Moscow Diary

Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics, and traces

“…In cities of the Global South, infrastructure is rarely complete or seamlessly functioning (Simone 2004 b ) and thus has a vigorous presence, even in its absence, in people's lives – no habituation here! The same holds abundantly true for many (post)socialist countries (Alexander 2012; Benjamin 1986; Dalakoglou 2012; Lemon 2009). One extension is that ‘failure’ may be too readily applied to African cities, occluding an appreciation of what is actually there (Simone 2004 a : 16, 96) and reducing the entire continent to a reductive cliché (Roitman 2017).…”