Paper short abstract

Underinvestment in France’s rural rail lines weaks the network, risking collapse amid SNCF’s privatization. Fragility shapes daily life: workers maintain tracks with scarce resources, users adapt informally, and mobilizations reimagine these infrastructures as ecological, inclusive transport.

Paper long abstract

For several decades, underinvestment in rural rail lines in France has led to reduced maintenance and weakened the rail network. Trains are fewer in number or have been permanently discontinued. The public railway company SNCF fears the irreversible collapse of this network if no investment is found, in a context of it’s privatization.

Fragility is not an exceptional phenomenon; it is woven into the daily lives of railway workers, residents, and users. What practices emerge when infrastructures routinely malfunction? What emotions does fragility generate, and what consequences do they entail? By tangibly disrupting people’s lives, it isolates certain rural territories, also revealing the ongoing reconfigurations of relationships among public services, the state, and inhabitants today.

I will base my argument on ongoing ethnographic studies of these different communities, conducted as part of a thesis in anthropology. These studies are being carried out on three railway lines in France located in mountainous areas.

First, I propose to understand how fragility is produced by political institutions and economic decisions at different levels of infrastructure.

Second, I will show how fragility is experienced on a daily basis: railway workers must maintain the tracks with limited resources and, when trains are not running, users develop informal coping strategies.

Finally, I will demonstrate how the attachments and mobilizations generated by this fragility are transforming these infrastructures. They are now perceived as ecological and inclusive modes of transport that challenge residents' ability to reclaim these infrastructures, thereby rehabilitating their living spaces.

Paper short abstract

In Northern Tanzania, many septic tanks are reinforced with reused railway tracks. The paper shows how household sanitation is made to work through delegated networks that secure durable materials while displacing risk, revealing infrastructure as a morally stratified social process.

Paper long abstract

In Northern Tanzania, fragments of colonial railway tracks are widely reused to reinforce septic tank lids, despite being state property. This practice depends on informal supply networks involving actors often described as wahuni—a moral category referring to people at the margins of society associated with disorder or theft—who remove, hide, and distribute the tracks. Although publicly condemned for criminal behavior, these actors are indispensable for residents who cannot afford formal materials and rely on their networks to obtain the tracks. The paper asks how everyday infrastructures are made to work through relations that are simultaneously condemned and relied upon.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with residents, builders, informal suppliers, and railway officials, the paper examines septic tank construction as a site where technical requirements, economic constraints, and moral evaluation intersect. Septic tanks are often constructed directly within household compounds due to limited space, and their lids are routinely walked over, sat on, and used as surfaces for washing clothes or children’s play. Structural failure therefore poses serious risks, while rebuilding is difficult in densely built neighborhoods. In this context, railway tracks are valued for their durability and load-bearing capacity.

The paper argues that sanitation infrastructure is sustained through delegated coordination in which material reliability depends on socially distributed roles. By showing how households outsource morally and legally risky aspects of material procurement to builders and intermediaries, it expands the notion of “people as infrastructure” (Simone 2004) to foreground mediation, moral distancing, and the uneven distribution of responsibility.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines dike reinforcements on the island of Marken as everyday infrastructure where climate imaginaries, heritage, and polarisation intersect, showing how heritage operates as relational infrastructure shaping and mediating contested notions of safety, authority, and belonging.

Paper long abstract

Dikes are among the most everyday infrastructures of the Netherlands. Their immovable presence, silently embedded in the landscape, is easily taken for granted until they require reinforcement. Hence, in the context of climate adaptation, dikes have become increasingly contested sites where questions of safety, authority, and belonging converge.

Drawing on ethnographic research on the former island Marken, an island of 1800 residents in the Markermeer, this paper explores how dike infrastructures function as everyday sites where climate imaginaries, heritage, and polarisation intersect. While regional water authorities frame dike reinforcement as a technical response to future climate risks, residents articulate safety through lived experience, collective memory, and island heritage shaped by relations with water. These differing logics of safety do not simply coexist but actively clash in participatory processes and everyday conversations around the dike, producing mistrust and a pronounced us-and-them dynamic between residents and external experts.

I argue that the island’s heritage operates here as a form of relational infrastructure: an intangible yet powerful assemblage of memories, practices, and attachments that mediates relationships between people, landscape, water, and governing institutions. Heritage, therefore, structures how polarisation around infrastructure is produced, stabilised, and sometimes contested. By foregrounding the affective and relational dimensions of dike infrastructures, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on the infrastructural turn and demonstrates how infrastructures are not only material systems but also moral and emotional terrains. Situating dikes within everyday life reveals how polarisation is negotiated through ordinary practices, emotions, and narratives of belonging in coastal climate governance.

Paper short abstract

By drawing from my fieldwork experience, this contribution aims to shed light on how the expansion of the port is shaping life in Prince Rupert, the expectations it generates, how people envision the future, and how economies of anticipation can counteract large-scale infrastructure development.

