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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, considering relations with sand in European port cities makes possible an inquiry into past ecological lives of the substance as well as the future vitality of sand in sustainable coastal fortification schemes.

Paper long abstract:

Considering sand as dead is both tautological and provocative. It is tautological because, according to science, sand is inanimate matter and not imbued with life. Positing the death of minerals assumes that they might have led or given a life and can be killed. In this paper, considering sand as dead makes possible an inquiry into past ecological lives as well as the future vitality of sand in new geosocial formations. Drawing on ethnographic research among European chemists, physicists, and engineers, I ask how sediment becomes the glue of coastal infrastructure. In Marseille, the company Seacure mobilizes sediment to produce “natural concrete,” a calcareous agglomerate similar to limestone used to repair eroding eddies and docks. It mimics coastal karst – an underwater landscape of sinkholes, ridges, and towers underlain by limestone – that characterizes the shoreline of Marseille and results from the dissolution of huge mollusc colonies formed in the Cretaceous and their incomplete erosion. Like bivalves forming skeletons, natural concrete employs calcium, the building block of aquatic life, to produce a stonelike material. The use of natural concrete in vital urban infrastructure allows to speculate about the place of sand in producing thresholds of life. In Vigo, an EU-funded project suggests transforming ports into lively hotspots of biodiversity by substituting traditional concrete with an ecologically active alternative. Sand here becomes part of a social formula. The paper then is interested in the vitality of shores in that they rearrange and repurpose minerals to support certain forms of life.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on a concrete road in Kazakhstan, a central stretch of the “Western Europe – Western China” highway. Through ethnographic methods, I show how local communities deal with the unanticipated effects of the celebrated material.

Paper long abstract:

Kazakhstan serves as a major transit country for logistical movements between China and Europe. The construction of the "Western Europe - Western China" (WE-WC) highway, as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013, linked Almaty, the financial capital, with the Sino-Kazakh border. The upgrade from a mere footpath to a concrete highway raised aspirations for speed, safety, and smooth transportation among local communities, who affectionately refer to it as the "betonka," or concrete road, due to its innovative material.

However, shortly after its completion, harsh weather conditions led to the appearance of the first cracks in the concrete and the once-promising dreams began to crumble. In my discussion about the unanticipated effects of the concrete highway, I seek to extend a debate about the temporality of infrastructure and its unforeseen consequences.

Drawing on 19 months of ethnographic field research conducted in communities along the "WE-WC" highway, I show how local communities and road users make sense of the highway and innovatively deal with its unanticipated shortcomings.

This paper aims to make three contributions: First, empirically I show how local communities along a concrete road deal with its imperfect realities on an everyday basis. Second, methodologically I shift the focus from the central nodes to the peripheries of supply chains. Third, theoretically I engage in a conversation on infrastructure temporality, with a particular focus on anticipation through the lens of concrete.

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Paper short abstract:

Concrete churches encode contradictions between the right to religious freedom and the instrumental political usage of public Orthodoxy. This presentation tackles the tensions between the rampant development of religious infrastructure in Romania and the Christian-Orthodox cosmologies inspiring it.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1990, Romania’s religious buildings industry has produced a brand-new house of worship per day. The Orthodox Church has built one cathedral per year, dozens of monasteries, and over four thousand churches. This industry relies on different materials: marble for pavements and columns, bricks for the walls, wood for the icons and the furniture, glass for mosaics and, obviously, steel and concrete for the structure. Bucharest’s newly built national cathedral, for instance, required up to 100,000 cubic metres of concrete, the same amount as ten ten-storey buildings.

Contemporary Orthodox perspectives on nature and the built environment ultimately rely on the theology of St Maximus the Confessor (580-662), who set the ground for the early Christian understanding of the 'cosmos' (or creation). The latter has an inherent value by virtue of having been created by God but also being subject to the synergetic action of God and man. What happens – this presentation asks – when such synergy leads to widespread anticlerical reactions and scornful contestations, as is the case among an increasingly larger proportion of secular Romanians?

