the changing economic territorialities of different types
of supranational, national and local states and regulatory authorities (see Jonas and Wilson,
1999). For example:

• How are different types of national and local state working to construct ‘glocal scalar fixes’
in practice, in efforts to try and make their cities, or parts of their cities, more ‘competitive’
as nodes on global circuits of exchange?
 POSTSCRIPT / 418

• In what ways do territorial state interests connect with the rapidly internationalising
interests of infrastructure, technology, real estate, and agents of transnational political and
economic governance, in forging and developing premium network spaces?
• How do these processes vary between centralised unitary states, federal and decentralised
states, the strong and less strong states in developing countries, and post-communist
state systems?
• How are these processes changing the territorial and political nature of the states
themselves as they become less concerned with managing national territories as a whole
and more interested in the construction of multiply scaled premium network spaces, for
connecting selected urban districts or city-regions to each other and to wider
internationalising circuits of exchange?
• Will the political and territorial tensions surrounding such transitions undermine the
legitimacy of both nation states and urban governance coalitions and regimes as premium
network spaces threaten to ‘delink’ from surrounding and hinterland regions?
• Are some types of nation state managing to maintain strategies that preserve their
territorial integrity better than others? If so, how and why?
• How can methodologies of urban analysis best capture and explore the reconstruction
of social scales which parallels processes of splintering urbanism?
• Finally, what political strategies are open to those groups and spaces beyond the gleaming
new glocal infrastructural fixes of contemporary capitalism – places that threaten to be
literally bypassed by dominant technological and economic circuits of exchange? May such
groups and spaces collaborate to lobby the growing institutions of global governance,
bypassing their nation states in the process?

THE COMPARATIVE URBAN AND CULTURAL POLITICS

OF SPLINTERING URBANISM

Second, and following on from these questions, we know very little about what we may term
the comparative urban and cultural politics of splintering urbanism. For example:

• How do different state and intergovernmental systems, traditions of law, political cultures
and civil societies support different experiences of urban and infrastructural change?
• How do the tensions between political and development coalitions supporting the
privatisation and closure of urban streets and network spaces play out against social
movements struggling to assert the social and territorial justice of the excluded urban
poor, in different political and social systems and for different infrastructural networks?
• How do urban power holders’ notions of urban ‘order’, the ‘competitive urban space’
or the ‘good city’ vary between different cultural and national contexts, in terms of their
efforts to structure the configuration of urban spaces and networks normatively, or their
attempts to control crime and disorder in urban spaces (see Body-Gendrot, 2000)?
• How are constructions of identity politics involved in supporting the splintering of
infrastructure networks in different contexts?
 POSTSCRIPT / 419

• What roles do discourses and representation play in different cities, in terms of both
highlighting the alleged virtues of constructing premium network spaces, and
undermining the arguments of political and social oppositions?
• What, under conditions of apparently global urban polarisation, allows some dominant
politicians and regulators into political compromises which serve to maintain or even
enhance the democratic possibilities of urban mixing within urban network and social
spaces?
• Can progressive urban and international coalitions successfully resist global tendencies
towards the construction of secessionary network spaces for internationalising elites,
tourists, and corporations? If so, how?
• Can social and governance traditions, which stress the importance of the equitable
development of networks, survive within a wider international political economy stressing
neoliberalism and underpinning social and economic polarisation? If so, how?
• What can groups and organisations that are resisting the construction of premium
network spaces learn from each other?
• Lastly, how can practices and concepts for strengthening urban democracy be built,
diffused and implemented, across spatial scales, cultural contexts, the disciplinary chasms
separating those dealing with urban space from those dealing with urban infrastructure,
and the infrastructure domains between the often sealed professional worlds of the water,
energy, street, traffic and communications engineers?

SPLINTERING URBANISM, THE PRODUCTION OF URBAN

SPACE, AND THE GLOBALISATION OF CAPITAL

Lastly, we need to understand better the relationship between the internationalisation of real
estate, architectural, media and infrastructure capital, the growing influence of diaspora
networks of social elites, and the widening application of techniques of urban splintering
across the world. For example:

• What roles do the international diffusion of exemplar models of real estate development,
infrastructure reregulation and liberalised network management play in the widening
reach of premium network spaces?
• What roles do the international movements of urban designers (especially ‘star architects’)
and economic models and cultural norms play?
• To what extent are the instruments, techniques, technologies and norms that go into
constructing malls, theme parks, gated communities, liberalised infrastructures and
premium network spaces diffusing from the North to the South, backed up by the growth
of transnational infrastructure, real estate, financial and media corporations?
• How do such internationalising production forces interact, in the form of ‘hybrid’
cultures, with local traditions, in forging different ‘glocal’ styles of urban governance
and the physical, social, economic and cultural transformation of cities?
• How do what Krasidy (1999, 471) calls the ‘entangled articulations of global and local
 POSTSCRIPT / 420

discourses’ become embroiled in the production and reconfiguration of urban space in

different urban contexts?
• How do the variety of premium and secessionary network spaces analysed in this book
fit into the ‘cogredience’ of contemporary metropolitan life, which, readers will recall from
Chapter 5, David Harvey defined as ‘the way in which multiple processes flow together
to construct a single consistent, coherent, though multi-faceted time–space system’
(1996, 260–1)?

E N D N O T E

There are clearly a myriad questions here which, despite its length, have only been touched
on in this book. The hope, however, is that our broad exploration of processes of urban
splintering in a variety of cities may help others to follow up some of these questions. Above
all, we hope the book has revealed the merits of exploring the complex and dynamic interplay
between networked infrastructures as a whole and contemporary urban space and societal
change. We hope, too, that we have highlighted the merits of a perspective on these issues
that manages to be simultaneously critical, transdisciplinary, international and sociotechnical.
Such a perspective, we believe, helps forge powerful new views of the rapidly changing nature
of urban life on our rapidly urbanising planet. In so doing we hope we have made a
contribution to what we believe remains one of the salutary challenges for contemporary
urban studies: constructing a critical urbanism of the networked city.
 GLOSSARY

Plate 21 Defensive condominium complexes under construction beyond the

traditional streetscape in the Pudong district of Shanghai, China, 1999.
Photograph: Stephen Graham
Actor network theory
A theory of the ways in which social and technological relations are mutually constructed and
ordered through the elaboration of actor networks. Developed in the 1980s by Bruno Latour
(1993), Michel Callon (1986) and John Law (Law and Bijker, 1992), among others.
ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line)
A new way of offering broadband telecommunications services over a normal telephone line.
Autonomous infrastructure
Refers to the development of stand-alone or decentralised technologies that allow users to
lower their degree of reliance and increase their autonomy from centralised infrastructure
networks. Examples include combined heat and power, renewable technologies, local water
and waste treatment, and mobile communications technologies.
Back office
An office complex with no face-to-face contact with customers, which delivers services entirely
via the telephone, Internet or private telecommunications connection (known also as a call
centre).
Biometric scanning
The process of digitally scanning a representation of the human body (hand, fingerprint, iris,
voice, face, etc.) in order to complete data bases which can be used in tracking, surveillance
and access control.
Black box (or Technological black box)
A technological assembly including infrastructure networks whose inner workings are so
completely unknown or hidden to its users that its successful functioning is totally taken for
granted. See Unblackboxing.
Bundled infrastructure
A monopolistic infrastructure network geared to covering an entire geographical territory with
broadly equal services offered at broadly equal cost (see Natural monopoly and Modern
infrastructural ideal). See Unbundling infrastructure.
Business Improvement District
An urban policy instrument widely employed by the United States and other countries in
recent years within which a local board of property owners is set up to raise specific local taxes
to be spent on extra local services (sanitation, street cleaning, marketing, environmental
improvements, new infrastructure, etc.).
Call centre
See Back office.
CCTV
Closed-circuit television.
CIAM
The Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, an influential group of advocates of
modernist architecture and planning during the the 1920s and 1930s.
 GLOSSARY / 423

Common pool goods

Goods that are rivalrous in consumption but have low excludability for other users.
Examples include small rural roads and access to storm drainage.

Customised infrastructure
The process by which infrastructure networks are packaged together to meet the precise
needs and demands of specific user groups, often inward investors and large commercial
users.

Cyborg urbanisation
The notion that contemporary cities are seamlessly mediated by technological and cybernetic
systems which completely mediate the city’s relationship to society, culture and nature.

Delinking
The process through which one particular territory or social space (say a global city) becomes
less and less related to its hinterland.

Denationalisation
The process through which the development, regulation and financing of infrastructure
networks become less and less connected with the nation state.

Developmentalist state
A particular configuration of nation states in the Developing World, common between 1945
and the 1980s, characterised by the dominance of coordinated national programmes of
infrastructural and economic development and planning.

Digital divide
Shorthand for the inequalities of socioeconomic and cultural access to, and use of, information
and communications technologies (especially the Internet). Term coined in the United States
in the early 1990s.

Disfigured city
A term coined by Christine Boyer (1995) to describe the spaces in the contemporary city that
fall in between the highly designed, imageable and developed spaces of consumption, leisure
and work. Usually encompasses spaces of dereliction and decay (see Figured city).

E-commerce
Umbrella term to describe the mediation of production, distribution and consumption by
telecommunications (especially the Internet).

Electronic road pricing

The process of charging money to use and access previously public road space, usually through
computerised systems of monitoring, tracking and transaction.

