In this provocative volume, distinguished authorities on urban policy expose the myths surrounding today's "infrastructure crisis" in urban public works. Five in-depth papers examine the evolution of the public works system, the limitations of urban needs studies, the financing of public works projects, the impact of politics, and how technology is affecting the types of infrastructures needed for tomorrow's cities.

Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation. As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research—transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision. Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.

Most new urban growth takes place in the suburbs; consequently, infrastructures are in a constant state of playing catch-up, creating repeated infrastructure crises in these peripheries. However, the push to address the tensions stemming from this rapid growth also allow the suburbs to be a major source of urban innovation. Taking a critical social science perspective to identify political, economic, social, and environmental issues related to suburban infrastructures, this book highlights the similarities and differences between suburban infrastructure conditions encountered in the Global North and Global South. Adopting an international approach grounded in case studies from three continents, this book discusses infrastructure issues within different suburban and societal contexts: low-density infrastructure-rich Global North suburban areas, rapidly developing Chinese suburbs, and the deeply socially stratified suburbs of poor Global South countries. Despite stark differences between types of suburbs, there are features common to all suburban areas irrespective of their location, and similarities in the infrastructure issues confronting these different categories of suburbs.

In this comparison of infrastructure across countries and sectors, leading international academics and practitioners consider the latest approaches to infrastructure policy, implementation, and finance. The book presents evidence-based solutions and policy considerations, essential concepts and economic theories, and a current overview.

This book explores urban futures in the making, as seen through the lens of urban infrastructure. The book describes how socio-technical arrangements of energy and water provision are being recast in continuing efforts towards realising ‘sustainable’ transformation of cities. It critically investigates how infrastructure comes to matter by analyzing the shifting capacities and entanglements of diverse actors with these systems, the various means they use to envision, enact and contest changes, and the wide-ranging social and political implications of emerging infrastructure transitions. Drawing on original research into urban infrastructure debates and projects in Stockholm and Paris, the author develops a novel conceptual framework for studying and acknowledging the active, vital role of infrastructure in constituting a material politics of urban transformation. Straddling the latest theoretical insights and empirical investigation of urban planning practice and socio-technical engineering of systems and flows, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure forges new, timely reflections and perspectives which will be of interest to the growing multidisciplinary community of scholars investigating infrastructure and to academics and practitioners with a concern for understanding the wider politics of urban futures.