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The article discusses the importance of integrated transport and logistics systems for sustainable global trade. It highlights recent disruptions to global supply chains caused by events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and trade wars, which have led to the need for supply chain reconfiguration and increased resilience. The article also emphasizes the role of decarbonization and digitalization in shaping the functions and roles of international transportation and logistics. It presents three research papers that explore various challenges and opportunities in transport and logistics integration, including inland terminal location selection, international logistics policies, and the optimization of air-rail freight transportation. The article concludes by suggesting future research directions, including the incorporation of decarbonization indicators and the use of IoT and big data for real-time modeling of greenhouse gas emissions. [Extracted from the article]

Over the past decades, digital technologies have become ubiquitous, impacting and changing the ways society operates. Immense public and economic value is being created by improving access to information and resources. Hence, many public administration units around the globe continue to focus on digital transformation. Although mostly associated with digitizing services and workflow via software platforms, India's efforts have taken a "Lego building block approach" toward technology which can be repurposed and recombined to deliver solutions at the social level. These digital public infrastructure (DPI) blocks have had significant impact on socio-economic development. In this special issue, we explore the role of DPI in digitally transforming public service delivery and in creating public value. The issue aims to make an important contribution to public administration and digital government literature, by examining India's DPI and its positive externalities, in particular its role in financial and health inclusion. These papers include vital knowledge that can support policy processes on digital transformation and public value creation for India and other developing countries of the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elucidates the infrastructural work of rendering 'climate risks' intelligible and actionable for financial investors. It analyses hybrid public-private initiatives to 'risk' carbon capital which accompany strategies to 'de-risk' green investments in the effort to make financial flows climate compatible. Empirically, the paper focusses on recent attempts to establish a 'global baseline' for climate reporting. I analyse these efforts as the building of a reporting infrastructure: a socio-technical network that brings together metrics, calculative devices and reporting conventions, and articulates actors like companies, investors, regulators and auditors according to its protocols. The infrastructure provides a conduit of power that can serve the interests of different actors and exercises ontological power by making up 'climate risk' in an economically digestible yet partial way. I will thus criticize that the focus on financial climate risks backgrounds the material risks of global heating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper seeks to address precarious lives and the politics of urban repair in the city of Mumbai, in Ram V and Anand Radhakrishnan's graphic novel Grafity's Wall (2020), a coming-of-age story about four youths in the city. Through waves of urban restructuring, this paper argues, precarity has emerged as a typical mode of Mumbai's urban life and living. The work investigates the urban underworld of crime, violence, and movements of urban solidarity in the form of care for fellow human beings as well as the city, to form a 'good city'. Since comics can record events that cannot be photographed, this paper aims to use insights from comics studies to understand the concept of precarity and care. Through the characters of four marginal urban youths, the comics show the regeneration of a dilapidated city through practising urban care in the form of youth subculture and urban solidarity movement. Drawing upon theoretical insights from the 'maximum city' and 'static/kinetic city', the paper shows how Grafity's Wall transcends the walled infrastructure of 21st-century urbanism, to advance a call for the right to the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of fauna-sensitive road design has the potential to mitigate negative impacts on wildlife caused by roads. However, our previous international review found adoption of fauna-sensitive road design has been limited at the level of transport planning, even in nations that mandate this. In Australia, where the adoption of fauna-sensitive road design is still in its early stages, a review of 57 peer-reviewed papers revealed that transport practitioners generally have not acknowledged or considered fauna-sensitive road design measures or road ecology concepts. This lack of consideration is due to deeply rooted economic interests and attitudes institutionalised within the industry. While the development of fauna-sensitive road design is possible in the Australian transport sector, a substantial institutional change driven by appropriate policies and user experiences is necessary. We recommend future studies explore practitioner experience to better understand the conditions that facilitated the voluntary adoption of fauna-sensitive road design policies in two Australian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to strategic thinking about infrastructure resilience and adaptation. A technique is presented in a case study for analysing options on the timing of protection against climate change. Predetermined trigger points for responses to resilience weaknesses are discussed, showing how flowcharts can act as prompts to the need for action. The roles of national governments in improving resilience in key areas are discussed. The paper introduces the concept of a 'chain of resilience' for interdependent infrastructure systems and identifies some key questions for national governments to ask about the linkages between systems before requiring appropriate remedial actions. Practical steps for private owners and investors to increase resilience in their own infrastructure are identified. Some suggestions for tackling the increasingly important area of cyber resilience are presented. The use of actuarial techniques is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of transnational challenges and decision-making heuristics and biases on the implementation of risk assessment (RA) process in the context of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). The investigation, which is based on a review of existing literature and a critical analysis of the ISO31000:2018 process, suggests that contemporary RA models and processes fail to adequately consider the domain-based characteristics of transnational Critical Infrastructure (CI) characteristics. They also fail to recognize the full extent of the human decision-making influence on the RA process itself, as well as the relative lack of homogeneity across assets, stakeholders, countries, paradigms, and people in transnational CI environments. The findings from this work provide a theoretical contribution towards a better understanding of the complexities introduced by the transnational nature of CIP and the effect of human decision-making. They