Results by title

32 books match the query 'Infrastructure'

cover of Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism: Switzerland, 1800–1900

Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism

Switzerland, 1800–1900

Mischa Suter

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

[more]
cover of Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital

Biomedicine in an Unstable Place

Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital

Alice Street

Duke University Press, 2014

Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is the story of people's struggle to make biomedicine work in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea. It is a story encompassing the history of hospital infrastructures as sites of colonial and postcolonial governance, the simultaneous production of Papua New Guinea as a site of global medical research and public health, and people's encounters with urban institutions and biomedical technologies. In Papua New Guinea, a century of state building has weakened already inadequate colonial infrastructures, and people experience the hospital as a space of institutional, medical, and ontological instability.

In the hospital's clinics, biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze. That struggle is entangled with attempts by doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to external others—to kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers—as socially recognizable and valuable persons. Here hospital infrastructures emerge as relational technologies that are fundamentally fragile but also offer crucial opportunities for making people visible and knowable in new, unpredictable, and powerful ways.
[more]
cover of Cinema as Infrastructure: Visuality, Power, and the Latin American South

Cinema as Infrastructure

Visuality, Power, and the Latin American South

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

University of Texas Press, 2027

Examining the interplay of visuality and infrastructure in Latin American films.

Images do far more than we realize. They do not simply represent or depict; they run our world. Surveillance cameras and drones, medical imaging, social media platforms, market-data visualization––these and other technologies make the image an infrastructure of power, a tool for organizing and governing, impressing labor and extracting value.

Adriana Johnson draws on the medium of film to sensitize us to the logics of visuality as a technology of power. In particular, Latin American cinema presents a key site for both crystallizing and retreating from these logics. Through close readings of Argentine, Paraguayan, and Brazilian movies—including the documentary Bus 174, the dystopian sci-fi The Aerial,and the farcical The Gold Bug—Johnson shows how filmmakers can amplify or attenuate the infrastructural reach of visuality. They also reveal visuality’s otherwise-submerged power, and even engage in something like piracy: hacking into, rerouting, and deconstituting the workings of visual infrastructures. A deeply insightful and theoretically rich account, Cinema as Infrastructure reframes the political stakes of filmmaking in an era when visual forms have become means of production and order.

[more]
cover of City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago

City Water, City Life

Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago

Carl Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2013

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.

[more]
cover of Concentrated Corporate Ownership

Concentrated Corporate Ownership

Edited by Randall K. Morck

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Standard economic models assume that many small investors own firms. This is so in most large U.S. firms, but wealthy individuals or families generally hold controlling blocks in smaller U.S. firms and in all firms in most other countries. Given this, the lack of theoretical and empirical work on tightly held firms is surprising.

What corporate governance problems arise in tightly held firms? How do these differ from corporate governance problems in widely held firms? How do control blocks arise and how are they maintained? How does concentrated ownership affect economic growth? How should we regulate tightly held firms?
Drawing together leading scholars from law, economics, and finance, this volume examines the economic and legal issues of concentrated ownership and their impact on a shifting global economy.
[more]
cover of Coordination and Information: Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise

Coordination and Information

Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise

Edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Daniel M. G. Raff

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Case studies that examine how firms coordinate economic activity in the face of asymmetric information—information not equally available to all parties—are the focus of this volume.

In an ideal world, the market would be the optimal provider of coordination, but in the real world of incomplete information, some activities are better coordinated in other ways. Divided into three parts, this book addresses coordination within firms, at the borders of firms, and outside firms, providing a picture of the overall incidence and logic of economic coordination. The case studies—drawn from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the modern business enterprise was evolving, address such issues as the relationship between coordination mechanisms and production techniques, the logic of coordination in industrial districts, and the consequences of regulation for coordination.

Continuing the work on information and organization presented in the influential Inside the Business Enterprise, this book provides material for business historians and economists who want to study the development of the dissemination of information and the coordination of economic activity within and between firms.
[more]
cover of Economic Analysis and Infrastructure Investment

Economic Analysis and Infrastructure Investment

Edited by Edward L. Glaeser and James M. Poterba

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Policy makers often call for increased spending on infrastructure, which can encompass a broad range of investments, from roads and bridges to digital networks that will expand access to high-speed broadband. Some point to the near-term macroeconomic benefits, such as job creation, associated with infrastructure spending; others point to the long-term effects of such spending on productivity and economic growth. 

