Publications
ACADEMIC
Read our most recent publications.
MEDIA
Check out RSA NOIR in the media.
WORKING PAPERS
See what we are currently working on.
Academic Publications
Virtual Special Issue: REGIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES, INFRASTRUCTURAL REGIONALISM
Regional Studies
Michael R. Glass, Jean-Paul D. Addie, Jen Nelles
2019
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An ‘infrastructure turn’ across the social and policy sciences is generating a new wave of interdisciplinary inquiry into how infrastructure is shaping urban and regional space. This collection charts the evolution of infrastructure as an empirical and conceptual concern within Regional Studies. The virtual special issue and accompanying editorial demonstrate that analyzing regions through infrastructure - whether large, capital-intensive projects or more mundane infrastructures - provides a novel and necessary perspective on the regional question.
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Read more articles from this virtual special issue >
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INFRASTRUCTURE CONFIDENTIAL: NOIR LAUNCHES IN THE CITY OF SAINTS
Regions EZine
Jen Nelles, Michael Glass, Jean-Paul Addie
2019
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Montréal, the site of the RSA’s 2019 North American conference this September, proved a fitting site for the launch of the RSA Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR). From the window of a plane circling the Island of Montréal on the descent into Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, the infrastructural sinews of the metropolitan region are plain to see. Highways and rail lines crisscross Montréal’s extended urban fabric. Bridges crossing the St. Lawrence River tie the city to its suburban hinterlands in Laval, Longueuil, and beyond.
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Media
Coming Soon...
Working Papers
PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF REGIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE IN
WASHINGTON AND LOS ANGELES
Reports and reflections from NOIR's pre-launch conference panels
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Jen Nelles, Michael Glass, Jean-Paul Addie
2020
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Prior to the official launch of the RSA Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms (NOIR) at the RSA’s North American conference in September 2019, NOIR’s directors organized pre-launch panels at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington DC, and the Annual Meeting of the Urban Affairs Association in Los Angeles. By bringing together scholars and practitioners addressing the infrastructural challenges of their home regions, each panel offered a wide-ranging exploration of the practice and theory of the infrastructures which constitute large and complex U.S. city-regions. Panelists anchored their remarks using specific examples from the Washington and LA regions, and in doing so provided the foundations for a broader interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral dialogue on how the funding, governance, and spatiality of infrastructure can promote urban, economic, and ecological sustainability at the regional scale.
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Publications
ACADEMIC
Read our most recent publications.
MEDIA
Check out RSA NOIR presentations and media
WORKING PAPERS & REPORTS
See what we are currently working on.
Academic Publications
REGIONALIZING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TURN: A RESEARCH AGENDA
Regional Studies, Regional Science
Jean-Paul D. Addie, Michael R. Glass, Jen Nelles
2019
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An interdisciplinary ‘infrastructure turn’ has emerged over the past 20 years that disputes the concept of urban infrastructure as a staid or neutral set of physical artefacts. Responding to the increased conceptual, geographical and political importance of infrastructure – and endemic issues of access, expertise and governance that the varied provision of infrastructures can cause – this intervention asserts the significance of applying a regional perspective to the infrastructure turn. This paper forwards a critical research agenda for the study of ‘infrastructural regionalisms’ to interrogate: (1) how we study and produce knowledge about infrastructure; (2) how infrastructure is governed across or constrained by jurisdictional boundaries; (3) who drives the construction of regional infrastructural imaginaries; and (4) how individuals and communities differentially experience regional space through infrastructure. Analysing regions through infrastructure provides a novel perspective on the regional question and consequently offers a framework to understand better the implications of the current infrastructure moment for regional spaces worldwide.
