ABSTRACT
More than twenty years ago now, in the foreword to their seminal collection of essays on ‘the rise of the networked city in Europe and North America’, Joel Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy pondered ‘to what extent the cities of the future will continue to depend on the infrastructure technologies of the nineteenth century, and to what extent they will incorporate new and more flexible technologies’ (Tarr and Dupuy 1988: xvi). This question has gained a particular salience in recent years. Indeed, we are witnessing an unprecedented critique of the extensive networked infrastructures built over the past 150 years for the provision of essential services such as water, sanitation, electricity and heating. In the wake of (and in response to) this critique, there is a parallel rise of alternative, smaller-scale technological systems, which are frequently viewed as more ‘sustainable’. While convinced that large infrastructure networks will long into the future continue to play a crucial role in basic service provision to urban populations around the globe, we focus in this chapter on the development of socio-technical alternatives to these large systems and on the new combinations between the former and the latter that result from this development.
