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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.