Economic Analysis and Infrastructure Investment explores the links between infrastructure investment and economic outcomes, analyzing key economic issues in the funding and management of infrastructure projects. It includes new research on the short-run stimulus effects of infrastructure spending, develops new estimates of the stock of US infrastructure capital, and explores incentive aspects of public-private partnerships with particular attention to their allocation of risk. The volume provides a reference for researchers seeking to study infrastructure issues and for policymakers tasked with determining the appropriate level and allocation of infrastructure spending.
[more]
cover of Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome

Engineering the Eternal City

Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome

Pamela O. Long

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before.
 
This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.
[more]
cover of Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Floating Power

Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Gökçe Günel

Duke University Press, 2026

Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Gökçe Günel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Günel uses the Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.
[more]
cover of From Environmental Loss to Resistance: Infrastructure and the Struggle for Justice in North America

From Environmental Loss to Resistance

Infrastructure and the Struggle for Justice in North America

Michael Loadenthal

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

North Americans have reached a socioenvironmental tipping point where social transformation has become necessary to secure a stable and desirable future. As hurricanes destroy coastal areas that once hosted schools and homes, petroleum refineries choke nearby communities and their parks, and pipeline construction threatens water rights for indigenous peoples, communities are left to determine how to best manage and mitigate environmental loss.

In this new collection, a range of contributors—among them researchers, practitioners, organizers, and activists—explore the ways in which people counter or cope with feelings of despair, leverage action for positive change, and formulate pathways to achieve environmental justice goals. These essays pay particular attention to issues of race, class, economic liberalization, and geography; place contemporary environmental struggles in a critical context that emphasizes justice, connection, and reconciliation; and raise important questions about the challenges and responses that concern those pursuing environmental justice.

Contributors include the volume editors, Carol J. Adams, Randall Amster, Jan Inglis, Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Zoë Roller, and Michael Truscello.
[more]
cover of Great Lakes Lumber on the Great Plains: The Laird, Norton Lumber Company In South Dakota

Great Lakes Lumber on the Great Plains

The Laird, Norton Lumber Company In South Dakota

John N. Vogel

University of Iowa Press, 1992

Focusing on the Plains territory of east central South Dakota as well as the Great Lakes lumber-producing region of Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley, John Vogel carefully and thoroughly examines the pattern and process by which lumber reached South Dakota. The Great Dakota Boom of 1878 to 1887 and the Laird, Norton Lumber Company of Winona, Minnesota, provide the basis for his engrossing book.

The westward expansion of the railroad and the continuing settlement of the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century allowed the lumber companies of Minnesota and Wisconsin to send their boards and beams and fenceposts and millwork to a market characterized by great demand and small supply. Laird, Norton followed settlers across southern Dakota as they arrived on the trains. The eastern portions of Dakota were settled first, and thus early lumberyards were found there; as settlement moved west, so did the lumberyards. Beyond its all-important function of distribution, the railroad forced Laird, Norton to alter the very structure of its operation. Experimenting with nearly complete vertical integration, the company pioneered organizational models that would serve significant purposes as frontier America—a republic of wood—solidified itself economically and culturally.

[more]
cover of Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968–2021

Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968–2021

Christian Long

Intellect Books, 2024

Lessons from society’s frameworks at the end of the world.

Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism, giving the audience a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds. In this book, Christian B. Long argues that if the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world, the presence of infrastructure, whether old or retrofitted or new, offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.

Film imaginings of energy, transportation, water, waste, and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.
 
[more]
cover of Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene

Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene

Kregg Hetherington, editor

Duke University Press, 2019

Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future.

Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehlmann, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Wakefield, Austin Zeiderman
[more]
cover of Lahore in Motion: Infrastructure, History and Belonging in Urban Pakistan

Lahore in Motion

Infrastructure, History and Belonging in Urban Pakistan

Edited by Ammara Maqsood, Chris Moffat, and Fizzah Sajjad

University College London, 2025

Follow Lahore’s Orange Line metro corridor to discover the tensions between development and displacement, progress and preservation, in one of the world’s great metropolises.

Lahore is a city in constant flux, and the frictions that characterize urban life are vividly apparent along the tracks of its first metro rail corridor, opened in 2020. Lahore in Motion follows the Orange Line’s 27-kilometer path, bringing together reflections from academics, activists, artists, and architects on the ways that infrastructure shapes urban belonging. The book offers a novel methodology for assessing how this mega-project has reconfigured neighborhoods, sparked new desires for modernity, and deepened existing social differences while destabilizing others.

