A Cable Laid Is a Cable Played: On the Hibernation Logic behind Urban Infrastructure Mines

Bj�rn Wallsten, Nils Johansson and Joakim Krook

Journal of Urban Technology, 2013, vol. 20, issue 3, 85-103

Abstract: Our societies are reliant on metals to such an extent that the total amounts of some of them in the built environment are comparable in size to the remaining amounts in known mountain ores. Because of concerns about mineral scarcity, the United Nations has assessed alternative sources for metal extraction and targeted urban areas in general and infrastructure systems in particular, since these are large, spatially concentrated and rich in metals. Referring to the possibility of recovering these metal stocks, infrastructure systems constitute what material flow researchers has conceptually termed "urban mines." While most urban infrastructure is in use, significant amounts of cables and pipes have been disconnected and remain in their subsurface locations; they are "hibernating." In this article, we analyze the occurrence of such hibernation in the Swedish city of Norrk�ping's urban infrastructure mine where, we know from a previous study, that every fourth kilo of infrastructure is discarded. Our applied perspective is different from the logic of system expansion as a way to meet increased demand often found in the field of infrastructure studies since we are interested in how systems are disconnected and left behind. This enables us to offer a refined understanding of the concepts of infrastructure "decline" and infrastructure "cold spots." We argue that to prevent the increase of dormant infrastructures and to engage in the urban mining of already dormant infrastructures, we must develop a sensibility to the materiality of derelict infrastructure components and the underlying causes for why they form different kinds of spatial patterns.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10630732.2013.809222 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjutxx:v:20:y:2013:i:3:p:85-103

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjut20

DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2013.809222

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Technology is currently edited by Richard E. Hanley

More articles in Journal of Urban Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().