Technische Infrastruktur

Die raumwissenschaftliche Debatte um technische Infrastrukturen in Deutschland wird bislang stark durch wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Perspektiven bzw. durch Diskussionen um Planungsinstrumente und Prüfverfahren der räumlichen Planung technischer Anlagen und -netze dominiert. Indem hier zunächst die Hauptmerkmale dieser sozio-technischen Systeme zusammengefasst und ihre vielfältigen Wechselwirkungen mit der Raumentwicklung skizziert werden, wird diese Debatte erweitert

Towards Smart Regional Growth: Institutional Complexities and the Regional Governance of Southern Ontario’s Greenbelt

The task of developing regional greenbelts poses multidimensional challenges to policymakers. Unlike their early 20th-century predecessors, these greenspaces incorporate multiple functions including growth management, farmland and environmental protection, and increasing economic competitiveness. This regional and multifunctional approach to greenbelt management involves considerable governance complexities, as an increasing number of policy fields such as economic growth, agriculture, housing, nature conservation, different policy levels and various territorial jurisdictions become involved in policy implementation. However, institutional dimensions of contemporary greenbelt governance are hardly reflected within the literature. This is also the case for the Greater Golden Horseshoe region in Southern Ontario, Canada, where a regional Greenbelt Plan was implemented in 2005. By engaging with institutional perspectives on regional governance, we analyse how the governance of regional greenbelts and smart growth have been influenced by vertical, horizontal and territorial coordination challenges and politics at the provincial and local levels. We conclude that despite provincial government intervention in regional planning, the impact of market pressures, growth coalitions and institutional coordination problems prevent growth management policies from delivering the significant changes promised by the Ontario government

Infrastruktur

Die deutsche Infrastrukturdebatte ist durch ökonomische Perspektiven geprägt und vernachlässigt häufig die Besonderheiten der beiden Teilbereiche sozialer und technischer Infrastrukturen und die Abstimmungsprobleme sowohl zwischen den verschiedenen Sparten der Infrastrukturplanung als auch die mit der räumlichen Gesamtplanung. Angesichts aktueller Herausforderungen sind vorliegende wissenschaftliche und planerische Konzepte der Infrastrukturentwicklung kritisch zu überprüfen

Co-producing maintenance and repair: Hybrid labor relations in water supply in Accra, Ghana

Access to water supply is still a problem in African cities. This has sparked discussions about how small-scale private actors could collaborate with the state to improve water supply. However, scholarly discussions on water supply have hardly examined the role of such actors in maintenance and repair. This paper shows how water infrastructures are maintained and repaired through hybrid labor relations between private and public actors where formal and informal practices are combined. These findings allow us to shift conceptualization in maintenance and repair beyond the state and explain how private actors enact and challenge the state’s power through maintenance and repair practices

The politics of tied aid: technology transfer and the maintenance and repair of water infrastructure

In many African countries, international donor funding schemes contribute significantly to financing water infrastructures, especially for constructing new networks and water plants and upgrading existing ones. However, little is known about how these financial arrangements shape infrastructure maintenance and repair. This article explores the politics of tied water aid to show how international donors’ technology transfer schemes and their associated funding conditionalities shape water infrastructure maintenance and repair. Empirically, this study builds on a qualitative study of the cities of Accra (Ghana) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), where the maintenance and repair of water infrastructures have been a persistent challenge. The article shows that the compulsory adoption of foreign technologies embedded in donors’ funding schemes limits local capacity to properly maintain and repair water infrastructure. As maintenance and repair increasingly depend on imported expert knowledge, spare parts, and engineering services, donors’ funding schemes undermine effective maintenance and repair in both cities. We argue that to make transferred water technologies work sustainably in recipient countries, funding schemes need to anticipate maintenance and repair by incorporating local capacity building and knowledge transfer to reduce import dependence

Urban electricity governance and the (re)production of heterogeneous electricity constellations in Dar es Salaam

Background: Electricity infrastructures in sub-Saharan African cities are characterized by heterogeneous socio-technical constellations, including alternative grid access channels and off-grid systems. These constellations secure access beyond conventional grids but also produce adverse social, environmental, and economic outcomes affecting sustainable energy transition efforts. In fact, interventions aiming to promote energy transitions may be restricted by institutional mechanisms that produce and maintain these heterogeneous constellations. This article explores these institutional mechanisms by focusing on the governance of heterogeneous electricity constellations in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It develops a novel framework on governance modalities to understand and explain the logics, mechanisms, and actors that govern different constellations across diverse neighborhoods as well as to unpack how they limit the potential of sustainable energy transitions and offer specific opportunities for them. Results: This article is based on a qualitative case study covering three diverse neighborhood types in Dar es Salaam (i.e., low-income, peri-urban, and affluent areas) that reflect heterogeneous user demands. The research draws on interviews with residents and community leaders to understand local modes of coordination, the participatory observation of technical features and user practices, as well as document sources and semi-structured expert interviews to analyze institutional aspects. Our study demonstrates that heterogeneous electricity constellations in Dar es Salaam are governed by the place-based interplay of four governance modalities: hierarchical, market-based, network-based, and managerial governance. Based on this conceptualization, we identified critical barriers for interventions toward urban energy transitions in the context of infrastructural heterogeneity, namely, conflicting logics that shape conventional grid services, complex and fragmented actor constellations, and diverging, place-based interests among various actors, including different state actors. Conclusions: Our study indicates that heterogeneous urban infrastructure constellations are not merely a response to the considerable socio-spatial inequalities within Southern cities. Rather, their prevailing importance and (re)production must be understood as resulting from the interplay of various governance modalities. The study contributes to debates on urban energy transitions in sub-Sahara Africa by explaining the institutional complexity associated with infrastructural heterogeneity, which can restrict interventions aiming to improve and universalize service provision through heterogeneous urban electricity constellations