can provide the impetus for further research in the fields of CIP and RA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the transformations of informal transportation practices in Siberia as an example of the process of social embedding of infrastructure in remote regions. Research about informal transportation is predominantly based on studies of minibuses, motorcycles, rikshaws and other small, low-performance vehicles. Meanwhile, the railroad often best exemplifies formalization, control, and surveillance, the characteristics opposite to informal practices. On the basis of information gathered from local and regional archives and semi-formal interviews with railroad workers, their families, and BAM builders (2016–2020), this paper traces the roots of embeddedness in specific norms and expectations that formed during construction of the railroad and persisted during its operation. Informal transportation became the norm and a resource for coping with a lack of infrastructure. Recent reforms have changed the railroad from a public system to a private, profit-seeking, dis-embedded enterprise. This process affects local communities' access to the railroad. Workers' trains, or okurki, are a last refuge for the retention of local mobility mostly in an informal way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens when the architectures of extraction, once intimately constituted by capitalist and racial forms of exclusion, begin to rot? Focusing on a Bolivian tin mine, this paper examines the social effects of deteriorating "architectures of extraction," a category that includes both aboveground infrastructures and belowground networks of tunnels and scaffolding. First, I argue that when Llallagua's extractive architecture was built, it helped shore up a connection between tin mining, working-class identity, and revolutionary nationalism – which in turn became bound up with mestizaje, an ideology of racial and cultural whitening. Second, I argue that the ruination of this extractive architecture has had ambivalent implications for the racial politics of contemporary small-scale mining operations that continue to operate inside the mountain. On the one hand, the rotting structures reinforce regional racial hierarchies in a variety of ways, but on the other hand, the slow degradation of the physical structures has made the corresponding social structures more porous, if not fully permeable, to members of regional Indigenous ayllus. While access to the financial benefits of mining is far from unambiguously liberatory, this paper nevertheless suggests that the political possibilities contained within the ruins of extractive architectures are not uniformly adverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon histories of Berwick Bridge, setting out a new interdisciplinary appraisal of its conception, design choices, and construction to account for its unique arch profile. Berwick Bridge is a sandstone bridge of 15 arches that spans the Tweed, a river that delimits much of the English-Scottish border on the east coast of Great Britain. Constructed between 1611 and 1624, after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, Berwick Bridge is a rare example of a state-funded building project during peacetime, and it represents an embryonic form of national infrastructure that would not re-emerge until the 19th century. However, the economic importance of Berwick-upon-Tweed belies the sufferance of the unreliable crossings that had previously served the town until the stone bridge was finished, and an explanation of the bridge's geometry is absent from current literature. By pairing a history of the town's experience of construction embodied in wooden iterations of the bridge and the fortifications, the technical confidence of the principal designers is affirmed in the shifting arch shapes as reflexive to material and monetary availability—as well as the site's challenging physical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The innovations of battery and charging technologies facilitate worldwide bus electrification, which can conserve energy and reduce emissions. The emergence of wireless power transfer technology offers the potential to alleviate bus range anxiety. This paper constructs the layout models of static wireless and centralized charging stations based on the seasonal differences associated with battery capacities and passenger flow, which aims to obtain the bus charging station layout scheme of the lowest cost. Then, the heuristic algorithm is utilized to solve the layout models as the mixed linear programming problem. This study results confirm that the combined layout of static wireless and centralized charging stations is more advantageous than a single model. Finally, the required fixed cost of supporting bus system operation is explored for future capital reserves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis article explores the entanglements of bodies, affects and infrastructures that give shape to the experiences, practices and sense-making of everyday mobilities among metro passengers in contemporary China. Building on the affective turn and infrastructural turn, this paper argues that passengering is an affectively charged and infrastructurally mediated process of forming and negotiating mobile subjectivities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this paper demonstrates how ‘squeezing in’ is a core space-making practice among Chinese passengers that involves not only acquiring bodily skills, habits, and tactics but also engaging in affective capacities to negotiate modes of feeling and affective relations on the move. Moreover, situating the analysis in the specific context of infrastructural development and citizenship cultivation in contemporary China, this paper reveals how the norms, regulations and practices of ‘good ridership’ is closely entangled with the narrative of ‘quality citizenship’ in post-reform China. This paper thus enriches existing literature on passenger mobilities through providing new empirical insights and conceptual contemplation on what it means to be a passenger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the symbiotic relationship between the Cayman Islands and the centrality of the United States (US) in global financial networks, using their connection as a test case for a broader theory of how infrastructural power of states is achieved through transnational and networked strategies. The legal and financial infrastructure of the Cayman Islands is extensively used by US financial institutions. This infrastructure supports the development of a significantly US-centric fund industry, facilitating substantial investments into US capital markets. Additionally, it serves as a global conduit, channelling funds from regions such as Asia and Latin America into US markets, streamlining the process by which foreign investors acquire US securities, and supporting the development of complex USD-denominated financial products. This dynamic enhances the depth, liquidity, and complexity of US capital markets, thereby reinforcing US centrality in global financial networks and bolstering its geopolitical power through financial diplomacy, economic sanctions, regulatory influence, and control over critical financial infrastructure. The relationship underscores the infrastructural power of the Cayman Islands, whose financial and legal framework is essential for sustaining and amplifying US centrality. Consequently, this paper aims to integrate