Each chapter unfolds through the lens of a particular metro stop, providing intimate glimpses into the frictions generated by development where connectivity and fragmentation, aspiration and dispossession collide. Engaging with broader debates on urban transformation in the Global South, Lahore in Motion goes against familiar narratives of top-down development, revealing a city animated by resistance and reinventing itself in response. An eye-opening, beautifully written work for all interested in urbanism, infrastructure, politics, and the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

[more]
cover of Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries

Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries

Edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries draws out the underlying economics in business history by focusing on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or less effectively, which can have major implications for how competition works.

The first three essays in this volume explore techniques firms have used to both manage information to create valuable asymmetries and to otherwise suppress unwelcome competition. The next three focus on the ways in which firms have built special capabilities over time, capabilities that have been both sources of competitive advantage and resistance to new opportunities. The last two extend the notion of learning from the level of firms to that of nations. The collection as a whole builds on the previous two volumes to make the connection between information structure and product market outcomes in business history.


[more]
cover of Making a Green Machine: The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling

Making a Green Machine

The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling

Jørgensen, Finn Arne

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Consider an empty bottle or can, one of the hundreds of billions of beverage containers that are discarded worldwide every year. Empty containers have been at the center of intense political controversies, technological innovation processes, and the modern environmental movement. Making a Green Machine examines the development of the Scandinavian beverage container deposit-refund system, which has the highest return rates in the world, from 1970 to present. Finn Arne Jørgensen investigates the challenges the system faced when exported internationally and explores the critical role of technological infrastructures and consumer convenience in modern recycling. His comparative framework charts the complex network of business and political actors involved in the development of the reverse vending machine (RVM) and bottle deposit legislation to better understand the different historical trajectories empty beverage containers have taken across markets, including the U.S. The RVM has served as more than a hole in the wall--it began simply as a tool for grocers who had to handle empty refillable glass bottles, but has become a green machine to redeem the empty beverage container, helping both business and consumers participate in environmental actions.
[more]
cover of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations

Media Backends

Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations

Edited by Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander de Ridder

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systems

Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the algorithmic backends at Netflix and Spotify, Google’s hyperscale data centers, and video-on-demand services in India.

A fascinating foray into an expanding landscape of media studies, Media Backends illuminates the behind-the-screen processes influencing our digital lives. 

Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Philippe Bouquillion, Jonathan Cohn, Faithe J. Day, Sander De Ridder, Fatima Gaw, Christine Ithurbide, Anne Kaun, Amanda Lagerkvist, Alexis Logsdon, Stine Lomborg, Tim Markham, Vicki Mayer, Rahul Mukherjee, Kaarina Nikunen, Lisa Parks, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Philipp Seuferling, Ranjit Singh, Jacek Smolicki, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Matilda Tudor, Julia Velkova, and Zala Volcic

[more]
cover of Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond

Oil Beach

How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond

Christina Dunbar-Hester

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Can the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to oil, capital, and trade?
 
San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in the world—some forty percent of containerized imports to the United States pass through this so-called America’s Port. It is also ecologically rich. Built atop a land- and waterscape of vital importance to wildlife, the heavily industrialized Los Angeles Harbor contains estuarial wetlands, the LA River mouth, and a marine ecology where colder and warmer Pacific Ocean waters meet. In this compelling interdisciplinary investigation, award-winning author Christina Dunbar-Hester explores the complex relationships among commerce, empire, environment, and the nonhuman life forms of San Pedro Bay over the last fifty years—a period coinciding with the era of modern environmental regulation in the United States. The LA port complex is not simply a local site, Dunbar-Hester argues, but a node in a network that enables the continued expansion of capitalism, propelling trade as it drives the extraction of natural resources, labor violations, pollution, and other harms. Focusing specifically on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Oil Beach reveals how logistics infrastructure threatens ecologies as it circulates goods and capital—and helps us to consider a future where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are not in violent tension.
[more]
cover of Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond

Oil Beach

How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond

Christina Dunbar-Hester

University of Chicago Press, 2023

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Can the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to oil, capital, and trade?
 
