BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Multi-infrastructure studies: ethnographic and historical explorations - Liviu Chelcea The waiting town: Life in transit and Mumbai’s other world-class histories, by Lisa Björkman, New York, Columbia University Press Asia Shorts Series, 2020, 160 pp., $16.00 (Paperback), ISBN 9780924304934 Remaking Berlin. A history of the city through infrastructure, 1920-2020, by Timothy Moss, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press Infrastructures Series, 2020, 472 pp., $50 (Paperback), ISBN 9780262539777 These two fascinating books on the politics of urban infrastructures in two important cities of the Eurasian landmass not only ofer rich descriptions of those cities’ relations with their infrastructures, they also present two intriguing ways of showing how infra- structures shape urban life and, ultimately, two diferent ways of producing knowledge about them. To be sure, the two volumes difer signifcantly in terms of academic discipline, analytical approach, empirical evidence, objects of study, theoretical conver- sations, and understanding of politics. Read together, however, they outline a productive conversation about how to foreground the interactions between diferent types of infrastructures in cities. Most social studies of infrastructures have analyzed only one network at a time. These two volumes suggest (Moss’s explicitly, Björkman’s implicitly) that there is much to learn from analyzing urban infrastructures together rather than in isolation. I will briefy compare and contrast them, and close by suggesting that both outline a space of theoretical exploration and ofer a generative entry point into urban life, located in analyzing multiple city infrastructures simultaneously. I was drawn to these books for diferent reasons. In Lisa Björkman’s case, I was interested in keeping up with ethnographic research on Mumbai, which has produced landmark studies of water and politics such as Björkman’s own Pipe Politics (2015) and Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City (2017). As regards Timothy Moss’s book, I have been puzzled for years over how one unites or divides cities infrastructurally (think of Buda and Pest, New York and Brooklyn in the late 19 th century, among others). Seeking to understand how state-socialism has handled utilities, a topic on which relatively little has been written, was another incentive to read Moss’s book: Berlin is an ideal case study for that. Moss’s study is historical and largely archival. It is primarily the voices of planners, engineers and municipal politicians that are present in the text. Woven together, they ofer a synoptic image (including graphic elements – Moss often uses maps) of the substantial expansion, destruction, and reconstruction experienced by Berlin’s infra- structures over the last 100 years. Moss uncovers the technopolitics in which the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Regime, war devastation and postwar reconstruction, the insular urbanism of West Berlin, the state-socialism of the GDR, German reunifcation, EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS