Disrupted Cities

When Infrastructure Fails

Stephen Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135851989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Bringing together leading researchers from geography, political science, sociology, public policy and technology studies, Disrupted Cities exposes the politics of well-known disruptions such as devastation of New Orleans in 2005, the global SARS outbreak in 2002-3, and the great power collapse in the North Eastern US in 2003. But the book also excavates the politics of more hidden disruptions: the clogging of city sewers with fat; the day-to-day infrastructural collapses which dominate urban life in much of the global south; the deliberate devastation of urban infrastructure by state militaries; and the ways in which alleged threats of infrastructural disruption have been used to radically reorganize cities as part of the 'war on terror'.

Accessible, topical and state-of-the art, Disrupted Cities will be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of technology, security and urban life as we plunge headlong into this quintessentially urban century. The book's blend of cutting-edge theory with visceral events means that it will be particularly useful for illuminating urban courses within geography, sociology, planning, anthropology, political science, public policy, architecture and technology studies.

CHAPTER 1
When Infrastructures Fail

Stephen Graham

The town exists only as a function of circulation and of circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits: something must enter it and exit from it.¹

DISRUPTED CITIES

On our rapidly urbanizing planet, the everyday life of the world’s swelling population of urbanites is increasingly sustained by vast and unknowably complex systems of infrastructure and technology stretched across geographic space. Immobilized in space, they continually bring into being the mobilities and circulations of the city and the world. Energy networks connect the heating, cooling, and energizing of urban life through infrastructure to both far-off energy reserves and global circuits of pollution and global warming. Huge water systems sate the city’s insatiable thirst, their waste water and sewerage parallels removing human and organic wastes from the urban scene (at least partially). Within cities, dense water, sewerage, food and waste distribution systems continually link human bodies and their metabolisms to the broader metabolic processes through which attempts are made to maintain public health. Global agricultural, shipping, and trade complexes furnish the city’s millions with food. Highway, airline, train, and road complexes support the complex and multiscaled flows of commuters, migrants, tourists and refugees, as well as materials and commodities, within and through the global urban system and its links with hinterlands and peripheries. And electronic communications systems provide a universe of digitally mediated information, transaction, interaction, and entertainment which is the very lifeblood of digital capitalism and which is increasingly assembled based on assumptions of always being “on.” The vital material bases for cyberspace are largely invisible and subterranean. They also link intimately both to the electrical infrastructures which allow it to function, and to the other infrastructural circuits of the city as they themselves become organized through digital media.

Whilst sometimes taken for granted—at least when they work or amongst wealthier or more privileged users and spaces—energy, water, sewerage, transport, trade, finance, and communication infrastructures allow modern urban life to exist. Their pipes, ducts, servers, wires, conduits, electronic transmissions, and tunnels sustain the flows, connections, and metabolisms that are intrinsic to contemporary cities. Through their endless technological agency, these systems help transform the natural into the cultural, the social, and the urban.

Infrastructural edifices thus provide the fundamental background to modern urban everyday life—a background that is often hidden, assumed, even naturalized. They fundamentally underpin the ceaseless and mobile process of city life in a myriad of ways. This process inevitably works across many geographical scales, from the level of the human body and its metabolisms—through which the food, water, and energy brought to the city through infrastructural circulation actually flow—through the city, region, and nation to the transnational and even planetary—with its transnational networks of energy extraction and flow, airline travel, electronic communication, food trade, port systems, and the movement of solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes. Much-debated processes of globalization—beneath the fast-fading hyperbole of the business press—rely after all on vast and unimaginably complex material circuits of infrastructure within which cities invariably act as the dominant hubs of built networks, the predominant centers of demand (for energy, food, water, transport, and communications), and the dominant centers for generating pollution and waste of all forms.

