Book launch: Infrastructure: New Trajectories in Law, by Mariana Valverde

Please register here: www.tinyurl.com/18May2022

Speaker:
Mariana Valverde, Professor Emerita, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto

Chair:
Luisa Sotomayor, Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change

Discussants:
Sergio Montero, Associate Professor, CIDER, Universidad de Los Andes
Patricia Wood, Professor, Department of Geography, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change

This book is will help citizens, public servants and students to inquire into infrastructure projects in their own communities. As such it does not present case studies of specific projects, but rather goes over many of the key common governance tools –mainly financial and legal, but also cultural—that constitute “the infrastructure enabling field” and that are widely used in the global South as well as the North. These commonly used governance tools include ‘the audit’, ‘bonds’, ‘credit ratings’, ‘’community consultations’, public-private partnerships’, and ‘value-for-money assessments’.

The author has carried out intensive studies of infrastructure planning and decision-making, mainly in the province of Ontario, but research on international projects (e.g. the Government of India’s ‘100 smart cities mission’, the Argentinian sovereign debt default) is also used to illustrate how the various governance practices have been used around the world, and what political effects (mainly anti-democratic effects) result from the routinized use of these particular tools.

Mariana Valverde is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2006. Professor Valverde’s main research interests are urban law and governance (historically and in the present) and, at the theoretical level, Foucault, sexuality studies, theories of spatiotemporality, and actor-network theory.  Professor Valverde is the author of six sole-authored books, six co-edited collections, about 50 refereed journal articles, and various research reports and popular publications, and has twice won the Law and Society Association’s Jacob award, its main book prize.