Gökçe Günel – författare

Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia offers a new understanding of how technological innovation, geopolitical ambitions, and social change converge and cross-fertilize one another through infrastructure projects in Asia. This volume powerfully illustrates the multifaceted connections between infrastructure and three global paradigm shifts: climate change, digitalization, and China’s emergence as a superpower. Drawing on fine-grained analyses of airports, highways, pipelines, and digital communication systems, the book investigates infrastructure both "from above," as perceived by experts and decision makers, and "from below," as experienced by middlemen, laborers, and everyday users. In so doing, it provides groundbreaking insights into infrastructure’s planning, production, and operation.Focusing on cities and regions across Asia, the volume combines ten tightly interwoven case studies, from the Bosphorus to Beijing and from the Indonesian archipelago to the Arctic. Written by leading global infrastructure experts in the fields of anthropology, architecture, geography, history, science and technology studies, and urban planning, the book establishes a dialogue between scholarly approaches to infrastructure and the more operational perspective of the professionals who design and build it. This multidisciplinary method sheds light on the practitioners’ mindset, while also attending to the materiality and agency of the infrastructures that they create. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia is conceived as an act of translation: linking up related—yet thus far disconnected—research across a variety of academic disciplines, while making those insights accessible to a wider audience of students, infrastructure professionals, and the general public.

In 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert GÖkÇe GÜnel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives-such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network-have stalled or not met expectations, GÜnel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.

In 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert GÖkÇe GÜnel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives-such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network-have stalled or not met expectations, GÜnel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.

Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Gökçe Günel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Günel uses the Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.