Splintering Urbanism at 20 and the “Infrastructural Turn”

As the authors of the book we do, indeed, find it hard to believe that it is 20 years since Splintering Urbanism was published. We are delighted, however, to have this opportunity to use this anniversary to look back at the book’s role in the wider so-called urban “infrastructural turn” that has occurred across the humanities and social sciences in the past two decades. We would also like to offer an agenda for future urban infrastructural research. Our aim in writing Splintering Urbanism was to encourage critical social science to move beyond a view of the material, networked infrastructures sustaining urban life as technical, hidden, and taken-for-granted domains. Although in France a much healthier situation pertained, we were frustrated that debates in the Anglophone world about infrastructure tended to be partitioned off from critical urban research, to be addressed overwhelmingly within the sector-specific and techno-economic worlds of engineers and specialized policy makers. It seemed to us that the healthy debates about urban and infrastructural history then underway needed to be balanced by a dramatic growth in analyses of the contemporary dynamics of urban and infrastructural change. Indeed, we made the bold accusation in the book that networked urban services like communications, energy, water, and mobility services remained the “Cinderella” of critical urban research: that urban economic and social geography, especially, featured burgeoning debates about all aspects of more “point-specific” urban services, those that were not organized through complex assemblages of networked technologies strung out across, within, and between places. Full of the boldness of (relative!) youth, we therefore sought in Splintering Urbanism to be ambitious: to problematize the material connectivities sustaining urban life. Indeed, we wanted to demonstrate that an explicit focus on networked materialities, and the many mobilities and connectivities that they sustain, actually provides much-needed analytical purchase to help understand the complex and fast-moving dynamics linking urbanism and globalization, understandings that might cut-across the always problematic partitions within urban debates across advanced capitalist, post-communist, and postcolonial/Global South(s) contexts. We thus aimed in the book to show how the “relational” turn then underway in social and urban theory needed to be extended to encompass the ways in which multiple, networked connections were continually enrolled and invoked in the dynamic processes and