Concrete churches encode contradictions between the right to religious freedom and the instrumental political usage of public Orthodoxy. Materials like wood, stone, and concrete convey distinct ideas of intimacy and spirituality (or the lack thereof). I shall argue that their heuristic potential casts light on the tensions between the development of religious infrastructure in Romania and the Christian-Orthodox cosmologies inspiring it.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation draws on material from Romania to describe the discursive and technical means by which European cement producers seek to legitimise burning trash instead of fossil fuels as an ethical contribution to decarbonisation amidst public health concerns about incineration.

Paper long abstract:

Cement is a major contributor to anthropogenic carbon dioxide, and is thus a main candidate for decarbonisation worldwide. In the European Union, the ambitious targets of the Green Deal and the rising costs of carbon credits are beginning to pressure corporations to cut their emissions. European industry associations are showcasing road-maps for carbon neutrality down the cement and concrete value chain promising to to reconcile the growth and sustainability. The most widespread of carbon cutting strategies is the replacement of coke and coal with trash for the heating of cement kilns. This process earns extra income for an industry with historically narrow profit margins and allows companies to market their products as ‚green’ and to promote themselves as contributing to decarbonisation and the reduction of landfilling rates. However, this practice is particularly controversial in Eastern Europe, where rising waste imports and the burning of ambiguous and often toxic garbage fuel concerns about public health, corruption, and regional inequalities. Drawing on research in Romania – with policymakers, cement producers, industry representatives, engineers, and activists – this paper investigates the discursive and technical means by which cement manufacturers seek to legitimise this practice. Most prominent among these strategies are the use of corporate oxymorons – discursive strategies that pair a desirable attribute with a harmful product – a strategic denial of power – by which corporations abdicate agency through an invocation of higher powers, and an unwavering trust in the power of technologies and standards.

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Paper short abstract:

While concrete has a useful life of about 100 years, in Mexico City, earthquakes, weathering and corrupt developers conspire to prematurely trigger concrete’s useless life. For residents trapped in the overlap of concrete's useful and useless lives, a building is both a home and a geological entity.

Paper long abstract:

Modern concrete has a useful life of about 100 years. After that, it begins its useless life, which tends to be much longer. But in some places, the useless life of concrete begins well before its useful life has ended. This is especially true in Mexico City, where earthquakes, weathering, injudicious construction, and a corrupt real estate sector conspire to trigger concrete’s useless life. Sinking foundations, cracking walls, leaning buildings, and caving roofs are but some of the indicators that mark the onset of concrete’s useless life. For residents, such buildings become two things simultaneously: a home that houses all the securities of domesticity, and a geological entity, distant and predetermined. Framing this overlap of the useless and useful lives as a geological simultaneity, this paper draws on 36 months ethnographic research in Mexico City to ask a very simple question: how does it feel to live in a building that is as much a home as it is an avatar of its future collapse? I suggest that while geological time is often understood as something utterly removed from human experience, inhabiting the useless life of concrete introduces a geological axis to everyday life, and compels residents of Mexico City to imagine a present that vanishes into deep time.

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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I analyse the interrelation between local culture and economic practices in Chalkida, Greece, a cement production site, vis-à-vis the national and international processes in the cement industry by examining the life and work histories of cement factory workers.

Paper long abstract:

In today’s global economy, cement plays a vital role in the formation of everyday worlds. From its production to its consumption, various forms of socio-economic practice are intermediated and woven into a multi-layered mesh that binds global markets with local realities. In this paper I examine the case of Chalkida, Greece, a mid-sized (post)industrial city which from 1924 to 2013 hosted a cement production unit that determined its industrial character. Its closure had been a major shock for Chalkida’s society as it has provided the means for multiple generations to make a living and to move up the social ladder. I treat the factory as an interscalar node which links global economic processes with local practices in order to unravel the importance of the cement industry in the making and unmaking of certain livelihood patterns. I examine through an historical perspective the political economy of Chalkida in relation to industrial labor and homeownership as well as the multiple opportunities and livelihoods that the industrial production of cement had enabled. I analyse the interrelation between local culture and economic practices found in Chalkida vis-à-vis national projects of development and global processes in the cement industry. I draw on ethnographic data which I collected in Chalkida between 2015 and 2016 and the life and work histories of cement factory workers and their families.