Electronic tagging
Attaching electronic transponders to a person (e.g. a baby, a low-level offender, an office
worker), pet or object (e.g. car) in order to allow the tracking of its movements in time and space.
 GLOSSARY / 424

Embedded infrastructure
Urban infrastructure representing large-scale and highly capital-intensive investments that are
sunk or embedded in particular locations. Networks that are rooted or entrenched in places
so that they can easily or economically be moved to other locations. The level of
embeddedness varies across networks: telecommunications networks are usually much more
flexible and malleable than a transport system or trunk water and waste networks.

Euclidean plain
Following the Greek mathematician, Euclid, the concept of geographical space as a flat,
geometric, gridded plain upon which events, activities and development occur.

Excludability
The feasibility of controlling access to an infrastructure. Usually, individual consumers can
be excluded from transactions involving purely private goods. Such exclusion is usually not
feasible, or very costly, in the case of public goods.

Export processing zone

A district or urban zone endowed with the financial and tax incentives, processing facilities,
labour supplies and infrastructure networks to attract internationally oriented business,
manufacturing and distribution and import–export activities.

Externalities
Unpriced effects which occur where the benefits and costs of producing or consuming a good
affect persons other than those involved in the transaction. In the infrastructure sector negative
externalities include air, noise, water and land pollution from motor vehicles and electricity
production. Positive externalities include the public health benefits of access to water and
sanitation infrastructure.

Fast track immigration

The use of special conduits in ports and airports, with or without biometric passports, to
allow favoured individuals to bypass normal passport and immigration controls. Example of
a premium network space.
Figured city
Christine Boyer’s (1995) term for the highly imageable and highly designed and packaged
spaces for work, consumption and leisure that dominate reconstructed and regenerated city
centres (see Disfigured city).
Filières
An economic value-added chain linking networks of firms, across space and time, into
interdependent systems.
Fiscal equivalence
The economic principle that ‘you get what you pay for’ in paying for goods, services and
infrastructure – so avoiding the traditional systems of general taxation and social and
geographical cross-subsidy associated with the modern infrastructural ideal. Applied in
initiatives like Business Improvement Districts (see Mallett, 1993a).
 GLOSSARY / 425

Flying base station

An aircraft or airship that hovers permanently over a metropolitan region, delivering
telecommunications services.
Fordism
The interconnected social, technological, cultural and political construction through which
mass production, distribution and consumption societies were elaborated in Western countries
between the 1920s and 1970s.
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
Direct investment in a city or nation by overseas capital.
Geodemographics
The range of techniques through which social, demographic and consumption data are
mapped and processed through the use of geographical information systems to aid the
development strategies of supplying firms.
GISs (Geographical Information Systems)
Computerised mapping systems which enable many geographically referenced data sets to be
superimposed and analysed.
Glocal by-pass
The development of an infrastructure that is configured to support interaction between valued
users and places across local and global circuits of infrastructure. Examples would include
specialist international telecommunication services designed to service specialist ports and
enclaves, customised transport services (most noticeably to international airports) to bypass
public networks, and international power connections to support export processing zones.
Glocal infrastructures
Infrastructure networks configured to connect local geographical spaces seamlessly with
international and global scales. See Glocal scalar fix.
Glocal scalar fix
Brenner’s (1998b) concept of a political, institutional and territorial strategy which uses
glocal infrastructure networks to help connect local spaces seamlessly with global circuits
of economic flow.
Grid erosion
Pope’s (1996) concept to describe the ways in which the traditional rectilinear grids of streets
in many US cities have been eroded by development trends which tend to produce
socioeconomic enclaves served by dedicated infrastructures and streets which terminate there.
Hubs, spoke and tunnel effect
A conceptual framework to capture the geographical effects of contemporary infrastructure
networks. Hubs are the dominant nodes that articulate and connect the flows of major
infrastructure systems. Spokes are infrastructure connections that radiate from hubs to serve
subservient places. Tunnel effects are the ‘wormholing’ effects of fast and highly capable
infrastructure networks that pass through, above or below a territory without allowing access.
 GLOSSARY / 426

ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies)

An umbrella term for all technologies of information or communication.
Infrastructural consumerism
A strategy for supporting competition, branding, diverse pricing and segmented marketing
of a wide range of infrastructure products and services within markets which are more or less
regulated.
Innovative milieu
A social, economic, cultural and institutional environment which fosters and sustains on-
going economic and technological innovation. See Neo-Marshallian node.
Intranet
A communications system using Internet technologies and protocols which is closed off for
the exclusive use of a firm or geographical or non-geographical community.
ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network)
A first-generation attempt to offer digital and multimedia services over the conventional
telephone line.
Keynesianism/Keynesian welfare state
A nationally driven political strategy, especially common in Western countries between the
1930s and 1970s, to stimulate economic growth through investing in coordinated
infrastructure and economic development plans, at the same time as elaborating systems of
universal public service provision in health, education and social services. Named after the
British economist John Maynard Keynes.
LAN (Local Area Network)
A telecommunications network linking a local cluster of computers.
Local by-pass
The development of a parallel infrastructure, such as a cable network, mobile telephone or
raised walkway, that selectively connects more valued users and places while at the same time
bypassing less valued users and places.
LTS (Large Technical System)
A term coined by Thomas Hughes (1983) to describe an interconnected and coordinated
infrastructure network encompassing technical artefacts, standards, practices and institutions
working in harmony.
Megalopolis
A term coined by the geographer Jean Gottmann (see 1990) to describe the coalescence of
cities and regions into large-scale polynuclear and extended metropolitan corridors.
Modern infrastructural ideal
The ideal of rolling out monopolistic, standardised and integrated infrastructure networks
to cover a city, region or country that was associated particularly with the period 1850–1960.
Closely associated with the idea of the natural monopoly, the theory of public goods and
Keynesian policies.
 GLOSSARY / 427

Multiservice rebundling
The processes of diversification, alliance formation and mergers through which liberalised
infrastructure companies make links with retailers and financial service companies to deliver
more and more services on a one-stop-shop basis.

Natural monopoly
The Keynesian economic concept which drove the modern infrastructural ideal and the
concept that infrastructure networks were public goods. A natural monopoly was seen to exist
when the costs of rolling out a network were so huge that the rewards of a regulated monopoly
were necessary to ensure the economic viability of the resulting infrastructure.

Neo-Marshallian node
Following the economist Alfred Marshall, an economic cluster of closely related firms within
an innovative milieu who rely on untraded linkages to sustain global competitiveness.

Network ghetto
An urban space with relatively poor connections to infrastructure networks.
Normalisation
Sociological term for the process through which a social phenomenon becomes widely taken
for granted and expected. Closely related to black boxing.

Pay-per revolution
Vincent Mosco’s (1988) term for an aspect of infrastructural consumerism where new
information technologies are used to transfer previously public services, charged through
general tariffs, into ones that are charged on a pay-per-use basis. Examples include electronic
road pricing.
Personal extensibility
Paul Adams’s (1995) term to describe the use of infrastructure networks to extend one’s
influence in time and space.
Post-Fordism
Umbrella term for the social, economic and political regime that has existed since the collapse
of Fordism.
Post-Keynesianism
Umbrella term for the social, economic and political regime that has existed since the collapse
of Keynesianism.
Prepayment meter
A utility meter, especially common in the United Kingdom, requiring the user to charge up
an electronic key in advance of use of the service.
Premium network space
A combination of urban and networked spaces that are configured precisely to the needs of
socioeconomically wealthy groups and so at the same time are increasingly withdrawn from
the wider citizenry and cityscape. (Also termed secessionary network space.)
 GLOSSARY / 428

Private goods
Goods or services, distributed within markets, that are usually consumed by one person at a
time (e.g. food, consumer durables). Private goods have high excludability and are highly
rivalrous in consumption.
Public goods
The economic notion that public authorities need to deliver certain goods and services which
underpinned the concept of the natural monopoly and the practices of the modern
infrastructural ideal. Public goods were seen to have three characteristics: joint supply (or
non-rivalrousness), meaning that if goods were supplied to one person, they could also be
supplied to all other persons at no extra cost; non-excludability, meaning that once a supply
had been developed a user could not be prevented from consuming the service; and non-
rejectability, meaning that once a service was supplied it must be equally consumed by all, even
those not wishing to.
Real-time congestion pricing
See Electronic road pricing.
Rebundled city
Term coined by Dick and Rimmer (1999) to capture the movement away from functional
single-use zoning and towards ever larger-scale buildings and complexes that encompass
multiple uses and facilities under a single roof.
Regularisation/Haussmannisation
Urban planning doctrine to bring order and coherence to the perceived disorder of an
unplanned cityscape through the imposition of standardised street systems and broader
systems of planning and engineering control.
Relational urban theory
A broad range of contemporary urban theories which stress the importance of the dynamic
and contingent worlds of social relations in structuring and making places, rather than the
structuring effects of formal geometries or urban forms.
Rivalrous
The degree to which goods or services can be consumed by one person without being made
available to others.
Rolling out
The process of extending an infrastructure network across space.
Secessionary network spaces
See Premium network space.
Segmenting infrastructure
There are three forms of segmentation. Vertical segmentation splits the core of networks
from those parts connected with consumers (e.g. power generation from transmission and
distribution). Horizontal segmentation involves the superimposition of new networks in
parallel (e.g. the provision of radio and satellite phones separated from traditional telephones).
 GLOSSARY / 429

