Infrastructural Lives

Urban Infrastructure in Context

Stephen Graham, Colin McFarlane, Stephen Graham, Colin McFarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317686392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies. An interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging urban researchers examine critical questions about urban infrastructure in different global contexts.

The chapters address water, sanitation, and waste politics in Mumbai, Kampala and Tyneside, analyse the use of infrastructure in the dispossession of Palestinian communities, explore the pacification of Rio's favelas in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, describe how people's bodies and lives effectively operate as 'infrastructure' in many major cities, and also explores tentative experiments with low-carbon infrastructures.

These diverse cases and perspectives are connected by a shared sense of infrastructure not just as a 'thing', a 'system', or an 'output, ' but as a complex social and technological process that enables – or disables – particular kinds of action in the city. Infrastructural Lives is crucial reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners in urban studies globally.

Part I Knowing infrastructure

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775098-2

Chapter 1 Relational infrastructures in postcolonial urban worlds

AbdouMaliq Simone

DOI: 10.4324/9781315775098-3

Introduction: relational infrastructures

In the so-called majority urban world of today, the trajectories of change sometimes seem univocal, at others, all over the place. Memories of national imaginaries – of slights and wounds, power grabs and nagging liberations – both harden and fade away. Speeds of transformation are deceptive in their manifestations. The seeming hegemonies behind the logics of mega-development appear to chew up everything in their path. But in their production of more of the same, they leave little to constitute the basis of dynamic interactions between them, and such interactions otherwise constitute the speed, the registration of history (Curran, 2007; Goldman, 2011; Hodson and Marvin, 2009; Kirkpatrick and Smith, 2011; Monstadt, 2009; Shatkin, 2008).

The chipping away of residential and commercial districts built up over many years to accommodate a great diversity of activities and people produces multifarious dispositions – different gradations of gentrification, renewal, decay, resurgence, and dissipation. Here, different actors, agendas, aspirations, games, and tricks produce a variety of interim solutions that go on to last a long time. While injustice could hardly be more glaring and the poor more discounted, maneuvers to foster more comprehensive integration into urban systems often prove intensely exclusionary. On the other hand, spatial polarization often proves the condition under which the marginalized, weakened or threatened work out operational spaces – however temporary – to establish more effective terms under which to participate in corporate modalities of governance (Auyero, 2007; Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009; Heller and Evans, 2010; McFarlane, 2008; Roy, 2011).

Within such conditions, how do the majority of urban residents in the postcolonial urban world put together ways of inhabiting the city? The specifications of land use, the conditions of tenure, the financial procedures for accessing housing, and the calibrations of labor markets are structural devices that generate a specific framework of possibilities. But there are also deep inventories of various social practices, ways of interpreting urban conditions, modes of social support and stabilization that have long “guided” urban residents. Using Isabelle Stengers’ notion of an ecology of practices (Stengers, 2010), residents do not simply adhere to norms and rules either as prescriptions for action or as frameworks for deciding what is viable or not. In part, this is because what those norms and rules consist of is usually defined in majority terms or are distillations of specific interests of the powerful. They become instruments of silencing in face of the “weight” that norms carry as the crystallization of the best way of doing things, and where refusal of adherence is a judgment (bad) of the individual who refuses rather than a judgment of the norms themselves.

Practices, says Stengers, entail obligations – obligations to pursue a particular path as opposed to others, but as a means to induce thinking, to build up a perspective over time and which generates a sense of efficacy, a sense of belonging to something capable of absorbing individual action and effort. A practice is more than a particular way of doing something, more than simply technique, for it entails obligations to others who have also “practiced.” Thus, practices introduces a temporality of hesitation, of thinking through what is entailed in the process that practice elaborates, and hesitating in face of the scenarios that practice opens onto, of knowing what works and what is useful or not (Latour, 2005).

What I want to do in this contribution is to explore some of the practices that residents have used to make viable forms of inhabitation in the postcolonial urban world. Most of these reflections are drawn from several years of research, activism and community organization in Jakarta – now part of one of the world’s largest urban regions. While these reflections are specific to Jakarta, other work that I have done over the past thirty years in Africa’s major urban areas, as well as in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, makes me think that many of these maneuvers undertaken by residents, nominally “belonging” to the working poor, working class, lower middle class, are also applicable more widely. Here, I focus on infrastructures of relationality. In other words, the ways in which relationships themselves constitute an infrastructure for inhabitation. These relationships are not just social events or descriptors of exchanges and transactions. They are not simply embodiments of sentiment or vehicles for organizing work, expenditure, attention and recognition.

