Abstract:

This paper examines maintenance in times of crisis using the example of a city where critical urban infrastructure has been threatened by many actors since its inception. The city of Aktau suffers from water shortages and power outages that affect at least one part of the city every day. The infrastructure - the pipes, the sewers, the cables, the facades - has not undergone major and centralized upgrades since it was built in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The problem of aging infrastructure is common to cities in Kazakhstan and across post-socialist space, but Aktau seems to be an emblematic case. The city's infrastructure was built in the same decades, and now it is aging throughout the city. The electricity grid cannot withstand the pressure of all the modern appliances, and the water, which comes from the Caspian Sea and is desalinated as the sea level drops, is increasingly difficult to access. But the crisis is unfolding slowly, not instantaneously. The infrastructure is still functioning to a degree that it is not completely unusable.

This paper explores how actors negotiate the adequate state of infrastructure through daily maintenance. I focus on those who have to deal with the infrastructure as it slowly breaks down and falls apart - residents, authorities, experts, and maintenance workers. The study is based on 50 in-depth interviews, go-alongs, and ethnographic observations of maintenance workers at work. The data is supplemented by an analysis of laws, public speeches and hearings, and media articles. Moreover, the paper follows the approach of researchers on repair, maintenance, and care (Anand, 2017; Denis, 2019) and pays particular attention to the materiality of infrastructure.

This paper shows that rather than being in a binary state of being broken or not, infrastructures are in a state of never-ending brokenness (Martínez & Laviolette, 2019). Developing the concept of ecologies (Domínguez Rubio, 2020), it shows how material, symbolic, political, social, and economic conditions form two responses to the crisis that occur simultaneously: first, ignoring the crisis, and second, making infrastructures work.