Virtual segmentation refers to the superimposition of new services on a monopolistic network

through the use of new information technologies (e.g. driver information systems).
Skywalk
A dedicated passenger walkway linking office blocks, malls or leisure spaces, especially
common in North American cities (see Boddy, 1992).
Smart home
A residential unit that has been equipped with the latest information technologies for
managing security, the environment, lighting, entertainment, etc.
Sociotechnical hybrid
Sociological concept designed to overcome the modern dualism of society/technology.
Stresses the subtle blending of the social and technical in contemporary societies (see Actor
network theory).
System builder(s)
The key entrepreneur(s) driving forward the construction of a Large Technical System.
Technological determinism
The conceptual practice of suggesting that technologies and infrastructures directly shape
social and spatial outcomes in a linear, cause-and-effect manner because of their abstract
qualities.
Technological fetishism
The celebration of a technology and its aesthetic quality as an icon of transformation without
paying attention to the social relations that produce and sustain it (see Technological
determinism).
Technological sublime
The cultural aura of excitement, limitless power and emancipatory potential than can be
constructed to surround new technologies.
Technopole
Planned space of high-technology innovation.
Terminal architecture
Pawley’s (1987) term for the way in which contemporary buildings function primarily as
terminals on infrastructure networks, rather than as disembodied monuments in urban space.
Territorial adaptor
Gabriel Dupuy’s (1995) concept, designed to explain the automobile system, which describes
the way infrastructure networks can be constructed to bring the extending landscapes of
megalopolis-style urban regions into dynamic articulation.
Time–space compression
David Harvey’s (1989) concept designed to capture the ways in which new infrastructure
innovations like the Internet and air travel effectively reduce space and time barriers for their
users.
 GLOSSARY / 430

Toll goods
Goods or services with high levels of excludability but a low level of rivalrousness. For
instance, it is possible to control access to a piped sewage system, but consumption by one
user does not usually lessen availability to others.
Town centre management
A UK movement, similar to that of Business Improvement Districts, to set up dedicated
private and public management bodies for town and city centres for the purpose of upgrading
their economic performance.
Unblackboxing
The process through which blackboxed technological systems become (re)problematised,
(re)exposing their inner workings and performance to scrutiny. Infrastructure networks often
become unblackboxed during periods of disruption through earthquakes, drought, war or
the consequences of terrorist action.
Unbundling infrastructure
The process through which standardised and bundled infrastructure is broken apart or
segmented technically, organisationally and institutionally into competitive and non-
competitive elements to support infrastructural consumerism. Usually associated with
privatisation and/or liberalisation.
Virtual network by-pass
Also known as virtual competition. The process through which information technologies are
applied to single infrastructure networks to allow them to support infrastructural competition
and consumerism.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Plate 22 The fast lane on the Massachusetts turnpike in Boston: a classic

example of the use of information technology to support local infrastructural
bypass and the construction of a premium network space. Cars equipped with
transponders enter the tolled highway without stopping. Tolls are electronically
debited from users’ bank accounts. Photograph: Stephen Graham
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 INDEX

Plate 23 Looking north across Los Angeles to Bunker Hill.

Photograph: Stephen Graham
 INDEX / 464

actor network theory (ANT) 179, 184–90, 188, black boxes 21, 180; and large technical systems
212–13 180, 181–2, 183
actor networks, and cyborg urbanisation Bluewater Mall, London 266–7
184–90 boundary control 207–8B, 266–7, 310,
advertising, gendered 69–71, 70 320–1B, 389
Africa: British railway construction 84; Boyer, C., figured and disfigured cities
infrastructure transitions 161, 163 210–11B, 216
age of extremes 221–2 Brazil 85; car wars 2, 343–4; community
air conditioning, and urban splintering 226–7 infrastructure, water supply 160B, see also
aircargo superhubs 359 São Paulo
airport cities 366 broadband Internet access 274–5B, 286
airports: bypass immigration for premium broadband investment, cherry-picking locations
passengers 3, 346B, 365, 366; hub and spoke for 251, 274–5B
arrangement 202; integration with fast rail broadband meets neotraditionalism 275B
networks 367–9, see also hub airports broadband networked spaces, economic
Amsterdam: CityRing® 314B; Digital City prospects beyond 375, 376
402–3 buildings, seen as terminals 207B
analogous cities 4, 256–9 bus route discrimination 5, 270B
apartheid 82; neo-apartheid South Africa 297; Business Improvement Districts (BIDS) 170,
socio-spatial, USA 210B; technical 305 262–3B; conflict in 389; and the homeless
architecture 18, 32, 412, 416; airport 364; flex- 292–3B; imposed property taxes spent within
tech 335–6; urban design and planning the district 261–2
practices, challenged 413–15 bypass immigration, for premium passengers 3,
Asia, East and South East 363; customised 346B, 365, 366
infrastructure, manufacturing investment and bypassing 283B, 377, 382
hyper-urbanisation 346–51, see also Malaysia;
Singapore call centre enclaves 352, 353, 354–5B
Atlanta, Georgia, Peachtree Center 260, 260 capital: corporate 311–12; infrastructure and
atria, and plazas 259–61 real estate 97, 311; international real estate,
automated voice recognition 244 and entrepreneurial planning 227–8; sunk
automobile traffic, technostructure 182–3 202, 215; (infrastructure networks as 12,
automotive secession 249–51, 252, 253–4B 78); territorial organisation of 74, 77;
uneven geographical development 198
back office zones/spaces/enclaves 172; and capital, global, search for investment possibilities
data-processing enclaves, global periphery 100
352–7; in the developing world 356, capital, global finance, incursion into
356–7B infrastructure 95, 96, 98
Balbo, M., on the network city 83 capital, global infrastructure 98, 122
Bangalore 337–9; Electronics City complex capital, global property 122
338; India’s Silicon Valley 337–8; capitalism: contemporary, geographical/ spatial
Information Technology Park 338-9; (role as economies of 190–202; global, sticky places
regional hub 339) of 305–6
Bangkok: interconnecting enclaves of new capitalist economy, global 91
developments 327, 328–9B; new towns in car culture: as coerced flexibility 118; and an
town 328B; private toll highways 169 inward turn in urban design 120–1
banks, conductors of transactions 248–9 car ownership, assumption of discriminatory
Battery Park City, Manhattan 257, 321 128B
Berlin, privatisation of street spaces 400 car plants: Brazil 343–4; Nissan, north-east
Bintan Island, Indonesia 2 England 345
biology of control, a concern 243–4 cars 119, 273; as body-armour 230B; as the
biometric scanning devices 3, 243, 365 future of urban transport 128B; main mode
biometric signatures 244 of urban transport 291; as parallel vehicles of
 INDEX / 465

physical and electronic space 230–2B; as megaprojects 224–5; people unwilling/

‘territorial adapters’ 118, see also automobile unable to leave central areas 394; peripheral,
traffic constructing technopoles in 337–9;
Castells, M.: expansion of the global economy rebundling of 222–7; relational links 204;
15; ‘network society’ thesis 209–10B; relationships with networked infrastructures
redundant producers, irrelevant 307; 176; small special-purpose zones 113; social
widening diffusion of the Internet 401 analyses forget infrastructure networks
CCTV cameras, and surveillance technologies 18–22; social and political tensions in 405; as
232–3, 263–4, 397, 399 social processes 204; socioeconomic
centralised public control and ownership, lost to landscapes of 388; sociotechnical hybrids
liberalisation/privatisation 91 214–15; as a sociotechnical process 10;
Chambers, Edgar, Roadtown 65B spaces/zones connected to other valued
China, Pearl River Delta 348–50 spaces/areas 15; splintering of infrastructure
Christopherson, S., market targeting 234 networks 102–3; still powerful political
CIAM see Congrès Internationaux actors 114; structure and function driven by
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) group system of binary divisions 124; substituted by
cities 8, 15–16, 42, 176, 313, 358–9, 410; and buildings 223–6; superconnection of elite
the archipelago economy 305–9; as spaces 210B; and the telephone 50–1B; time
archipelagoes of enclaves 110–14, 121, patterns stretched and reconfigured 204;
209B, 280; central nodal functions bridged trends surrounding splintering urbanism
outwards 313; cheap-labour 352; classical 386; water and sewerage 44, 55–7
notions of challenged 116; collages of cities, contemporary 391, 412; connections and
fragmented spaces 112–13; concentrated disconnections 206, 209B; forms of super-
demands of 13; cyborg liaisons of inhabitants inclusion 196; hybrid nature 14–15; off-line
187–8; displaying intensifying unevenness spaces/lag-time places 196; relational
308; diversity of 393; a dystopian view 383; theories of 179, 202–6
as engineered systems 44–5; expanding, cities, developed 25; and developing,
infrastructure crises in 59–61; experience of overcoming the divide 34–5; Northern:
subject to flows and interchange 32; fabric of (infrastructural erosion and relative
governance and planning, splintering 113; disconnections 374-5; infrastructure and
face variations of same logics of development growth of high-tech clusters 335-7)
307–8; figured and disfigured 210–11B, cities, developing 373, 387; application of the
216; foggy geographies of urban water modern ideal, postcolonial critiques 128–30,
systems 57–9; fragmentation into cellular 131–2B; back office enclaves 356, 356–7B;
clusters 5; globally distant places relationally community infrastructure 158–9, 160B;
closely connected 16; Haussmann’s dualised systems of water consumption
regularisation plans for Paris 12, 53–5, 56; 296–7; elites, develop urban policies to suit
the ideal 409; increasing international own interests 130, 131–2B; formal
connections between 67–8; increasing colonialism 82–4, 387; infrastructure and
underinvestment in margins 97–8; the economic enclaves 327, 328–9B;
‘infinite city’ 121–2; integrated and neocolonialism 84–7; premium network
coherent, collapse of notion of 215–16; spaces and public health externalities 388;
Internetting of 330–2; intraregional and water infrastructure, social and geographic
interregional differences 307–8; as machines dualisation 130, 131–2B
or organisms 53, 62; the modern unitary cities, global 313; colonising the peripheries
ideal (1880–1960) 62, 63–5B; mono-centric 321–7; in the developing world 315B;
to poly-centric 115; more open with electronic infrastructures compress space and
rectilinear grid system 60; multi-layered and time barriers 313, 316; filtering out of
faceted 380; new hard-edge boundaries 206; unwanted traffic 318, 318–21B; of the future
new plans for 64–5B; new socioeconomies of 405–6; new media enclaves 329–33; optic
221; no longer ‘special places’ 302; order fibre networks extend influence of 317–18;
and disorder in 396; Pacific Rim, urban ranking of 314–15B; and second-tier 305–6
 INDEX / 466

