ABSTRACT
Drawing on an emerging collection of urban research on diverse infrastructures that extend beyond the grid, this chapter explores how beyond-the-network urbanism structures urban space, social relations, politics, and bodies, shaping urban inequities and differing lived experiences of global urbanism. It examines how beyond-the-network urbanism can be used as a heuristic device to help illuminate key dimensions of global urbanism, including: urban fractures and fragments that reveal cities within cities, everyday urban governance regimes “beyond the state,” and the bodily scale of contemporary global urban inequality. Analyzing infrastructural fragments and fractures requires upsetting some of the dominant modes and scales by which theoreticians, practitioners, and even policy makers tend to approach the city. Provincializing infrastructure beyond large-scale socio-technical networks reveals domains of political space and governance that exceed the state/nonstate binary and involve a wide range of political actors and institutions. Beyond-the-network urbanism helps to reveal the complex ways the body is intimately connected to the “city’s machinic materialities”.
