The politics of governing cities, infrastructures and resource flows: spaces of reproduction or reconfiguration?

Hodson, M. & Marvin, S. (2011). The politics of governing cities, infrastructures and resource flows: spaces of reproduction or reconfiguration? Geographica Helvetica, no. 2, pp. 702-714.

Platform
Sheffield-Manchester Global
Publication type
Scientific article (peer-reviewed)
Projects
Governance and Policy for Sustainability, GAPS
Journal
Geographica Helvetica
ISSN/ISBN
0016-7312
Author(s)
Mike Hodson Simon Marvin
Published year

 

Abstract

This paper develops a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the role of space and politics in governing relationships between cities, critical energy, water, waste and transportation infrastructures and resource flows. It presents a view of cities as dynamic, experimental social spaces underpinned by infrastructural unevenness with variable provision of and access to resource flows. An emerging set of new pressures to the ways in which cities, infrastructure and resource flows are organised under conditions of neo-liberal urbanism is reviewed. The paper then reflects theoretically and conceptually on the ways in which these pressures can be appropriated in terms of the re-organisation of city, networked infrastructure and resource flows as predicated on tensions between transformative reconfiguration and obduracy from historically produced social and institutional coalitions.

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