This paper develops the concept of archipelagic technonatures to analyse how urban infrastructures are reshaping the geographies of global conservation. We focus on climate-controlled biomes in Paris and Zurich that simulate Madagascar's rainforest ecosystems. These enclosed environments function as infrastructural nodes in a trans-situ regime where endangered ecologies are displaced, reconstructed and managed across geographically discontinuous but functionally integrated sites. By tracing how species, climates and conservation expertise settle in and circulate through these biomes, we show how climate itself is rendered programmable as an object of governance. Using archipelagic thinking to extend insights from urban political ecology and infrastructure studies, we argue that these biomes constitute a postcolonial material topology of conservation. They transform endangered life into curated, atmospheric and data-generating forms that sustain urban authority over planetary ecologies while reproducing North-South asymmetries. Yet they also create experimental 'truth spots' where ecological reconstruction techniques can be tested and circulated. The concept of archipelagic technonatures foregrounds this ambivalence: infrastructures that both expose inequalities of displacement and open possibilities for more relational modes of conservation across unsettled, multi-sited landscapes. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on ecological urbanisation, climate governance and the technopolitics of nature in the Anthropocene.

This introduction to the special issue critically explores the pervasive logic of solutionism in infrastructure-led urban development and planning – a logic marked not only by the strong belief in the transformative power of infrastructures but also by a tendency to reframe how urban problems are prioritised and governed. Although infrastructures are increasingly positioned as key tools for urban decarbonisation, circularity, resilience or smartness, this introduction critically questions dominant solutionist approaches to complex urban problems. Drawing on recent urban scholarship, it explores infrastructures as ongoing, relational, and contested sociotechnical processes, rethinking transformative urban change as a situated, incremental, and ambiguous process shaped by local politics, materiality, and everyday repair and patching. Contributions to this issue highlight how infrastructural initiatives, even when partial or unrealised, can challenge dominant interests and practices and open space for alternative urban futures. Rather than repudiating infrastructural solutions, therefore, we suggest that the special issue foregrounds infrastructures’ contested potential to enable progressive, transformative change. We pull out four transversal themes from the papers, around rethinking governance, repoliticising infrastructure development, embracing incremental and context-sensitive approaches and expanding conceptions of justice. In doing so, we call for approaches to infrastructural transformation that remain open to uncertainty, friction and possibility.

This essay explores how contemporary urban infrastructure is being conceptually and operationally extended into new domains. Across five key arenas-elemental, care, more-than-human, cyber-physical and the neurotechnical-we trace how infrastructures are no longer confined to traditional networked systems but instead permeate and co-compose atmospheres, bodies, ecologies and cognition. These extensions reconfigure what infrastructure is and does, operating as agents of socio-technical modulation under conditions of planetary crisis. We argue that these emergent infrastructural forms constitute a significant shift, where the capacity to live, sense, feel and adapt is increasingly subject to infrastructural capture, stratification and control. The essay reflects on the risks of conceptual overreach while asserting that a more expansive understanding of infrastructure is necessary to grasp contemporary urban governance. We conclude by proposing a renewed research agenda for urban infrastructure studies that is interdisciplinary, ethically attuned and responsive to the operationalization of life itself under conditions of turbulence and inequality.

This paper critically examines why urban studies should be interested in the emergence of controlled environment agriculture. Over the last decade, there has been significant commercial and urban policy interest in controlled environment agriculture systems for producing food in enclosed environments. Furthermore, there has been a significant expansion in research publications on urban controlled environment agriculture, stressing the novel character of these systems and the complex relationships with the conventional concerns of urban agriculture. The paper subjects these claims to critical scrutiny and then reconceptualises urban controlled environment agriculture as an emergent urban infrastructure of artificial, highly productive microclimates and ecosystems for non-human life designed to increase the productive use of ‘surplus or under-utilised’ urban spaces. We argue that controlled environment agriculture tries to secure food production through three spatial–temporal fixes: (1) the enclosure move – holding food closer by substituting the increasingly hostile outdoors for the controlled indoors in order to optimise yield, quality, efficiency and the ‘cleanness’ of the food; (2) the urban move – holding food closer to the city by substituting rural agricultural space for urban space to shorten supply chains and thereby help secure food production and improve its green credentials; and (3) combining 1 and 2, the urban interiorisation move – holding food yet closer still by moving food production into city buildings and intricate infrastructural systems, increasing control by securing total environments. In these ways, the paper shows how urban controlled environment agriculture selectively extends existing logics of urban and rural agriculture and identifies the future research challenges for urban studies.

