Rethinking Global Cities: Infrastructure

• published: 04 Mar 2015
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Session V: INFRASTRUCTURE This panel was made possible by the Rethinking Global Cities project, a Duke project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's "Partnership in a Global Age". For more information on this project: http://sites.duke.edu/rethinkingglobalcities/ (Chair: Ara Wilson, Duke) Yan Song (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) Infrastructure, Spatial Forms, and Urban Planning in Urban China Policy makers in China are utilizing infrastructure services—including power, transportation, telecommunications, provision of water and sanitation, and safe disposal of wastes— to stimulate economic production and urban growth. It is commonly agreed that infrastructure plays an important role in stimulating urban land development and private economic activity. This presentation discusses the links between infrastructure provision and urban expansion, the relationship between levels of infrastructure and land prices, and the mechanisms used to finance infrastructure using data and case studies from developed and developing cities in China. The presentation will demonstrate the extent to which the provision of infrastructure affects urban development and shapes spatial patterns. Burak Erdim (North Carolina State University) Housing as Urban (and Transnational) Infrastructure in the Cold War Middle East, 1950-64 Industrialization and the rise of the metropolis along with its economic structure based on speculative development and surplus value production have typically been examined as the primary factors that contributed to the shortage of housing and the rise of social and political unrest during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During the second quarter of the twentieth century however, housing as a social and economic issue preceded industrial development in a number of settings. Especially in the developing regions of the first and third world nations, housing and construction was conceptualized as the foundation of a new national social and economic structure with ties to transnational systems of finance and governance. Within these contexts, products and settings of American domesticity were not just propaganda pieces lauding the achievements of American systems of development. The financing, production, and dissemination of systems of housing and construction comprised the very components of a world economic structure. This paper critically examines how housing, new standards of domesticity, and construction were conceptualized as an industry and as the underlying structure of a world system to regulate speculative finance, to prevent social unrest, and to create models of development compatible with the recommendations of international agencies of world finance and governance. The paper examines early postwar exchanges between US architecture and planning firms and Turkish ministries to establish policies and training and education in these fields to create a transnational network of experts and agencies in housing and planning. These policies targeted not only cities, but also the country to slow down urbanization and to encourage models of regional development implemented in the US during the New Deal. Pilot projects were tested in Turkey and were carried back to the US and to other countries creating a postwar geography of reconstruction and development. These projects can be seen as mild predecessors to the current modes of neo-liberal development based on construction and speculative development seen in Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East. Interestingly, they are also the precedents to the micro-finance schemes that have also become prevalent in numerous parts of the developing world. Brenda Chalfin (University of Florida) “Conspicuous Waste: The Public Life of Infrastructure in Ghana’s City of Tema.” This paper tracks the social life of sanitary infrastructure in Ghana’s edge-city of Ashaiman. Denied basic services and sustained infrastructural investment by municipal authorities, Ashaiman has emerged is a space of political exception and experimentation over its 50 year existence. Among other forms of self-help and self-organization, the city’s dual history of aspiration and abandonment has spawned novel solutions to basic human needs. Ashaiman hosts an astounding array of privately-built, owned, and managed public toilets, large in scale, some free standing, and some located within private households. Turning public toilets into spaces for the conspicuous display of wealth and status, these installations transform excreta from individual output into profit bearing substance and means of class mobility for public toilet users and owners alike. Here, in the vein of Bataille’s accursed share, bodily wastes and the infrastructures that channel and contain them are socially productive. Rather than vectors of pre- or anti-social disorder, they are repositories of symbolic and surplus value.