cities, industrial: infrastructure decay 92–3; consumption and business spaces, local bypass
modern 45; old, reconstructed as back office and seamless connection 365–7
spaces 352–3 consumption and transactions, electronically
cities, modern: city planning 42; integration by mediated 248
infrastructure grids 52; and the urban water contemporary society, social power and power
system 59; worked to reinforce the division to move quickly over space 195–6
of labour 126B copper rush, Russia 3, 26, 300–1B
cities, postmodern: fear in 222; retreat into copresence, embodied and situated 407–8
cocoons of 210B corporate customers, large, bypassing public
cities, world, constructing technopoles in 337–9 Internet system 255
City Beautiful movement 63B corporate enclaves, linked by skywalks 257
city centres, packaged and commodified 233 counterculture movements 289
city core media complexes 265–6 crime and homelessness, moved on 262B, 284B
cityscapes 391–2; and the car 117–18; cross-media alliances 236
patchworks of growth and decline 115 cross-subsidies 233–4, 234–5
Clark Special Economic Zone, the Philippines cultural movements, asserting rights of
267 minorities and ‘others’ 123
co-location 372 customer database–call centre–Internet
cogredience 203, 420 integration 241–2
collective consumption 102 cyberspace: home districts for 329–33; not
colonial infrastructure, and priorities of single and unified 186
metropolitan power 86–7B cyberwar/infowar 27–8
colonial states, problems of inherited transport cyborgian boundaries 185
networks 130B
common interest developments 272–6 Dallas, infomart development 336
common pool goods 146 data entry tasks 357B
communism, Soviet and East European 91 data havens 372
communities, poor or marginal, space–time Davis, M., vision of socio-spatial ‘apartheid’ in
constraints on 195 US metropolis 210B
community infrastructure, user provision with decentralisation 71; planned 64B; urban, and
policy support 158–9 the telephone 51B
competition: for markets 153, 154B, 155–6; defensive enclaves 99
using virtual bypass 175 delegated infrastructure 152, 166; public
competitive markets, new 14 ownership, private operation 153–6
complexes, bundled and superblock delinking 313; external and interiorised
development 321 constructions 336–7; of world cities 307
computer communications systems, overlaid demand management technologies, small-scale
upon older networks 30 140
computer failure, ramifications of 207B demodernisation, of post-communist societies
computer viruses, sabotage/hacking 28–30 26
Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture denationalisation, of capitalist territorial
Moderne (CIAM) group 60–1 organisation 198
conjunction, economies of 358 deregulation 149, 183
connection 387; with distanciation 247–8 Detroit, people-mover transit systems 257
consumer engineering 70 developed economies, high-income 162, 164,
consumer identities, segmentation of 242 362
consumer society, electronic cash and the poor developing countries/world 85, 91, 93; affluent
295B enclaves within megacities 282–4B; back
consumers: differentiation of 241–2; and office enclaves 353, 355–6; low-income
emerging integrated urban infrastructures economies 161, 162; overcoming failures of
69–71; the power users 236; satisfaction the modern ideal 373–4; structural
from infrastructure supply 147–9 adjustment programmes 99; transport
 INDEX / 467

86–7B, 129–30B; use of intermediate electronic financial services, shifts to polarisation

technology 134 in access 248–9
development: regional, prospects boosted electronic guardian angels 302
355–6; uneven, intensifying 307–8 electronic integration 14; of distant offices 352,
development agencies, luring foreign and 354B
tourist-related investment 99–100 electronic labour integration 357B
development and consumption zones 99 electronic road pricing 140, 170, 199, 250–1,
development corridors, South Africa 342 252, 318; electronically tolled private
difference, cultural politics of 123 highways 253–4B
differential value, geography of 15 electronic tagging 243
digital divide, beyond 374–5, 376 electronic tracking and surveillance systems
digital enclaves 352 243–5, 318, 320B
disconnection, patterns of 308 electropolises 45–6; Berlin 46–7
discrimination, by town centre management elite corridors 366
schemes 263 elite groups 130, 131–2B, 247–8; resources
disintermediation 352–3 concentrated on 296
distributive network services 19 Ellin, N., Enlightenment ideals 41–2
‘dot-com’ phenomenon, Boston 375, 376 Emberley, P., shift to global network societies
downtowns: as analogous cities 256–9; some 206
dominance maintained 115 enclaves 292; for car users 120–1; creation
Doxford International Business Park, of 83; self-contained, glocally oriented
Sunderland 354–5B 376, see also types of enclaves (e.g.
Dubai: defensive office complex 381P; Deira economic)
City Mall 269, 269 energy markets 237; Internet-based 248
dynamic congestion pricing 253–4B energy pathways, hard and soft 133
energy and power systems, Russia,
e-commerce distribution hubs 371 fragmentation and collapse of 300–1B
e-commerce enclosures 352, 371 energy sector 170; glocal infrastructure and
e-commerce spaces, and the splintering trading of power 172; marginalised energy
metropolis 369–72 spaces 297–301; and parallel infrastructure
economic convergence, global 210B 169
economic enclaves 83 engineering geography 44
economic exploitation, and infrastructure Enlightenment ideals 41–2
networks 83–4 ‘entertainmentisation’ developments 265
economic and social restructuring 91 environmental determinism 413–15
edge cities, and US gated developments 273 environmental movement 133–4
edifice complex 310 ethnic segregation, patterns supported by
electricity 68; electricity competition 137P; highway construction 120
hostages 26–7; and housework 126B Europe 67–8; Internet community networks
electricity markets: UK, alliances in 237, 238–9; 402–3; selective integration of glocal
virtual network competition 200 infrastructures 367–9, see also France; UK
electricity sector: outages 207B, 301B; excludability 146
unbundling options 164 exclusion, politics of 384
electrification, and the urban technological export processing zones 361–4
sublime 45–7, 49, 50–1B export substitution, capital intensive 87
electronic communications network, exclusion externalities 147; negative 80, 390–2
from 291–2, 293–6B Ezecieli, C., US cities, reinforcement of local
electronic consumption and surveillance systems boundaries 16
383
electronic democracy 246 facial-recognition software 264, 321B
electronic domains, incorporation of excluded FDI see foreign direct investment
voices 401 feminist movements, work of 125
 INDEX / 468

financial enclaves, new, global connections, local glocal enclaves 376, 389; defensive, Docklands
disconnections 321–7 325, 326, 327
financial markets 14, 96, 311 glocal infrastructure(s): resilient 173; a widening
fiscal equivalence 234–5, 261 set of tunnel effects 358; the worlds beyond
Fordism 41, 66–7, 67–8, 67, 135 372–5, 376
Fordist–Keynesian economic growth 72 glocal links, seamless, demand for 311
foreign direct investment (FDI) 306; glocal network firms 311, 312
customising infrastructure for 339, glocal scalar fixes 198, 202, 213, 310, 417
342–51 glocal–local connectivity 99–101
fortified enclaves 111 government departments, infrastructure
fortress spaces see gated enclaves/ communities provision 153
France 73, 172, 336; delegated infrastructure, government monopolies, pressure to move away
water sector 154B; EuraLille complex 369 from 177
free-trade zones 362 grid erosion 229–30B
freeways 109B; and fragmentation 119 grid system, North America 60
freight exchange cities 359–64 gridlock, made less troublesome 231–2B
Friedman, J., model of economic development growth corridors, polycentric 350, 351
84–5 Guinea, water sector 154B