This paper examines the understudied relationship between nature conservation and climate control in botanic gardens. Drawing on research conducted at Kew Gardens in West London, we analyse how the relations between climate control, techniques that allow the creation of particular microclimatic conditions in volumetric enclosures, and ex-situ-out of nature-botanical management have changed over time. The paper shows how climate-controlled conservation works through three spatial-technological modes-acclimatisation, climate simulation, and climate security-that reconfigure in-situ and ex-situ relations. These modes increasingly transcend local environmental conditions, creating the possibility of conservation without natural climate. The paper extends existing geographies of climate control by focusing on the role of technology in permitting plant life to be moved between different geographical contexts, in enabling ex-situ and in-situ natures to become increasingly entwined, and in constructing enclosed conditions decoupled from local climate. Secure climate-controlled conservation now strategically transforms ex-situ botanic gardens into the actual sites, and in some cases the last remaining sites, of these natures. This paper examines the understudied relationship between nature conservation and climate control in botanic gardens. The paper shows how climate-controlled conservation works through three modes that permit plant life to be moved between geographical contexts, entwine ex-situ and in-situ natures, and construct life support conditions decoupled from local climate.image

This chapter examines the emergence of the smart microgrid as a logic of grid security that can seamlessly switch between 'normal' and 'emergency' configurations in microseconds. It contributes to further understanding of the evolving temporalities of urban infrastructure configurations in three ways. The chapter first locates the 'always-on' uninterruptible capacity of the smart microgrid in a series of concepts, ideas, and strategies developed in work on self-healing systems in a variety of contexts. It then traces the development of the smart microgrid in US military and urban contexts, exploring how it has become central to a logic of urban resilience that seeks to mitigate threats and prepare for future turbulence by pursuing the reconfiguration of grids into permanent 'alert' mode. Finally, it outlines the differential, asynchronous experience of seamless transition enabled by smart microgrids whereby new forms of socio-spatial selectivity are produced through infrastructure temporalities.

ABSTRACT Increasing threats to the electrical grid are generating responses that seek to secure selected “mission critical” assets essential to the functioning and continuity of life. Focusing on military and urban domains in the United States that use the smart microgrid as a technique for securing “always-on” power during grid failure, we explore the core rationales, socio-technical configurations and wider implications of these projects. The paper argues that smart microgrid systems are an adaptive mode of grid expansion that utilizes the off-grid “islanding” and grid-tied functionalities of microgrids to secure urban operational continuity. They constitute a relational systemic reconfiguration that draws on, develops and holds together expertise and interdependencies across domains to construct an integrated response to grid vulnerability. Smart microgrids thus bring into view an emerging set of spatial–temporal dynamics and implications through which the interval of disruption is eliminated and power maintained, albeit for selected designated critical assets.

Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (2001) brought the study of infrastructure to the core of urban studies and inspired the "infrastructural turn" in the social sciences more widely.The book catalyzed a rich trove of research on how technology and society are implicated in the production of contemporary cities.More than any other publication, it has animated the socio-technical systems of water, energy, transport, and telecommunications as fundamental to the functioning and livability of cities.It has inspired scholars to seek out the vital processes and politics of the cables, wires, pipes, and roads that undergird urban development.The twentieth anniversary of the book provides a good opportunity to reflect on the impacts of the book and to consider the emerging trajectories of scholarship on urban infrastructure.Splintering Urbanism has taken on that rare quality in the history of urban thought and research in that it is both a text and an event.Of course, it is not the first book to focus on the relationship between the city and its infrastructure systems.It builds upon the work on large technical systems (Hughes, 1983;Mayntz and Hughes, 1988; Summerton, 1994), network urbanism and societies (Dupuy, 1991;Castells, 1996), socio-technical transformations (Winner, 1986; Bijker and Law, 1992), the role of infrastructure in histories of urban planning and government (Tarr and Dupuy, 1988;Aibar and Bijker, 1997), and research on the emergence of information and digital technologies in the city (including Graham and Marvin's first opus Telecommunications and the City, in 1996).Indeed, Graham and Marvin (2001: xxvi, xxv) begin Splintering Urbanism by acknowledging that "this book, more than most, has been possible only by drawing on and synthesizing a huge body of work" that informed their "fascination with the complex intersections of cities and networked technologies."The book was published amidst a rich stream of research already in train across urban and regional research in sociology, geography, and planning that centered on the production, politics and materialities of urban and regional infrastructure.This work examined infrastructure in and between cities, from the labor and significance of large infrastructural projects in the history of cities, regions, and nations, to the varied and highly uneven experience of access to and use of infrastructure services from water and sanitation, to electricity and transportation.Splintering Urbanism, however, triggered a significant perceptual shift by providing a means to read and apprehend the urban condition through infrastructure.Take, for instance, a fairly straightforward case of someone living in a peripheral neighborhood, with adequate public transport or a private car to utilize a freeway to access different locations, and someone else living nearby but blocked off by that freeway and lacking any viable transport

Indoor and outdoor leisure environments are increasingly understood to be mutually constituted through merged relationships but there has been less focus on the actual forms that hybridisation can take. This paper provides an analysis of forms of hybridisation through time by focusing on the socio-technical configurations through which three leisure environments are materially constituted. We analyse the key functional elements of these configurations: the technological systems and their genealogies over time that allow the making and unmaking of activities; the spatiality of facilities and systems in terms of their locations and connections across space; and the construction by providers of user pathways between indoor and outdoor activities. The paper uses this structure to compare purpose-built indoor recreational spaces located in the city region of Greater Manchester that recreate outdoor activities focusing on skydiving, skiing, and ice wall climbing. We construct a framework of three modes of hybridisation – emergent, merged, stretched – that contributes a deeper understanding of the diversity, intensity, and changing temporality of interrelations between indoor and outdoor environments.

Indoor and outdoor leisure environments are increasingly understood to be mutually constituted through merged relationships but there has been less focus on the actual forms that hybridisation can take. This paper provides an analysis of forms of hybridisation through time by focusing on the socio-technical configurations through which three leisure environments are materially constituted. We analyse the key functional elements of these configurations: the technological systems and their genealogies over time that allow the making and unmaking of activities; the spatiality of facilities and systems in terms of their locations and connections across space; and the construction by providers of user pathways between indoor and outdoor activities. The paper uses this structure to compare purpose-built indoor recreational spaces located in the city region of Greater Manchester that recreate outdoor activities focusing on skydiving, skiing, and ice wall climbing. We construct a framework of three modes of hybridisation – emergent, merged, stretched – that contributes a deeper understanding of the diversity, intensity, and changing temporality of interrelations between indoor and outdoor environments.

This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on 'low cost' measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.

The informational city is a powerful and distinctive geographical expression of a constantly evolving technoeconomic paradigm with two main attributes. First, there has been a gradual redefinition of urban regions as socioeconomic systems for the production, management, and distribution of information. Second, a series of technological advances have placed digital information and communications networks at the heart of the functioning of urban societies and economies. While the networked nature of information production, processing, and sharing has served to loosen some ties that have traditionally bound cities to specific territories, information generation and use continue to concentrate in and around urban areas. As a result, information is a constitutive part of the meaning, value, and experience of the relations and interactions which make up the city. Urban life is now increasingly bound up with and mediated and augmented through digital information. Informational cities materialize, however, in diverse and sociospatially uneven ways at all scales, thus demanding close attention to their political constitution and consequences. A number of limits to and critiques of the concept of informational city have been formulated, while theoretical and practical challenges around informational cities continue to be discussed.