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Paper short abstract:

Flood defensive infrastructures, such as dikes and drains, are not simply hydraulic interventions engineered to disrupt the natural (over)flow of water. This infrastructure exercises agency and elicits affect by manoeuvring space-time to produce new formations of 'infrastructural time'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper brings recent discussions, on the socio-political life of infrastructures (Alderman & Goodwin 2022., Hope & Arsel 2022), and the manoeuvring of time during disasters (Bonilla 2020., Merilainen, E & Koro, M 2021), into conversation with each other. It does so to discuss the ways in which flood defensive infrastructure (dykes, drains) are made real by postcolonial subjects who have lived through a flooding disaster. Drawing on empirical research from a flood affected region in the north coast of Peru, we argue that residents living in urban and semi-urban localities around hydraulic systems believe that non-human hard infrastructure to prevent flooding must be protected. This is not because they value the highly engineered river systems of Rivers Chira and Piura, as modernist progress, in the same way that many state planners do, in fact they are more likely to be sceptical of such large-scale infrastructures. Rather, our research participants from the big and small towns around Piura are strong believers in the emancipatory possibilities of hydraulic infrastructures because of the way in which they are able to manoeuvre, even control, time. Dykes being broken, or sandbag walls being erected at the height of the flooding, gives such (infra)structures immense agency to impact the most precious feeling at that moment (that there is not enough) time till the floodwaters arrive. Through a series of participant stories, locally produced art, outputs from mapping exercises and ethnographic research this paper interrogates the relationship between time and space through ‘infrastructural time’ (Hetherington 2014).