Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes the concept of “negotiations of accountability” to explore how inhabitants of a council estate navigate ghostly futures of eviction performed by a nearby harbour redevelopment amidst arbitrariness of state action at the margins.

Paper long abstract:

A key contention among ethnographers of infrastructures is that, while often instantiating sites of reinforcement of state sovereignty, infrastructures also constitute key nodes where configurations and projects of state power can become most unstable (Larkin 2013). Drawing on ethnographic research on a harbour redevelopment near a council estate, this paper asks what configurations of the future are performed in relation to infrastructural redevelopment in Cagliari, Italy. Testing expectations about the future against tales of arbitrary forms of state power, I reflect on how the denial of accountability that characterises the state at the urban margins might take on a paradoxical character of illegibility (Das 2004), whereby the signature of the state in the spectre of eviction is read everywhere and yet cannot be tied to recognisable contexts and actions. I thus propose the concept of “negotiations of accountability” to show how illegibility prompts inhabitants to seek security from the state by searching for collective solidarities. Questioning a common distinction between resistance and subordination, I show how such quests exploit the voids left by the state's material and social infrastructures to imagine human infrastructures (Simone 2021) that foster new future possibilities of inhabiting.