Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Rethinking Infrastructure
Download Rethinking Infrastructure full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Rethinking Infrastructure ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities by : Aaron Pinnix
Download or read book Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities written by Aaron Pinnix and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infrastructure comprises a combination of sociotechnical, political, and cultural arrangements that provide resources and services. The contributors to this volume show, in their respective fields, how infrastructures are both generative forces and the materialized products of quotidian practices that affect and guide people's lives. Organized via shared conceptual foci, this volume demonstrates infrastructuralist perspectives as an important transdisciplinary approach within the humanities.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Infrastructure for Development by : François Bourguignon
Download or read book Rethinking Infrastructure for Development written by François Bourguignon and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides profiles of over 50 countries with 54 development indicators about people, environment, economy, technology, infrastructure, trade and finance, all in one handy, pocketsized volume. A must have for anyone interested in today's development challenges in subSaharan Africa.
Book Synopsis Financing Climate Futures Rethinking Infrastructure by : OECD
Download or read book Financing Climate Futures Rethinking Infrastructure written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report is a joint effort by the OECD, UN Environment and the World Bank Group, supported by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. It focuses on how governments can move beyond the current incremental approach to climate action.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Infrastructure Design for Multi-Use Water Services by : Čedo Maksimović
Download or read book Rethinking Infrastructure Design for Multi-Use Water Services written by Čedo Maksimović and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we approach a historic tipping point in the global trend toward urbanisation – within two decades urban dwellers will increase from 49% to 60% of the planet’s population – this book identifies and addresses a critical problem: water. The editors show how cities can shift from being water consumers to resource managers, applying urban water management principles to ensure access to water and sanitation infrastructure and services; manage rainwater, wastewater, storm water drainage, and runoff pollution; control waterborne diseases and epidemics; and reduce the risk of such water-related hazards as floods, droughts and landslides. The book explores the Multiple-Use Water Services (MUS) paradigm, offering a section on the MUS approach and a means of calculating the value of MUS systems, as well as tools and resources to support decision-making. Case studies illustrate MUS in selected urban and rural contexts. Each case study breaks out the challenges, policy framework, benefits, benchmarks, lessons learned (success and failures) and potential next steps. The contributors consider the main options for applying the Multiple-Use Water Services (MUS) paradigm, breaking down its components and offering cost-benefit analyses along with challenges and considerations for both the short and long term. Also discussed are methods by which mutual interactions of water infrastructure and vegetated areas are taken into account in the synergy of spatial planning and optimised modelling of ecosystems’ performance indicators. This method of planning should make future developments cheaper to build; their users will pay lower utility bills for water, energy and heating. These developments will be more pleasant to live in and property value would likely be higher. The brief includes a section on the MUS approach and a means to calculate the value of MUS systems, as well as provides tools and resources to support decision-making. Case studies are included to illustrate MUS in selected urban and rural contexts. Each case study breaks out the challenges, policy framework, benefits, benchmarks, lessons learned (success and failures) and potential next steps.
Book Synopsis Rethinking America's Highways by : Robert W. Poole
Download or read book Rethinking America's Highways written by Robert W. Poole and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-03 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A transportation expert makes a provocative case for changing the nation’s approach to highways, offering “bold, innovative thinking on infrastructure” (Rick Geddes, Cornell University). Americans spend hours every day sitting in traffic. And the roads they idle on are often rough and potholed, with exits, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges in terrible disrepair. According to transportation expert Robert Poole, this congestion and deterioration are outcomes of the way America manages its highways. Our twentieth-century model overly politicizes highway investment decisions, short-changing maintenance and often investing in projects whose costs exceed their benefits. In Rethinking America’s Highways, Poole examines how our current model of state-owned highways came about and why it is failing to satisfy its customers. He argues for a new model that treats highways themselves as public utilities—like electricity, telephones, and water supply. If highways were provided commercially, Poole argues, people would pay for highways based on how much they used, and the companies would issue revenue bonds to invest in facilities people were willing to pay for. Arguing for highway investments to be motivated by economic rather than political factors, this book makes a carefully-reasoned and well-documented case for a new approach to highways.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Readiness by : Jeff Schlegelmilch
Download or read book Rethinking Readiness written by Jeff Schlegelmilch and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As human society continues to develop, we have increased the risk of large-scale disasters. From health care to infrastructure to national security, systems designed to keep us safe have also heightened the potential for catastrophe. The constant pressure of climate change, geopolitical conflict, and our tendency to ignore what is hard to grasp exacerbates potential dangers. How can we prepare for and prevent the twenty-first-century disasters on the horizon? Rethinking Readiness offers an expert introduction to human-made threats and vulnerabilities, with a focus on opportunities to reimagine how we approach disaster preparedness. Jeff Schlegelmilch identifies and explores the most critical threats facing the world today, detailing the dangers of pandemics, climate change, infrastructure collapse, cyberattacks, and nuclear conflict. Drawing on the latest research from leading experts, he provides an accessible overview of the causes and potential effects of these looming megadisasters. The book highlights the potential for building resilient, adaptable, and sustainable systems so that we can be better prepared to respond to and recover from future crises. Thoroughly grounded in scientific and policy expertise, Rethinking Readiness is an essential guide to this century’s biggest challenges in disaster management.
