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- Convenors:
-
Deana Jovanovic
(Utrecht University)
Maria Salaru (University College London)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Penny Harvey
(University of Manchester)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/052
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to ethnographically inspect the temporal and material ways in which makeshift practices play a crucial role in making everyday infrastructural lives possible in contemporary times of urban transformations.
Long Abstract:
Profound contemporary urban transformations, fuel insecurity and increased energy prices have been propelled by social, political and economic crises. These brought to the fore many inventive ways in which individuals and institutions have approached the ensuing infrastructural obstacles. For instance, difficulties to maintain utility provision or to pay for it are often solved by creative - and sometimes illicit - solutions (Jovanović 2021). This panel invites papers that explore various practices of undertaking inventive and resourceful solutions to problems posed by contemporary transformations of city infrastructure, exacerbated by their financialization, privatization and the withdrawal of the state. We specifically invite ethnographically-rich papers that document makeshift practices of circumventing, patching, deceiving, improving, and concealing, which make transformed material infrastructural provisions more accessible.
Infrastructures are hope-generating, future-oriented and anticipatory material devices (Harvey 2011, Reeves 2017). This panel looks at temporal dimensions of material manifestations of different makeshift practices that inflect everyday social rhythms: ad hoc, stopgap, improvised and temporary solutions that citizens resort to while striving for a good life and maintaining hope for "normal life" (Jansen 2015). Hence, the panel inspects temporal and material aspects of how makeshift practices play a crucial role in making everyday infrastructural lives possible. We are looking for papers on anthropological inquiries of (but not restricted to) materiality, commoning, affect, care, hope and "ordinary ethics" (Lambek 2010). While offering new perspectives on the intersection of a growing body between anthropological literature on energy, infrastructures and temporalities, we encourage submissions from various ethnographic and theoretical perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Maria Salaru (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores makeshift thermal insulation practices in Northern Romania, with a focus on polystyrene. A pervasive material used in the cladding of blocks of flats, polystyrene creates social and material disruptions and requires a multifaceted understanding of risk and temporality.
Paper long abstract:
Once associated with modernity and progress, large scale housing projects are now a global phenomenon everywhere from China to Latin America. In Europe they have been at the forefront of current debates about welfare provisioning, austerity and social inequality. In Romania, they still house a majority of the population, but they are coming towards the end of their life cycles, posing a real threat to the health and safety of the residents. Having more than fifty years of use, these buildings require profound rehabilitation or reconstruction altogether.
This paper will examine the rehabilitation I witnessed during my fieldwork in Northern Romania, with a particular focus on polystyrene, the most used insulation material in the cladding of the buildings. I will argue that this material caused more problems than it solved, among which: the degradation of buildings due to lack of air permeability of the polystyrene, the fire danger because of the high flammability of this material and the occurrence of several health problems as the result of mould in apartments. As a material, polystyrene is not inert, but it transforms and interacts with the building in ways that are unexpected and disruptive. I argue that a multifaceted understanding of risk and temporality can bring architects and anthropologists together and engender fruitful collaborations for a better future of social housing.
Natashe Lemos Dekker (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the potentialities and uncertainties of makeshift practices through which an urban community health centre in Brazil seeks to materialize an envisioned infrastructural hub for the provision of palliative and end-of-life care.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, I reflect on the practices, envisioned futures, and materialities of an urban community health care centre. Located in an old and partly derelict wool factory, the centre is in the midst of constructing a new hospice building. By creating the material infrastructures to facilitate its services, the centre aspires to become a regional hub for palliative and humane end-of-life care, thereby addressing the problem of unequal access to health care. In this paper, I explore how the everyday health care provided amidst the concrete frame of a hospice-to-be, relates to creative practices through which the community appropriates the space. By realizing physical marks and structures, it establishes its undeniable presence in the present and projects itself into the future. In exposing this dynamic, I demonstrate on the one hand the potentiality of these practices, whereby the envisioned future (the aspired care infrastructure) is continuously constructed through early materializations of it. On the other hand, I reflect on the uncertainties inherent in this hopeful projection, as its realization is also dependent on political relations and the acquisition of funding. As the initiative is manifested in unfinished structures, its materiality becomes enmeshed with moral claims, ideologies, and aspirations, whereby the present seems to form an in-between moment, oriented towards what it should eventually become.
Oskar Lubinski (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how collective and individual strategies of survival and informal economic practices contribute to the development of grassroots infrastructures in the informal settlements of Havana.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers how collective and individual strategies of survival and informal economic practices contribute to the development of grassroots infrastructures in the informal settlements of Havana.
I draw upon anthropological reflections of infrastructures as assemblages that hold promises of better future, progress and freedom (Anand et al. 2018), to argue that grassroots infrastructures become spaces of resistance. The ongoing economic crisis and product scarcity lead to massive migrations towards Cuba’s capital and development of informal settlements in peripheral areas that lack access to basic infrastructures or where infrastructures are in a state of neglect. The inhabitants of these settlements adapt the little infrastructures that exist and develop new ones as a survival strategy.
Social networks play a crucial role in these efforts, as people themselves become essential for the functioning and creating these grassroots infrastructures (Simone 2004). Exchange of seedlings, water sharing and exchange of information all allow to navigate the economy of scarcity. These practices are enhanced by community projects that operate in the marginal areas of Havana and capitalise on different strategies of survival of the communities as means to strengthening community resilience. These systems have been used to alleviate the situation of the most vulnerable population in the informal settlements during the COVID-19 pandemic as the projects organised distribution of foodstuff, medicines or masks.
Vaiva Aglinskas (CUNY Graduate Center. Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore)
Paper short abstract:
In a neighborhood in central Vilnius that has been subject to long-running state neglect, new infrastructure improvements have been met with ambivalence. This paper looks at past and existing DIY solutions to infrastructural neglect and new responses in the face of urban renewal.
Paper long abstract:
Šnipiškės is a centrally located neighborhood of Vilnius that has long been excluded from urban developments and infrastructural grids common throughout the rest of Lithuania’s capital city. For decades, residents have articulated their position and experience of living in wooden houses at the foot of skyscrapers in terms of abandonment: as adjacent to yet overlooked and forgotten by the city government and state institutions. In 2019, the reshaping of the main street of the neighborhood signaled renewed interest on the part of the city government to improve the area by investing in utilities, pavement, and other infrastructures, while simultaneously auctioning off social housing units. This regeneration project forged new vectors of hope but also critique aimed at the poor design decisions on the part of planners and shoddy workmanship of construction personnel on the ground. While residents had long engaged in makeshift solutions in the face of state neglect, by maintaining unpaved roads, improvising hook-ups to city water, scavenging firewood, and engaging in public landscaping, once the state showed interest in providing such services to the neighborhood, residents became ambivalent about this attention. The services offered by the state represent an uneasy fit with the practices and places that people had already negotiated for themselves in the face of state neglect. Residents took up new practices of surveillance, appropriation, artistic commentary, and public complaint to maintain an intimate connection to the neighborhood, which proved more important than the material conditions that are either withheld, bestowed, or sold-off by the state.