The political, economic, social, and environmental importance of the world’s lattices of urban infrastructure can only grow as the world becomes more urban. Well over 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities; 75 percent of the world’s population of over 9 billion people is projected to live in them by 2050.² Within just over four decades there will be fully 7 billion people living in the world’s cities, 4.75 billion more than in 2007. The overwhelming majority of these will be in the burgeoning cities and megacities of the so-called developing world: in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

As this great demographic and geographic shift continues, humankind will become ever more reliant on functioning systems of urban infrastructure. Indeed, the very nature of urbanization means that every aspect of people’s lives tends to become more dependent on the infrastructural circuits of the city to sustain individual and collective health, security, economic opportunity, social well-being, and biological life. Moreover, because they rely on the continuous agency of infrastructure to eat, wash, heat, cook, light, work, travel, communicate, and remove dangerous or poisonous wastes from their living place, urbanites often have few or no real alternatives when the complex infrastructures that sometimes manage to achieve this are removed or disrupted.

This book is the first to concern itself exclusively with what happens when the infrastructural flows or metabolisms of the modern city, which so often come to be considered so normal that urbanites may even come to see them as culturally banal, invisible, even boring, are suddenly interrupted or disturbed. In what follows we are concerned with what happens when technical malfunctions, interruptions in supplies of resource, wars, terrorist attacks, public health crises, labor strikes, sabotage, network theft, extreme weather, and other events usually considered to be “natural” (floods, earthquakes, tsunami, etc.) disrupt the flows of energy, water, transportation, communication, and waste that are the very lifeblood of the contemporary city. To address this question, Disrupted Cities brings together an unprecedented collection of cutting-edge research from an influential range of academic writers within geography, political science, sociology, and urban planning. These explore a series of instantly iconic case studies of such disruptions with a high degree of sophistication and detail. Such cases are drawn largely, but not exclusively, from North America and include very high profile events such as the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the 2003 power blackout in the North Eastern seaboard, the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the infiltration of the global airline system by the SARS virus in 2003.

Disrupted Cities, however, is not just an exploration of iconic recent infrastructural dis-ruptions that have been such a feature of global urban life in the early twenty-first century, notably in the United States (although we must be conscious that global media biases mean that infrastructure disruptions beyond North America, Europe, Australasia, and East Asia rarely receive much in the way of news coverage within mainstream Western media). The book complements these studies with analyses of much less known but equally important infrastructural disruptions: the deliberate targeting of city infrastructures in Iraq and the Occupied Territories by the U.S. and Israeli state militaries; the hidden sclerosis of city sewers caused by discarded fats; the ways in which concern about disruptions is being used to politically reorganize and securitize global port systems in the wake of the “global war on terror”; and the normal disruptions of city infrastructure that tend to characterize life in the burgeoning megacities of the Global South—at least for the populations of informal settlements.

Together, these diverse, critical, and connected analyses provide the first systematic social scientific study of practicalities, politics, and implications of events where the circuits sustaining flows of energy, water, waste, sewerage, transportation, or communications within or between cities break down, are deliberately attacked, or become infused with malign infiltrations. We reveal in unprecedented detail how the processes of the politics of city life respond to such crises, how the threats of disruption can be manipulated for political ends, and what such events tell us about the times and geographies when infrastructural flows and metabolisms sustaining urban life continue as “normal.” Above all, the book raises major questions about the challenges facing our planet as we move headlong into the urban twenty-first century marked by intensifying urbanization and ever-growing reliance on urban infrastructures to provide for the essential needs of humanity.

The aim of Disrupted Cities, then, is to study moments of stasis and disrupted flow as a powerful means of revealing the politics of the normal circulations of globalizing urban life which tend to fall off the radar screen of contemporary political and social-scientific debates. The book is motivated by a paradox: Studying moments when infrastructures cease to work as they normally do is perhaps the most powerful way of really penetrating and problematizing those very normalities of flow and circulation to an extent where they can be subjected to critical scrutiny.

