Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (review)

Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. By Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xxix+477. $110/$36.

In their new book, Steve Graham and Simon Marvin demonstrate once again their talent for crafting works with value for both academic specialists and for undergraduates. Like their previous effort, Telecommunications and the City, this book's strengths include its synthetic perspective and clarity of expression, this time on the subject of infrastructure networks across the globe. In the authors' own words, their approach is "athletically interdisciplinary," and pulls together scholarly literatures from urban studies, science and technology studies, geography, sociology, architecture, engineering, and communications. Their basic argument is that urban infrastructure networks, once developed and maintained by the public sector, have been opened to private competition, a shift with a range of consequences for politics, culture, and society. The book's title is shorthand for their claim that, of these consequences, most notable are the increasing (and oftentimes invisible) forms of segregation occurring within metropolitan areas.

Like many other scholars of material culture, Graham and Marvin contend that infrastructure has been an overlooked area of inquiry. This, they argue, means that readers need to become familiar with the history of infrastructure development before they can understand what has changed and what continues to change. The book begins with a concise historical account of the rise of networks in cities across the world, focusing on the growth of technical standards and centralized operations. "Constructing the Modern Networked City, 1850-1960," the first chapter, treats the development of public networks, including roads, water, electricity, telephones, and public spaces, charting both physical developments (with wonderful illustrations) and the growth of regulatory frameworks to sustain them. It is against this backdrop of the historical growth of the "integrated infrastructural ideal" that their claims of splintering follow throughout the rest of the book.

Drawing on the work of other scholars as well as their own firsthand observations, Graham and Marvin use the next six chapters to examine the extent to which streets, highways, housing, telecommunications, and "public spaces" have been privatized, and the consequences for urban communities both locally and globally when access to certain infrastructure becomes limited to populations of elite political or financial means. Alongside the trend toward splintering, they observe the phenomenon of "glocalization," a creation of new networks among privileged users of the most high-end infrastructures. The comprehensiveness with which they present their arguments can occasionally become a weakness; numerous subheadings and shadowboxed case studies throughout the book can detract from the continuity of the narrative. But for undergraduate readers in particular, these shadowboxes bring down to earth the book's theoretical claims about "glocalization" and "cyborg urbanization."

Splintering Urbanism's theme, the urban aspects of privatization, is not new. In an American context, public figures including Robert Reich and scholars such as Christopher Lasch already have observed a "secession of the successful" and a "revolt of the elites" in sectors of urban society from housing to schooling to health care. Where Splintering Urbanism packs its punch is in the authors' emphasis on the global continuities of this phenomenon, tracing changes to a multiplicity of urban infrastructures in a multiplicity of metropolitan areas. Overall, this is an excellent book, one that likely will have great value in university classrooms across disciplines.