Paper long abstract

Located on Kaien Island, one of the northwestern isles of British Columbia, Prince Rupert is home to the deepest natural harbor on the west coast of North America. In addition, its strategic location offers the shortest shipping route from North America to Asia. The combination of these factors has played a major role in the development of the port in the last fifty years, with Prince Rupert’s dock currently being the third largest in Canada by cargo tonnage and containers

handled. Prince Rupert’s strategic location with connections to the Arctic and sub-Arctic, its proximity to Alaska, and long- term envisioning as a hub of global transport and exchange with Asia, evoke imaginaries of “Arctic Silk Roads” parallel

to those discussed in other chapters in this volume. Such imaginaries have been strengthened following the construction of the Fairview Terminal, the first dedicated intermodal container terminal in North America, operated by DP World. New hopes about development and economic growth have started to circulate among politicians, business owners, and locals in 2022, when DP World announced a two-year agreement with the Port Authority to conduct an assessment regarding the feasibility of building a second innovative container terminal. Economic actors reacted with growing excitement to the news; however, not everyone agrees that the relentless port development is the only available path. Whereas large- scale infrastructure development plans have been Prince Rupert’s defining element in recent decades, smaller and unexpected economies have emerged around the imagined development of Prince Rupert.

Paper short abstract

This paper develops infrastructural sovereignty as an anthropological concept for analysing how communities enact self-determination through everyday infrastructural practices, drawing on Indigenous-led digital and transport systems in northern Ontario and Manitoba, Canada.

Paper long abstract

Infrastructural sovereignty is an anthropological concept for understanding how communities enact self-determination through infrastructural practices. Based on ethnographic research in northwestern Ontario and northern Manitoba, Canada, the paper examines how Indigenous and northern communities build, own, maintain, and govern essential infrastructures shaped by state neglect, market withdrawal, and settler-colonial histories.

In Ontario, the First Nations–owned KO-KNET broadband network shows how digital infrastructure becomes a site of collective care, coordination, and governance through practices of maintenance, organisational work, and local decision-making. In Manitoba, the Arctic Gateway Group—a consortium of Indigenous and northern communities—illustrates a parallel process in the transport sector through the community-led operation of the Hudson Bay Railway and the Port of Churchill. Despite their different forms, both cases demonstrate how infrastructures become arenas where communities negotiate responsibility, sustain everyday life, and imagine shared futures.

Rather than treating infrastructure as a technical backdrop or sovereignty as a legal status, the study approaches both ethnographically. Infrastructural sovereignty is conceptualised as a practice-based process that takes shape through mundane work such as repair, coordination, and adaptation, and through the social relations that infrastructure both depends on and produces. Seen this way, infrastructures are not simply objects of governance but ongoing collective achievements.

By foregrounding infrastructural practice, this contribution engages anthropological debates on infrastructure and sovereignty. It shows how infrastructural sovereignty offers a comparative lens for analysing how communities in marginalised regions enact self-determination through the work of keeping infrastructures going and of projecting collective futures under conditions of uncertainty.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines everyday infrastructures in Tropojë, Albania, showing how breakdown, repair, and anticipated projects tied to tourism and EU integration shape relationships to the state and suprastate bodies, and how trust and political expectation form through infrastructural experiences.

Paper long abstract

One evening last summer, while sipping raki at his hotel above Tropojë, Gary, a close interlocutor, showed me a computer-generated rendering of the proposed “Red and Black” railway. The animation traced a route from Shkodër, through tunnels to Komani Lake, and onward across Kosovo to Prishtina. “This will solve all our problems,” he said. Less than an hour later, the electricity cut out, plunging the town below into darkness. He laughed. “Business as usual.”

This paper situates such moments within the everyday infrastructural condition of Tropojë, Albania’s northeastern border region. Long marked by limited state investment and fiscal insolvency, the region remains poorly connected to the rest of Albania and subject to recurring power outages. Infrastructure here is encountered through breakdowns, informal repairs, and routine uncertainty, shaping how residents relate to the state and often producing skepticism toward its capacity.

At the same time, Tropojë has become a key site in Albania’s expanding tourism economy, where infrastructure is increasingly tied to state-led visions of development and EU integration. Proposed interventions—including a transnational railway corridor, a planned 600 MW wind farm, and road improvements—enter everyday life less as coherent plans than as unevenly materializing promises. Residents engage these projects through anticipation, hope, and doubt, drawing on past experiences of abandonment to interpret new infrastructural claims.

This paper examines how everyday encounters with infrastructural projects mediate relationships to the Albanian state and to suprastate bodies like the EU, and how trust, skepticism, and political expectation are formed through ordinary infrastructural experiences.

