Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition [Paperback]

Steve Graham (Author), Simon Marvin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415189659 | ISBN-13: 978-0415189651 | Publication Date: July 20, 2001

Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about:
*globalization and the city
*technology and society
*urban space and urban networks
*infrastructure and the built environment
*developed, developing and post-communist worlds.
With a range of case studies, illustrations and boxed examples, from New York to Jakarta, Johannesberg to Manila and Sao Paolo to Melbourne, Splintering Urbanism demonstrates the latest social, urban and technological theories, which give us an understanding of our contemporary metropolis.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Both interesting and important. It addresses the notion of the network city in a profound way ... a promising and fruitful approach.' - Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

'Splintering Urbanism is a significant work and achievement, bringing together a tremendous amount of research on networks and urban technologies and putting them in one 'manual' or 'guide', whilst at the same time providing an authoritative view of implications and limitations of the 'splintering' process ... it should earn a position as an essential item in any up-to-date reading list.' - Urban Studies

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (July 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415189659
• ISBN-13: 978-0415189651
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #693,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Aggravating, January 5, 2005

By 

tierny - See all my reviews

This review is from: Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (Paperback)

This explores the sociopolitical causes and ramifications in the development of modern infrastructure. But due to continual stating and restating of simple points, a reader loses track of what the authors are attempting to train his attention on. With all the research the authors have done on the subject matter, you might expect that; but it could take you a year of poring over this to get the full thrust of this. It certainly isn't concise.

The books real problem is the writing style. The text is a hybrid of bureaucratic and academic writing, defensively constructed to obviate charges of ambiguity or assumption. Here's a typical sentence:
"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."

You can go a few pages before encountering a sentence that hasn't been overworked like this. Torpid.

The other big problem is it's design. What you get out of it will depend on whether you can overcome the disruptive format. Just when you've finally bit into a passage of that writing, a new heading in boldface interrupts both the text and your concentration. This occurs once or twice a page for 400 pages. It isn't helpful. Is this a book, or is it six hundred short articles? Frequent sidebars also induce reader distraction.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars reworking urban thinking, April 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (Paperback)

Graham and Marvin change the way we look at the city. Borrowing from architecture, geography, urban planning and sociology they demonstrate how infrastructure, mobility and urban life are intertwined in messy, fragmented configurations. Splintering Urbanism illustrates the increasingly segregated city, describing the unequal access to infrastructures of energy, information and transport - where providing corporations `cherry pick' the most potentially profitable users. The books major value is its integration of a corpus of diverse theoretical and practical approaches to the urban. This book is likely to reinvent the imagining of the city for academics, planners and architects alike.