This paper explores the temporalities of infrastructuring, breakdown, and repair/disrepair interacting generativelymaterially and symbolicallyin "Yachay, the city of knowledge," the most ambitious and controversial public infrastructural project in Ecuador's history. I analyze the roles of expectations, and the infrastructural dynamics in the process of shaping Yachay during its intragovernmental scaling-up from a technical university to a city of knowledge; and during the material implementation of some of its basic physical infrastructure. I also highlight the embeddedness of the expectations in particular pasts and historical trajectories, thus extending the common use of expectations as only oriented to the future. The argument presented here draws on fieldwork conducted in Yachay for 14 months between 2016 and 2018.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.