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Paper short abstract:

As a form of repair, preventive and corrective maintenance of Mumbai's train networks is spatialised and distributed across both, urban infrastructural assemblages and embodied labour. Yet, as a temporal intervention against breakdowns and risk, repair also converges workers, materials, and objects.

Paper long abstract:

The care of infrastructural assemblages like Mumbai's suburban trains require the mobilisation of both people and matter. Engineers and workers refer to these practices as preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance. The former refers to identifying and mitigating faults, whereas the latter refers to the repair of failures or breakdowns, which are then recursively folded into routine schedules. In this presentation, I explore how preventive and corrective maintenance manages the materiality of matter—particularly water, dust, and crowd—at the oldest car shed in Mumbai. Maintenance practices are guided by relational ideas of risk, which acknowledge the fragility of infrastructures, and the fact that matter cannot be eliminated but only managed and redistributed. At the same time, because maintenance is imbricated within power structures of state bureaucracy and neoliberal capitalism, the management of matter is also political. Inasmuch as the work and labour of maintenance is entangled within these political-economic and posthuman forces, infrastructures continue being cared for. Car shed workers and engineers refer to the overwhelming and saturating effects of these entanglements as "over-capacity," but they still affirm that care is necessary to maintain both public transport infrastructures and the urban socialities and spatiotemporality they produce.