ABSTRACT

Splintering Towers of Babel focuses on and redefines soft infrastructures and critical infrastructure projects. It explores key issues in contemporary urban studies including town planning histories, architecture, heritage, colonialism and postcolonialism, philosophy, and ethics.

The book combines transdisciplinary perspectives on the key historical, philosophical, and political issues associated with urban experiences, built forms, and infrastructure networks. It explores uneven dimensions in contemporary urbanisms and develops spatial phenomenological thinking with reference to the northern and southern hemispheres. This book connects the past and the present, in addition to Western and global South geographies, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Its main contribution is to broaden readers' understanding of infrastructure through the lens of the humanities and to engage with political, poetical, and ethical perspectives.

This book is tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban planning, urban geography, architectural history, urban design, infrastructure studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, African studies, and philosophy.

chapter 1|14 pages

Introduction

Splintering towers of Babel: paradoxical architectures and urban infrastructures

chapter 2|9 pages

Ethical infrastructure

Rethinking the relationship between the garden and the home

chapter 4|11 pages

Babel as paradoxical superstructures

A photography exhibition

chapter 6|13 pages

A Babylonia of heritage and destruction

Gendered architecture and gender-based violence in Timbuktu

chapter 7|14 pages

Between Be'er-Sheva and Bruegel's Babel

Recollection as architectural indicator

chapter 8|29 pages

The splendor and decline of socio-engineering projects

From Babel to colonial railways in Africa

chapter 9|24 pages

Traversing towers

A spatial reading of Emmanuel Levinas

chapter 10|24 pages

Revealing the polyvocality of street names

Babel as a parable

chapter 11|5 pages

Conclusion

Urban and infrastructural experiences beyond the confusion of Babel