Chapter 5 layers in investigation of notions of empire and longevity, examined here through the lens of more mundane and pervasive structures—its streets and public highways—to reckon with the attenuated and amalgamated temporalities that these infrastructures construct through the accumulation of large- and small-scale acts of maintenance and repair and the referencing of those interventions by milestone monuments in the extra-urban landscape.

Chapter 3 considers the nature of provincial government, the role and legal responsibilities of governors, both legati Augusti and proconsuls, the management of Rome’s assets through the census and by direct intervention, for example, in managing the benefits and dangers of rivers. We look at the constitutions of municipia, and the nature of their laws and regulations, and Rome’s supervision of the infrastructure of local towns, and the consequences for local people. In the administration of justice there was a melding of local legal practice and Roman law. Did the Romans have an idea of what constituted fair and efficient government and how far did they achieve it? The evidence shows good intentions on the part of emperors and governors, but also many abuses, especially from the presence of soldiers, and problems in obtaining legal redress.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

In the coming decades, cities and other local governments will need to transform their infrastructure as part of their climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. When they do, they have the opportunity to build a more resilient, sustainable, and accommodating infrastructure for humans and non-humans alike. This chapter surveys a range of policy tools that cities and other local governments can use to pursue co-beneficial adaptations for humans, non-humans, and the environment. For example, they can add bird-friendly glass to new and upgraded buildings and vehicles; they can add overpasses, underpasses, and wildlife corridors on transportation systems; they can reduce light and noise pollution that impact humans and nonhumans alike; they can use a novel trash policy to manage rodent populations non-lethally; and more.

Eighteenth-century Britain experienced massive growth in its transportation networks. As turnpikes, canals, and railways extended throughout the realm, they inevitably crossed one another. Each crossing compelled Britons to decide how different forms of traffic would share space. This chapter shows how writings occasioned by crossing disputes conceived infrastructure not as an unthought material strata – as it is often construed today – but as a call to weigh and prioritize different amenities. The chapter focuses specifically on one contested crossing in early eighteenth-century South Wales where a coal tram crossed the king’s highway. This intersection spurred an exchange of pamphlets between those who characterized the tram tracks as a public nuisance, and those who regarded them as a public work that employed artisans, distributed carbon fuel, and generated customs revenue. At stake in these writings is the question of whether privately owned freight conduits advanced or undercut the public good.

While Chapter 4 outlines the national pattern of visibility projects and the forced exit of private firms from the urban bus sector, this chapter uses comparative case studies, in-depth interviews, and process tracing to explore the causal mechanism linking visibility projects to deprivatization. Guangzhou and Nanning, two capital cities in neighboring provinces in southern China, are selected for a most-similar case comparison. Guangzhou deprivatized its bus sector in 2007, whereas Nanning continues to have a privately controlled bus sector.

Guangzhou initiated multiple visibility projects in its urban bus sector, driven by ambitious city leaders seeking attention from the Party-state. In contrast, Nanning launched only a few projects, as its city leaders sought to avoid attention following recent political turmoil. By contrasting these two cases and demonstrating why deprivatization occurred in Guangzhou but not in Nanning, this chapter illustrates how visibility projects led to the end of marketization in China’s urban bus sector.

Peat extraction profoundly transformed central Russia’s physical, economic, and social geography. This chapter traces how canals, railways, cables, as well as housing and social welfare helped make central Russia’s peatlands more habitable. From the 1920s onwards, and particularly following Stalin’s death in 1953, the government invested considerable funds allowing workers to live permanently near important peat extraction sites. Over time, workers’ settlements turned into regular parts of the landscape and homes for workers and their families. The everyday in these places blended features of urban and rural life. Enjoying access to running fresh water and basic health care, most people combined employment in peat extraction with private gardening to produce food. This chapter foregrounds the often overlooked role of workers’ settlements as spaces of reproduction in the history of Russia’s fossil economy. Peat was not just a fuel but also a source for place-based feelings of belonging that allowed workers to embrace the margins of Russia’s fossil economy as their home.

Even in the most mundane sectors, firms are still required to provide political services. This chapter examines how the urban bus sector across Chinese cities became a focal point for visibility projects starting in the early 2000s and how this trend led to an uncoordinated, nationwide deprivatization of the urban bus sector by city governments beginning in 2005. These actions contradicted policies that encouraged private provision of bus services.

Using an original dataset on visibility projects and sectoral data from 288 Chinese cities covering the urban bus sector between 1996 and 2016, the chapter demonstrates how successive waves of visibility projects were closely linked to the reversal of marketization in the sector. The chapter opens with an account from a city government official describing their efforts to force private firms out of the urban bus sector, and is enriched with detailed interview notes throughout.

A common yet often overlooked political service provided by companies is funding authoritarian officials’ visibility projects – the key concept in this chapter. In the absence of elections, authoritarian officials often demonstrate their competence and loyalty to leaders by initiating ambitious, large-scale infrastructure or public projects. These projects prioritize appearance and scale over practicality, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability, as they are designed to enhance the officials’ political visibility in the system and career prospects. This chapter defines this concept and identifies the conditions under which visibility projects arise within a sector. It offers numerous real-world examples of visibility projects, including wastewater treatment plants, industrial parks, desertification control efforts, and programs such as “Grain for Green,” among others. It traces the emergence of visibility projects to flawed authoritarian personnel management systems that emphasize both competence and loyalty.

Owing to their scale and wasteful nature, government officials often solicit contributions from firms to launch visibility projects. Private firms, however, are at a disadvantage compared with state-owned enterprises, given their more limited financial resources. Consequently, visibility projects are often associated with the decline of private firms within a sector.

While local efforts to decarbonize will mainly benefit the world as a whole, local efforts to adapt to climate change will benefit mainly people in cities, who will be more resilient to the extreme heat, drought, flooding and fires that planetary warming is exacerbating. Reflecting the benefits to cities of adapting, cities began planning adaptation early in the twenty-first century. However, as of the early 2020s, US cities had undertaken little adaptation (as opposed to adaptation planning). From 2000 until 2012, when Superstorm Sandy struck the city, New York policymakers focused on gathering information about the risks that climate change presents for the city, but they undertook few tangible actions to protect the city against risks such as storm surge flooding. Sandy increased policymakers’ perception of the urgency of acting to adapt, and injected $15 billion of federal funding into the city that enabled it to invest in adaptation. Yet, between 2012 and the early 2020s, the city had great difficulty implementing adaptation actions. New York City’s top-down approach to climate change adaptation underscores the difficulties that cities face implementing the costly local public good of climate change adaptation without additional assistance from higher levels of government.

How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

The agricultural practices associated with the green revolution assumed their fullest form in the state of Punjab and are commonly associated with the launch of HYVs in 1964-66. But in reality, Punjab had been undergoing a process of agrarian transformations for a long time. Punjab developed as the subcontinent’s most productive agrarian region during colonial times. Though the partition disrupted the region’s agricultural infrastructures, the state embarked upon a massive phase of rebuilding under the leadership of a handful of bureaucrats with a technocratic vision. These efforts were tailored to build a system of productive agriculture to restore the province’s pre-partition preeminence. The pursuit of productivity trumped every other agenda in Punjab and a spell of regional technocracy took hold. The American experts arriving under the Indo-US treaties and those sent over by the American foundations believed that the modernization of Indian agriculture must start from Punjab. When the HYVs arrived, Punjab was readier than any other region.