gas, competitively supplied 164 Hamilton, K. and Hoyle, S., society’s altered
gated enclaves/communities 4, 16, 267–76, view of the street 121
389; Brazil 219P; fortress spaces, Istanbul hands, in individual profiling 244
277–9 Haussmann, Baron G. E. 59; laid foundations
Gemini transatlantic cable 317 for modern water and sewerage systems 56;
gender, and mass consumption 69–71 plans for regularisation of Paris (1853–70)
gentrification 330–2; spirals of 330 12, 53–5
geodemographic targeting 240–1; Acorn system Heathrow Express rail link 170; future glocal
240 connections 367, 368; glocal and local bypass
geodemographics, supportive role 239–42 172, 374
geographic technologies, neutrality of 17 helicopters, the ultimate commute 5–6
geographical distancing and biased Holmes, D., Melbourne CityLink 254–5B
infrastructure development 269–70B homelessness, treatment in USA 292–3B
geographical unbundling 142 homes, networked, emergence of 71–2
Ghana: international telecommunications hotels, close liaison with telecom and media
infrastructure 363; liberalisation of the companies 267
cellular telephone market 160B household infrastructure systems 126B;
Gillespie, A., on resisting network connections mechanisation gendered 126B
412–13 households, individualised 127B
global citadels 4–5 houses, single arterial service loop 285
global city cores 313–16, 370 housework, mechanisation of 126B
global connections, local disconnections Houston, Texas, skywalk and tunnel system
313–27; last mile connectivity 316–17 257, 258, 259
global financial services 207B, 321–2 Howard, Ebenezer 12, 64B
global transpark phenomenon 360, 361 hub airports: competition with host city 364,
global–local connections 100; seamless and 365–6; seamless connection with valued
powerful 316 spaces 367
global–local network connections 207B hub cities 358–9
globalisation 198, 408–9; affecting national hub positions 313
infrastructural monopolies 197; and new hubs, spokes and tunnel effects 200–2, 213;
models of consumption 282B new patterns of 307
glocal bypass 167, 167, 171–3 Hughes, T. 185; electricity networks, early
glocal connections/connectivity 215, 354–5B twentieth century Britain 180
 INDEX / 469

hyperurbanisation 391; Pearl River Delta, China development and geographical distancing
349 269–70B; changing demands of economic
restructuring 161, 164; characteristics
ICBM bunkers, ultimate security 372 influencing marketability 145;
iconic landmarks 20, 44–5, 87 commodification of 243–4; coping with
ICTs see information and communications withdrawal of 170–1; customised: (for
technologies foreign direct investment in manufacturing
IMF, structural adjustment programmes 99 339, 342-51; for global financial enclaves
income, and the Internet 245, 245 313-27; manufacturing investment and
India 25, see also Mumbai hyper-urbanisation, East and South East Asia
indigenous populations, infrastructural practices 346-51); demand for and service use,
‘backward’ 82–3 characteristics of 147–9; as fixed supports for
individual profiling 243–4 space–time mobilities of capitalism 191–2;
industrial colonisation 250 formal colonialism, objectives of 82; glocal,
industrial spaces: round Northern cities 335–6; provision of, north-east England 344–5;
supporting infrastructures, services and increasing demands cannot be met by local
labour drawn to 336–7 government 234–5; informal, self-help and
informal settlements 83, 288, 296, 297, 339, private provision 161, 400; and
396, see also squatter settlements modernisation 84–7; and national sense of
information and communications technologies cohesion 74; no longer seen as technical,
140, 246; and electronic systems of finance engineered systems 106B; private 373–4;
and consumption 248–9; market-driven privatisation of 95–6; self-provision of
dynamics of 245–6; personalised 244; 373–4; standardised with equal prices for all
(systems as ‘personal bubbles’ 246); supports 80–1; as a symbolic marker 20; unbundled:
for urban splintering 243–9; the unwired (institutional pathways to 151-66;
291–2, 293–4B, 294–6B marketability of 145-9, 150; transition to
information technologies 6, 14; integration into 161, 162-3, 164)
consumption spaces 267; use of control infrastructure companies: increasing investment
capabilities 237 in duplicate/back-up power systems 26–7;
informatisation, of city/urban life 243–9 strange alliances 237, 238–9
infrastructural bypass 167–8, 167 infrastructure development 96, 100
infrastructural chains, filières and global infrastructure grids: modern 111–12, 199; need
production 307 for public control, USA 73
infrastructural collapse, fears of, complex infrastructure industries, market segmentation
realities of 23–5 strategies 234
infrastructural consumerism 102–3, 233–4; infrastructure ladders 229B
social construction 235–7, 238–9 infrastructure, liberalised 152, 164; private
infrastructural investment, project-by-project competitors 158, 159B, 160B
risk assessment 97 infrastructure networks 11, 12, 185, 195,
infrastructural trickle down: failures 129; and 214–15; change in emphasis in the urban
modernisation 84–5, 86–7B context 385–6; changing relationships of 9;
infrastructural unbundling 138–44, 176, 195, Cinderella of urban studies 18–22;
215, 243, 382; into customised and customised for premium spaces 101; in
fragmented time–space arrangements 212; developing cities 129, 129–30B; differing
logic of 201–2, 201; not a simple process capabilities of 193; and economic
176; and rebundling of cities 222–7; social exploitation 83–4; as embedded geopolitics
dimensions of 220; and urban fragmentation 12; and enclave formation 228–9, 229–32B;
189–90; and urban transformations 166–75 experiences and fears of infrastructural
infrastructural warfare 27–8 collapse 22–30, 212; focused on needs of
infrastructure 100, 123, 198, 202, 374–5; expanding urban areas 13; and functional
assignation of activities between public and zoning, developed round the urban grid 60;
private sectors 149, 151–66; biased future, industrial structure of 138–9;
 INDEX / 470

gendering of 125, 126–8B; geographically international articulation, zones of 306

embedded nature of 311; glocal, new and internationalisation, of infrastructure markets 96
materially distinct 171; homogenising, now Internet 256, 329; access to trunk networks
becoming punctured/ruptured 200; as 369–70, 370; community networks 401–3;
integrators of urban spaces 8; legitimised as free Internet zones 372; as a global ghetto
standard monopolies 77–81; and lifestyle 244–6; mobilising through 400–3; new
differentiation 135; local, integrated to form protocols and routers discriminate socially
national grids 79, 80; as locally dependent 255–6; private ‘pipes’ 172, 274–5B; sifting
capital 193–4; and the modern nation state of more valued information ‘packets’ 4,
as a territorial container 73–7, 213; 255–6; splintering of 251, 255–6;
nineteenth century expansion 40; not all unbundling of services 155–6
have been unbundled 176–7; parallel 168–9; investment: competitive scramble for 306–7;
power to bind and connect cities 43; and glocal bypass 171–2; state, replaced by
powerful images of stability 182; remote private 97–8, see also capital
control and technological ordering 186; seen investment enclaves: customising infrastructure
as ‘precarious achievements’ 182–3; seen as 2; SiJoRi 347B
public goods 80; as sociotechnical assemblies iris- and retina-scanning 244
31; splintering of in parts of cities 102–3; Istanbul 396; fragmenting into fortressed spaces
supporting distant linkages 307; as 277–9
technological networks 187, 188; tendency
to ‘black-box’ 21, 180; unbundled locally, Jakarta: gated communities 276–7; peripheral
integrated internationally 100–1; unevenness new towns/rebundled cities 277, 278; water
and bias in 386–7; water and sewerage, value vendor cost 297
of 44, 55–7, see also premium infrastructure Jamaica Digiport 356, 356–7B
networks Japan: packaged city concept 337; technopolis
infrastructure operators, as ‘growth statesmen’ concept 336, see also Tokyo
311 Jerde, J., the disappearing art of citymaking 223
infrastructure planning, case of urban transport Jersey City, New York 322
105–7B Jinqiao Export Processing Zone, Shanghai,
infrastructure, privatised 255; private ownership special advanced infrastructure networks
and operation 156, 157–8 363–4
infrastructure provision, bottom-up models Joerges, B., on built space and control rights
158–9, 160B 415
infrastructure service providers 100, 146–7 Johannesburg 281–2
infrastructure services 80; awareness of just-in-time flows, effects of disruption 207B
deterioration in 92–3; characteristics of,
rivalry and excludability 145–6; development Keynesian infrastructure planning/ projects 74,
of as commodities 233; increased range and 76, 77
quality 140; seamless 174–5; standardised Konvitz et al., on Urban History 21–2
and dependable 66–7; value added to 100 Koolhaas, R.: the new urban system in the Pearl
infrastructure systems, physical synergies River Delta 350, 351; ‘new urbanism’ in the
between 31 USA 413–14
integrated infrastructure 100; and development
plans 63B; and modern utopias 64–5B; labour, redundant and devalued 210B
unbundling of networks 97 large technical systems 211–12; destabilisation
integrated networks 174–5; new technologies of 180–4, 215; failure to develop territorial
aid unbundling 139–40 analyses 173–4; interdependence of 181;
integrated public highway systems, unbundling problematising and unblack-boxing 183;
of 255B theories 179
integration, and coordination 62 Lasch, C., independence of elites from public
intelligent infrastructural terminals 175 services 247–8
interdisciplinary barriers, breaking down 33–4 Latour, B.: inclusionary/exclusionary nature of
 INDEX / 471