Rather, they are materials themselves to be articulated in various forms in order to construct circulations of bodies, resources, affect and information. They are vehicles of movement and becoming, ways of mediating the constantly oscillating intersections of various times, spaces, economies, constraints and possibilities making up city life. Relations are also the tools through which political imaginations and claims are exerted and thus are the embodiment of force. Here, force, regardless of how it is mediated or institutionalized, exists in its potential as a means of urban change. More than notions of social capital, care, support, economy and livelihood are entailed in the efforts inhabitants make to work on and with relations. For what is also entailed are the circumvention of domination and the keeping open of many different trajectories of what life could be all at once (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Nancy, 2002; Virno, 2009).

Mimetic zones

In variegated neoliberal urban conditions, probabilities, accountancy, and the stochastic modeling of risk are the things that really matter – not only because they are the instruments that work with large assemblages of data and uncertainty to specify the positions, the hedges, and the arbitrage that are critical for any urban economy, but also because they are the seemingly proficient instruments of dissimulation – they cover up for the fact that no one knows quite what is going on. This efficacy is derived from the way they make everything count, everything accountable; the ways in which large volumes of raw data can be scrutinized in order to establish the visibilities, the patterns that are worthy of being discerned, that will constitute the locus of intervention. Everything else that falls outside of such modeling does not matter (Callon et al., 2007; Cooper, 2010; Foucault, 2008). For large numbers of residents in cities of the majority world, then, the dilemma is how demonstrate that where they live and what they do matter, when the possibilities of translation, visibility and value become more problematic. On the other hand, it is important, and to a large extent has been important for a long time, to stay outside the count, not to get sucked into the game of who and what is eligible and who is not (Bayat, 2009; De Boeck and Plissard, 2006; Gooptu, 2001; Roitman, 2005; Whitson, 2007).

One course of action for not getting sucked into the game is to act as if one is very much involved in it, in a kind of mirroring process. The idea here is for particular communities, populations, or networks – otherwise considered to be divergent or incapable – to reflect back to hegemonic actors aspects of the practices that are acknowledged as playing a critical role in the reproduction of that hegemony. This constitutes an implicit acknowledgement by the weak of the capacities of the strong but also inevitably signals that, in the hands of the weak, these practices can never be implemented in ways sufficient to challenge the strong. The very same kinds of practices that in the hands of those with power are construed as calculating, daring, and innovative, in other hands are seen as impetuous and self-destructive. These are the very behaviors, then, which would seem to disqualify “ordinary residents” from being eligible to participate fully in a wide range of managerial, decision-making processes. Yet, in this process of mirroring, limited spaces of maneuverability are opened and for much of the very same reasons they are opened for those supposedly much more well-versed in using them (de Certeau, 1998; Goldstein, 2004; Taussig, 1999; Williams, 2002).

In this process, the “devices” associated with the incursions and re-compositions engineered by global capital – such as speculative finance, cut-and-paste modularization of spatial products, translocal configurations of production mechanisms, and the privileging of surface maneuvers emptied of historical reference – also are appropriated by collective actors as a means to substantiate practices of creating space and opportunities that ensue from different logics and aspirations. Under certain urban conditions, residents of lesser means and subject to the arbitrary constrictions on anticipating the future due to race, ethnicity or other attributes have often used the very bodies of household and kin to hedge against uncertainty. Spreading out across different locations, institutions, careers and exposures, households extend themselves across different sources of opportunity (Cross and Morales, 2007; Kothari, 2008; Meagher, 2010; Roitman, 2005).

While socio-psycho dynamics may account for differentiations within the household in terms of varied distributions and balances of power and responsibility, the ways in which members of a single family may be situated in higher education, factory work, the prison, the military, the hospital, or the corporation may reflect an unfolding infrastructure to connect different positions as a means of securing household livelihood. If one position doesn’t pan out, others might. In situations where an individual’s sheer identity – rather than skills or capacity – make them vulnerable to downturns, attritions, and scapegoating, this infrastructure of hedges proves necessary (Haber, 2006; Menjívar, 2000; Small, 2009; Stack, 1997; Telles and Hirata, 2007).

