This paper examines the social life and sociality of urban infrastructure. Drawing on a case study of land occupations and informal settlements in the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, where the staples of life such as water, electricity, shelter and sanitation are co-constructed by the poor, the paper argues that infrastructures – visible and invisible – are deeply implicated in not only the making and unmaking of individual lives, but also in the experience of community, solidarity and struggle for recognition. Infrastructure is proposed as a gathering force and political intermediary of considerable significance in shaping the rights of the poor to the city and their capacity to claim those rights.
De Boeck F (2013) ‘Poverty’ and the politics of syncopation: Urban examples from Congo-Kinshasa (mimeo). Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, University of Leuven.
10.
ElyacharJ (2010) Phatic labour, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo. American Ethnologist37(3): 452–464.
11.
FischerB (2014) Introduction. In: FischerBMcCannBAuyeroJ (eds) Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
12.
GoldsteinBE (2009) Resilience to surprises through communicative planning. Ecology and Society14(2): 33–44.
13.
GrahamS (2010) Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, New York: Routledge.
14.
GrahamSMarvinS (2001) Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition, London: Routledge.
15.
GrahamSMcFarlaneCDesaiR (2013) Water wars in Mumbai. Public Culture25: 115–141.
16.
GreenfieldA (2013) Against the Smart City, New York: Do Projects.
17.
GuimarãesB (1992) Favelas em Belo Horizonte – tendências e desafios. Análise & Conjuntura7(2/3): 11–18.
18.
HalpernOLeCavalierJCalvilloNPietschW (2013) Test-bed urbanism. Public Culture25(2): 273–306.
19.
HarveyP (2012) The topological quality of infrastructural relation: An ethnographic approach. Theory, Culture & Society29(4/5): 76–92.
20.
HarveyPKnoxH (2013) The enchantments of infrastructure. Mobilities7(4): 521–536.
21.
HeynenNKaïkaMSwyngedouwE (2006) The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, London: Routledge.
22.
HirschkindC (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, New York: Columbia University Press.
23.
HolstonJ (2008) Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
24.
HumphreyC (2003) Rethinking infrastructure: Siberian cities and the great freeze of January 2001. In: SchneiderJSusserI (eds) Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, Oxford: Berg, pp. 91–107.
25.
Inclusive Cities Laboratory (2010) Belo Horizonte, Brazil Villa Viva Programme – Aglomerado da Serra. Working Paper, Development Planning Unity, University College, London.
26.
JacquesPB (2013) Urban regeneration: The improvisation tactics from the favelas vs. the spectacularisation of public space. In: LearyMMcCarthyJ (eds) The Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration, London: Routledge, pp. 260–270.
27.
JaglinS (2014) Regulating service delivery in southern cities: Rethinking urban heterogeneity. In: ParnellSOldfieldS (eds) The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, London: Routledge.
28.
KitchinRDodgeM (2011) Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
29.
LahoudA (2010) Introduction. In: LahoudARiceCBurkeA (eds) Post-traumatic Urbanism, Chichester: John Wiley, pp. 14–23.
30.
LarkinB (2004) Degraded images, distorted sounds: Nigerian video and the infrastructure of piracy. Public Culture16(2): 289–314.
31.
LarkinB (2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology42: 327–343.
32.
McCannB (2014) Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
33.
McFarlaneC (2011) The city as assemblage: Dwelling and urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space29: 649–671.
34.
MackenzieA (2010) Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
35.
MahvungaC (2013) Cidades esfumaçadas: Energy and the rural-urban connection in Mozambique. Public Culture25(2): 261–272.
36.
MantonJ (2013) ‘Environmental alkalism’ and the war on filth: The personification of sanitation in urban Nigeria. Africa83(4): 606–622.
37.
Morado Nascimento D (2012) A (possível) produção democratizada do espaço. Paper presented at II Encontro da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pósgraduação em Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Natal, 18–21 September.
38.
MumfordL (1938) The Culture of Cities, San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
39.
ParkR (1952) Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
40.
PerlmanJ (2010) Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, New York: Oxford University Press.
41.
PieterseEHymanK (2014) Disjunctures between urban infrastructure, finance and affordability. In: ParnellSOldfieldS (eds) The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, London: Routledge.
42.
Rhys-TaylorA (2013) The essences of multiculture: A sensory exploration of an inner-city street market. Identities20(4): 393–406.
43.
SassenS (2012) Urbanising technologies. In: BurdettRRodeP (eds) Urban Age Electric City Conference, London: London School of Economics, pp. 12–14.
44.
SennettR (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York: Norton.
45.
ShepardM (2011) Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
46.
SimoneA (2004) People as infrastructure. Public Culture16(3): 407–429.
47.
SimoneA (2014) Jakarta: Drawing the City Near, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Thrift N (2014) The ‘sentient’ city and what it may portend (mimeo), University of Warwick.
50.
TonkissF (2013) Cities by Design, Cambridge: Polity.
51.
TousignantN (2013) Insects-as-infrastructure: Indicating Project Locustox and the Sahelization of ecotoxicology. Science as Culture22(1): 108–131.
52.
ValeLCampanellaT (2005) The Resilient City, New York: Oxford University Press.
53.
ValladaresL (2006) La favela d’un siècle à l’autre; mythe d’origine, discours scientifiques et représentations virtuelles, Paris: Editions de la MSH.
54.
Vasudevan A (2014) The autonomous city: Towards a critical geography of occupation. Progress in Human Geography (published online 30 April 2014). DOI: 10.1177/0309132514531470.
