ABSTRACT
As Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) suggest, the period from the 1930s to the 1960s witnessed the growing invisibility of the infrastructural complexes of water, power, and communications, especially in Western cities. With the exception of what they call the “new urban phantasmagoria” of urban highways, infrastructure networks tended to be gradually shifted beneath the urban scene, both physically and metaphorically. The “urban dowry” of pumping stations, telephone exchanges, and electricity power plants were often closed and recycled, as cities sourced their power and water resources from further afield, and as digital fiber-optic lines were threaded through the fabric of the city. The huge technological networks of ducts, pipes, conduits, and wires were themselves relegated to the urban background, just as accessibility to the networks seemed to approach universality. As they put it, “high modernity crusaded towards clarity, towards veiling what lied underneath the city”(134).
