Infrastructure And Form

In the 1990s and 2000s, contemporary art in India changed radically in form, as an art world once dominated by painting began to support installation, new media, and performance. In response to the liberalization of India’s economy, art was cultivated by a booming market as well as by new nonprofit institutions that combined strong local roots and transnational connections. The result was an unprecedented efflorescence of contemporary art and growth of a network of institutions radiating out from India. Among the first studies of contemporary South Asian art, Infrastructure and Form engages with sixteen of India’s leading contemporary artists and art collectives to examine what made this development possible. Karin Zitzewitz articulates the connections among formal trajectories of medium and material, curatorial frames and networks of circulation, and the changing conditions of everyday life after economic liberalization. By untangling the complex interactions of infrastructure and form, the book offers a discussion of the barriers and conduits that continue to shape global contemporary art and its relationship to capital more broadly.

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. Contributors Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

In this comparison of infrastructure across countries and sectors, leading international academics and practitioners consider the latest approaches to infrastructure policy, implementation, and finance. The book presents evidence-based solutions and policy considerations, essential concepts and economic theories, and a current overview.

Today, more than 100 blockchain projects created to transform government systems are being conducted in more than 30 countries. What leads countries rapidly initiate blockchain projects? I argue that it is because blockchain is a technology directly related to social organization; Unlike other technologies, a consensus mechanism form the core of blockchain. Traditionally, consensus is not the domain of machines but rather humankind. However, blockchain operates through a consensus algorithm with human intervention; once that consensus is made, it cannot be modified or forged. Through utilization of Lawrence Lessig's proposition that "Code is law," I suggest that blockchain creates "absolute law" that cannot be violated. This characteristic of blockchain makes it possible to implement social technology that can replace existing social apparatuses including bureaucracy. Government is a social technology that exists through social consensus, serving to ensure trust among anonymous individuals in an expanded community; likewise the blockchain, though varying in its nature as a physical-social technology, is specifically designed to ensure trust among anonymous individuals. When we investigate the functions of government in detail, various devices for providing trust to society operate in various areas and at various levels. In terms of ensuring trust, governments have many different ways of performing the same role. The newly developed technology of the blockchain is revolutionary in offering the first ever mechanism to ensure trust. In summary, there are three close similarities between blockchain and bureaucracy. First, both of them are defined by the rules and execute predetermined rules. Second, both of them work as information processing machines for society. Third, both of them work as trust machines for society. Therefore, I posit that it is possible and moreover unavoidable to replace bureaucracy with blockchain systems. In conclusion, I suggest five principles that should be adhered to when we replace bureaucracy with the blockchain system: 1) introducing Blockchain Statute law; 2) transparent disclosure of data and source code; 3) implementing autonomous executing administration; 4) building a governance system based on direct democracy and 5) making Distributed Autonomous Government(DAG).

At the core of the logic of this book is that states engage in infrastructuring as a means of securing and enhancing their territoriality. By positioning infrastructure as a system, there is a presumption that all infrastructures exhibit some degree of mutual dependence. As such, a National Infrastructure System (NIS) is not simply about conventional conceptions of infrastructure based on those that support economic activity (i.e. energy, transport and information) but also about broader hard and soft structures that both enable and are supported by the aforementioned economic infrastructures. Consequently, this book offers an ambitious holistic view on the form of NIS arguing that the infrastructural mandate requires a conception of the state that encapsulates themes from both the competition and the welfare states in infrastructure provision.

A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.

This book presents the select proceedings of the Virtual Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (VCDRR 2021). This book discusses various relevant topics such as Disaster resilience and Infrastructure, Risk reduction and structural measures, Evidence based approach for DRR Case studies, Numerical modelling and Constructions methods, Prevention Methods and Safety Engineering, Cross cutting issue in DRR and Infrastructure etc. The book is also a comprehensive volume on multi-hazards and their management for a sustainable built environment. This book will be useful for academicians, research scholars and industry professionals working in the area of civil engineering and disaster management.

Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century. Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraftwill change how we think about cities-and, perhaps, how we live in them.