Paper short abstract

What does everyday life look like when infrastructure constantly breaks? This paper analyzes the housing infrastructure (power, water, sewage, etc.) in Aktau, Kazakhstan. By closely examining maintenance practices of different actors, it shows how breakages constitute and shape everyday life.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers a perspective on housing infrastructure as a matter that becomes visible and ever-present through everyday breakages. In Aktau, Kazakhstan, almost the entire water supply, including fresh water, heating, and electricity, has been centrally provided through one power and desalination plant. The city has been tightly dependent on infrastructure built in the 1970s, which has not yet been centrally modernized or repaired to eliminate the constant state of breakages. The current infrastructural breakdown also reflects uncertainties about the retreat of the Caspian Sea. Those involved in maintenance are constantly negotiating what should be repaired, how, when, and at what expense.

This paper is based on in-depth interviews with the residents of the Soviet-built micro-districts of Aktau, maintenance workers, experts, and authorities; ethnographic observations of maintenance work; the analysis of laws and public discourse; and archival research of the documents related to maintenance during the Soviet time.

Further exploring the concept of a continuous state of breakdown, functionality spectrum, or brokenness (Martínez and Laviolette 2019), this paper details the conditions under which actors engage in maintenance. Looking at maintenance practices holistically, I situate them within the duality of two practices: ignoring the breakage and making-things-work. This paper pays specific attention to the labor conditions, materials, and bureaucratic situatedness of maintenance. Additionally, following Christina Schwenkel (2020), it places infrastructure on the spectrum of functionality as an intrinsic part of its everyday existence.

Paper short abstract

Infrastructure in São Paulo’s peripheries are informal assemblages that are hard to disentangle. Here, I argue – based on my experiences in a specific favela – that absence of infrastructural transparency induces a process of dynamic repair that shuffles neighborhood social relations constantly.

Paper long abstract

Against the commonsensical notion of infrastructure as a boring, state-sanctioned blueprint (Star 1999:377), infrastructural assemblages in São Paulo’s periphery are better understood as bottom-up structures retrospectively legalized by state authorities. Taking a cue from the conveners – “Infrastructures often remain invisible until they break down” – I investigate how recurring breakage of infrastructure in a São Paulo favela works to threaten materially based relationships between inhabitants (moradores) but also create new ones.

Recalling that repair may be dynamic when its activity is transformative of a structure, or static when it is aimed at rehabilitation of the structure according to its previous condition (Martínez 2019:9), in the São Paulo favela, where I have done most of my fieldwork, the ‘previous condition’ of the material, infrastructural assemblages is often not a possibility, as it is buried in different unintelligible labors of several constructors, most of them autodidacts, with diverse ‘styles’ of building. Repairing and breaking are therefore, ultimately, two sides of the same coin. This essentially makes peripherical infrastructures into blackboxes the moradores can’t disentangle, or properly intervene in, without overwriting past layers. Thus, dynamic repair is an indisputable condition of their ‘everyday infrastructures’.

Kregg Hetherington notes (2016:40) that infrastructure may be understood as “that which lays the conditions for the emergence of another order”. By using the concept of overwriting (cf. Frederiksen 2013: 37; Yampolsky 1995) however, I argue that lack of infrastructural transparency in São Paulo makes impossible the emergence of a clear future horizon (Guyer 2007) for the moradores.

Paper short abstract

This paper builds on the idea of “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) to show how the interconnectedness between State officials and common people is at the core of the contemporary functioning of the Cuban State, at a time where its material public infrastructure is collapsing.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I build on my fieldwork in Havana (Cuba) on the State’s involvement in urban agriculture projects and on the notion of “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) to show how people’s interconnectedness underpins a crucial mode of functioning of the contemporary Cuban State. Indeed, I make a distinction between a ‘material infrastructure’, historically at the core of the Cuban State and now collapsing, and a ‘human infrastructure’ composed of State officials and common citizens whose constant face-to-face contact is at the core of the specific form the Cuban State takes at the grassroots. ‘Material infrastructure’, the infrastructure of provisioning of the Cuban revolutionary State, has been intimately penetrating Cubans' personal lives for decades : public housing, hospitals and state-run food provisioning facilities have been a feature of everyday life for generations of Cubans, deeply shaping their subjectivities (Holbraad, 2018). However, the current crisis in Cuba has brought to a near complete standstill several of these infrastructures and multiple state’s redistributive initiatives more generally. The prolonged nation-wide blackouts that have been recently caused by the deterioration of the state-run electrical grid are an epitome of a wider situation of infrastructural collapse. Despite all of this, low-level State officials continue to do their work even if its nature has radically changed : it does not consist anymore in redistributing resources but rather in the ambivalent task of at once helping and controlling citizens’ initiatives. They do so by constantly acting on their personal relationships, the ‘grid’ of the ‘human infrastructure’.

