[Themaintainers] Introduction: Fallon Samuels Aidoo

Fallon Samuels Aidoo fallon.samuels at gmail.com
Thu Mar 19 16:22:12 EDT 2015


Happy Spring everyone,

Thank you Lee for providing a platform for kindred spirits. As an urban historian of science and technology, I often seek but rarely find scholars interested in the historiography of who makes, manages and maintains the built environment. I am particularly interested in conflicts and consensus between public, private and “third sector” institutions—nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations—on what constitutes critical infrastructure and what counts as protecting it.  Currently, my research on ‘critical infrastructure protection’ (CIP) focuses on the relocation, rehabilitation, and redevelopment of commuter rail sites and services in the Rustbelt region since the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on Greater Philadelphia, my dissertation explores the role that amateur and professional actuaries of private divestment from public transportation —community development corporations and rails-to-trails conservancies as well as global management consultants and defense contractors—have played in planning where and how reinvestment in rail rights-of-way takes place.

One case study of such distributed risk governance will appear in print this fall as part of Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place (Harvard GSD / Harvard University Press), a collection of essays co-edited by Delia Wendel (a cultural geographer of places post-conflict) and myself. The most rewarding part of the larger project, however, has been collecting oral histories and other ephemera of suburban activists for urban accessibility and urban activists for suburban accessibility that have taken responsibility for the structures and infrastructure of neglectful railroad companies. People of color and/or privilege, the men and women rarely figure into urban studies or STS work on sustainability.  In short, a wide rage of scholarship on the risk society, from disaster studies to whiteness studies, informs my work on resilient cities in the PhD Program and the Transforming Urban Transport Project of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

My work likely dovetails with many of you, particularly those conducting research on past and present efforts to protect “vital systems” for homeland security, emergency management, economic recovery, disaster relief, free speech, etc. I can only hope that, by classifying and regulating the Internet as a ‘public utility,’ the Obama administration has laid the groundwork (with grants if nothing else) for disparate corps of CIP scholars to work across our respective technology ‘sectors’ (transportation, energy, computing). Until then, I look forward to exchanging knowledge with all of you at the upcoming SHOT conference.

Best,


Fallon

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Fallon Samuels Aidoo
PhD Candidate, Urban Studies
Research Associate, 'Transforming Urban Transport' Project
Harvard University | Graduate School of Design
fsamuels at fas.harvard.edu
http://www.linkedin/com/in/fallonsamuelsaidoo

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