the transnational perspective on infrastructural power within the International Political Economy (IPE) and Geopolitics literature, demonstrating how the Cayman Islands function as a multifaceted networked site that strengthens, projects, and sustains US state power on a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a maintenance prioritisation framework for Taiwan's 1268 pedestrian bridges. It aims to standardise their inspection and maintenance, as Taiwan's current bridge management specifications and manuals only apply to its highway and railway bridge infrastructure. It is designed to assess the structural safety and serviceability of six pedestrian bridge types by visual inspection. To assign weight factors to the structural safety and serviceability components of the identified bridge types, two rounds of Delphi method interviews with bridge experts were conducted. The framework is centred on a weighted average condition assessment method that integrates expert-determined weight factors with visual inspection results to calculate a condition index (PBCI). Pedestrian bridges are ranked and classified based on their PBCIs to set appropriate inspection frequency and scope, and to inform maintenance resource allocation. The application of the framework to five pedestrian bridges in Taoyuan City demonstrated its practicality and value for bridge authorities tasked with managing large inventories of pedestrian bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Battery-assisted bicycles, or E-bikes, are part of a disruptive wave of transportation technology that uses electricity and rechargeable batteries to increase the velocity, the traveled distance and, as a consequence, the ridership. Biking and E-biking are globally recognized to have the potential to play an important role in the transition to a Net-Zero society. The widespread availability of E-bikes is significantly impacting several sectors of the tourist industry. Therefore, Touristic Administrations (TAs) now provide tourists with trail options and the corresponding charging infrastructure for E-bikers with different profiles. Our main objective is to provide TAs with a suitable decision-support tool that serves two purposes: (1) finding locations for charging stations by considering the difficulty and the cost of installing such stations in remote, often off-the-road locations; and (2) designing itineraries that are suitable for different categories of E-bikers. In the scientific literature, the first decision component has been mostly addressed in the context of electric cars, and it is not suitable for E-bikes. On the other hand, works on the second decision focused on muscular bikes, thus ignoring the first decision component. In this paper, we aim at closing this gap. We formulate this problem as a mixed-integer linear program. We develop an efficient branch-and-cut algorithm and present a comprehensive computational experiment. In particular, we provide a case study in the Asiago Sette Comuni Plateau in Italy, where the obtained charging stations and bike trails maximize a measure of attractiveness for three types of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence technologies have elicited a range of policy responses in India, particularly as the Government of India attempts to position and project the country as a global leader in the production of AI technologies. Policy responses have ranged from providing public infrastructure to enable market-led AI production, to nationalising datasets in an effort to enable Big Data analysis through AI. This paper examines the recent history of AI policy in India from a critical political economy perspective, and argues that AI policy and governance in India constructs and legitimises a globally-dominant paradigm of informational capitalism, based on the construction of data as a productive resource for an information-based economic production, and encouraging self-regulation of harmful impacts by firms, even as it attempts to secure a strong hand for the state to determine, both through law and infrastructure, how such a market is structured and to what ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the recent research progress in bridge-related topics, including safety, maintenance, management, life-cycle, resilience, and sustainability. It highlights the International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety, and Management (IABMAS) and the papers presented at the conference. The article covers various aspects such as bridge design, structural monitoring, load testing, connectivity assessment, service life extension, refurbishment, digital twinning, and climate change considerations. It also explores new technologies for bridge inspection and monitoring, drive-by bridge condition monitoring, and the use of sensors in bridge monitoring. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of bridge condition monitoring and the potential benefits of digital twins in asset management and condition monitoring. [Extracted from the article]

This paper compares the application of two recently published guidance documents for risk-based assessment of hydraulic actions on bridges, namely the UK Design Manual for Roads and Bridges and the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport's Guidelines, to two case study bridges (Staverton Bridge, UK; Borgoforte Bridge, Italy). This work is one of the first to illustrate how to apply these guidelines. Both documents present risk-based methods for the assessment of hydraulic actions, while exhibiting fundamental differences. For example, the UK method prescribes calculations for local and constriction scour, water depth, and velocity at several cross-sections; by comparison, the Italian method does not prescribe calculations to assess the risk level. For the case studies in this paper, the hydraulic risk obtained for Staverton Bridge resulted as 'High' using both methods. The scour score for the Borgoforte Bridge resulted higher using the Italian method (Medium-High), as compared to the UK approach (Medium). This difference is due to how the guidelines assess the vulnerability associated with the minimum clearance. The comparison of these two risk-based approaches and the resulting discussion may serve as a useful resource for those wishing to develop new risk-based methods for assessing hydraulic actions on bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews with foreign scholars in China (hereafter 'FSC'), this paper examines the impact of various infrastructural interruptions on the transnational lives of mobile individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores how the labour of maintenance and resourceful quick-fixes employed by FSC constitute infrastructuring strategies in times of isolation and uncertainty. Specifically, the paper first asks how specific COVID-19-induced infrastructural barriers, such as tightened visa policies, mandatory PCR testing for border crossing, and suspended flights, intersect with the (im)mobility experiences and trajectories of FSC. Second, the paper investigates how these individuals navigate and cope with infrastructural glitches by fashioning a set of infrastructuring strategies to maintain transnational lives within the pandemic context. In doing so, this paper develops a deeper understanding of not only the generative but also destructive capacities of infrastructural processes in terms of their transformative effects on migrant identities, aspirations and lived experiences, further