Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the politics and the temporal contradictions emerging from the large-scale reconstruction project of military villages in urban Taiwan. It looks at the rationale of the project as well as the effects of different temporal horizons of planning on the life of the residents.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the politics and the temporal contradictions emerging from the large-scale relocation project of military villages in urban Taiwan. Recent literature on modern capitalist time, futurity and planning has called for ethnographic research exploring the heterogeneity and the conflictual social experience of time in modern capitalism (Bear 2016; Guyer 2007; Abram 2014). The paper aims at ethnographically documenting the conflictual interests and the temporal gaps that this reconstruction project entails.

Created after the retreat of the Nationalist government (KMT), military villages were temporary makeshift settlements housing military personnel and their families until the return to mainland China, which never materialised. Only in 1990s the Ministry of Defence initiated a policy of large-scale village reconstruction, relocating residents to modern high-rise blocks. Yet, despite being promised a house for decades, the residents of Zhongxin village in Taipei were among the last to be relocated. The promise of a new house was reiterated at the vigil of each political election, but never concretised until October 2016, resulting in deep political mistrust.

As a consequence, the residents lived in a permanent state of impermanence until 2016, when now elderly, they were asked to relocate. How did residents fill the gap between the temporal horizons of an elusive promise and their own life aspirations? By conceptualising this relocation plan as an "elusive promise" (Abram and Weszkalnys 2011; 2013), I investigate these suspended expectations of modernity, as well as the ways aspirations are reactivated and anticipated at the vigil of the move.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how a network of water pipelines reflects the political engagements that the communities they supply have with states, local governance systems, and with people's senses of time and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

The paper takes as its ethnographic focus the context of north Cyprus and the recently built water pipeline running underneath the Mediterranean and connecting the Turkish mainland's freshwater resources to the Turkish-occupied territories of the island of Cyprus. I understand this incoming, supposedly clean and drinkable water not just as an object of political contention, but also as something that accentuates northern Cypriots' present conditions of dependency and inability to 'act upon' governing themselves, and reflects their imaginations and anticipations of an uncertain future.

Water infrastructure and its governance have been at the center of everyday political discussions in north Cyprus when it comes to interrogating notions of willpower, sovereignty, and taking matters into their own hands. These discussions among locals oscillate between expressions of incapability and incapacity—what I call the lethargic present—to govern the pipeline infrastructure, and aspirations of reclaiming their willpower in an uncertain future. Relying on ethnographic data, I present people's articulations of time, specifically impermanence, and uncertainty regarding water infrastructure. The temporality of infrastructure constitute the analytical focus for this paper; I interrogate how the Turkish state-funded water pipeline system encapsulates the conjunction between Cypriots' past appreciations, present grievances, and future expectations for themselves vis-à-vis the Turkish state. As such, I discuss how infrastructures invested with clear ambitions for the future can become material manifestations of contested pasts and presents. I contend that the incoming water and the network of pipelines engender new questionings of their lethargic present and uncertain future.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the 'spectacular urbanism' fueling the urban development of an emerging South Indian city, Cochin. More specifically, it focuses on the everyday hustlings of local real estate builders and investors as they construct/imagine new urban futures in the face of unfulfilled promises

Paper long abstract:

From a Special Economic Zone, an Emerati-backed IT Park called SmartCity, to the construction of the Metro; the promise of these infrastructural projects under the state-driven campaign of "Emerging Kerala" has been the catalyst for a 'speculative urbanism' that has transformed Cochin over the past two decades. In anticipation of future land price appreciation, private real estate developers have flocked to the city, seeking to front-run these large-scale infrastructural projects by developing the surrounding lands. Much of these developments have been high-end residential flats, more than 60-70% of which are said to be unoccupied, held as "long-term investments" by Non-Resident Keralites (mostly living and working in the Gulf), who themselves seek to capitalize on those teleological development narratives of "Emerging Kerala," and the powerful imageries of economic growth they engender.