San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in the world—some forty percent of containerized imports to the United States pass through this so-called America’s Port. It is also ecologically rich. Built atop a land- and waterscape of vital importance to wildlife, the heavily industrialized Los Angeles Harbor contains estuarial wetlands, the LA River mouth, and a marine ecology where colder and warmer Pacific Ocean waters meet. In this compelling interdisciplinary investigation, award-winning author Christina Dunbar-Hester explores the complex relationships among commerce, empire, environment, and the nonhuman life forms of San Pedro Bay over the last fifty years—a period coinciding with the era of modern environmental regulation in the United States. The LA port complex is not simply a local site, Dunbar-Hester argues, but a node in a network that enables the continued expansion of capitalism, propelling trade as it drives the extraction of natural resources, labor violations, pollution, and other harms. Focusing specifically on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Oil Beach reveals how logistics infrastructure threatens ecologies as it circulates goods and capital—and helps us to consider a future where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are not in violent tension.
[more]
cover of Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An Industrial Epic

Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District

An Industrial Epic

W. David Lewis

University of Alabama Press, 1994

"A masterpiece that deserves to be ranked with such seminal and influential works as Cash’s Mind of the South." —Edwin T. Layton Jr., author of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Profession

This pathbreaking book tells the dramatic story of a unique manufacturing complex and the city that it helped to create. The events recounted and  interpreted by W. David Lewis are of more than local or regional significance. The rise of Sloss furnaces and Birmingham epitomized the emergence of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.  Similarly, the closing of a once-profitable ironmaking installation amid social and technological changes that convulsed Birmingham nine decades after the city's founding typified challenges that were facing America at the dawn of the postindustrial age.

Above all,  Sloss Furnaces resonates with the class of competition and the frenetic energy with which southerners joined other Americans in a rush to transform a continent after a fratricidal drive for independence had failed. The sweeping narrative that Lewis has produced amply justifies its subtitle, An Industrial Epic.

[more]
cover of The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment

The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure

Race, Affect, Environment

Edited by Kelly M. Rich, Nicole M. Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A critical reading of the unstable structures that organize biological and social life

This timely and radically interdisciplinary volume uncovers the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure. From roads and bridges to harbors and canals, infrastructure is conventionally understood as the public works that allow for the circulation of capital. Yet this naturalized concept of infrastructure, driven by capital’s restless expansion, is haunted by imperial tendencies to occupy territory, extract resources, and organize life. Infrastructure thus undergirds the living nexus of modernity in an ongoing project of racialization, affective embodiment, and environmental praxis. Rather than merely making visible infrastructure’s modes of power, however, The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure brings literary methods to bear on the interpretive terrain, reading infrastructural space and temporalities to show that their aesthetic and sensorial experience cannot be understood apart from histories of production and political economies.

Building on critical infrastructure studies in anthropology, geography, and media studies, this collection demonstrates the field’s vitality to scholars working across the humanities, including in literary, visual, and cultural studies. By querying the presumed invisibility of infrastructure’s hidden life, the volume’s contributors revitalize ongoing literary debates about reading surface and depth. How, they ask, might infrastructure and aesthetics then function as epistemic tools for rethinking each other? And what urgency do they acquire in light of current crises that bear on death, whether biological, social, or planetary?

[more]
cover of The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania

The City Electric

Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania

Michael Degani

Duke University Press, 2022

Over the last twenty years of neoliberal reform, the power supply in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s metropolis, has become less reliable even as its importance has increased. Though mobile phones, televisions, and refrigerators have flooded the city, the electricity required to run these devices is still supplied by the socialist-era energy company Tanesco, which is characterized by increased fees, aging infrastructure, and a sluggish bureaucracy. While some residents contemplate off-grid solutions, others repair, extend, or tap into the state network with the assistance of freelance electricians or moonlighting utility employees. In The City Electric Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state. Moving from the politics of generation contracts down to the street-level experience of blackouts and disconnection patrols, he reveals the logics of infrastructural modification and their effects on everyday life. As politicians, residents, electricians, and utility inspectors all redistribute flows of payment and power, they reframe the energy grid both as a technical system and as an ongoing experiment in collective interdependence.
[more]
cover of The Homeowner Ideology: Economic (F)Utility of Real Property Rights in Four African Cities

The Homeowner Ideology

Economic (F)Utility of Real Property Rights in Four African Cities

Singumbe Muyeba

University of Michigan Press, 2025

While homeownership has clear benefits among the impoverished, The Homeowner Ideology shows that the utility of real property rights as an economic resource are severely limited in sub-Saharan African cities. Although global poverty has declined since 1990, it remains widespread in Subsahara, the region with the highest proportion of the global population living in slums. Mainstream thinking in development studies is dominated by market fundamentalist neoclassical economics and the premise that ownership reduces poverty. Singumbe Muyeba contends that this neoliberal premise is flawed and unsupported by data within the African context. Muyeba argues that property rights function as structured idle capital on the formal market in African cities and the persistence of homeownership as the intervention of choice is explained by the influence of neoliberal ideology, intergenerational transfer of homeownership culture within the family, and the state’s deliberate and active support for homeownership tenure.
[more]
cover of The Organization of Industry