revealing the fragility, incompleteness and situationality embedded in migration infrastructures. More critically, this paper theorises how infrastructural interruptions constitute the necessary social-temporal conditions in which individuals' infrastructuring strategies emerge through acts of waiting, adaptation and maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the rise of mobility platforms, this paper explores the practices and politics of mobility arising from the everyday infrastructural functioning of Baemin, the largest food delivery platform in South Korea. While the literature on food delivery platforms centres on changing labour relations, platform workers do not merely represent a new type of labour; they likewise form a critical conduit in the urban logistics system. Platform-mediated food delivery can be therefore conceptualised as a moving assemblage of heterogeneous entities that constitutes an urban infrastructure. Having emerged as an urban mobility regime, food delivery platforms increasingly enact a form of governance, enabling a particular mode of circulation and movements. Engaging with the mobility framework, combined with critical infrastructure scholarship, this paper seeks to uncover the politics of im/mobility involved in the creation of a ceaselessly flowing city envisaged by Baemin. It identifies three forms of mobilities—connected, programmed, and immobilised—produced through contingent interactions between moving bodies, technologies, and the environment, which could amount to tethering effects. Integrating empirical materials from multimethod mobile ethnography in Seoul, it presents on-the-ground accounts of practices, interactions, and sensations gathered around the Baemin-mediated food delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper interrogates the seemingly absurd conspiracies associated with the “15-minute City,” an idea taking hold of urban communities across the globe to bring more amenities, including parks, recreation facilities, and libraries, within a 15-minute walk of where people live. Introduced as a mundane planning initiative to improve livability, eliminate or shorten car trips, and improve health outcomes, the 15-minute City has encountered surprising, yet resolute attack by conspiracy theorists who view it as a concealed leftist tactic to imprison local inhabitants within restrictive neighbourhood boundaries. In exploring the origins of the 15-minute City idea and the emergence of conspiracy theories that surround it, this paper unpacks the complex interplay of social, political, and psychological factors that drive current conspiratorial thinking about ostensibly benign policies and practices. In so doing, it considers the responsibility of leisure scholars in an age of misinformation, alternative facts, and post truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analysis of the politics and temporality of infrastructure through a focus on the idea of a project. A project (noun) is an assemblage of expertise, labour, materials and resources. The development of a project to build a port, pipeline, a mine, or a hydropower plant entails the mobilization of ideas, finance, political support and the law, the containment of material forces, as well as the organization of expertise, resources and labour. To project is also a verb; to throw forwards or to imagine, visualize or speculate on a possible future, which may or may not be actualized in practice. Moreover, individual infrastructural projects are often built on the legacy of earlier projects and conceived as contributions to ambitious projections of the future – including modernization, socialism, development and state building. Our analysis of the politics and temporality of projects is both developed and illustrated through an account of infrastructural projects in the Republic of Georgia which are also understood as contributions to a larger project of transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling spatial search processes such as residential location search are challenging, particularly, due to the need to deal with a large dataset and wide array of factors. This introduces a multi-dimensionality challenge to location search modeling. With the motivation to accommodate multi-dimensionality, this paper develops a machine learning–based Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for location search. This study accommodates the effects of several factors including accessibility, land use, dwelling, transportation infrastructure, and neighborhood attributes on location search decisions. The spatial unit of analysis is dwelling-level. This study conceptualizes that households' search for location based on their reason to move. The pool of alternatives for each household is generated based on probability estimates of GMM. The location choice model considering the reason-based GMM outperforms the model without considering relocation reasons in GMM and random sampling-based model in-terms of predictive performance. The search model has been implemented in an integrated urban model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this third paper in a series of four, we explore some ways of doing education differently. An education that moves beyond the persistent failures and irredeemable injustices of modern mass schooling episteme. The episteme for education we adumbrate – an episteme of life continuance – begins with a recognition of interdependency and the value of diversity, diverse knowledges and relations of tolerance. We propose an escape from the extinction ethics which modern schools perpetuate and a new grammar of living in which education and politics are processes of re-learning, co-learning, decision taking, limit testing, and conflict resolution in relation to an uncertain future. To achieve this, we outline a set of open and 'unplanned' commoning activities that would take place within local social infrastructures focused on re-politising learning itself and practicing the care of oneself, others, community and the environment. The proposal for a different education as common(ing) activities undertaken within social infrastructures, is about reimagining political and environmental relations, and co-creating a sense of collective ownership of and responsibility for the environment. A form of community that it is practical, rather than utopian, and that would be both the means and ends for such an education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Portland has developed a national reputation as a bike-friendly city as a result of numerous citywide bike infrastructure plans, yet as is true across the country, ridership data indicates that people of color make up a small portion of regular cyclists. The current study draws from 25 interviews with men of color bicyclists in Portland, Oregon, and builds upon the work of Black and Latinx geographers, mobility justice scholars, and the scholarship on gentrification to explore the racialized nature of public cycling spaces. We use our data to argue that: (1) men of color bicyclists experience public cycling spaces as exclusionary; (2) uneven spatial dynamics, or racialized geographies, generate a sense of "out of place-ness" for bicyclists of color. Though some scholarship has considered the quantitative aspects of racialized bicycling inequalities, this paper is the first to elucidate the qualitative experiences of men of color bicyclists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorizes the gendered