Cochin is thus a city increasingly being built out of these many dreams, anxieties, desires and speculations. However, when the anticipated infrastructural projects get perpetually delayed, the IT companies thought to be coming never arrive, compounded by a Gulf financial crisis freezing capital financing, those anticipated urban futures go suspended. Yet as Cross (2014) writes "crisis is the ground on which capitalism regenerates itself;" left in a state of anxious suspension between these urban promises and their non-realization (in a perpetual state of 'emerging'), these builders and investors hustle to secure their own socioeconomic futures, finding ways piecemeal to turn these unrealized promises into fertile grounds for the construction of new investable urban futures to be speculated upon.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the intertwinement of affects and latent materialities, exploring moral, temporal, and political dispositions emerging through engagements with a morphing urban landscape, in a post-revolutionary context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with present engagements with projects of city renewal in Tunis. Like other cities in North Africa, Tunis has become the target of an accelerating form of speculative and spectacular urban development financed by Gulf countries. Promoted during the dictatorship of Ben Ali, and yet stalled during the Revolution, multi-million megaprojects are now back on the government's agenda and flagged as necessary to the process of post-revolutionary, democratic transition.

As such, eliciting both past and future imaginaries, these latent materialities catalyse ambivalent moral dispositions to Tunisian socio-political change. Based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in and around two megaprojects at the outskirts of Tunis, this presentation will examine states of temporal and moral ambivalence local inhabitants feel towards these renewed attempts at urban development, theoretically addressing the role of latent materialities in co-constructing affects, morals, and temporal imaginaries.

Paper short abstract:

This paper takes the long view on contemporary global processes of financial accumulation from the Indian railways. It traces the connections between the railway guarantee of the 1840s and current investment strategies shaped by the World Bank. Overall it argues for an analysis of speculation as a technology of imagination that sets lose contradictory conflicts in time --particularly in relation to fixed capital. And crucially for a critical engagement with the term infrastructure which was first given currency by World Bank initiatives to turn circulatory systems into an asset class.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes the long view on contemporary global processes of financial accumulation from the Indian railways. It traces the connections between the railway guarantee of the 1840s and current investment strategies shaped by the World Bank. Overall it argues for an analysis of speculation as a technology of imagination that sets lose contradictory conflicts in time --particularly in relation to fixed capital. And crucially for a critical engagement with the term infrastructure which was first given currency by World Bank initiatives to turn circulatory systems into an asset class.

Paper short abstract:

How to people live with infrastructures if these fail to materialise the promised future of economic growth, development and modernity? I look at the effects of the oil price drop on the transport infrastructures of the southern Angolan port of Lobito to question the notions of ruination and crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructure projects centred on the Angolan port of Lobito and its transport corridor epitomise the ruling MPLA government's developmental visions, as well as its transnational economic entanglements. As such, the economic crisis the country is facing as a result of a downturn in world oil prices since 2014 is at the same time a political one, as it reveals the material limits of the regime's hegemonic project.

Past, present, and future economic interests and political visions are made concrete in Lobito's maritime logistics infrastructures, while revealing the limits and failures of these concrete politics and an oil-dependent economy: nothing works, or at least not as promised, and the imports of goods have run dry. How do the 'thingness' and relational qualities of port infrastructures, and their symbolic and aesthetic values change if they seemingly 'fail' to fulfil their intended (political and economic) purpose?

