| Item Description: | "The absence of the general public from the planning of complex public infrastructures constitutes one of the most ubiquitous complaints against contemporary infrastructural policymaking and implementation. This book begins with the contention that such claims arise from an erroneous premise. Human beings, both individually and collectively, always lie at the heart of infrastructural policy. This means that the primary issue is not that humans are excluded, but rather when and how they are brought into infrastructural policymaking. Combining STS studies with post-structural theory, Ureta has written the first in-depth study of this topic, and he does so through a genealogical analysis of Transantiago. Transantiago is a public transportation system in Santiago, Chile that was the result of a major public transportation system overhaul. The project was initially mired in various disasters owing to a myriad of infrastructural problems. Using smart city technologies, Transantiago promised to fully modernize the transportation system while in parallel transforming Santiago into a world-class city. But its beginnings in February 2007 were complete chaos and escalated into one of Chile's greatest controversies in the country's recent history. Challenging traditional approaches, the book looks at Transantiago as a policy assemblage formed by an array of heterogeneous elements, centrally among them the multiple artefacts and practices through which different kinds of human subjects were brought into infrastructure. Such "human devices" occupy central positions on such assemblages not only because they act as guidelines on the continual (re)assembling of infrastructures but also because through them particular ways of being human in contemporary societies are produced." |
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