consequences of refugee dispossession for social reproduction, focusing on Ethiopian refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. We analyze the Kenyan refugee regime as structured by colonial legacies of racialization and by neo-colonial global political economy strategies of managing 'surplus' populations. We demonstrate that refugees' ongoing experiences of interpersonal and structural violence constitutes an attack on their capacity for social reproduction and argue the 'feminization of refugee survival' is an important gendered consequence. We identify two transnational displacements that produce a new form of racialized enclosure and the alienation of refugees from the means of social reproduction. The first transnational displacement occurs due to their dispossession from support infrastructure for social reproduction in their origin country, and in the host country. A second, invisible but racialized transnational displacement is the refusal of global North countries to take on the anticipated welfare costs of refugee social reproduction. Transformative and re-generative approaches to refugee social reproduction would need to address both forms of displacement. The paper thus urges IPE scholarship to recognize that the crisis of refugee social reproduction is not only produced by global capitalist regimes, but also deeply structured by gendered, racialized, and colonial hierarchies of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale disasters have exposed vulnerabilities in energy systems and interdependent infrastructure, underscoring the importance of proactively mitigating risks to critical infrastructure. This paper focuses on strengthening power system planning by incorporating the costs associated with prolonged and extensive power interruptions to bolster resilience. To achieve this, duration-dependent customer damage functions are developed, capturing the direct, indirect, and societal impacts of power interruptions, ranging from short, localized events to widespread and long-duration ones. The research methodology is applied to three islanded communities facing substantial resilience challenges with limited data availability. Three customer interruption cost surveys are conducted with local electricity customers, yielding valuable insights into duration-dependent customer damage functions for direct, indirect, and monetizable societal costs. Significantly, the power interruption cost estimates derived from these functions vary considerably from those in the contiguous U.S. and even between the different islanded communities, reflecting their distinct hazard profiles and geographical characteristics. In conclusion, this study demonstrates the potential of duration-dependent customer damage functions to enhance power system resilience. It also identifies several areas for further research, paving the way for a more robust and resilient power infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electric vehicles (EVs) have gained increasing attention as a more sustainable and environmentally friendly mode of transportation. Many countries should include electrification of their transport networks in their future smart city plans to ensure environmentally sustainable growth. The number of EVs in metropolitan areas is expected to experience extensive growth. EVs are often considered an alternative to addressing the challenges posed by increasing carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels. However, the acceptance of EVs tends to be slow due to concerns such as range anxiety, prolonged charge times, inconvenient charging locations, and inadequate charging infrastructure. To address these challenges, this paper discusses the planning and optimization of EV charging infrastructure based on existing literature. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of publications focusing on EV charging stations. This demonstrates the growing interest and research activity in the field of EV charging infrastructure. Furthermore, the literature is categorized into recurring topics, specifically EV charging planning and optimization for EV charging infrastructure. This particular review paper includes empirical work on charging network planning for EVs. Therefore, this analysis provides the latest trends and findings for EV charging infrastructure planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the complex interplay between economic development and environmental sustainability in the context of India's pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It examines the inherent contradictions and trade-offs involved, particularly in agriculture, industrialisation, and infrastructure sectors. The paper highlights how economic growth, essential for improving living standards, often conflicts with environmental objectives. The paper underscores the importance of integrating economic, environmental, and social objectives to achieve a sustainable and inclusive future for India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For cities seeking to promote active transport, overcoming the institutional practices of car-centric planning and investment is critical to redistributing funds toward dedicated walking and cycling infrastructure. Slowly, urban policy and research are expanding traditional mobility-centric economic evaluations beyond major road and rail projects. This review paper of the academic literature employs a systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) methodology and contributes an up-to-date examination of academic economic evaluations undertaken on large-scale active transport infrastructure implementations (i.e. capital costs greater than USD$3 million as of 2022). Seventeen (17) peer-reviewed academic papers were included in the final analysis. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA), followed by cost-effective analysis (CEA) and health impact assessment (HIA), were the most common pre-implementation (ex ante) and post-implementation (ex post) assessment methods. Between implementation-types, contexts, and methodologies, the parameters factored in econometric evaluations present a large degree of variance. Despite this, all studies demonstrated the positive return on investment in large-scale active transport infrastructure, where all CBAs produced benefit-cost ratios greater than the breakeven threshold (i.e. >1). Results show health parameters contribute the greatest benefit to positive evaluations, accounting for 77% of total benefits (and 67% in the CBA papers). However, evaluations inconsistently factor or omit long-term, intergenerational, and non-mobility benefits that highlight a partiality in their approach and can be co-opted to support predetermined outcomes. Further research must seek to establish if more expansive, sustainability-orientated methods are needed, or whether to adopt policy positions acknowledging the positive returns walking and cycling infrastructure deliver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjective interpretation of what is valuable to society is paramount for evaluating the merits of an intervention. As a result, social value (SV) evaluation go beyond objective evaluations. This evaluation is organic and has to do with the continuous challenges of being in the world with others, thus using different approaches to overcome social and environmental issues. Studies on SV overlooked how non-Western societies perceive SV in development projects. Hermeneutics is suitable to reveal SV's social