Regionalizing the infrastructure turn : a research agenda

An interdisciplinary ‘infrastructure turn’ has emerged over the past 20 years that disputes the concept of urban infrastructure as a staid or neutral set of physical artefacts. Responding to the increased conceptual, geographical and political importance of infrastructure – and endemic issues of access, expertise and governance that the varied provision of infrastructures can cause – this intervention asserts the significance of applying a regional perspective to the infrastructure turn. This paper forwards a critical research agenda for the study of ‘infrastructural regionalisms’ to interrogate: (1) how we study and produce knowledge about infrastructure; (2) how infrastructure is governed across or constrained by jurisdictional boundaries; (3) who drives the construction of regional infrastructural imaginaries; and (4) how individuals and communities differentially experience regional space through infrastructure. Analysing regions through infrastructure provides a novel perspective on the regional question and consequently offers a framework to understand better the implications of the current infrastructure moment for regional spaces worldwide

Public Works, the Courts, and the Consent Decree: Environmental and Social Effects of the “Freeway With a Heart”

Transportation planning in the United States has undergone a revolution in the past two decades. As recently as the late 1960s, with little citizen participation apart from public hearings on specific routes (Rosener, 1975), technical experts laid out plans for major transportation facilities, and their agency colleagues implemented those plans through standard routines. These routines often included noncontested condemnation and considerable alteration of the physical environment

Not so extraordinary: the democratisation of UK counterinsurgency strategy

This article argues that recent developments in UK counterinsurgency strategy and subsequent counterterror legislation have been informed and enabled by military and political interventions in Afghanistan and Northern Ireland. The article contains three interconnecting arguments. First, that UK counterterrorism policies since the intervention in Afghanistan are an extension of previous practices in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s, rather than representing a new phase in security strategy. Second, that the articulation of the external terror threat by successive UK governments since 9/11 has led to a blurring of emergency law into domestic governance and a movement of this emergency legislation from the colonial periphery into the metropolitan centre. Third, the article argues that the techniques at the heart of these counterinsurgency efforts risk hollowing out the values they are supposed to uphold and defend

Public Works, the Courts, and the Consent Decree: Environmental and Social Effects of the “Freeway With a Heart”

Transportation planning in the United States has undergone a revolution in the past two decades. As recently as the late 1960s, with little citizen participation apart from public hearings on specific routes (Rosener, 1975), technical experts laid out plans for major transportation facilities, and their agency colleagues implemented those plans through standard routines. These routines often included noncontested condemnation and considerable alteration of the physical environment