technical networks 186; ‘skein of networks’ Manhattan: internetting of 329; New York
216; on space and time 188, 189 Information Technology Center 332; Silicon
Le Corbusier (Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard) 12, Alley 329–30
64–5B, 72 Manila 277–9, 363, 366; gated urban spaces
liberalisation: of infrastructure markets 96; 279; tolled freeways and flyovers 279
partial 328B; and structural adjustment marginalisation 195, 259, 289, 385; advanced,
programmes 99; and unbundling 139 in network societies 288–9; caused by
life and health insurance 243–4 gentrification 330; of the city homeless
Lima, Peru, private water storage 374 292–3B; of groups and spaces 350–1; and
linear city utopias 65B the Internet 294–6B; of poorer people and
local bypass 167, 167, 168–71; coping with communities 248–9; social and economic
withdrawal of infrastructure 170–1; 287–8; of the unphoned 293–4B
segmentation of an existing network 169–70; marginalised communities, challenge of securing
superimposition of parallel networks 168–9 on-line access for 295–6B
local connectivity, increased filtering of 317–18, marginalised spaces, fortressing of 290–301
319–21B, 382 market forces 91
location, bandwidth, location 369–71 market niches, ability to target marketing and
logistics enclaves 357–72 services delivery 241–2
London 2, 59, 169, 313; digital media clusters marketing 69; shift from standardised to
and bypass electronic infrastructures 332–3; precision targeting 236
inner city redevelopment, secure housing mass consumption: domestic 68, 69; home-
271; London Stock Exchange software glitch based, gendered construction of 69–71
25; new packaged landscapes for global mass markets 174, 234
finance 323–7; public spaces 233; Sohonet mass mobility, no mass accessibility 118
332–3, 334P; superimposition of parallel Mattelart, A. 33–4; evolutionist concept of
infrastructure 169; Victorian, private streets history 22
59, 386 media conglomerates, construction of private
London, City of: Action against capitalism overlay networks 255
demonstration 395; Camerawatch 321B; media enclaves, new 329–33
global connections and local disconnections mega-development projects 113
318–21B; ‘ring of steel’ electronic Melbourne, Australia, Transurban CityLink
surveillance 2, 170, 320B 254–5B, 398
London Docklands 323–7; mini ring of steel metropolitan forms, decentralised 71
325, 326P, 327; road, rail and air links 323, metropolitan periphery, location for logistics
324–5 nodes/airport complexes 364–5
Los Angeles 383, 396, 400, 402; Fashion Island metropolitan regions, and the expanding
Mall 1P periphery 116
low-income people/users 291; displaced 328B, Mexico City 315B, 391
331–2; and the global peripheries, options micropolis see Business Improvement Districts
372–5; regulation for 148; resist eviction and mobility, primary activity 215
exclusion 399; the unphoned 293–4B modern infrastructural ideal 43–89, 97, 108,
LTSs see large technical systems 134, 309, 387; collapse of 131–2B, 135–6,
296B; complex multifaceted, diverse set of
Madrid, water distribution network 57, 57 constructions 87–8; and decentralisation 71;
maintenance and rehabilitation, lacking for exported, experience of developing cities
infrastructure networks 92–3, 93–4B 81–7; feminist critiques 124–8; gendered
Malaysia: GigaWorld 340B; key elements landscapes of movement and mobility 125,
340–1B; Multimedia Super Corridor 339, 127–8B; growth beyond the limits of
340–2B; problematising the strategy 341–2B 116–17; inertias and continuities with
mall spaces: making more public 398; 385–6; and large technical systems 180;
pedestrians denied access to 5, 269–70B limits to states’ ability to pursue structural
malls 264–5; without walls 262–3B policies 202; never achieved in practice
 INDEX / 472

386–7; overcoming the failures of in the network ghettoes 289, 316

developing world 373–4; struggle to move network segmentation and unbundling, styles
away from 123; undermined 112; (by the of: horizontal segmentation 142; vertical
environmental movement 133-4); segmentation 141–2, 142, 164; virtual
undermining processes 91–2 segmentation 143, 144
modern networked household 125; feminist network society thesis 209–10B
critiques 126–7B network society(ies) 14–15, 206, 310; advanced
modernisation, and infrastructure 84–7 marginality in 288–9
modernisation theory: biases of 129–30, network spaces: of energy and power,
130–2B; economic modernisation through marginalised 300–1B; of resurgent
industrialisation 85; and trickle down citizenship 407–8; secessionary 220-33;
benefits 84–5 (open to environmental risk 392)
modernity: multiple modernities, networking of networked connections, possibility of resistance
87–9; network-based 42; seen as 412–13
fragmentation 111 networked infrastructures 34, 382; complex
monopolies, natural 77–9, 80; conditions for interdependence between 30; customised for
147; unravelling of 199–200 users 113; and the infinite city 121–2; sense
monopolistic service provision, being of failure 111; as sociotechnical armoury 377
undermined 14 networked urban infrastructure 12, 13, 42;
Montreal, Underground City 258 Fordist production and the city 66–8; and
monumentality, new 20 the supported mobilities 16–22; what is
Moses, R., New York highways, the meat axe happening? 9
approach 108–9B networking multiple modernities 87–9
motorisation, and the urban effects of car New York 313, 322, 398; Grand Central
culture 117–21 Business Improvement District, zero
‘multi-utilities’ 6 tolerance strategy 262B; infrastructure crises
Mumbai (Bombay) 284B; physically close but 94B; Internet-ready real estate 332, 333;
relationally severed 213; water pipes as Robert Moses and highway construction
footways 2, 284B 108–9B; Tompkins Square park, struggle
Mumford, L. 72; extending the infrastructural against enforced ‘sanitisation’ 395, see also
ideal to the regional scale 63B Business Improvement Districts
Muschamp, H., infrastructure networks 43 Newcastle Business Park 354B
Nigeria: pipe vandalism 399; private electricity
nation states 79, 95, 197, 418; changing roles generators 374
of 309–10; finding new ways of regulation nodes 19, 201–2, 201; developed and
99; import substitution industrialisation 87; interconnected, patterns of 308; neo-
and the modern infrastructural ideal 88; Marshallian, on global networks 306
modern, as territorial containers 73–7 Nokia, broadband personal wireless
national economic performance 81 communication system 246
natural disasters and famines, show ‘non-places’ 122
infrastructural fragility 23, 24, 25 North Africa, French colonial cities 82
neoliberalism, and the retreat of the state 96–9 North Carolina Global Transpark 360, 361
Nepal, suitable drainage and sanitation systems north-east England: call centre enclaves
400 354–5B; glocal infrastructure provision and
Netherlands, new airport city 366 partial reindustrialisation 344–5
network associations, more customised 190 Northern city industrial spaces, new 335–6
network collapses, in the always-on digital
economy 26–7 Oceania project 372
network cross-subsidies: to fiscal equivalence optic fibre networks/grids 25, 31, 354–5B,
234–5; withdrawal of 233–4 369–71, 375; distribution of, New Jersey
network development, supply-oriented logics of 293–4B; glocal transoceanic networks 304P;
81 integrating global archipelagoes of 317;
 INDEX / 473

‘intelligent corridor’, Bangkok 328; last mile poverty: of connections 288; urban 221
connectivity 316–17; London 318–19B; power geometries 196
private networks 172; urban 2; (competitive power lines, but no electricity 7P
struggle between global cities 314-15B) power sector, vertical segmentation 141–2, 142
outsourcing, transglobal 353, 355–9 power stations, nuclear/coal-fired 133
Predatory Globalization, R. Falk 401
‘packaged development’ 223 premium infrastructure links 270B
Paris 313 premium infrastructure networks 15, 100–1,
Pawley, M., on new financial dealing houses 101; rail 170; road, for affluent commuters
208B 252, 253–5B
‘pay per’ revolution 199–200 premium infrastructure services, for needs of
Pearl River Delta, China 348–50; marginalised secessionary spaces 236–7
groups and spaces 350–1 premium networked spaces 408, 410, 419; cost
pedestrian–traffic separation 65B of enforcing space–time boundaries 391; in
pedestrians: denied access to malls 5, 269–70B; gated communities 273; glocal 412; and
separated from skywalks 257 glocal enclaves 389; and the modern city
peripheralisation process 115–16 301–2; political and social responses 396–7;
personal extensibility concept 196 recognising complexity of 398–9; spaces of
personal surveillance and control 244 seduction 249; telecommunications
Philadelphia Central Waterfront complex, concentrated on 294B
money for car access 270B prepayment metering 298B; examples of
Phoenix, Arizona, gated community 273 microsocial effects 299B; problems of
place 122; diverse social process 203 298–9B; self-disconnections 299B
places, mobilising new concepts of 416–17 pricing mechanisms, use of 148
planners 113; ideal of master planning seen as privacy/closure vs. openness/mixing 386
illusionary 107 private goods 145
planning movements, and the city 52 private governance regimes 271B
planning practices, contemporary 113–14 private Internet systems 255
planning schemes (major physical), and glocal private sector, participation in infrastructure
bypass 171 151, 152–61
planning and urban policy practice, privatisation 99, 149, 156, 157–8, 202, 296;
representation of spaces 416–17 ending subsidies 233; of the public realm,
plazas and atria 259–61 Johannesburg 281; UK infrastructure 95
policing, proactive 268B privatism: enclosure and self-sufficiency 72; in
political economy perspective 191–4 gated enclaves 267
political issues, of the ideal city 409 production, distribution and consumption, use
politics of exclusion 384 of expanding networks 40–1
polycentric cities, and the car 118 profits, short-term 242
poor: and black, of little concern in Silicon public goods 145–6, 351; criteria for 80
Valley 336–7; hardship for 103 public mixing, and strategies of resistance 392–9
Pope, A.: cities 407; freeways and coarsening of public spaces: attempts at social control of
the urban fabric 109B; grid erosion 232–3; for corporate workers 322;
229–30B; impact of the parallel skywalk and disciplinary efforts ineffective 393–4;
tunnel city 259; laddered flow, path to urban privatised 394; quasi-public 232
closure 249–50; spatial inundation 230B public subsidies, for TGV networks 369
population, tenured, casualised or structurally public utilities, seen as essential to civilised life
excluded 221 78–9
post-communist states 99; infrastructure public and welfare services 289–90
coverage and performance 161, 162, 164 ‘public works’ 20
post-Fordism, and democratisation 410 public–private, binary separation of 124
postmodern metropolis 110 Pudong redevelopment area, Shanghai 178P,
postmodernism 135; transition to 123 349–50, 421P
 INDEX / 474

