Sustainable Consumption Institute

The motivation for producing this chapter is out of a concern to understand the history of the technoscience of the production, circulation and deployment of integrated urban infrastructure. The starting point for this project was the striking similarities between ways of representing metabolic resource flows and integrated infrastructures in both the design of cabins of spacecraft and the design of green buildings. The chapter seeks to develop an understanding of how infrastructural integration appeared to be based on a set of rational and standardised techniques designed to abstract, audit, quantify, manage and re- integrate flows of resources - water, energy, wastes and carbon at a number of different levels. What struck us was how little understanding of the history of these techniques and approaches we had as urban infrastructure specialists and yet how potentially important they might be in framing the purpose and processes of integration.

Using this insight into the connections between space (and military) programmes to construct ‘cabin ecologies’ for capsules, biomes, space ships, space settlements, submarines this chapter seeks to explore the production, dissemination and testing and then deployment of integrated urban infrastructure technoscience, and ways in which the boundaries between interior and exterior environments are being selectively but significantly redrawn.  The conclusion argues that urban infrastructure studies need to take the hidden history of infrastructure and enclosed life support systems more seriously in a period when anthropogenic change is reshaping the global ecological context of urban life, creating responses that seek to rebundle selected ecologies and infrastructure to ensure urban reproduction.

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