Practicing Urban Resilience to Electricity Service Disruption in Accra, Ghana

Electricity is essential for the functioning of contemporary cities. However, despite its overarching criticality, residents of Southern cities like Accra are challenged by splintered access and limited reliability of electricity services. To maintain access, and creatively maneuver blackout situations, residents in Southern cities employ many alternative socio-technical configurations and adaptive strategies. Using the lenses of urban resilience, vulnerability, and social practice theory, we explore the everyday energy practices of residents and businesses in different settlements across Accra, particularly in response to electricity service disruptions. Here, we interrogate electricity as an enabler of practices as well as the consequences of electricity disruption, and the technologies and adaptive strategies employed to maintain those practices. Our goal is to assess the potential for ensuring urban resilience in the face of electricity blackouts through adaptive energy access and user practices. Empirically, we employ primary data gathered from expert interviews with utility providers and local government officials, neighborhood visits, observations, interviews with urban residents and businesses, and document analyses. By examining the everyday energy practices of urban residents, we argue that we can better understand urban/critical infrastructure resilience and the alternative pathways to it. We further contend that the relationship between resilience and practices is predicated on—and necessitated by—systemic socio-economic and socio-spatial inequalities. We therefore advocate for a stronger engagement with electricity user perspectives and everyday energy practices in mainstream resilience and vulnerability discourses related to critical infrastructure disruption

Toward Urban Resilience? Coping with Blackouts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

The seamless and ubiquitous supply of infrastructure services such as electricity is usually seen as a critical backbone of modern urban societies. Yet electricity supply in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, like many other infrastructure services in cities in the Global South, is unreliable and unpredictable, with urban power cuts being everyday occurrences. Major challenges in electricity supply have resulted in severe crises leading to spatially uneven rationing of electricity. Amid such insecurities, however, the criticality of such infrastructure services and the shortfall of reliable networked services are met with innovation, creative maneuvering, and the building of adaptive systems that allow cities to continue to function. Based on debates on urban and infrastructure resilience and heterogeneous infrastructures, this article examines the coping mechanisms of urban residents in response to electricity blackouts in Dar es Salaam. It identifies the different energy constellations that function either complementarily or alternatively to networked services. Pointing to the adaptive capacities of urban dwellers that enable them to be prepared for power cuts but also highlighting their unequal access to infrastructure services, it argues for a more critical reassessment of debates on urban and infrastructural vulnerability and resilience from a Southern perspective

Heritage conflict evolution: changing framing strategies and opportunity structures in two heritage district redevelopment projects in China

Heritage district (re)development usually involves conflict, especially when the local community challenges existing preservation policy arrangements, and conflicts involve the framing of competing positions in the public sphere. While framing strategy aids in understanding conflict dynamics, further theoretical exploration is necessary. This paper emphasizes the role of contextual influence and how opportunity structures can enhance framing analysis's explanatory power in tracing the evolution of heritage district redevelopment conflicts. We perceive opportunity structures as emerging properties of interactive relationships between contending actors' framing strategies (agency) and the contextual systems where they assert their claims (structure). Through an analysis of the media frames, policy documents and interviews with 50 relevant actors, we investigate two heritage conflicts in China. The results show that conflict is shaped by diverse heritage values and competing interests as well as the presence of short-lived or long-lived opportunities. Opportunities may be missed even when conditions are conducive to achieving actors' goals. Visibility, resonance, and legitimacy are three key aspects of opportunity structures that provide advantages or disadvantages to contending actors. Policymakers benefit from consonance, which refers to positive resonance, and legitimacy within opportunity structures, which substantiates their heritage redevelopment initiatives. For policy challengers seeking to influence heritage-related policy, the visibility, resonance, and legitimacy aspects within opportunity structures stand as pivotal

Beyond the dikes: an institutional perspective on governing flood resilience at the Port of Rotterdam

Seaports, infrastructural nodes in global supply chains and production processes, are vulnerable to flood risks: they are crisis-prone critical infrastructure (CI) systems. However, the governance of their flood resilience involves many different private and public actors in a complex institutional environment and there is no scholarly consensus about how resilience can be successfully governed. We investigate the governance of flood resilience at the Port of Rotterdam (PoR) from an institutional perspective, by studying institutional arrangements for flood resilience within and across vertical, horizontal and territorial dimensions to elucidate the strengths and ongoing challenges of shaping the port’s flood resilience. We conducted semi-structured expert interviews (n = 17) and an analysis of policy documents and legislation (n = 33) relating to flood risk management and CI protection. We find that the institutional design for flood resilience in the Netherlands consists of a complex matrix of responsibilities, capacities and plans. While coordination is visible in the shared visions and strategies for flood resilience developed at different policy levels and domains, we find fragmentation and persisting institutional challenges, including siloed governance approaches, knowledge gaps and blurred distribution of responsibilities; these are significant barriers to enhancing flood resilience for CIs and port–city relationships