The Organization of Industry

George J. Stigler

University of Chicago Press, 1983

The Organization of Industry collects essays written over two decades—pieces prepared especially for this volume, previously unpublished material, and reprinted articles drawn from numerous sources, many which include additional commentary by the author. The essays are unified by George J. Stigler's careful analysis and by his clear and witty style.

In part one, Stigler examines the nature of competition and monopoly. In part two he discusses the forces that determine the size structure of industry, including barriers to entry, economics of scale, and mergers. Part three contains articles on a wide range of topics, such as profitability, delivered price systems, block booking, the economics of information, and the kinky oligopoly demand curve and rigid price. Part four offers a discussion of antitrust policy and includes Stigler's recommendations for future policy as well as an examination of the effects of past policies.

"Stigler's writings might well be subtitled 'The Joys of Doing Economics.' He, more than any other contemporary American economist, dispels the gloom surrounding economic theory. It is impossible to confront the subject treated with such humor and verve and come away still believing that economics is the dismal science."—Shirley B. Johnson, American Scholar

[more]
cover of The Problem with Feeding Cities: The Social Transformation of Infrastructure, Abundance, and Inequality in America

The Problem with Feeding Cities

The Social Transformation of Infrastructure, Abundance, and Inequality in America

Andrew Deener

University of Chicago Press, 2020

For most people, grocery shopping is a mundane activity. Few stop to think about the massive, global infrastructure that makes it possible to buy Chilean grapes in a Philadelphia supermarket in the middle of winter. Yet every piece of food represents an interlocking system of agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, logistics, retailing, and nonprofits that controls what we eat—or don’t.

The Problem with Feeding Cities is a sociological and historical examination of how this remarkable network of abundance and convenience came into being over the last century. It looks at how the US food system transformed from feeding communities to feeding the entire nation, and it reveals how a process that was once about fulfilling basic needs became focused on satisfying profit margins. It is also a story of how this system fails to feed people, especially in the creation of food deserts. Andrew Deener shows that problems with food access are the result of infrastructural failings stemming from how markets and cities were developed, how distribution systems were built, and how organizations coordinate the quality and movement of food. He profiles hundreds of people connected through the food chain, from farmers, wholesalers, and supermarket executives, to global shippers, logistics experts, and cold-storage operators, to food bank employees and public health advocates. It is a book that will change the way we see our grocery store trips and will encourage us all to rethink the way we eat in this country.
[more]
cover of The Promise of Infrastructure

The Promise of Infrastructure

Nikhal Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, editors

Duke University Press, 2018

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.

A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar

Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler
[more]
cover of The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America

The Rise of the Public Authority

Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America

Gail Radford

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In the late nineteenth century, public officials throughout the United States began to experiment with new methods of managing their local economies and meeting the infrastructure needs of a newly urban, industrial nation. Stymied by legal and financial barriers, they created a new class of quasi-public agencies called public authorities. Today these entities operate at all levels of government, and range from tiny operations like the Springfield Parking Authority in Massachusetts, which runs thirteen parking lots and garages, to mammoth enterprises like the Tennessee Valley Authority, with nearly twelve billion dollars in revenues each year.
 
In The Rise of the Public Authority, Gail Radford recounts the history of these inscrutable agencies, examining how and why they were established, the varied forms they have taken, and how these pervasive but elusive mechanisms have molded our economy and politics over the past hundred years.
 

[more]
cover of Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination

Tourism Geopolitics

Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination

Edited by Mary Mostafanezhad, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Roger Norum

University of Arizona Press, 2021

By the start of the century, nearly one billion international travelers were circulating the globe annually, placing tourism among the worlds’ most ubiquitous geopolitical encounters. While the COVID-19 pandemic brought the industry to a sudden halt, its geopolitical significance remained. With striking clarity, tourism desires and reinvented mobilities revealed the impermanence of Old World orders as new global alliances were forged. While scholars have critically examined tourism in the contexts of development, cultural change, and environmental crisis, much less attention has been paid to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of the world’s largest industry. This collection homes in on tourism and its geopolitical entanglements by examining its contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures. It develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life, as well as the geopolitical nature of the tourism encounter.