Paper short abstract

This paper frames Israeli settlers as a human infrastructure of occupation. Through mundane, gendered, and affective practices—housing, childcare, schooling, marriage, and defence—they circulate people, goods, and ideology, normalising settler presence and sustaining colonial expansion.

Paper long abstract

If we are to interpret infrastructures as facilitating flows of people, goods, and ideas, and to emphasise the spectacular mundanity of infrastructures through the ethnographic gaze, I invite scholars of everyday infrastructures to consider the work of Israeli settlers as a human infrastructure of occupation. Motivated by both colonial intent to claim Palestinian land and aspirations for social and economic mobility, settlers circulate themselves, their resources, and their ideology to advance settlement. These political and violent goals, however, unfold within picturesque, leafy, upper-middle-class settlements, where everyday practices render occupation livable and durable. Settlers’ narratives of abandonment by the Israeli state further intensify these infrastructural labours, positioning self-organisation as both necessity and virtue.

Drawing on ethnographic research in the region and focusing on the lives of female settlers engaged in creating a ‘normal everyday’ for their families, I examine how settlement is sustained through state, military, and material infrastructures, as well as mundane, gendered, and affective domestic routines. Through these practices, settlers forge an ostensibly ordinary presence while reproducing settler-colonial violence and exclusion.

By foregrounding these mundane routines, the paper shifts attention from spectacular moments of violence or policy to the infrastructural work embedded in daily life. It shows how settler colonialism operates not only through force but through the ordinary maintenance of families, communities, and futures. Infrastructures of care, belonging, and domesticity thus become central mechanisms through which territorial expansion and Palestinian exclusion are normalised and sustained.

Paper short abstract

Care infrastructures like the recovery shelters for homeless people in Delhi are characterized by a temporariness in the state’s modernist vision. This vision is contested by the radical act of rehabilitative care to homeless people representing a politicisation of the care infrastructures.

Paper long abstract

Although care infrastructures such as the recovery shelters of the Delhi Municipal Board were instituted to provide rehabilitative support to ailing homeless people, historically shelters have occupied a contested space in the Indian state’s modernist vision of Delhi.

Ethnographic findings indicate that this shelter has been left un-repaired for multiple months owing to an impending demolition. I suggest that a temporariness has become permanently assigned to this shelter. Its temporariness comes from the temporary status that was assigned to the shelter structure by virtue of its physical built form of a portable cabin that was not designed to be a permanent form of occupancy. This temporariness is contested by the provision of care, in a non-hospital setting by a Civil Society Organisations (CSO), representing a politicisation of the care infrastructures in its disruption of the exclusionary and modernist vision of the state. The struggle to exist in this space and provide rehabilitative care for homeless people constitutes a struggle for the appropriation of a space, situated in a site historically associated with displacement in order to secure equitable access to healthcare for a population invisiblized by the state.

I argue that this form of support for the homeless population symbolizes an alternate form of care with a radical disposition challenging inequities in access to healthcare. It is a radical act of care that operates with a vision towards strengthening community-based models of care that are supportive of a strong primary healthcare system as part of a robust public healthcare system.

Paper short abstract

The paper explores invisible nonhuman labour in everyday water infrastructures, focusing on freshwater mussels used in urban biomonitoring. It examines how care, invisibility, and epistemic tensions shape infrastructures in a polarised world.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines everyday water infrastructures through the lens of nonhuman participation, focusing on freshwater mussels incorporated into urban biomonitoring systems in Poland. Rather than analysing infrastructure solely as a technical system or a site of governance, I approach it as a lived, relational, and more-than-human arrangement that quietly organises everyday life while remaining largely invisible.

Building on ethnographic research on urban water infrastructures, I explore how nonhuman organisms function simultaneously as infrastructure, labour, and indicators of environmental risk. Their role is framed institutionally as neutral and instrumental, yet in practice it produces epistemic/moral tensions: between care and exploitation, protection and extraction, visibility and erasure. These tensions become especially salient in a polarised world where infrastructures are increasingly mobilised as symbols of security and efficiency.

The paper situates biomonitoring within broader debates on the “infrastructural turn”, engaging concepts such as nonhuman beings as infrastructure, care infrastructures, and people—and organisms—as infrastructure. By foregrounding everyday interactions between engineers, technicians, water flows, and nonhuman actors, I show how infrastructures are not merely imposed from above but are co-produced through mundane routines, embodied practices, and multispecies relations.

Methodologically, the paper draws on para-site ethnography and slow, infrastructure-adjacent fieldwork to make visible forms of infrastructural life that escape dominant geopolitical or technocratic narratives. I argue that attending to nonhuman care within everyday infrastructures opens anthropology to new possibilities of connection and critique, challenging understandings of infrastructure as either purely technical or purely political, and instead revealing it as a fragile, relational achievement.