Paper short abstract:

This paper draws from ethnographic research to examine the temporality of infrastructural absence, discussing how residents of informal settlements link place to time in articulating persistent material and technological exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the precarious nature of everyday urban life through a discussion of the temporality of infrastructural absence; what we might think of as the unconnected time. Drawing from 16 months of ethnographic research with residents of several informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, I consider what it means to live with temporary infrastructures for water, sanitation, and electricity that have, seemingly, become permanent. In the extension of informal settlements until an unforeseeable and ever-receding future formality, everyday life becomes an static present, producing developmental, post-colonial "others" defined by exclusion from a material and socio-political modernity. The notions of a fixed impermanence or a constant temporary that typify long-term informal spaces uncomfortably mash together readings of space and time, holding still and in place something meant to be in reliable movement—time itself. The complex overlapping of time and space produced by extended material and technological exclusion are readily articulated by residents of informal settlements, becoming poignant frames for experience within the periphery of the city. Here, discussions of place in relation to large-scale infrastructural absence become discussions of foreclosed futures, endless waiting, and empty promises. What happens to patterns of everyday life and political engagement when the profound orientation towards the future embedded within infrastructural and technological promise ceases to be resonant?