IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/20849_27.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

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

In: Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

Author

Listed:
  • Anique Hommels

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Anique Hommels, 2024. "Science, technology and society studies perspectives on urban responses to infrastructural breakdown," Chapters, in: Olivier Coutard & Daniel Florentin (ed.), Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities, chapter 27, pages 404-416, Edward Elgar Publishing.
  • Handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:20849_27
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800889156.00039
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:20849_27. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Darrel McCalla (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.e-elgar.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.