dimensions and explore individuals' perceptions through their lived experiences beyond quantitative modelling. Therefore, this study applies a hermeneutical approach to SV to dissect the lived experiences of individuals working in national infrastructure planning in a non-Western society, which is Oman. The paper analyses 11 semi-structured interviews conducted with governmental decision-makers about Oman's infrastructure development. Findings present a total of 14 outputs and 11 outcomes for developing an SV model mapped across different national infrastructure sectors. These sectors are energy, ICT, transport, waste, and water. Findings determine different sectors provide different forms of SV, with an energy sector project being the highest contributor of SV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructure outages after disasters can cause contrasting impacts throughout a community due to differing vulnerabilities. The identification of critical social impact nodes for use in infrastructure risk mitigation planning and restoration will allow for overall disaster impact reduction and lessening of impact disparity across a community. To achieve criticality identification, this paper presents a probabilistic methodology to quantify the service outage impact of every node. Modelling of impact due to outages is accomplished by fixating outage occurrence in existing impact models and randomly sampling other input variables. The impact variability due to each node's outage is captured through conditional impact probability density functions (CIPDFs) that are first developed with Monte Carlo simulation at base nodes. Characterization of upstream CIPDFs is achieved through convolution of downstream nodes' CIPDFs. Mean impact curves/surfaces are developed from CIPDF and nodal vulnerability information for all components to further characterize the impact expected at a certain hazard level. Criticality identification using CIPDFs and mean impact curves/surfaces is presented for both pre-event and post-event situations. The methodology is applied for electric power network criticality identification for household dislocation impact in Galveston, TX, USA in a hurricane event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study details a new, network-level optimization tool aimed at supporting transportation agencies in their efforts to reduce the global warming potential of their road pavement infrastructure. Through a two-stage bottom-up algorithm that integrates with a comprehensive cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment, the proposed tool learns optimal management policies for individual pavement sections and uses that information to guide network-level allocation choices. Through a realistic case study based on data made available by a state department of transportation, this study demonstrates that the proposed modelling approach identifies management strategies expected to reduce the global warming potential of a pavement network by up to 4.8% over 20 years relative to a more traditional, reactive management approach. The resulting model presented in this paper can support agencies in achieving ambitious targets to reduce the global warming potential of their paved infrastructure systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores power dynamics among stakeholders in the Kejetia/Central Market Redevelopment Project in Kumasi, Ghana. It adopts a case study approach and draws on multiple qualitative data collection methods, including in-depth interviews of 62 representatives of evicted traders and project officials. The study reveals the use of participatory approaches that ignored many informal stakeholders of the project. These stakeholders also adopted varied strategies to engage city authorities with myriads of outcomes. We argue that the major infrastructure development projects in emerging African cities should have built-in mechanisms for identifying and including stakeholders at all stages of their implementation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-regions in Central Eastern Europe are still underrepresented in academic debate on metropolitan planning and governance. However, they may provide a valuable insight into the early stages of creating planning partnerships that struggle to cope with problems arising from uncoordinated spatial development in the period of post-socialist transformation, which was not addressed adequately by formal planning systems and regular territorial-administrative units. The paper presents a comparative analysis of six city-regions in Central Eastern Europe based on a review of strategic and planning documents, and direct interviews with representatives of key stakeholders in each area. The main findings of the paper include the significant but underestimated role of the second-tier local governments in metropolitan institutional setups and the crucial position of emerging coalitions of academics, metropolitan-oriented officials and planners for establishing a sustainable planning agenda in the city-region. City-regions in CEE do not follow the categorization of soft spaces of planning that is derived from other territorial contexts. This is because the spatial planning efforts within city-regional soft spaces in CEE are more sustainability-driven than growth-oriented. Yet, more ambitious spatial visions may be overshadowed by a strong focus of local elected politicians on infrastructure projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that the counterinsurgent proposition of 'winning Hearts and Minds' is more complex than building a road. This paper examines how project workers in three infrastructure projects in Colombia sought community support not for military intelligence or to improve government-community relations, but to intervene with armed groups on the project's behalf. The findings highlight the role of community institutions in negotiating between two actors – rather than being 'won over' by either. This paper also indicates the limitations of community agency in the face of changing local orders, questioning the local empowerment of goods delivery in conflict areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statistical tools are crucial for a variety of hydrological applications, whether to model processes and enhance understanding and knowledge or to design infrastructure systems. Given the rapid evolution of statistical methods and the need for a solid theoretical foundation for their correct application, a multidisciplinary community STAtistics in HYdrology Working Group (STAHY-WG) aggregated under the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) umbrella to contribute to this research field. Now, more than 15 years since its inception, this paper summarizes the main achievements of this productive community collaboration in four (of many) branches of statistical hydrology: extreme value analysis, multivariate analysis, time series analysis, and regionalization. The aim is to provide an overview of recent developments, offer practical suggestions (e.g. software packages), and outline future challenges to support scientists and practitioners in their endeavours within the realm of statistical hydrology studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of urban cemeteries is highly context-dependent and varies greatly across cities and countries. Despite the growing body of literature on the cemeteries' potential for urban development, Eastern Europe, and in particular Russia, remains underrepresented. Seeking