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.

This collection is a study of the process by which European planning concepts and practices were transmitted, diffused and diverted in various colonial territories and situations. The socio-political, geographical and cultural implications are analysed here through case studies from the global South, namely from French and British colonial territories in Africa as well as from Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. The book focuses on the transnational aspects of the garden city, taking into account frameworks and documentation that extend beyond national borders, and includes contributions from an international network of specialists. Their comparative views and geographical focus challenge the conventional, Eurocentric approach to garden cities, and will interest students and scholars of planning history and colonial history. -- .

This book is focused on the street-naming politics, policies and practices that have been shaping and reshaping the semantic, textual and visual environments of urban Africa and Israel. Its chapters expand on prominent issues, such as the importance of extra-formal processes, naming reception and unofficial toponymies, naming decolonisation, place attachment, place-making and the materiality of street signage. By this, the book directly contributes to the mainstreaming of Africa's toponymic cultures in recent critical place-names studies. Unconventionally and experimentally, comparative glimpses are made throughout between toponymic experiences of African and Israeli cities, exploring pioneering issues in the overwhelmingly Eurocentric research tradition. The latter tends to be concentrated on Europe and North America, to focus on nationalistic ideologies and regime change and to over-rely on top-down 'mere' mapping and street indexing. This volume is also unique in incorporating a rich and stimulating variety of visual evidence from a wide range of African and Israeli cities. The materiality of street signage signifies the profound and powerful connections between structured politics, current mundane practices, historical traditions and subaltern cultures. Street-Naming Cultures in Africa and Israel is an important contribution to urban studies, toponymic research and African studies for scholars and students. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003173762

This is the first collection of interdisciplinary scholarship to expand on gridded modalities, with a strong affinity to the arts. It seeks to inspire new avenues of research by exploring a horizon of gridded relationships among humans, between humans and the environment, and between human and non-human actors. By bringing together philosophical themes and applied practices, the volume traces a genealogy of the "grid" as an exercise in grasping its inherent complexity and incomplete quality. A collective effort by a group of researchers, practitioners, and designers, it promotes an understanding of gridded modalities as complex networks that interact with other networks, generating new meanings and reflecting changes in thought.

This volume explores the planning and architectural cultures that shaped the model space of French colonial Dakar, a prominent city in West Africa. With a focus on the period from the establishment of the city in the mid-nineteenth century until the interwar years, the book reveals a variety of urban politics, policies and practices, and complex negotiations on both the physical and conceptual levels. Chronicling the design of Dakar as a regional capital, the book suggests a connection between the French colonial doctrines of assimilation and association, and French colonial planning and architectural policies in sub-Saharan Africa. Of interest to scholars in history, geography, architecture, urban planning, African studies and Global South studies, the book incorporates both primary and secondary sources collected from multilateral channels in Europe and Senegal. -- .