In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices, as well as the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters. This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.

Contributors: Sarah Becklake, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Jason Dittmer, Klaus Dodds, Jamie Gillen, Simon Halink, Jordan Hallbauer, James Igoe, Debbie Lisle, Mary Mostafanezhad, Dieter K. Müller, Roger Norum, Alessandro Rippa, Ian Rowen, Robert Saunders, Juan Francisco Salazar, Tani Sebro, Mimi Sheller, Henry Szadziewski, Vernadette Vicuña González, Emma Waterton

 
[more]
cover of Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

Unlearning the City

Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

Swati Chattopadhyay

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience.

Urban life is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid views laid down in much of urban studies theory. Chattopadhyay looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban history, Chattopadhyay provides an in-depth study of vehicular art, street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities that link the visual and spatial attributes of these popular cultural forms with the imagination and practices of urban life. She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political potential of the people inhabiting cities.

Unlearning the City uses the popular culture of Indian cities to question the dominant conception of urban infrastructure and encourage a conceptual realignment in how the city is seen, discussed, and even experienced.

[more]
cover of Urban Informality and the Built Environment: Infrastructure, Exchange and Image

Urban Informality and the Built Environment

Infrastructure, Exchange and Image

Edited by Nerea Amorós Elorduy, Nikhilesh Sinha, and Colin Marx

University College London, 2024

An innovative collection that explores how informal urban structures, from unauthorized residential areas to unregulated economic activities, shape urbanity through insights from architects, planners, political scientists, geographers, and urban theorists.

Urban Informality and the Built Environment demonstrates the value of greater and more diverse forms of engagement of built-environment disciplines with what constitutes urban informality and its politics. This collection lays forth a range of new methodologies to the study of urban informality, by exploring case studies from multiple geographies, including the creative place-making of street artists in Accra, the morphological evolution of urban Tirana, urban agriculture in la Habana, and social reproduction in Greece. Together these case studies offer ways to promote cross-fertilization between disciplines, lenses, geographies, and methodologies. Drawing on recent research by architects, planners, political scientists, geographers, and urban theorists, this book brings a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of informality and the built environment in diverse contexts.
 
[more]
cover of Worlds at the End: Los Angeles, Infrastructure, and the Apocalyptic Imagination

Worlds at the End

Los Angeles, Infrastructure, and the Apocalyptic Imagination

Pacharee Sudhinaraset

Temple University Press, 2024

Worlds at the End attends to a body of literature that renders Los Angeles’s infrastructure, or its material foundations, as central to the rise and consolidation of colonial life. Pacharee Sudhinaraset employs a women-of-color feminist methodology to examine Indigenous, Black, Asian American, and Latinx literary works about apocalypse and the end times.

Worlds at the End analyzes destruction, rupture, and continuance through texts ranging from Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, which considers racial colonial infrastructure, to the work of Diné poet Esther Belin, which illuminates how the separation between the Indian reservation and LA is part of a broader infrastructural network of termination. And she unpacks Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic novel, Parable of the Sower, where LA’s freeways and roadways are routes of forced migration, colonization, and flight.

Tearing down existing institutions that marginalize people of color and moving past them, Worlds at the End highlights the imaginaries of those subjugated, racialized, and made other, for whom modernity, freedom, and progress meant violence, brutality, and relegation to the status of devalued surplus populations. As Sudhinaraset deftly shows, the apocalypse marks moments of historical and spatial transition, offering stories of doomsdays that will give rise to resurgence and regeneration.
[more]
cover of Yali's Question: Sugar, Culture, and History

Yali's Question

Sugar, Culture, and History

Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Yali's Question is the story of a remarkable physical and social creation—Ramu Sugar Limited (RSL), a sugar plantation created in a remote part of Papua New Guinea. As an embodiment of imported industrial production, RSL's smoke-belching, steam-shrieking factory and vast fields of carefully tended sugar cane contrast sharply with the surrounding grassland. RSL not only dominates the landscape, but also shapes those culturally diverse thousands who left their homes to work there.

To understand the creation of such a startling place, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz explore the perspectives of the diverse participants that had a hand in its creation. In examining these views, they also consider those of Yali, a local Papua New Guinean political leader. Significantly, Yali features not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel—a history probed through its contrast with RSL's. The authors' disagreement with Diamond stems, not from the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made—and from an insistence that those with power be held accountable for affecting history.
[more]