to fill this empirical gap, this paper brings forward the case of cemeteries in Moscow, the capital of Russia. Using the concept of public space as a theoretical lens, I aim to explore the extent to which cemeteries are envisioned as public spaces in planning policies and development practices in Moscow. The study builds on a critical qualitative analysis of relevant policy documents and semi-structured interviews with experts, supplemented by field observations. The empirical material is analyzed through the prism of four dimensions: liminal, spiritual, commercial and multifunctional. The findings show that planning policies and development practices view cemeteries primarily in terms of disposal provision. Regarded as an "unspectacular" part of the urban environment, cemeteries are excluded from the authoritarian programs of improvement of public spaces in the city. However, Moscow cemeteries have a range of qualities which make them valuable—although invisible at the policy level—public spaces with a multifaceted role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disasters often require large-scale evacuations, and damage key infrastructure (e.g., power, transportation). With growing electric vehicle (EV) adoption and electrification of transportation, governments and utilities may face significant power challenges during disasters, especially during the evacuation stage. Low state-of-charge, sporadic charging infrastructure, or power outages could significantly hamper safe and effective evacuations. Yet, EVs also offer possible resilience benefits to emergency response by more easily charging electronics or sending power back to the grid through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. This paper focuses on the opportunities, benefits, and drawbacks of EVs in disasters and evacuations through a systematic review of current literature, reports, and sources. Overall, this review discovered EVs show promise as modes of transportation and mobile energy supply units. However, crucial challenges such as charging infrastructure locations, upfront cost of resilience technologies, and user behavior necessitate more dedicated research to overcome shortcomings and guide more realistic implementation of benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, IoT has transformed personal environments by integrating diverse smart devices. This paper presents an advanced IoT architecture that optimizes network infrastructure, focusing on the adoption of MQTT protocol and introducing Cognitive Smart Objects for managing personal IoT applications. These objects use Neural Networks to predict optimal actions based on user behavior patterns. A Continuous Learning mechanism enables real-time adaptation of the network to evolving user interactions. The study highlights the role of Cognitive Transformation in Personal IoT, driving intelligent automation and enhancing user experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal Louisiana is experiencing climate-related impacts at rates substantially higher than other areas worldwide. Unique coastal communities face imminent impacts requiring adaptation and possible relocation. As such, Louisiana's strategies for ecosystem-scale flood management and ecological restoration are relevant globally. In this paper, we trace the idea of managed retreat as a nonstructural adaptation mechanism through the analysis of Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan and LA SAFE documents, and interviews with residents and planning professionals. Although Louisiana's plans and policies increasingly recognise increasing risk, and relocation as a necessary adaptation strategy, planning goals for relocation have weakened over time. Our analysis found two reasons for this. First, professionals and residents view risk and relocation differently. Low- and moderate-income residents had varied claims and constraints that influenced the adoption of relocation programmes and highlighted the need for community-driven initiatives. Second, no social infrastructure was implemented with the technical capacity or financial resources to work with communities to develop and implement relocation initiatives. As climate impacts increase, policies facilitating managed retreat will also need to expand. This work provides insights into the evolution of large-scale relocation planning, and a better understanding of the challenges facing states and communities as these efforts are expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainable development of railway represents an essential dimension of spatial planning and a priority of the European Union as it constitutes a safe and environmentally friendly transportation mode. This paper focuses on the application of an integrated approach supporting the development of railway in Greece. A Decision Support System (LIPSOR) was used in order key components, key actors and possible future states to be explored; alternative scenarios were designed and assessed in combination with policy goals and measures. The main outcomes indicated the need to upgrade rail infrastructure and services, increase railway extroversion and reinforce investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to construct a sonic understanding of the recent past of Hong Kong in protest. By utilizing and extending Steven Feld’s framework of acoustemology, I examine the sonic events during protests and identify sounds in the cultural system understood among the inhabitants. I conducted a digital archival search of newspaper articles and created a dataset of the events sounding ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. I explore three aspects: the participants, the space where the protest activities took place, and the sound generated and/or sounded in the activities. By demonstrating the interrelationality of them, I argue that sounds are able to reveal and (re-)claim spaces, establish a relationship between humans and space, bring an understanding of Hong Kong, and construct ‘Hong Kong,’ via collective sounding in protests and daily activities across time. This is the acoustemology of Hong Kong in protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to scholarship that conceptualises housing, particularly social housing, as an infrastructure of care. Care for people with housing needs that cannot be met in the private market is shaped through the provision of social housing, and social housing can also be a site for caring (and careless) practices and relations. Using qualitative data gathered in interviews with tenancy managers at one of the largest social housing providers in Victoria, I argue that tenancy management must be understood as an integral pillar of the caring infrastructure social housing can provide. Tenancy managers who participated in this study understood tenancy management in social housing as a caring practice. They described their role as oriented around sustaining the tenancies of people with high and complex support needs who would otherwise be at high risk of homelessness. However, tenancy managers also faced consistent barriers to the enactment of tenancy-sustainment-as-care, which emerged when caring relationships between the actors involved in sustaining a tenancy broke down. This paper focuses on their experiences of overcoming barriers, resolving conflicts, and successfully sustaining tenancies. The analysis shows that ‘caring-with’ – i.e., working relationally to build collaborative networks of care-givers and care-receivers – can support tenancy sustainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the minimal role of statutory city-regional planning in Finland, the Finnish state promotes inter-municipal, integrated planning of land-use, housing and transportation in the biggest city regions by a strategic planning instrument and a contractual policy tool called MAL procedure. MAL procedure includes MAL agreements, where the central government agrees to fund transportation infrastructure, while the municipalities in the city-regions commit to certain planning principles. MAL policy has advanced sustainability goals in planning, but it has also been argued to be prone to legitimacy problems as MAL negotiations take place behind the backs of citizens. The article discusses the structure of the MAL policy, assessing the ways in which this structure supports the legitimacy of the policy. It focuses on the interplay of strategic and communicative rationalities in the MAL procedure, starting from the observation that the theorists of strategic planning have focused predominately on communicative rationality as the legitimacy basis of planning. This paper aims to show that from a broader, structural perspective, both rationalities – and the way in which they interact – have a role in maintaining the legitimacy of planning. The article builds on theoretical studies and interviews with actors engaged in the MAL procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain can enable small countries to overcome systemic constraints and strengthen their economies. Based on dynamic capabilities theory, we develop a conceptual framework that explores the applicability of blockchain for fostering economic development. Specifically, we postulate that the agent's role in dynamic capabilities theory can be extended from the organisation level to the country level. Our proposed framework integrates blockchain as an economic driver and dynamic capabilities on higher-order and lower-order levels (i.e., business and investment development, human capital development, financial system enhancement, regulatory framework improvement, and systems and infrastructure improvement) to show their impacts on different aspects of economic development. International regulatory and political factors serve as moderators that determine whether a national blockchain-based strategy will ultimately be successful. In summary, we illustrate how blockchain as an enabler of dynamic capabilities can contribute to a small country's economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractBased on ethnographic research in northern Ghana, this article explores the complex logistics of blood and the ways in which the availability of blood has been transformed through the introduction of drones. We explore how drone services affect this ecosystem of supply and contribute to reshaping the practices of physicians, nurses, facility pharmacists and stock managers, as well as the expectations and experiences of patients and their families. Situated at the interface of medical anthropology, critical studies of infrastructure and anthropological studies of digital innovations in healthcare, our paper attends to the emerging anthropological research on medical logistics as a means of connecting people with medical resources. It demonstrates the fundamentally ambivalent nature of technological innovation: on the one hand, drones have fueled health workers’ hopes and transformed access to blood. On the other hand, their introduction has also led to connectivity without stock. In line with STS scholarship, we highlight the important role of the physical properties of objects such as blood in shaping their circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the technological development of vehicles and fuels is not adequate to meet current climate mitigation targets, infrastructure development also plays an important role in transforming the transport system. Previous studies have argued that conventional infrastructure planning is incapable of implementing climate mitigation. The aim of the paper is to provide insights into power means and mechanisms that counteract integration of climate mitigation targets in infrastructure planning. This is done by an in-depth case study of current Swedish national transport planning. This case provides a rich illustration of a situation with high political ambitions regarding climate mitigation on the one hand, and power mechanisms and resistance with regard to climate goals during the planning process on the other. The case is analysed using the perspective of power circuits and shows how forecasting works as an obligatory passage point, sorting in and out which analyses will be part of the decision-making material. Analyses which do not fit the forecasting model are dismissed from planning. The conclusion is that as long as the transport infrastructure planning practice is dependent on forecasting as the only central analysis there will be difficulties in changing the scope of infrastructure planning and making climate goals central for transport planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the infrastructure projects undertaken for the event initially known as the Semaine des sports d'hiver, which took place in Chamonix, France, from 25 January to 4 February 1924 and was later recognized as the first Winter Olympics. Although the already famous resort town was able to use its existing hotels to accommodate visitors and athletes, it also made a considerable investment in the construction of new sports infrastructure. Following an agreement signed just 9 months before the Games, these facilities included a large ice rink, a bobsleigh run and a ski jump. The project was entrusted to the Ponts et Chaussées engineers, who encouraged local firms to help with the construction. Archival analysis will be used to examine the relationship between the project and the changing environment. Our aim is to show how the work in Chamonix modified the environment by exploiting certain natural elements (e.g. water, soil and forests) and, conversely, how the natural (in particular, the geological and climatic) and historical (notably land ownership) components of the environment affected the execution of these works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Critical Political Economy (CPE) to explore energy transitions in Mexico. It analyzes struggles over competing energy visions from a decolonial, spatial and post-development perspective. The article frames energy transformations as more than a move away from fossil fuels: They encompass a radical overhaul of universalized Eurocentric capitalist modernity that call the state's role as both facilitator and driver of the energy transition into question. I examine two low-carbon infrastructure projects in the state of Yucatan, Mexico to build on Bridge and Gailing's notion of new energy spaces as the sites, scales and spatialities through which broader questions of political economy and contemporary struggles are being worked out. CPE of the energy transition must ensure that low-carbon infrastructures are not deployed as new forms of extraction, but rather as the material basis of pluriversal transitions informed by affected communities and their territorial struggles. Both studies on the political economy of energy transitions and territorial struggles can benefit from an open dialogue about how socioecological transformations are imagined, designed and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]