The article has the main aim of utilizing the literature on “fragment urbanism” and case studies in infrastructure from the global South to question the notion—dear to the World Bank and the IMF—that the global South ought to follow the North’s lead in aiming at “the modern infrastructure ideal,” that is, a series of integrated nation-wide networks. That model suits certain needs—electricity, phone service, perhaps Internet—but it doesn’t always work, even if funding can be found, for many other infrastructure needs. What is often thought of as “informal” solutions may in fact deploy more site-specific and community-specific techniques and tools.

The article also shows that even in the global North’s most advanced capitalist countries, the lack of overall planning and the absence of needs assessments done before choosing which projects will go ahead mean that infrastructure provision and governance is far more fragmented than the “modern” ideal would suggest. The fact that major projects are usually financed separately, often having their own credit rating, encourages a way of non-evidence based planning that is rife for political interference in infrastructure decision-making. The “art of the deal” is in fact the model for infrastructure projects these days, not the ‘seeing like a state’ that characterized many projects in the post-World War II era.

By examining the history of the Ahvāz pipe mill in the 1960s and 1970s, this article investigates the manner in which competing understandings of Iran's modernizing trajectory among Pahlavi officials were bound up with the material aspects of steel, such as weight, volume, and form. The mill was built to provide pipe for the First Iran Gas Trunkline, a sprawling system intended to gather, refine, and transport natural gas to Iranian cities and the Soviet Caucasus. Officials overseeing the project debated whether the mill's design should prioritize serving the pipeline project or, more ambitiously, establish a new pipe rolling industry able to serve domestic and regional markets. Argued in this article is the significance of attending to infrastructure and materiality in understanding Iran's twentieth-century history of developmentalism.

Janssen et al. (Exp Econ 14:547–566, 2014) studied an asymmetric, finitely repeated common-pool resource dilemma with free-form communication in which subjects made decisions about investments in an infrastructure, and about extraction from a resource made available by this infrastructure. They found that infrastructure provision and joint payoffs converged to high levels because structurally advantaged head-enders tend to behave fairly by restricting themselves voluntarily at the extraction stage, and structurally disadvantaged “tail-enders” reciprocate by investing. This paper reports a fully independent, pre-registered, double-blind replication attempt conducted in a different lab, that also supplies elevated statistical power and adheres to the highest principles of scientific transparency and openness. We find that the key results of Janssen et al. not only re-appear qualitatively but are quantitatively and statistically strengthened. The conclusions drawn from the results are therefore robust, and the basic design can be confidently used for follow-up research.

Quantum technologies (QT) are being awaited with excitement. They are supported by many governments, the corporate sector, international bodies and technology forecasters. There is discursive investment as well in terms of creating expectations and laying down a vision for the ‘Second Quantum Revolution’. Science and technology studies are also playing their part to think of the quantum future along with philosophical discussions around it. These visions and expectations perform an implicit and latent function of steering policy proposals and governance. At the current stage of development of quantum technologies, a comprehensive and cogent legal framework is hard to envisage. As it is difficult to foresee the final shape of these technologies, a way to proceed can be to focus on the legal enquiry related to economic, political and policy factors which contribute to its material emergence. This can broaden the focus from thinking about its impact to contextualizing its production and development. Further, it allows a way of determining the extent to which social science and ethical frames can apply to the governance of QT, given the legal and practical realities of technology production and use. This article maps the myriad governance frameworks being envisaged to think about the future of QT. It zooms onto the discussion related to the access divide being framed for QT to understand the points of legal intervention. It uses the case of quantum computing to understand the way legal and practical policy solutions have been ideated. It highlights the way these solutions entrench power of digital infrastructure providers further. This seeks to motivate further work to expand the scope of a legal framework for QT.

This introduction revisits the relevant literature in the fields of tourism history, as well as in imperial/global history. Identifying shortcomings in these two research strands, the authors advocate bringing themes and approaches from both historiographical fields into dialogue. They outline the intersections between the development of modern tourism since the mid-nineteenth century and the global expansion of empires over the same time period and identify three important themes in the entangled history of tourism and imperialism: tourism's relationship with colonial infrastructure and development; the contested labour relations underpinning colonial tourism; and tourism as a site of encounters between colonisers and the colonised, as well as of touristic gazes and counter-gazes. Finally, the introduction also situates the individual contributions of the special issue within this broader historiographical framework and indicates how they can show the way towards a fuller understanding of the workings of modern empires and imperialism.

Usage data on research outputs such as books and journals is well established in the scholarly community. Yet, as research impact is derived from a broader set of scholarly outputs, such as data, code, and multimedia, more holistic usage and impact metrics could inform national innovation and research policy. While usage data reporting standards, such as Project COUNTER, provide the basis for shared statistics reporting practice, mandated access to publicly funded research has increased the demand for impact metrics and analytics. In this context, stakeholders are exploring how to scaffold and strengthen shared infrastructure to better support the trusted, multistakeholder exchange of usage data across a variety of outputs. In April 2023, a workshop on Exploring National Infrastructure for Public Access and Impact Reporting supported by the United States (US) National Science Foundation (NSF) explored these issues. This paper contextualizes the resources shared and recommendations generated in the workshop.

The future of public humanities will be determined by the infrastructural investments that support its continued development. These include, in the context of the United States, increased federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities; a serious re-engagement in the material support of new humanities scholarly production by private foundations; and a focused effort by humanities organizations to cultivate philanthropic donors. This manifesto argues that the humanities are the rightful inheritance of every person, regardless of background or position. If we are to take seriously both the resource needs of humanities research—which demand that funds be allocated for highly trained scholars to read, interpret, authenticate, preserve, and circulate primary source material—and the idea that no one has a higher claim than anyone else to these sources and processes and the insights they yield—which demands that individuals outside of the academy explicitly experience them selves as equal participants in the humanities—then our approach to both research infrastructure and public engagement must radically shift to emphasize repair. Repair, here, is the interpersonal, intellectual, strategic, repetitious, time-intensive work of ensuring that every individual can claim this rightful cultural inheritance. It is the work of creating the conditions for encounters between individuals and the vastness of history, culture, and difference. The future of public humanities must be in the creation of replicable models for these encounters, in the knowledge that in every instance, the work of the humanities is and must be unreproducible.

From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, rivers played a key role in the colonization of Hokkaido, a northern island in the Japanese archipelago. The Kushiro River, in eastern Hokkaido, was transformed into infrastructure, a process which shaped the institutions, strategies, and practices of territorial control during the transition from the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) to Imperial Japan (1868–1947). Trade between local Ainu communities and the shogunate's vassals contributed to a river-based territoriality. Later in the 1800s, as the island became territory of the modern state, the river was further converted into infrastructure through settler colonialism, industrial development, land reclamation, and the dispossession of indigenous communities. This transformation empowered the state to probe territories, exert control over labor, and access natural resources. Drawing on research on the political ecology of rivers, this paper focuses on two hydrosocial functions that emerged during the process of reworking river basins into legible and governable spaces: the transportation conduit and the water delivery system. The river's transition from a living system to infrastructure coincided with and furthered the establishment of colonial settlements and the expansion of the Japanese state's imperial reach.

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system