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Read more >
Virtual Special Issue: REGIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES, INFRASTRUCTURAL REGIONALISM
Regional Studies
Michael R. Glass, Jean-Paul D. Addie, Jen Nelles
2019
​
An ‘infrastructure turn’ across the social and policy sciences is generating a new wave of interdisciplinary inquiry into how infrastructure is shaping urban and regional space. This collection charts the evolution of infrastructure as an empirical and conceptual concern within Regional Studies. The virtual special issue and accompanying editorial demonstrate that analyzing regions through infrastructure - whether large, capital-intensive projects or more mundane infrastructures - provides a novel and necessary perspective on the regional question.
​
​
Read more articles from this virtual special issue >
​
INFRASTRUCTURE CONFIDENTIAL: NOIR LAUNCHES IN THE CITY OF SAINTS
Regions EZine
Jen Nelles, Michael Glass, Jean-Paul Addie
2019
​
Montréal, the site of the RSA’s 2019 North American conference this September, proved a fitting site for the launch of the RSA Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR). From the window of a plane circling the Island of Montréal on the descent into Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, the infrastructural sinews of the metropolitan region are plain to see. Highways and rail lines crisscross Montréal’s extended urban fabric. Bridges crossing the St. Lawrence River tie the city to its suburban hinterlands in Laval, Longueuil, and beyond.
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Read more >
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Media
RSA Regions in Recovery 2022 Plenary
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100 YEARS OF INFRASTRUCTURAL REGIONALISM: Exploring the dynamic interaction between infrastructure and regional governance in metropolitan New York
March 31, 2022
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The Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR) launched with a call for a new research agenda focusing on exploring the intersection between infrastructure and regionalism centered on four interrelated themes: interdisciplinarity; infrastructure and regional governance; seeing like a region; and infrastructure and regional lives. This talk brings the topic of infrastructure governance to the fore by examining the synergies between how infrastructure shapes governance structures, and how actors involved in regional governance determine the development of regions. It explores this theme through the lens of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) and the infrastructural development of the New York metropolitan region, based on research from my forthcoming book with Phil Plotch, Mobilizing the Metropolis (University of Michigan Press, Forthcoming 2023). While the PANYNJ is in some ways a unique organization – a vast, well-established, financially self-sustaining, multipurpose, bi-state agency – exploring its evolution in parallel with infrastructural sinews that fueled the region’s growth and bound it together reveals some of the tensions inherent in regional governance. Come for the conflict, the fragmentation, the scandal, and the political struggles. Stay for lessons about the importance of coalition building, collaboration, and creativity required to pull off a hundred years of infrastructure innovation, growth, and development!
The session features contributions by discussants (John Harrison, Julie Cidell, and Markus Hesse) who offer their own perspectives on the theme of infrastructure and regional governance and stimulate a lively discussion by adding international contexts to complement the New York metropolitan case.
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WATER INFRASTRUCTURE AND REGIONAL GOVERNANCE WORKSHOPS
September 29-October 2, 2020
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Water infrastructure performs a vital role in making and remaking regions. Watersheds and reservoirs, pipelines and ports, and storm water management and climate change mitigation represent complex political, economic, and environmental challenges. They are essential, if often black-boxed infrastructures that define how regional space is constructed, territorialized, and experienced. As critical urban infrastructures and contested political objects, water systems are fundamental to conversations about sustainability and economic development trajectories for communities across the global South and global North. This event held online in Fall 2020 aimed to assess how water infrastructure shapes formal and informal regional spaces, communities, and governance dynamics and explores how these shape how water infrastructure is developed.
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Research Panel 1: Decision-Making and Engagement in Regional Water Governance
Regional infrastructures are often taken for granted by the public, with the consequence that infrastructural management and planning is surrendered to experts and institutions that may not be representative of the region overall. By tracing the lines of authority and influence that shape city-region infrastructures, we hope to reveal opportunities for greater engagement of more diverse publics in the deliberations over infrastructural futures.
