Re-appraising sociotechnical continuity and change

Re-appraising sociotechnical continuity and change

The infrastructure systems which provide cities with energy, water and wastewater services have long become symbols of stability and durability. Designed for decades in advance, embedded physically in the urban substrata and sustained by complex institutional arrangements and routinized practices, these systems conjure up notions of immobility, obduracy and resilience. Given the high degree of path dependence attributed to urban infrastructures as a result, the pertinent question is how they change at all, once established. Historians of technology have provided valuable explanations for the emergence and subsequent stabilization of so-called Large Technical Systems (LTS), from their early beginnings in the hands of inventors, entrepreneurs and financiers to the large-scale urban networks familiar to urban landscapes of industrialized countries today. Transitions scholars have sought to demonstrate, by contrast, how established sociotechnical regimes can get destabilized by innovative ‘niches’ and shifting ‘landscapes’, creating openings for regime change. However, both approaches have recently been criticized, by human geographers in particular, for their lack of sensitivity to place-specificity, contingency, non-linearity and the broader political economy. 

Berlin’s infrastructure history over the past 100 years is a case in point. The physical appearance of the electricity, gas, water and sanitation systems serving the city today may bear some striking similarities to those already in existence in the 1920s. However, it would be short-sighted to assume from this any path-dependent immunity to Berlin’s turbulent twentieth-century history. Similarly, reducing the city’s infrastructure history to the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of a sociotechnical regime transition would miss crucial interactions between the city and its infrastructure spanning five hugely diverse political systems, ranging from democratic Weimar Berlin, the Nazi dictatorship, state-socialist East Berlin, geopolitically isolated West Berlin to the reunified city post-1990. My talk will use the case of Berlin to challenge common conceptualizations of sociotechnical obduracy and change. I will disentangle the ‘seamless web’ of the city’s energy infrastructures to reveal what changed (and what did not change) to the way these were envisioned, appropriated and governed in response to radical shifts in their political and socio-economic environment. On the basis of this empirical case I will set out a more nuanced and relational way of theorizing the temporalities and spatialities of urban infrastructures that is sensitive to the interaction of both long-term trends and short-term shocks, both continuity and change, and both sociotechnical and socio-spatial developments.

Bio:

Timothy Moss became a Guest Professor at IRI THESys in April 2016, having been an affiliated member since June 2014. Prior to this appointment he headed a research department at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS). He holds a B.A. in European Studies (Sussex), an M.Phil. in Modern European History (Oxford) and a D.Phil in German municipal history (Oxford). His research revolves around processes of institutional change relating to public goods and their spatiality in general, and urban infrastructure systems in particular. With his multi-disciplinary background in history and political science and 20-year experience on interdisciplinary research projects both within and beyond the social sciences he is naturally attracted to scholarship at the interface of diverse debates on this topic. In his work he draws on concepts relating to socio-technical systems, institutional change, urban and regional development, multi-level governance, global change and environmental history in order to devise novel perspectives and derive innovative insight on the dynamic relationship between infrastructures, actors and space. He has led and conducted numerous research projects for the European Commission, the German Research Council (DFG) and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and published widely in leading academic journals and edited volumes. Many of his projects have had a strong transdisciplinary component, involving close interaction with practitioners in policy, administration, business and civil society. He is a member of the German Academy of Spatial Research and Planning (ARL) and the Council for Land Stewardship (DRL).

Lunch will be served, so please let us know if you are coming by sending an e-mail to karin.lillevold@uib.no