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Paper short abstract:

I share accounts in which geology is not incidental but crucial to construction industry in Nepal, and is proactively interlinked with the organisation of Nepali politics and economy.

Paper long abstract:

Between 1950-1990, the cement as well as RCC’s (Reinforced Concrete Cement) history came to be technologically interlinked with the geological history of Himalayan riverine sand as a construction material in Nepal. Several experiments were undertaken for the utilization of different types of sand and cement for making the construction material, concrete. This geological knowledge at my field sites that sediments beneath the surface could be utilized as construction material 'resources,' came to set tone for how the natural history came to dominate the subterranean politics of resource extraction and governance in this region. Here, I focus on the thick movable young geology of Churia Himalayas and its hydraulic volatility, that explains the historical instinct behind setting up the concrete industry in Nepal. Based on twelve months of my fieldwork (between 2020/22) around Himalayan rivers, and four months of archival research, I share accounts in which geology is not incidental but crucial to construction industry in Nepal, and is proactively interlinked with the organisation of Nepali politics and economy, where regional history and availability of local sand resources and labour as well as extractive revenue-generating logics inform matters of the environment.

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Paper short abstract:

Dakar's urban pulse beats in concrete blocks, not just as building materials but as dynamic catalysts. From laundry lines to impromptu seats, these blocks move and are diverted from their original route, revealing a metropolis shaped by everyday practices and emergent materialities.

Paper long abstract:

In the heart of Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, the concrete jungle (Martinez) has been taking form for years now, comprised of grey architectures sculpted by ubiquitous concrete blocks. These unassuming blocks, manufactured informally across the city on available plots of land, navigate the bustling streets on trucks and horse carriages, destined to pile up on ongoing or future construction sites. They escape the scrutiny of the inattentive urbanite. But far from petrifying the city, these concrete blocks play a central role in the vibrant tapestry of social interactions and urban practices. Adopting a flaneur's perspective, akin to Coates and Benjamin, I have observed their integration into daily life—women drying clothes on block stacks, blocks forming makeshift passages during the rainy season, street vendors utilizing them as impromptu benches, and children turning block piles into playgrounds. These seemingly mundane objects transcend their construction origins and take diverse paths in the city. These diversions are becoming integral to the urban design of Dakar beyond the pure construction sector. Analyzing concrete blocks as urban things (Appadurai, Lieto) and drawing on AbduMaliq Simone's concept of “People as Infrastructure” and De Certeau's “Practice of Everyday Life”, this paper explores the emergence of unexpected materialities in Dakar, shedding light on how these elements shape a flexible and dynamic cityscape.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how persistence, modification, recombination, and the absence of concrete convey transformations in social morals, ideals, and imaginations. My results are based on ethnographic research in northwest Bulgaria.

Paper long abstract:

During our visit to the abandoned thermal baths in Northwest Bulgaria, Natasha and I observed several sites and facilities that, according to my interlocutor, either required investment or suffered from privatization. Using both terms at a discussion on two plastic pipes tapped with concrete, Natasha referred to investments (‘Инвестиции‘) for the enhancement of local infrastructure with external funding, and to privatisation (‘Приватизация‘) to address the sale of local infrastructure for immoral personal gain. Building on rich ethnographic material from northwest Bulgaria, the paper analyses how the continuity of concrete persists in both terms, frequently cited by my interlocutors to not only support the narratives of flexibilisation but also the immoral, yet appealing possibilities of participating in self-enrichment practices (‘Самообогатяване’). As my argument develops, I conclude that the modification, recombination, and absence of familiar materials such as concrete may serve to convey social morals, ideals, and imagination. All data was collected between December 2019 and September 2021.