In fact, infrastructural disruptions provide important heuristic devices or learning opportunities through which critical social science can excavate the politics of urban life, technology, or infrastructure in ways that are rarely possible when such systems are functioning normally. Disruptions and breakdowns in normal geographies of circulation allow us to excavate the usually hidden politics of flow and connection, of mobility and immobility, within contemporary societies. Occasions of immobility and interrupted flow help to reveal urban infrastructure systems to be much more than the technocratic engineer’s stuff configured in value-free ways to serve some notional public good often imagined.³ Instead, they emerge, fleetingly, as materializations of the starkly contested and divided political, ecological, and social processes which tend both to characterize contemporary cities and to shape the configurations of the flows, and immobilities, that sustain global capitalism. Studying infrastructural disruptions critically thus allows us to do much more than learn policy or planning lessons about how to avoid repetitions of such events or how to ameliorate their effects. It also brings major opportunities to rethink and retheorize the nature of contemporary urban life.⁴

Before introducing the chapters of the book in more detail, it is necessary to understand our starting paradox of the book in more detail. To do this it is necessary to develop an introductory exploration of the nature of urban infrastructure and its disruption.

THE LUSTER OF INFRASTRUCTURE: MASTER NARRATIVES AND THE EDIFICE COMPLEX

“Cities are the summation and densest expressions of infrastructure,” write Herman and Ausubel. “Or, more accurately, a set of infrastructures, working sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frustrating discord, to provide us with shelter, contact, energy, water and means to meet other human needs.”⁵ By sustaining flows of water, waste, energy, information, people, commodities, and signs, massive complexes of contemporary urban infrastructure are the embodiment of Enlightenment dreams of the social control of nature through advances in technology and science. They are a prerequisite to any notion of modern “civilization.” They are at the heart of the ways in which cities act as the main centers of wealth creation and capital accumulation through extending their control and appropriation of labor power and all sorts of resources over distant territories, people, and ecosystems. They have tended to become inexorably woven into notions of the modern state and modern identities associated with nationhood. And infrastructure networks are always at the center of discussions about urban futurity and the impact that new waves of technological innovation will have on our rapidly urbanizing planet.

In fact, the often deterministic and teleological tendency within Western history and archaeology to label entire social and historical “ages” as “stone,” “iron,” “space,” “railway,” “nuclear,” “jet,” “information,” “biotechnology,” or whatever else, says much about the tendencies, especially within Western culture, to reduce complex social, political, and cultural realities of entire civilizations to their purportedly dominant technological circuits. These are often portrayed unproblematically as a linear march of progress—a simple process whereby faster, more capable, and more efficient infrastructures and technologies are invented, introduced, and used as a means to deterministically reorganize economies, societies, cultures, and geographies in increasingly urban ways.

Assumptions that societies are deterministically shaped by technological systems in a simple and linear way often also underlie efforts by state policy makers or city boosters to legitimize the infrastructural megaprojects that so characterize urban politics in so many cities around the contemporary world. Symbols of urban and national arrival, power, status, and kudos, gleaming new airport terminals, city-size container ports, massive highways, huge electrical generating stations, elaborate water treatment or desalinization complexes, and the high-tech accoutrements of satellite dishes, broadband lattices, and telecom masts are often still served up as icons of brave new urban or national futures. Such projects form a major element within the broader range of grandiose development projects that national political coalitions and city governments strive to build as their legacies. This edifice complex is often preoccupied with producing symbolic architectures of hypermodern mobility and c...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 When Infrastructures Fail
• CHAPTER 2 Managing the Risk of Cascading Failure in Complex Urban Infrastructures
• CHAPTER 3 Disoriented City: Infrastructure, Social Order, and the Police Response to Hurricane Katrina184
• CHAPTER 4 Power Loss or Blackout: The Electricity Network Collapse of August 2003 in North America
• CHAPTER 5 Containing Insecurity: Logistic Space, U.S. Port Cities, and the “War on Terror”
• CHAPTER 6 Clogged Cities: Sclerotic Infrastructure
• CHAPTER 7 Securitizing Networked Flows: Infectious Diseases and Airports
• CHAPTER 8 Disruption By Design: Urban Infrastructure and Political Violence
• CHAPTER 9 Infrastructure, Interruption, and Inequality: Urban Life in the Global South
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• Index