Games of anticipation are also mechanisms for taking on the profitability of risk. In everyday transactions, interactants anticipate the likely responses of each other as the basis on which to style particular overtures and interventions. Individuals are not likely to act when they feel unable to anticipate the likely range of responses their behavior is likely to elicit. They attempt to anticipate what the likely response will be to a forthcoming action. But rather than constituting a straightforward narrative of behavior shaped by a response that confirms the confidence of the actor to anticipate, there is always the presence of a certain dread. The recipient of the behavior can also use his or her response as an anticipation of the anticipation of the initial actor. This not only provides the scenario that the initial actor seems to want but, more importantly, provides confirmation of the initial actor’s ability to correctly have read the situation – having made the right anticipation (Garfinkel, 1991; Goffman, 1986; Taussig, 1992).

Thus, this is a game full of potential duplicities, steering interactants into false confidence and subsequent vulnerabilities. In the accretion of these projected anticipations, actors can lose a sense of what it is that each other “really” anticipates. In such circumstances, actors may speculate about what might happen when they show behavior which is not what on the surface is anticipated. Instead, this behavior addresses an anticipation that is masked by the surface anticipation, so that the interaction becomes a moment of simultaneous discovery or surprise. Here, the other is momentarily disarmed by being addressed in a way that she discovers that she really wants and either must decide to quickly re-mask this desire or allow themselves to be addressed within it. This maneuver carries certain risks, especially when those in weaker positions of power attempt to deploy it.

But this is precisely the maneuver played out day after day in many markets of cities in the majority world, as well as in the overtures made by individuals seeking inclusion in some kind of business or economic opportunity to which they are otherwise ineligible. Appeals are made to the possibility that the ways in which the recipients conceive stable livelihoods and businesses, security for their enterprises and schemes – while effective, normal or customary – are perhaps too limiting for the aspirations they might have. Here, there is the attempt to construct a sense that an extra body, an extra contact or activity might have a higher payoff. If one listens to the conversations at different conjunctions of work activities – carters who deliver boxes of goods to the market, mobile hawkers selling wares across various commercial landscapes, a journeyman looking for part-time work in some new workshop, factory workers talking to their supervisors about various aspects of work on the factory floor, minivan drivers ferrying workers back home from an office, low-level local officials collecting fees from market stalls – they are replete with such appeals (Fawaz, 2008; Guyer, 2004; Lindell, 2010; Peters, 2009; Prag, 2010; Wu et al., 2010). The attempt is to try and steer the transaction into an opportunity for inclusion in some other, sometimes undefined, opportunity. The risks entailed is that the person initiating these appeals – these speculative anticipations of a possible more “real” anticipation than the one being most apparently performed by the other – will lose the current position they have. This is what I mean by taking on risk.

The impetuous, speculative involvement of many urban residents across the majority world in gambling, loan sharking and ponzi schemes is well known. Traditional urban markets are increasingly becoming the locus for more systematic, organized speculative ventures folding in the dimensions of the derivation process centered on the linkages among different kinds of assets. Here, the apparently naturalized link between economic efficacy and specific urbanized styles of calculation and individuation may also be broken. Economic success need not necessarily connote an overarching desire for individual material gain or the absence of it need not necessarily rule out the ability of individuals to assume what might be seen as a highly urbanized demeanor. Within a given street, there may be people who work constantly, stringing together a plurality of small jobs and their work may enable others to seemingly do nothing, even as this “nothing,” this removal from work is the vantage point from which information is retrieved and coordinated enabling specific jobs to be created. Meager earnings are sometimes pooled together and seemingly “wasted” on games and improvised festivities which become the only means for a neighborhood to attract a wider “audience” to it, and then use that audience as a means of finding out what is taking place at larger scales. Individual accumulation, in face of being embedded in contexts of overwhelming economic vulnerability, may give way to excessive displays of expenditure intended to enfold diverse others into relationships that may have no other concrete basis for existing (De Boeck and Plissard, 2006; Guyer, 2004; Wilson, 2008).

Periodic displays of excess of all kinds can be a means to refuse modernist emphases on examining individual insufficiency and the need for continuous “upgrades” and improvements, as well as the associated compulsion for individuals to progressively dissociate themselves from their surrounding human and material environments (Tassi, 2010...