Public. Infrastructure, architecture, territoire. analyzes the defeat, persistence or defense of what linked infrastructure, public good and territorial identity. It observes what has changed or is changing about the public in terms of architectural, urban and territorial life and organization through the analysis of researchers, architects, urban planners, engineers, historians and sociologists.
While large infrastructures have risen since the 19th century to the rank of technical prowess allowing new monumental embodiments - crossing, catchment or transmission - we observe today a mistrust of society towards large technical works. In a reversal proper to the era of neo-liberal capitalism, we see confusing and opposing, on the one hand, centralization and privatization, on the other, localism or deconcentration and common good. The public is constantly counterbalanced, opposed, endangered by what has become its almost inverted corollary, the private. At best it is associated with it; more rarely does the private return to the public.
"Public," arguably the most ideologized term in planning, is here held at a distance from the expression with which it is most frequently associated - "public space." Public is raised, displaced and reactivated by studying its relation to infrastructure, from Bangkok to Saigon or Guangzhou, from Trieste to Rotterdam, from Iran to Brazil, through the avant-gardes in the Soviet Union. The book analyzes the various occurrences, in history, in the present moment as well as in fictional time, where the term operates in the spatial, environmental, political environment; public as a good, a domain, a thing, a utility, a service, a necessity, an investment, a heritage, an infrastructure, a space, a spectacle, or as an invention of its publics.
Published under the scientific direction of Dominique Rouillard, with contributions from researchers at the Infrastructure, Architecture, Territory Laboratory, research unit of the École nationale supérieure d'architecture Paris-Malaquais: Sina Abedi, Marie Artuphel, Carlotta Daro, Gilles Delalex, Pauline Detarvernier, Cécile Diguet, Bérénice Gaussuin, Alain Guiheux, Dimitra Kanellopoulou, Fanny Lopez, Mathieu Mercuriali, Luca Merlini, Can Onaner, Pascal Pinet, Claude Prelorenzo, Camille Reiss, Marika Rupeka, Zeila Tesoriere, Dimitri Toubanos, Xioli Wei.
ISBN: 978-2-84056-803-2
Price: €25
18,5 x 24,5 cm
391 pages
April 2021
Co-published with the École nationale supérieure d'architecture Paris-Malaquais