Download or read book Points and Lines written by Stan Allen and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text collates Stan Allen's writings and projects that propose architectural strategies for the contemporary city. It presents speculative texts outlining Allen's general principles with specific projects created by his office in an interplay of theory and practice. Projects include: the Cardiff Bay Opera House, Wales; the Korean-American Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Museo del Prado, Madrid; and White Columns Gallery, New York. Each project is accompanied by explanatory text as well as drawings, models, photographs and computer renderings.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Smart Urbanism by : Prince K. Guma
Download or read book Rethinking Smart Urbanism written by Prince K. Guma and published by Eburon Uitgeverij B.V.. This book was released on 2021-01-03 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Smart Urbanism is an empirical exploration of the multiple ways in which cities and infrastructures are constructed and reconstructed through ICT innovation and appropriation. Drawing on the case of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, the study explains existing infrastructure constellations through countervailing processes and rationalities in the context of splintered urbanism. In doing so, the study examines the relationship between urban plans and digital infrastructure development, place-based contexts that shape digital infrastructures, and the extent to which these infrastructures facilitate utility companies’ ambitions of extending centralized networks to new territories. It draws on the theoretical and empirical base of urban and infrastructure studies, particularly in the fields of smart urbanism, postcolonial urbanism, and Science and Technology Studies. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative research design and presents in-depth case studies that combine ethnographic methods with a thorough investigation of written sources. Ultimately, it is hoped to enhance our understanding of urban and digital possibilities, and add new insights to debates on technology and urbanity in Africa and beyond.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Power Sector Reform in the Developing World by : Vivien Foster
Download or read book Rethinking Power Sector Reform in the Developing World written by Vivien Foster and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1990s, a new paradigm for power sector reform was put forward emphasizing the restructuring of utilities, the creation of regulators, the participation of the private sector, and the establishment of competitive power markets. Twenty-five years later, only a handful of developing countries have fully implemented these Washington Consensus policies. Across the developing world, reforms were adopted rather selectively, resulting in a hybrid model, in which elements of market orientation coexist with continued state dominance of the sector. This book aims to revisit and refresh thinking on power sector reform approaches for developing countries. The approach relies heavily on evidence from the past, drawing both on broad global trends and deep case material from 15 developing countries. It is also forward looking, considering the implications of new social and environmental policy goals, as well as the emerging technological disruptions. A nuanced picture emerges. Although regulation has been widely adopted, practice often falls well short of theory, and cost recovery remains an elusive goal. The private sector has financed a substantial expansion of generation capacity; yet, its contribution to power distribution has been much more limited, with efficiency levels that can sometimes be matched by well-governed public utilities. Restructuring and liberalization have been beneficial in a handful of larger middle-income nations but have proved too complex for most countries to implement. Based on these findings, the report points to three major policy implications. First, reform efforts need to be shaped by the political and economic context of the country. The 1990s reform model was most successful in countries that had reached certain minimum conditions of power sector development and offered a supportive political environment. Second, countries found alternative institutional pathways to achieving good power sector outcomes, making a case for greater pluralism. Among the top performers, some pursued the full set of market-oriented reforms, while others retained a more important role for the state. Third, reform efforts should be driven and tailored to desired policy outcomes and less preoccupied with following a predetermined process, particularly since the twenty-first-century century agenda has added decarbonization and universal access to power sector outcomes. The Washington Consensus reforms, while supportive of the twenty-first-century century agenda, will not be able to deliver on them alone and will require complementary policy measures
Book Synopsis Urban Phantasmagorias by : Iulia Stătică
Download or read book Urban Phantasmagorias written by Iulia Stătică and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces. The book draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, which provides a critical framework through which it articulates the dynamic relationship between ideology, architecture, and everyday practices, and reassesses their impact upon individual subjectivity and agency. The woman emerges as a central subject of the book, upon whom the phantasmagoric effects of the socialist state’s modernizing agenda have an acute impact at the level of lived domesticity and everyday life. Through a focus on the lived experiences of women, the book illuminates the prismatic effect of the state’s infrastructural and legal intentions, including the ways in which these were subverted through women’s lived bodily experiences of the home. The book establishes, both theoretically and through the concrete case of the city of Bucharest, the methodological significance of Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria as an epistemological approach to a modern communist cityscape. Urban Phantasmagorias is an important contribution to scholarship in architectural history and theory, urban and gender studies, and post-socialist and Eastern European studies.
