Splintering Towers of Babel: Paradoxical Architectures and Urban Infrastructures

Splintering Towers of Babel focuses on and redefines soft infrastructures and critical infrastructure projects. It explores key issues in contemporary urban studies including town planning histories, architecture, heritage, colonialism and postcolonialism, philosophy, and ethics.

The book combines transdisciplinary perspectives on the key historical, philosophical, and political issues associated with urban experiences, built forms, and infrastructure networks. It explores uneven dimensions in contemporary urbanisms and develops spatial phenomenological thinking with reference to the northern and southern hemispheres. This book connects the past and the present, in addition to Western and global South geographies, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Its main contribution is to broaden readers' understanding of infrastructure through the lens of the humanities and to engage with political, poetical, and ethical perspectives.

This book is tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban planning, urban geography, architectural history, urban design, infrastructure studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, African studies, and philosophy.

Liora Bigon is an urban (planning) historian and an associate professor at Ariel University after a lengthily service at Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), also as the institutional responsible of the Accessibility of Higher Education Program for the Arab, Druze, and Circassian Society. She specializes in toponymy, (post-)colonial urban history, and planning cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on West Africa, and has published widely in these fields, including articles, encyclopedic entries, books, and edited collections. Among her books are Garden Cities and Colonial Planning in Africa and Palestine (2014, co-ed. with Y. Katz); French Colonial Dakar (2016); Place Names in Africa (2016); Grid Planning in the Urban Design Practices of Senegal (with Prof. E. Ross, 2020); and Street-Naming Cultures in Africa and Israel (with Dr. Arch. Michel Ben Arrous, Routledge, 2021) – the latest couple of books include extensive fieldwork in a variety of sub-Saharan Africa and Israeli cities.

Edna Langenthal is a chartered architect and a philosopher, a senior lecturer, and the Head of the School of Architecture at Ariel University where she teaches, the first-year studio and the final project in the fifth year. She is the co-chief editor of Architext, a peer-reviewed bilingual (Hebrew/English) architectural journal, with Arch. Itzik Alhadif. She is the author of numerous articles published in major periodicals. Her latest book, Question of place: Architecture between the poetic and the ethical (2021), offers a new understanding of the elements of architectural practice with exposure to phenomenological thought. Her areas of specialization are ethical and poetic architecture, especially Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Her research and her teaching combine philosophical and ethical questions, emphasizing the connection between the field of architecture and phenomenology.