Anne Taufen, Lisa Hoffman, & Ken Yocom (University of Washington-Tacoma): Unveiling Infrastructures
Ramazan Sayan, Nidhi Nagabhatla, & Marvel Ekwuribe (UN University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health): Soft Power, Discourse Coalitions, and the Proposed Interbasin Water Transfer Between Lake Chad and the Congo River.
Fenna Hoefsloot, Javier Martinez, & Karin Pfeffer (University of Twente): Speculative futures of Lima’s water infrastructure
Cat Button (University of Newcastle): Governing Water Infrastructure from our Homes
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Research Panel 2: Regional Partnerships Under Threat
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Whereas regional infrastructures such as sewer lines, water treatment plants, and water transportation technologies (namely locks and dams) were constructed as part of earlier periods of urban and regional development, shifting patterns of demand threaten to diminish the utility of these assets. We need to ascertain how such changing dynamics are influencing (and being influenced by) the existing governance of those infrastructural networks.
Andrew Dick & Sara Hughes (University of Michigan): Risk in State-Led Regional Governance Networks—the case of the Karegnondi Water Authority
Dayne Walling (University of Minnesota): Urban Geographies of Fragmentation and Distress: Government Planning, Development, Infrastructure, and Inequality around Deindustrialized US Cities
Sachin Tiwale (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai): Grabbing Water Resources in Urban Agglomeration—The Case of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR)
Grete Gansauer & Julia Haggerty (Montana State University): Large-Scale, Regional Infrastructure as a Solution to Rural Water Insecurity: Literature Review and Future Research Opportunities
Karsten Zimmerman (TU Dortmund): Infrastructure Regionalism as Driver for Metropolitan Governance? The Case of the Ruhr Region in Germany
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Research Panel 3: Emerging Complexities in Regional Water Governance
Health crises, Federal mandates, technological innovation, and exogenous shocks can all disrupt formal and informal governance structures. We seek empirical examples and theoretical advances that can help to conceptualize how city-regions across the Global North and Global South are affected by these complexities, and to seek out best practices whereby specific regions are confronting these complexities.
Mark Usher (University of Manchester): Hydraulic Territory: Internal colonization through urban catchment management in Singapore
Filippo Menga & Michael K. Goodman (University of Reading): The Good Samaritan: Capitalism, Religion and the Political Economy of Care in International Water Charity
Michael Finewood, A. Marissa Matsler, Ruthann Richards, Olivia Pierce, & Zenya Lederman (Pace University): What Does it Mean to Empower Communities? Green Infrastructure Incentive Programs as a Form of Neoliberal Governance
Richard Milligan, Ellis Adams, Chris Wheeler, & Scott Raluerson (Georgia State University): Urban Water and Hydrosocial Inequalities: Atlanta's Situation in a Regional Water Governance Conflict
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Working Papers & Reports
WATER INFRASTRUCTURE AND REGIONAL GOVERNANCE
RSA Workshop Event Recap Report
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Jean-Paul Addie, Michael Glass, Jen Nelles
2020
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This document reports on a series of virtual workshop sessions on Water Governance and Regional Infrastructure held from September 29 – October 2, 2020.
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PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF REGIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE IN
WASHINGTON AND LOS ANGELES
Reports and reflections from NOIR's pre-launch conference panels
​
Jen Nelles, Michael Glass, Jean-Paul Addie
2020
​
Prior to the official launch of the RSA Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms (NOIR) at the RSA’s North American conference in September 2019, NOIR’s directors organized pre-launch panels at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington DC, and the Annual Meeting of the Urban Affairs Association in Los Angeles. By bringing together scholars and practitioners addressing the infrastructural challenges of their home regions, each panel offered a wide-ranging exploration of the practice and theory of the infrastructures which constitute large and complex U.S. city-regions. Panelists anchored their remarks using specific examples from the Washington and LA regions, and in doing so provided the foundations for a broader interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral dialogue on how the funding, governance, and spatiality of infrastructure can promote urban, economic, and ecological sustainability at the regional scale.
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