Bonding Infrastructure, Affect, and the Emergence of Urban Collectivity
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Bonding Infrastructure, affect, and the emergence of urban collectivity Vorgelegt im Promotionsausschuss der HafenCity Universität Hamburg zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktorin der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) Dissertation von Laura Kemmer 2020 Contents Introduction | Tramspotting 4 New formations: Public transport as collective 11 “No one let go of anyone’s hand”: Bonding as mode of un/relating 16 Afraid of Things 20 According to schedule? Multi-sited ethnography and the value of deviation 24 Mind the gap: Between methodology and praxis 32 First Part | Formations of Collectivity One | Reassembling Collectivity 48 Commemorating suspension: Seven years without tramway 54 Piling up: How infrastructure distributes agency 66 Present in absence: Experiencing collectivity 79 Two | A Premissory Assemblage 85 Rio on rails: The becomings of a Modern City 93 Between asphalt and hilltop: The Divided City 103 Second Part | Modes of Un/Relating Three | Material Resistance 112 Free-riding Rio: Public transport as mobile meeting place 119 Swinging - balançar: The micropolitics of movement 128 Political matters? On ambivalent attachments 136 Four | Promissory Things 141 Stop sign rumors: The elasticity of affective bonds 145 Tight schedules: Proximity and potential 161 Five | Loose Bonds 168 Repulsive asphalt: Strategic detachments 172 Get out, cockroach: Passing on the promise 187 Hole counting: How to care for looseness 191 Conclusion | After Redemption 202 References 218 Figure sources 241 Figures and Tables Figure 1: “Exposição” 23 Figure 2: Video-recordings 36 Figure 3: Archive of the neighborhood association 41 Figure 4: Santa Teresa maps 51 Figure 5: Seven years without tramway 54 Figure 6: Timeline for reinstallation works 60 Figure 7: A “complex” actor constellation? 68 Figure 8: Protocol from the foundation of the neighborhood association 74 Figure 9: Collective sadness 77 Figure 10: “Give me a shirt” 78 Figure 11: March across the aqueduct 82 Figure 12: Rio’s tramway network in 1937 86 Figure 13: “The moonlight is bewitching” 98 Figure 14: “Electric Journeys” 105 Figure 15: Technical drawings of Santa Teresa tramway 117 Figure 16: Prototype of new tramway 121 Figure 17: Re-enacting the tramway 126 Figure 18: Bonde-pixação 128 Figure 19: Footboard-dance 134 Figure 20: Examples of bonde-font 146 Figure 21: Real estate speculations 157 Figure 22: Schedule of reconstruction works August 2016 and 2017 159 Figure 23: “Pre-operation” announcement 164 Figure 24: “We want the bonde at ‘clock in’ time” 167 Figure 25: Asphalt pavement 175 Figure 26: When the favela comes down and it’s not carnival 179 Figure 27: “Don’t stop on the tracks” 182 Figure 28: Bus protests 187 Figure 29: From sad tramway to angry bus 189 Figure 30: Sending out a “tramway SOS” 194 Figure 31: Planting without roots 195 Figure 32: Pothole fillings 196 Figure 33: “Prevent Santa Teresa from turning into a swiss cheese” 199 Figure 34: “The bonde won't stop” 205 Figure 35: The promise of a monster 216 Table 1: Research stays 31 Table 2: Interviewees (selection) in order of appearance 45 Table 3 Chronology of events 55 Table 4: “Rio de Janeiro’s tramway century” 85 Introduction | Tramspotting | 4 Tram spotting Young people are jumping turnstiles underground. They squeeze past ticket controllers, crawl underneath fare gates, sit on top of the metal machines that guard the entry to the train platform. One level up, thousands of people have gathered on the city streets. High school students mix with health care workers and teachers, black activists from the peripheries walk together with white middle class associations, feminists and environmentalists fraternize with drivers. If they spot a bus, they would burn it? Twenty centavos more for a bus ride. Brazil, June 2013. Thirty pesos more for a subway trip. Chile, October 2019. Two of South America’s most disruptive urban mass protests of the past decade have emerged from an increase in public transport fares. The Brazilian uprising was still fresh in people’s minds when I first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in March 2014. Seven years later, I am writing up this introduction as Chilean protesters stand by, confined to banging pots and pans from their balconies, while the outbreak of the new coronavirus has temporarily cleared them off the streets. Both movements have profoundly shaken up their respective societies and political systems, albeit with different outcomes. In Brazil, the demonstrations have ultimately been hijacked by conservative and right- wing populist forces and ended with the impeachment of the Worker’s Party president Dilma Rousseff in 2016. In Chile, a popular referendum planned for October 2020 strives to replace the 