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This article argues for the importance of social imagination in the understanding of urban infrastructures, especially those designed and built by engineers. It begins by defining social imagination as image‐based systems of representation and values that are shared by various collective stakeholders concerned with infrastructure, such as engineers, but also politicians, administrators, operators, maintenance technicians and indeed users, and then introduces a tripartite model of infrastructure. Infrastructure is interpreted as the result of the interactions between a material basis, professional organizations and stabilized socio‐technical practices, and social imagination. The notion of network is interpreted from such a perspective. Its dependence on imagination is outlined. Through two case studies, the nineteenth‐century networked metropolis, epitomized by Haussmann's Paris, and the rise of the contemporary smart city perspective, the role of social imagination in the conception of urban infrastructure is analyzed further. What seems at stake in the transition towards the smart city is the increased importance given to occurrences, events and scenarios as the basis for urban infrastructure regulation.

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Nineteenth-century Parisian cartography was marked by the emergence of a new cartographic genre: the specialized atlas of the city. This genre was linked to a change in the function assigned to urban maps. Before the French Revolution, the plans of Paris had been shaped by either the desire to portray the city and its singularity or the quest for accuracy in the representation of its layout. In contrast, nineteenth-century plans and atlases reflected the ambition to understand the city according to the light provided by the various natural and social sciences. This article explores the different kinds of maps and atlases produced throughout the nineteenth century in relation to this ambition. Of special interest in this respect are the Bertillon family's thematic maps based on statistics gathered by the Parisian administration. CARTOGRAPHIC GENRES AND THE MEANING OF MAPSLike other historical documents, maps can be interpreted on various levels.1 The first and most evident one is related to the information they convey. Renaissance maps and atlases enable the historian to measure the degree of knowledge of the New World that had been acquired by the time of their production. A second level of analysis concerns the graphic techniques used by the mapmaker. These techniques are linked to broader issues, such as the definition of accuracy and the relation between observation and representational conventions that prevailed in a given culture. Many historians of cartography have focused on these fundamental issues. There are, however, many other ways to look at maps. For instance, one can pay attention to the genres to which they belong. These genres, from the atlas of the world to the detailed representation of a city, are defined by contrasting one with another. Each is permeated with preoccupations that can be better apprehended by taking into account the entire system of genres and its characteristics. In literature, a convenient way to understand how tragedy