Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia - Hardcover

9780824892913: Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0824892917 ISBN 13: 9780824892913

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, 2023

Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia offers a new understanding of how technological innovation, geopolitical ambitions, and social change converge and cross-fertilize one another through infrastructure projects in Asia. This volume powerfully illustrates the multifaceted connections between infrastructure and three global paradigm shifts: climate change, digitalization, and China’s emergence as a superpower. Drawing on fine-grained analyses of airports, highways, pipelines, and digital communication systems, the book investigates infrastructure both "from above," as perceived by experts and decision makers, and "from below," as experienced by middlemen, laborers, and everyday users. In so doing, it provides groundbreaking insights into infrastructure’s planning, production, and operation.

Focusing on cities and regions across Asia, the volume combines ten tightly interwoven case studies, from the Bosphorus to Beijing and from the Indonesian archipelago to the Arctic. Written by leading global infrastructure experts in the fields of anthropology, architecture, geography, history, science and technology studies, and urban planning, the book establishes a dialogue between scholarly approaches to infrastructure and the more operational perspective of the professionals who design and build it. This multidisciplinary method sheds light on the practitioners’ mindset, while also attending to the materiality and agency of the infrastructures that they create. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia is conceived as an act of translation: linking up related―yet thus far disconnected―research across a variety of academic disciplines, while making those insights accessible to a wider audience of students, infrastructure professionals, and the general public.

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About the Author

Max Hirsh is a research fellow at the University of Hong Kong and managing director of the Airport City Academy.

Till Mostowlansky a research professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

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