A state of crisis has arguably been a permanent reality for a majority of Angolans for most of the past 50 years. If incompleteness is normal, do people living with and through this economic architecture see it as failure? Ports, as nodes of globalised capitalism, materialise multiple regulatory regimes. In the context of crisis, how are global capital flows de-regulated and reappropriated? Based on fieldwork in Lobito in May and June 2018, this paper seeks to interrogate and disaggregate the notions of ruination and crisis as an emergency, and study its effects in people's everyday lives.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the temporal transformation of an electricity crisis in Accra, Ghana into a "trend", exploring the postcolonial "chronopolitics" of infrastructure through the remaking of a fashionable present.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I look at the transformation of a 2014-2016 energy crisis in Accra, Ghana (colloquially known as Dumsor, Twi for off/on), experienced as a moment of economic stagnation and social paralysis, into a popular trend (abaso, meaning "what has come on top"). Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, I explore the ways in which a vernacular poetics of crisis turned an instance of infrastructural decline and failure into what Johannes Fabian (1998) has called "moments of freedom", creating opportunities for self-exposure, forms of desire, laughter and pleasure through idioms of resilience expressing the ability to stay afloat and to "keep moving" in moments of enforced shutdowns. In Ghana, as elsewhere in Africa, the political temporality of infrastructure has been deeply embedded in discourses of modernity, acting as economic indicators of growth and development, as visible manifestations of "good governance". Infrastructures are often taken as the most objective signs of success and international recognition, and have therefore become critical to claims of "global membership" and demands for "comparability" (Ferguson 2006) in the global economy. The "chronopolitics" (Klinke 2013) of Dumsor, emphasizing an unflinching commitment to the present and an apparent resistance to speculating or divining the future, acted as a temporal "trick" (Morosanu 2016) and tripping of linear time into forms of attraction that opened up possibilities of intervention in postcolonial temporalities of modernity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper observes how an Israeli architect mediates between military and civilian futures, when building bomb shelters in homes. It considers the different expectations of modernity and future intersecting, as shelters solidify the infrastructure of war and Occupation within Israeli homes.

Paper long abstract:

Bomb shelters are ubiquitous in Israel. Part of a state-mandated national infrastructure that continuously remembers and anticipates warfare, shelters 'entify' (Krupa and Nugent 2015: 31) an Israeli temporality in which future and security are only sustainable through conflict (Virilio 1975). Between wars, shelters are used as junk rooms, spare rooms, children's bedrooms, community spaces, etc. This contributes to an 'Israeli ontology' in which war and the everyday are synthesised, and periods of exceptional conflict made routine (Shapiro and Bird-David 2016). In the home, shelters allow quotidian interaction with war's infrastructure. This holds scope for contemplating the hidden and intimate spaces in which political subjectivities and the sensing of Israeli time are crystalized.

Drawing on ethnographic research on Israel's northern borders between 2012 and 2014, this paper approaches the juncture of infrastructure and temporality emboldened by shelters. Examining how a local architect absorbs stringent regulations surrounding the mandatory building of shelters in private homes into her creative practice, it observes how the spectre of 'audit' (Strathern 2000) haunts her work.

The architect is employed to materialise aspirations for modern suburban living and affluent futures. However, as the region is situated on a military front line, the homes she builds must include shelters adhering to stringent and ever-changing regulations. This repeatedly interrupts her client's visions. The paper charts how the architect mediates between the competing aspirations for the secure future that 'hinge' (Pedersen and Nielsen 2013) around the shelter, as well as the temporalities concretised when infrastructure comes home.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to broaden the understanding of infrastructures as highly political socio-technical entities. Infrastructures are thought of as the materialization and enactment of multiple intertwined practices like envisioning, scaling and infrastructuring which have an effect on time and space.

Paper long abstract:

In the blueprint of the "National Development Plan (NDP) 2030 - Our future make it work" (National planning commission 2012) the South African government and the TNPA anticipate an improvement of port infrastructures in Durban's. In 2014 the South African Government additionally launched the project "Operation Phakisa - Oceans Economy" to fast-track the implementation of the NDP. The South African government anticipates a seven billion South African Rand investment in port infrastructures. These government plans articulate an envisioned future of a flourishing economic prosperity and a solution to the high unemployment rates in Durban. Nevertheless the communities of South Durban, subsistence fishermen and farmers contest these sociotechnical imaginaries by pointing out the (un)intended affects for human and non-human livelihoods in Durban.

By looking at the port of Durban and its infrastructures I want to take a closer look at one of the key nodes to the networks of the circulation of people, commodities, and ideas. Additionally, this paper how networks of circulation are intertwined in sociotechnical imaginaries and how these are continuously transformed in and over time and space? Drawing on empirical data this paper conceptualizes infrastructures as socio-technical entities which are materialized and enacted through multiple intertwined practices like envisioning, scaling and infrastructure which are thought of as enactments of regulations and standards.