racism/sexism, CCTV control rooms 263–4 liberalised infrastructure markets 236–7; and
rail networks: fast, integration with airports unbundled infrastructure networks 228–9,
367–9; premium, construction of 170, see 229–32B
also Heathrow Express rail link secessionary living, international examples
re-regulation 99, 102 271–84
real estate, Internet-ready 332 secessionary networked spaces 222–32, 419
regional blocs, emergence of 95 security, Johannesburg enclaves 281
regulation 148; attempted, public spaces 393–4; security infrastructure, smart 285, 286
economic, reduced in USA 159B; local and segmentation 173; of an existing infrastructure
national 397–8 network 169–70; concept of 141; and
reindustrialisation, partial 344–5 delegated infrastructure 153; of integrated
relational urban theory 209–11B, 214; terminal networks 174–5; of markets 239; of mass
architectures and zero defect enclosures markets 174
207–8B segregation, enforced 247
reliability: of glocal infrastructure 173; services 288; for selected users 174, 237;
important in infrastructure 148, 149 unbundling of 237
remote control 186 sewage, unbundling options 166
‘renucleation’, of work, home and Shanghai 387, see also Jinqiao Export Processing
neighbourhood 14 Zone, Shanghai; Pudong redevelopment
resistance 104; and the daily life of the city area, Shanghai
395–6; and politics of representation 396 shanty towns see informal settlements
resource extraction, infrastructure for supplied shopping malls 264–5
by colonial power 83 short-term profits 242
retrofitting, of parallel networks 168–9 SiJoRi (Singapore/Johor/Riau) growth
revenue streams, predictable 199–200 triangle: Batam Island, spaces of splintered
risk assessment, project-by-project 97 segregation 347B; in-migration and squatter
rivalry 145–6 settlement construction 391; as a
road transport telematics 250–1, 250 regionalised division of labour 346–7B
roads: laddered 273; and the ‘road place’ 119, Silicon Valley, California, poor and black of
see also urban highways little concern 336–7
roadscapes, divisive 196 Siliconia Web site 334–5
Robins, K., the future global city 405–6 Singapore 82–3, 336; electronic road pricing
Rose, M., decentralisation in the USA 71 318; SiJoRi as regionalised division of labour
Rostow, W., economic development model 84 for 346–7B
rural–urban migration 87 Skeates, R., maintenance of parallel perspectives
Russia, systems decay and collapse 3, 26, 247
300–1B skywalk systems 4, 37, 169; and atria 256-9:
Rybczynski, W., modern networked house 72 (skywalk cities 257, 258, 259)
smart buildings 322, 323
San Francisco: backlash against gentrification by smart cards 346B
dot-commers 330–2, 331; Multimedia Gulch smart electronic systems 199, 200; prepayment
district 330 meters 298–9B
Santiago, Chile 366 smart homes/condominiums 274B, 284–7
São Paulo 374; extremes of wealth and poverty smart infrastructures 199
282B; fortified enclaves in 282–3B; intense smart routers 256
infrastructural investment 327; the ultimate social bias(es) 11; of infrastructural change
bypass, helicopter commuting 283B 194–6, 297, 298–300B
seaports, major, delinking from hinterlands 360 social control, non-belonging groups 232–3
secession 382; beyond the spaces of 287-301; social democratic welfarist consensus 123
(strategies 268-71B); leads to fear of mixing social polarisation 220, 221, 331–2, 383
383; political and social responses to 396–7 social redistribution, withdrawn 221, 234
secessionary enclaves 222, 390; and the social welfare, neoliberalism triumph 235
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social/cultural movements, resistance to 387–403; placed in a wider context 384–7;

splintering urbanism 394–5 public space and social control 232–3;
society 73, 74; capitalist, reliant on large reproblematising of infrastructure networks
technical systems 180–1 88; and social control of public spaces
socio-cultural change, reshaping cities and 232–3; and the spaces of democracy 301–3
regions 104–5 squatter settlements 277–8, 279, 284, 391, see
socioeconomic enclaves 386–7, 389 also informal settlements
socioeconomic groups: affluent: (homes as standardisation, long path towards 40–2
secure sanctuaries and hubs 285-6; ICTs and standardised infrastructure network 40, 41
the city 244-8); marginalised 262B states, changing territorialities of 417–18
sociology 17–18; of communication, failed 17 stealth buildings 208B
sociotechnical assemblies/’machinic complexes’ streets 53, 119, 170, 400; downtown,
31 disappearance of discrete space 256;
sociotechnical constructions 190 mimicked by plazas 260–1; residualisation of
sociotechnologies, urban, as control rights 120–1, 259; and sewers 53–5; symbolic
415–16 nature of 256; traditional, marginalised by
Soria y Mata, A., proposed linear city 65 highway growth 121; urban, privatised and
South Africa 7P, 233, 296–7; gated self-contained 4
communities 379P; neo-apartheid streetscapes: secessionary 262–3B; splintering
infrastructure policy? 297; Spatial 256–61, 261–4
Development Initiatives 342; transport suburbanisation of the centre 256–7
resistance 399–400 suburbia and the car 128B
space(s) 113, 122, 198; of flows 209B; of high- Summerton, J., large technical systems 182,
tech production and innovation 334; 183–4
increasingly fragmented 203; of insurgent sunk costs 147, see also capital, sunk
citizenship 399–400; low-income, options superblock development 321
for non-access to water networks 131–2B; supermodernity, logistical switching centres of
redundant, re-infrastructuring of 101; 122
remaining in cities 393; of seduction 220, supply-chain management 358
227, 249, 301; tyranny of to be overcome surveillance 173; in gated communities 273;
42; ultra-secure 372, see also marginalised practices in CCTV control rooms 263–4;
spaces, fortressing of; premium networked technologies used by social movements and
spaces; public spaces; urban spaces activists 399
spaces and realms, public, becoming increasingly Swyngedouw, E: economic and cultural
problematic 136 inequality 195–6; on marginality 195
spatial barriers, local scale 356 Sydney, Darling Harbour complex 270B
spatial imagination, and the splintering
metropolis 406 Tanzania, transport networks, not helpful 130B
spatial inundation 230B tariffs: distance-independent 100; rebalancing of
spatial scales 197; breaking tyranny of 411 235
spatial segregation 219, 383 tax burden 409
Special Economic Zones 122 technical collapse 23–5
specialist users, provision of quality supplies for technical networks, inclusionary/ exclusionary
169–70 nature of 186
spillovers 390–2 technical and social, breaking down a priori
splintered metropolis, towards a spatial distinctions between 185
imagination for 405–6 technological determinism 21–2, 106B
splintering urbanism 35, 352, 382, 385, technological innovations, and network
413–15; comparative urban and cultural unbundling 139–41
politics of 418–19; contemporary shift technological networks, Western cities 41
towards 215; dangers of 383–4; defined 33; technological optimism 45–6
and infrastructural unbundling 220; limits of Technology Foresight 106B
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technology(ies) 135, 213; appropriate 140–1, toll goods 146

