Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.