The temporal fragility of infrastructure: Theorizing decay, maintenance, and repair

Abstract

Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social processes, thus offering insights into lived experiences, governance, and socio-spatial reordering. More specific attention to infrastructure’s temporality has challenged its supposed inertia and inevitable completeness, leading to an engagement with questions of the dynamics of infrastructure over different phases of its lifespan, and their generative effects. In this paper, we advance these debates through a focus on the processes of decay, maintenance, and repair that characterize such phases of infrastructural life, by exploring how specific infrastructures are materially shaped by, and shape, social, political, and socio-ecological arrangements. Our intervention has two related aims: first, to conceptualize decay, maintenance, and repair as both temporal phases of infrastructure’s dynamic materiality and its specific affective conditions; second, to trace how these phases of infrastructural life rework embodied labor, differentiated citizenship, and socio-ecological relations. We argue that attention to infrastructure’s “temporal fragility” elucidates the articulation between everyday capacities and desires to labor, the creation of and demands made by political constituents, and the uneven distribution of opportunities and resources.

Urban (in) security in an emerging human settlement: Perspectives from Hopley Farm Settlement, Harare, Zimbabwe

“…The gray spaces articulated by Yiftachel ( 2009) resonated with infrastructural violence because being in the shadow of the city and positioned in spaces susceptible to destruction and death often means the government fails to provide and cater for the servicing and provisioning of these settlements. Subsequently, residents must reside in communities lacking basic services such as water and sanitation, electricity and public transport, exposing them to several dangers and threats (Mphambukeli, 2015;Ramakrishnan et al, 2021). According to Young (1990), this denial and exclusion make individuals and groups vulnerable to exploitation.…”

Schauplätze des Reparierens und Selbermachens

“…Haben die bislang gegebenen Einblicke in die Schauplätze des Reparierens und Selbermachens vermittelt, in welcher Bandbreite sich kollektive Erfahrungsräume gemeinsamen Erhaltens in Szene setzen lassen und auf dieser Basis fragile und f luide, dabei aber vielfältige Ausgangsmomente der Weitervermittlung nachhaltigkeitskeitsorientierter Umgangs-und Verwendungsweisen sein können, blieben sie aber noch die Antwort schuldig, unter welchen Voraussetzungen und Bedingungen die Entfaltungspotentiale des DIY-Urbanismus viel stärker als bislang möglich initiiert werden können. Es geht also um die Frage, wie Infrastrukturen als Akteure auftreten, die sozialökologischen Wandel über Zeit und Raum hinweg ermöglichen oder behindern (Ramakrishnan et al 2021).…”

Making Justice the Subject of Resettlement Planning

“…In the current decade (2020-30), the accelerated pace of infrastructure building around the world, especially in the global South is expected to increase the number of displaced people (Cernea and Maldonado 2018). The contemporary infrastructure building involves private investors and international donors promoting global agendas for sustainable development (Power 2019;Sassen 2014), and resettlement planning constitutes investment projects that address sustainability issues.…”

“…As one of the African nations deeply in debt to the international monetary system, Mozambique experienced the structural adjustment at the end of the 1980s, which opened the door to donor interventions in all public spheres (Hanlon and Smart 2008). In particular since the mid-2000s, Mozambique has been a donor darling and has continued to attract new investors, mainly from China and Brazil in addition to the traditional European donors (Power 2019). Their projects have sporadically helped district governments acquire off-grid solutions, such as water pumps or tanks attached to solar panels as seen in the failed borehole dug by the Chinese contractor in Banga, but prevented the governments from developing their network infrastructure in close collaboration with public utilities.…”