159; intermediate 134; networked, and topological connection 120, 120, 189
urban utopias 64–5B; new: (and Toronto, Canada, electronic toll road 253B
infrastructural unbundling 139-44; traditional and informal settlements,
supporting virtual network bypass 173-4); populations ignored/declared illegal 83
socially biased configuration 108B, 297, traffic flows, exploding, management of 122
298–300B trains à grande vitesse see TGV rail links
technopoles 333–9; networked, construction of transactional generated information (TGI) 241
122; in peripheral and developing world transnational corporations 91–2, 95, 347B; and
cities 337–9 tax avoidance 409; use export processing
technopolis cities, modular 337, 338 zones 363
Teesside airport 359 transport 20, 166, 169, 172–3; and the
telecom hotels, customisation of 370–1 gendering of the modern city 127–8B; and
telecommunications grids, investment in 96 the splintering metropolis 290–1; urban, and
telecommunications industry alliances 98, 98, infrastructure planning 105–7B; virtual
100 network unbundling 143
telecommunications networks 139, 142, 202, transport geography 17
357B; City of London 318–20B; UK, transport networks 87–8B, 129–30B, 290–1
segmentation of the infrastructure 144, 144; transport planning: modern 106–7B; and policy,
value-added services 140 feminist critiques 127–8B
telecommunications sector 160B, 170, 172; tunnel effects 201–2, 201, 213, 358, 365, 374;
cherry-picking in newly liberalised markets bring valued spaces and places closer 307
236, 294B; combining global connections
and local disconnections 313–16; UK 75, 76, 169, 235; back office spaces in
marketability of unbundled services 164; and peripheral regions 353, 354–5B; bank
virtual bypass 174 branches, withdrawn from inner cities 248–9;
telecommunities 275B electricity:( development of generating
telemarketing 357B capacity 81; electrical backwardness 79;
telephone networks: cross-subsidisation in 51B; multiplier effect of extended grid 72; vertical
deterioration in poor areas 294B segmentation in infrastructure 141-2, 142);
telephones: uniting the nation 74, 75; northern industrial cities 305; prepayment
unphoned may also mean unbanked 294B; meters 171; private town centre management
and urban change 50–1B strategies 263–4; (‘targets’ develop evasion
terminal architectures 208B tactics 395); programme of infrastructure
terrorist attacks 207B privatisation 95, 95; re-emergence of private
TGV rail links 367, 368–9 streets 271; shift from uniplex metropolis to
theme parks, shopping malls and urban resort multiplex urban region 204, 205; Slough, an
complexes 264–7 e-commerce distribution hub 371; socially
‘third way’ politics 384 biased configuration of technology 297,
Thrift, N., technology and its wider contexts 298–300B; South West Water, call-line-
185 identification and account details 241–2;
time, a multiple phenomenon 203 telecomms sector, segmentation of 144, 144;
time and space 189, 203, 204; management of use of parallel infrastructure networks 169;
40; multiple meanings 416, 417; problems utilities 6, 240
with (Latour) 188; relational perspective Ulysses network 317
213–14; shaped by architecture 32 unbundling options 164–6
time zone differences and seamless working 355 underinvestment, in urban structure 97–8
time–space compression 194, 195, 213 Underneath New York, H. Granick, Sullivan’s
time–space demands, of the powerful 412 introduction 19–20
Tokyo 313; artificial platform cities 323, 324; UNDP 401; Internet creating parallel
new complexes 323 communications systems 294–5B
Tokyo Teleport Town 323 universal service obligations 81
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urban 410–11; contemporary sense of 302–3 urban infrastructure networks 11, 13–14; for
urban boundaries, discipline attempts 320–1B the colonial metropolis 82–3; expansion of
urban change, and telephones 50–1B household access to 68, 69; and Fordist
urban cohesion 52 production 66–8; invisible 19–20, 112;
urban consumption, networked, construction of opened to urban research 34
66–72 urban landscapes 41, 71, 114–23, 407; in the
urban control zones, large 266–7 age of extremes 220–33; emerging 16;
urban cores 2; colonial 82; networked, eclipsed laddered 109B
by urban peripheries 116–17; old, urban life 302, 396–7; contemporary, a
reconstructing corporate leisure spaces in conceptual understanding 410–13;
265–6; traditional, swamped by polynuclear dependence on networked infrastructures
urban regions 121–2, see also global city 23–30; modern, and images of speed, light
cores and power 42
urban democratisation 406–10 urban location, defined by topological
urban design practices, and secession 268 connection 120, 120
urban development plans, and integrated urban megaprojects 223–6
infrastructure 63B urban order, and infrastructure networks 12
urban development/planning agencies 310 urban panopticism, limits of 395–6
urban dream, modern or postmodern 388 urban peripheries: developing world 376–7;
urban economic development strategies 310 and increasing dominance of the car culture
urban economies, local, disintegrating 305 117; ‘liquefaction’ of urban structure
urban enclaves, teleport town style 323 115–16
urban engineers 44 urban places, as ‘translocalities’ 35
urban fabric 206, 230B; porous 216 urban planning: collapse of the comprehensive
urban fragmentation 14, 196, 215, 216; and ideal 103–14; (crises of inflexibility 104–5,
infrastructural unbundling 189–90; through 105–7B); and the development of enclaves
motorisation 119–20 110, 111, 112–14; limitation of binary
urban future, dynamic 47, 48, 49, 50–1B dualisms 107, 108–9B; and practice, ways
urban governance 310; glocal 419 forward 413–17
urban highway programmes, urban coherence urban planning and development agencies,
vs. urban fragmentation 108–9B effects of 227–8
urban highways 119, 249, 291, 328B; premium urban planning, modern: coherence and order
252, 253-5B; (entirely commodified 251); imposed 124; enclave construction and
privately funded lanes 169, 170; seamless global economic integration 112–14;
connections to shopping complexes 269B; neglects views of ‘others’ 111; for smaller,
segmented 174; smart space 5, 250; social inward-looking projects 112; supports
biases of design 109B; tolled 350–1; urban fragmentation and social exclusion 111;
coherence vs. urban fragmentation 108–9B, theories and practices 49, 52-65;
111; and urban partitioning 228–9, (Haussmann’s ideas gave essential
229–32B; vertical segregation 276, see also foundation 59; and the unitary networked
freeways city 62, 63-5B)
urban infrastructural islands, regulated urban planning movements 41–2, 88, 92
interconnection and extension of 41 urban polarisation 419; and the unphoned
urban infrastructure 9, 97, 175–7, 214, 309; 293–4B
capitalist 179; (changing political economies urban political imaginary, new, and tiny
of 190-202; spatial political economies of empowerments 407–8
213-14); the crisis 92–3, 93–4B; urban politics: of difference, support for 408;
development and governance, changing nineteenth century 40
political economies of 94–103; glocal, urban redevelopment schemes, mixed use 321
economic players in construction of urban reform, and the technological sublime
309–12; and the rise of the urban periphery 43–7, 48, 50–1B
115–17 urban regions, policy implementation 309
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urban research, challenges to 417–20 highways 169; real estate customised with
urban social conflict 330–2 ‘global connectivity’ 335–6; Seniornet
urban space–time 389 project 401; social bias in New York highway
urban spaces 118, 341–2B, 389; disfigured design 108–9B; technological optimism in
287–8; fractured by planners 108, 108–9B; 45–6; value of roads and canals 43; virtual
male and female 62; second layer of 306–7; segmentation of the highway infrastructure
support for virtual shopping 371 143, 143; Washington, DC, segmented in
urban structure, results of liquefaction 115–16 lifestyle communities 240–1, 241
Urban Studies 182; infrastructure networks the user profiles 174, 199, 239
‘Cinderella of’ 9, 18–22 users 170–1; most and least profitable 174;
urban, the, an all devouring monster 121–2 segregated and categorised 237
urban transformations, and unbundling utilities: disconnections fall with prepayment
infrastructure 166–75 meters 299B; Haussmann’s plans for Paris
urban vision, new 302 54, 55, 56; long term impact of social
urban–regional multiplex 204–5 dumping 300B
urbanisation 380, 410; a disjointed pattern of utility grids, multiplying 6
development 228; peripheral, bundled new utility providers: cherry-picking the affluent
town complexes 276–84; USA, and the 287; role of north-east England 344–5
extension of infrastructure 59–60 utility supplies, public local goods 8–9
urbanism 8, 404P; and architecture 18; new utopian urban visionaries 64–5B
urbanism movement 413–15
urbanism, contemporary: asserting publicness of valued users and places 176, 213
393; cyborg readings 187–8B; mediating vendor and customer asymmetry 251
networks 10–12 virtual network bypass 167, 167, 173–5
urbanity, redefined 208B virtual network competition 175, 200
US Immigration and Naturalization Service Visteon voice-operated Internet system 231,
Passenger Accelerated Service System 231–2B
(INSPASS) 3, 365
USA 63B, 74, 75, 117, 235, 292–3B; and the Wall A., the future of architecture 416
automobile 229–32B; civic networking water 284B, 345; as a city cleansing agent 56;
movement 401–2; ‘common interest dualised systems of water consumption,
developments’ 272–6; Congrès developing cities 296–7; foggy geometry of
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne urban water systems 57–9; privatisation and
(CIAM) group 60–1; cyberwarfare 28; e- cherry-picking 233; and sewerage:
commerce distribution hubs 371; effects of (domestication of the urban body 55–7;
environmental pressure 133–4; electronically value of 44); wealthy users benefit more from
tolled private highways 253–4B; failure of subsidies 132
modern infrastructure planning 117; figured water infrastructure 160B; in developing cities
and disfigured cities 210–11B; gated 130, 131–2B
enclaves/communities 272–6; gentrification water and sanitation crisis, global 131B
by dot-commers 330; geographical water sector: delegated infrastructure:
patchwork of special districts 289–90; (contractual arrangement possible 156,
hospital cleaners unable to access health 156–7; examples 154B); inflated charges of
services 4–5; lack of city planning 227–8; water retailers 297
land area devoted to cars 117–18; liberalised water and waste sectors 170; glocal bypass 172;
infrastructure in 159B; master-planned, unbundling options 166
gated communities 272–6; New Deal wealth levels, rural-urban differences 129
initiative 74, 77; new urbanism movement, Web server management companies 370
environmental determinism of 413–15; welfare states 102–3; in crisis 91
obsolescence and physical decay of urban West Edmonton Mall, Alberta 265
infrastructure 93-4B; (causes of 94B); women: expansion of travel needs 128B; as
postmodern centres 260; privately funded ‘housewives’ 69–71; invisibility of 125;
 INDEX / 479

mobility restricted 127–8B; as users of the Wright, Frank Lloyd 12, 64B
new technology 126B
World Bank, funding water and sanitation xenophobic enclaves 109B
programme for low-income urban people
160B zero defect enclosures 208B
WorldCom city grids 317, 381B zoning, and the urban development plan 63B