Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the corporeal dimension of infrastructural maintenance and repair, a form of labour that plays a central role in mediating metabolic relations.

Presentation long abstract

Human labour is central in mediating metabolic relations. However, its significance is often overlooked in Urban Political Ecology research. This contribution examines the crucial and ongoing work of maintaining networked infrastructures in Hamburg, Germany, which appear extremely stable and are characterised by a high level of technological advancement and digitalised control. Yet despite these technological standards, workers’ embodied skills and sensory expertise underpin the everyday operation of the city’s infrastructures.

Drawing on data collected through extensive archival research, interviews with employees of utility services, and participant observation with maintenance crews, this paper explores the corporeal and affective dimensions of maintenance and repair across sectors and historical periods. Tracing how workers’ bodies and sensory practices – particularly seeing, smelling, and listening – have been entangled with the city’s gas, water, and sanitation infrastructures, the paper demonstrates that these practices continue to play a central role, rendering human labour and workers’ bodies indispensable to the city’s metabolic processes. By centring the corporeality of maintenance, repair, and the bodies that perform these practices, this contribution sheds light on lesser-known aspects of infrastructural reproduction and, potentially, transformation.