1980 Pinochet-era constitution, seen as embodiment of the dictatorship’s neoliberal inheritance. Both movements have spurred radical political transformations in one direction or another, but also importantly both have for the first time in many years brought together people of very different socioeconomic backgrounds, political convictions, and territorial belongings in constellations quite uncommon for their highly segregated urban societies (Rolnik 2017; Segura 2014; 2019). How did a fare increase of a few cents bring thousands of protesters onto the streets? Recent propositions for re-thinking public transport as a particular kind of public space (Tukivene et al. 2020) offer some initial answers to this question.1 Looked at from this perspective, public transport arguably belongs to the “social sphere”: It is a space where political conflicts are fought out, where claims over citizenship emerge – it’s full of promises for participation and mutuality (Arendt 1972, 57). Adding from less human-centered conceptualizations of publicness, mass transit becomes a “matter of concern” (Latour 2004): Turnstiles being jumped over in present-day South America, 1 I am grateful to Tauri Tukivene and the PUTSPACE (“Public Transport as Public Space”, cf. putspace.eu) project members for pointing me into this direction, thank you especially to Wladimir Sgibnev and Tonio Weicker for sharing their thoughts on the potentialities (and risks!) of exploring the publicness of transport. Introduction | Tramspotting | 5 a seat taken by a black woman in 1980’s USA, burning tramways in the streets of Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the twentieth century – protest evolves from relations between people and things2 that are more than symbolic. The capacity of things like fare gates and bus benches to enter into new relationships with the potential to disrupt existing inequalities of race, class, and gender also points to how public transport might not be seen as merely a static reflection of structurally determined social conflicts. What a “mobilities” perspective can offer for a critical (urban studies) inquiry into public space, then, is an emphasis on the transitory character of socio-spatial arrangements and the fleeting intensities of temporary encounters amongst all kinds of stranger people and things (Sheller and Urry 2003). Against this background, the question marks left by the South American fare protests point to the relevance of exploring new formations of urban collectivity from their very fluidity and ephemerality: How could a mass movement emerge spontaneously and without previous “warning”, and how to make sense of its radical openness towards the future? In lieu of answers, two influential critical urban researchers have admitted the limits of established theories of social movements and urban inequalities when invited to comment on the recent uprisings in the two countries. “A new social phenomenon exists”, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells remarked in a public speech in Chile in November 2019, “spontaneous social explosions in various societies that are difficult to understand.”3 Three years earlier, David Harvey told activists from the Rio de Janeiro Right to the City Movement that the even if they singled out the factors that led people to the streets in 2013, for him, what would remain unanswered would be the question “where did these collectives come from […] and how could [they] disappear so quickly again?” 4 (audio transcript, 08/03/2016). 2 I will use the terms “matter” and “thing” interchangeably throughout this work, following Bruno Latour’s (2004) etymological and philosophical retracing of the terms. “Matter”, in the following, will be used to designate a material object that has turned into a thing “of great concern” (ibid., 235) and that has the capacity to assemble, or to “gather” (ibid., 237), a number of people around this concern. 3 Manuel Castells, public speech held at the Parque Cultural, Valparaíso, November 06, 2019, full speech available at: https://youtu.be/h97emCUyMf0 (last accessed 10/04/2020). I am very thankful to Maxwell Samuel Woods for providing me with this quote after delivering a sharp and inspiring presentation on the Chilean Social Explosion of 2019 at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, in January 2020. 4 David Harvey, public speech held at the Cine Odeon, Rio de Janeiro, March 08, 2016. The above quote is a transcription from an audio recording made by the author. The full quote goes “We cannot identify this Introduction | Tramspotting | 6 These quotes do not only underline the importance of exploring the emergence of new forms of urban collectivity, they also raise again new questions about their exact ways of un/relating. What held together the very different protesters, which started from high school and university students, but which