Book Synopsis Inhabitable Infrastructures by : CJ Lim
Download or read book Inhabitable Infrastructures written by CJ Lim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhabitable Infrastructures: Science fiction or urban future?, the follow up to Food City and Smartcities and Eco-Warriors, from one of the world’s leading urban design and architectural thinkers, explores the potential of climate change-related multi-use infrastructures that address the fundamental human requirements to protect, to provide and to participate. The stimulus for the infrastructures derives from postulated scenarios and processes gleaned from science fiction and futurology as well as the current body of scientific knowledge regarding changing environmental impacts on cities. Science fiction is interdisciplinary by nature, aggregates the past and present, and evaluates both lay opinions and professional strategies in an attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures. The research culminates in the creation of innovative multi-use infrastructures and integrated self-sustaining support systems that meet the challenges posed through climate change and overpopulation, and the reciprocal benefits of simultaneously addressing the threat and the shaping of cities. J. G. Ballard has written that the psychological realm of science fiction is most valuable in its predictive function, and in projecting emotions into the future. The knowledge from the book is widely transferable, constituting both solutions and speculative visions of future urban environments. The book is indispensable reading for professionals and students in the fields of urban design, architecture, engineering and environmental socio-politics.
Book Synopsis Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities by : Olivier Coutard
Download or read book Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities written by Olivier Coutard and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.
Download or read book Muddy Urbanism written by Kathy Waghorn and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muddy Urbanism is a special urban-research studio at The School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland. This research proposes new interfaces between urban policy, ecological systems and community participation for the regeneration of an urban river catchment in the city's inner west. Muddy Urbanism was part of the 5th Auckland Triennial, curated by Hou Hanru. It was first presented at the Auckland Art Gallery in May, 2013. Muddy Urbanism was led by Kathy Waghorn from The University of Auckland in collaboration with Teddy Cruz, Professor of Public Culture at the University of California, San Diego and co-founder of the Center for Urban Ecologies.The book contains documentation of all projects and an interview with Teddy Cruz.
Book Synopsis The Promise of Infrastructure by : Nikhil Anand
Download or read book The Promise of Infrastructure written by Nikhil Anand and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Book Synopsis Infrastructures and Social Complexity by : Penelope Harvey
Download or read book Infrastructures and Social Complexity written by Penelope Harvey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.
Book Synopsis Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things by : Ryan Ellis
Download or read book Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things written by Ryan Ellis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how post-9/11 security concerns have transformed the public view and governance of infrastructure. After September 11, 2001, infrastructures—the mundane systems that undergird much of modern life—were suddenly considered “soft targets” that required immediate security enhancements. Infrastructure protection quickly became the multibillion dollar core of a new and expansive homeland security mission. In this book, Ryan Ellis examines how the long shadow of post-9/11 security concerns have remade and reordered infrastructure, arguing that it has been a stunning transformation. Ellis describes the way workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others used the threat of terrorism as a political resource, taking the opportunity not only to address security vulnerabilities but also to reassert a degree of public control over infrastructure. Nearly two decades after September 11, the threat of terrorism remains etched into the inner workings of infrastructures through new laws, regulations, technologies, and practices. Ellis maps these changes through an examination of three U.S. infrastructures: the postal system, the freight rail network, and the electric power grid. He describes, for example, how debates about protecting the mail from anthrax and other biological hazards spiraled into larger arguments over worker rights, the power of large-volume mailers, and the fortunes of old media in a new media world; how environmental activists leveraged post-9/11 security fears over shipments of hazardous materials to take on the rail industry and the chemical lobby; and how otherwise marginal federal regulators parlayed new mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric power industry into a robust system of accountability.
Book Synopsis Beyond the Networked City by : Olivier Coutard
Download or read book Beyond the Networked City written by Olivier Coutard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse, fluid and unstable landscapes emerging beyond the networked city, this book identifies dynamics through which a ‘break’ with previous configurations has been operated, and new brittle zones of socio-technical controversy through which urban infrastructure (and its wider meaning) are being negotiated and fought over. It uncovers, across a diverse set of urban contexts, new ways in which processes of urbanization and infrastructure production are being combined with crucial sociopolitical implications: through shifting political economies of infrastructure which rework resource distribution and value creation; through new infrastructural spaces and territorialities which rebundle socio-technical systems for particular interests and claims; and through changing offsets between individual and collective appropriation, experience and mobilization of infrastructure. With contributions from leading authorities in the field and drawing on theoretical advances and original empirical material, this book is a major contribution to an ongoing infrastructural turn in urban studies, and will be of interest to all those concerned by the diverse forms and contested outcomes of contemporary urban change across North and South.
