Smart Cities and Infrastructural Justice

Essay, High Density, Mimi Sheller, Politics and economics, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Cities, Citizens, City of commons, Cultural agitator, Ecology, Essay, Infrastructure, Justice, Megacities & High Density, Mobility, Movement, Operative Infrastructure, Political & Economic Approach, Politics, Refugees, Smart city, Social city, Social consciousness, Territory&Mobility, Transportation Systems, Urban mobility

Excerpt from Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (London and New York: Verso, 2019)

Cities are formed by mobilities as well as moorings. Located at the confluence of rivers, roadways, ports, rail termini, highways, and airports, cities have long been understood as a space of flows of people, goods, information, and ideas. They are places of intense infrastructural density founded upon the energy and resource-dependent movements of people, data, and objects: “Much of the city’s existence is concerned with energy flows taking place on different levels: from water and sewage through to electricity and information, from people and animals, to machines and vegetables.”