Science, technology and society studies perspectives on urban responses to infrastructural breakdown

Anique Hommels

Chapter 27 in Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities, 2024, pp 404-416 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter focuses on how cities respond to the breakdown of infrastructure, as well as the various implications of urban responses to breakdowns for innovation and change in infrastructure systems. It distinguishes three approaches in the overlapping and interdisciplinary field of large technical systems (LTS), science, technology and society studies (STS), and infrastructure studies focusing on ‘vulnerability’, ‘disaster’ and ‘crisis’ respectively. Analysing a number of empirical examples, this chapter explores articulations of urban responses to breakdown according to these three approaches. The first approach draws on historical LTS work that studies the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in cities and system interdependencies. The second approach, largely stemming from other strands of sociological and historical STS work, looks at urban sociotechnical responses to disaster. The third approach focuses on how users of infrastructure respond to conditions of infrastructural precariousness. The chapter compares and contrasts all three perspectives, and uses the analysis to propose some avenues for further interdisciplinary research in the area.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Environment; Geography; Sociology and Social Policy; Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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