Furthermore this paper will argue that infrastructures are, especially in post-apartheid South Africa, a material and racialised encapsulation of time which still is part of the sociotechnical imaginaries of black communities in Durban.

Paper short abstract:

This paper provides an ethnographic exploration of urban life in Colombo to theorize confinement, rather than unrestricted mobility, as one of the primary effects of infrastructure construction.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when projects of urban infrastructure constrain rather than free urban residents? When the ideals of smooth, frictionless movement and unrestricted mobility are such prevalent aspirational tropes, especially in marketing the construction of various forms of urban infrastructure, how can we account for the fact that these projects often produce the opposite experience for city-dwellers, especially the urban poor? This paper examines the experience of confinement ethnographically through the perspectives of marketplace vendors and fishermen in Colombo. How can ethnography help us theorize confinement as one of the central experiences of contemporary urban life?

Indian Ocean studies have frequently emphasized historical forms of mobility, exchange and circulation. Contemporary policy-makers often repeat the same tropes in official proclamations about the need to reinvigorate transnational connections, usually in the service of global capital. This paper offers a different perspective for understanding the lived realities of urban development and change in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region, based on the voices and experiences of Colombo's non-elite residents.

Paper short abstract:

This paper directs its attention toward the intersection of infrastructure and embodied experiences of women in the public sphere by exploring how the Metro Bus system allows them, albeit limited, access to inhabit the outside world in the form of commuting.

Paper long abstract:

Despite patriarchy's long-held tradition of confining women in the private sphere, women have, albeit unwelcomingly, begun to frequent the public space. How does the city's focus on infrastructural developments in relation to commuting impact this?

The research is centered towards the Metro Bus System that recently became operational in the city of Lahore. The purpose of this research is to find out in what capacity is the Metro Bus system accessible to women, and how the lives of women that use public transport are affected by the nature and quality of this bus. This paper explores the impact that infrastructural development and the environment of the said public transport medium is having on the traveling and commuting conditions for women. The paper also embodies gendered experiences of women inhabiting the public space. By looking at these experiences through the lens of a changing paradigm of a third world country, the paper explores how infrastructural development allows women to navigate through societal norms and expectations about their bodies.

Some of the sub-questions that this paper attempts to answer through research are:

What effect does the access to public transport have on women's mobility?

How does the state infrastructure determine access to the buses?

How does gender segregation affect the decision of women who use the Metro?

Both primary, and secondary research was carried out including interviews, focus groups, and extensive participant observation in the field which included the Metro Buses, as well as the bus stations.

Paper short abstract:

Guadalajara and Mexico City have been shaped by power practices with visible markers of inequalities. Recently, cycling activists have achieved changes in mobility infrastructures by navigating chronotopes defined by bureaucratic and neoliberal principles, while focusing on their own aspirations.

Paper long abstract:

Construction projects have been historically used by Mexican governments to promote their interest in improving living standards for local populations. In Guadalajara and Mexico City, most new public works are related to mobility, albeit usually focused on benefiting automobile commuters. In recent years, however, dozens of activist groups in both cities have successfully lobbied for improved mobility infrastructures with an emphasis on inclusivity. In a short time-span, there has been a marked increase in the number of cycle-ways and cyclists in both urban areas. Some activists are professionals in urbanism, environmental law, or political science, who seek to drastically change not only urban landscapes, but also both cities' political fabrics or how urban dwellers relate to their sense of collective self. Their activist politics use the bicycle as a symbol of a wider movement that promotes urban equality through issues such as public space and public transport. This paper explores the rapid changes both cities have experienced through an ethnographic account of activists' practices. Time, speed, and cycles are here of the essence, as activists highlight the value of slow movement, and yet use multi-modal competitions to prove that in congested cities the bicycle is the fastest form of transport. International institutional actors, like NGOs or the World Bank, have strongly backed the transformation of these and other cities for them to conform to a 'green future' model. Activists therefore navigate different chronotopes, like the bureaucratic or the neoliberal-entrepreneurial, but frame their work through an aspirational one of their own.