This book provides a comprehensive insight into the contemporary naturecultural world by exploring infrastructures through the dwelling approach. The notion of naturecultures has been utilized in environmental humanities and social sciences to emphasize the inherent messiness of the lived world and the inseparability of social and biophysical elements. Concept of naturecultures stresses that seemingly “natural” is always simultaneously “cultural” and vice versa. This approach allows fleshing out the messy engagements with infrastructures, which in this book is conceptualized as infrastructural being. This book is a contribution to emerging discussions on infrastructures in the fields of environmental social sciences and humanities. It sensitizes to the peculiarities of modern dwelling and modern, yet often overlooked, ways of being connected with nature. Moreover, it provides tools for speculating, how could things be otherwise. The book is a topical response to the urgent call for developing new forms of human-nature relations in times of environmental turbulence.

Explorations of the many ways of being material in the digital age. In his oracular 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that social relations, media, and commerce would move from the realm of “atoms to bits”—that human affairs would be increasingly untethered from the material world. And yet in 2019, an age dominated by the digital, we have not quite left the material world behind. In Being Material, artists and technologists explore the relationship of the digital to the material, demonstrating that processes that seem wholly immaterial function within material constraints. Digital technologies themselves, they remind us, are material things—constituted by atoms of gold, silver, silicon, copper, tin, tungsten, and more. The contributors explore five modes of being material: programmable, wearable, livable, invisible, and audible. Their contributions take the form of reports, manifestos, philosophical essays, and artist portfolios, among other configurations. The book's cover merges the possibilities of paper with those of the digital, featuring a bookmark-like card that, when “seen” by a smartphone, generates graphic arrangements that unlock films, music, and other dynamic content on the book's website. At once artist's book, digitally activated object, and collection of scholarship, this book both demonstrates and chronicles the many ways of being material. Contributors Christina Agapakis, Azra Akšamija, Sandy Alexandre, Dewa Alit, George Barbastathis, Maya Beiser, Marie-Pier Boucher, Benjamin H. Bratton, Hussein Chalayan, Jim Cybulski, Tal Danino, Deborah G. Douglas, Arnold Dreyblatt, M. Amah Edoh, Michelle Tolini Finamore, Team Foldscope and Global Foldscope community, Ben Fry, Victor Gama, Stefan Helmreich, Hyphen-Labs, Leila Kinney, Rebecca Konte, Winona LaDuke, Brendan Landis, Grace Leslie, Bill Maurer, Lucy McRae, Tom Özden-Schilling, Trevor Paglen, Lisa Parks, Nadya Peek, Claire Pentecost, Manu Prakash,Casey Reas, Paweł Romańczuk, Natasha D. Schüll, Nick Shapiro, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, Evan Ziporyn Book Design: E Roon Kang Electronics, interactions, and product designer: Marcelo Coelho

As the international economy globalises, there is a need for national infrastructure systems to adapt to form a global infrastructure system. This network of networks aids mobility between national systems as a means of supporting their territorial needs and preferences. This reflects a strategic approach to state infrastructuring as nations seek to utilise these physical systems to support and enhance their territoriality. Providing a thorough examination through the lens of economic infrastructure, the book addresses the forces of integration and fragmentation in global networks. This book explores the trend towards the development of regional infrastructure systems within the context of territorial strategy. Regional systems emerge out of states seeking to position themselves within the international system. Colin Turner identifies the diverse processes that are driving regional infrastructures, as well as examining the formal and informal patterns of integration that are shaping developments. This book is ideal for international political economy and regional development scholars who seek an advanced understanding of current regional infrastructure systems. It will also serve as a vital tool for practitioners who need to understand the implications for policy-making.

With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area. Features include: a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.

Infrastructure is a much discussed topic within the field of landscape architecture. It regards the entire urban and rural space as a network that calls for an integrated planning and urban design approach. Natural and man-made infrastructures are viewed as forming a single, overarching whole. The book examines this robust and ecologically sustainable approach with essays by well-known experts in the field. It also documents 14 international case studies by SWA landscape architects and urban designers, among them the technologically innovative roof domes for Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Science in San Francisco, the restoration of the Buffalo Bayou in Houston, and several master plans for ecological corridors in China and Korea. Other projects develop smart re-use concepts for railroad tracks that no longer serve their original purpose, such as Kyung-Chun railway in Seoul or Katy Trail in Dallas. All projects are described extensively with technical diagrams and plans. The publication offers ideas for reinventing, repurposing, and repositioning infrastructure as a viable medium for addressing issues of ecology, transit, urbanism, and habitat.

Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure addresses the struggles of national and local states to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure. It develops fresh thinking on financialisation and city statecraft to explain the socially and spatially uneven mixing of managerial, entrepreneurial and financialised city governance in austerity and limited decentralisation across England. As urban infrastructure fixes for the London global city-region risk undermining national ‘rebalancing’ efforts in the UK, city statecraft in the rest of the country is having uneasily to combine speculation, risk-taking and prospective venturing with co-ordination, planning and regulation.

Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Myanmar Country Study Guide - Strategic Information and Developments Volume 1 Strategic Information and Developments

Critical Infrastructure: Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Fifth Edition represents a continuation of research and recommendations from the past editions that spans nearly twenty years of focusing on critical infrastructure (CI) protection. Over that time, the operating, threat, and technical environments have changed drastically. The doctrines that have guided practitioners across various domains have also evolved due to changing demands. This is a natural result when doctrines collide and gradually evolve toward, and coalesce into, a singular understanding of an issue. Those who have practiced in this domain have seen these collisions in the past - an example being the convergence of physical security and cyber information and operational) technologies security. It is with this backdrop and understanding of the domain that the authors not only describe the current state of affairs, but also provide a means through which researchers and participants - such as practitioners, students, industry stakeholders, owners, and operators in various government and private CI sectors - can look at trends and changes the in the domain that may not be apparent elsewhere. The authors identify shifts in today’s environment that move the thinking away from simply the robustness of systems to their adaptability and resilience. They outline design processes that, likewise, are evolving away from the simple adoption of best practices to risk-based management and even towards structures based on engineering-driven principles. These changes are not occurring at a unified pace and the differences can result in tensions between certain communities. However, the debate itself is indicative of the critical thinking that is beginning to take hold within each infrastructure domain. Critical Infrastructure, Fifth Edition continues to critically examine the evolving importance of our critical infrastructure to our society - recognizing the underpinning value of cyber technology and how physical infrastructures and delivery models impact and affect people and society.