The session will focus on Nathalie Roseau's book:
Le futur des métropoles. Temps et infrastructure (The Future of Metropolises: Time and Infrastructure),
MétisPresses, 2022, 256 p.
Discussant: Jonathan Rutherford, researcher at LATTS
A controversial subject, infrastructure is the entry point through which this book examines the imaginary and concrete production of urban space. The study of three metropolises—New York, Paris, and Hong Kong—provides an in-depth look at the relationship between cities and their infrastructure, built to last even though their functions are destined to evolve.
Nathalie Roseau offers a reinterpretation of the major urban artifacts that surround us, recounting the debates that accompanied them and the crises they still face. She considers infrastructure from a situated and transnational perspective and, like an archaeologist, identifies the visible and invisible traces of its sedimentation. The stories of the New York parkway, Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle, the Parisian ring road, and Hong Kong's infrastructure reveal society's expectations for the future and clarify the power relations between authorities and representations, establishing the project as a chain of convergences and conflicts, decisions and reversals.
Reflecting on urban planning as knowledge and practice, this book questions the value of projected futures and proposes a change of perspective in the face of the transformations imposed on metropolises. Anchored in the history of cities, infrastructures engage in dialogue with the challenges of the present.
Program for the session on Monday, March 6, 2023
Zoom link: https://sciencespo.zoom.us/j/9637802275