Patchwork
Repair labor and the logic of infrastructure adaptation in Mexico City
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4476241 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Julio Alejandro De Coss Corzo (0000-0002-9405-0513, Durham University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 237-253 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263775820938057 |
| OpenAlex | W3041579524 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 59 |
| References cited | 40 |
This article introduces the concept of patchwork to understand how repair practices are carried out in Mexico City's networked hydraulic infrastructure.Drawing on data gathered through a one-year participatory ethnography, patchwork follows the Mexico City Water System (SACMEX) workers' descriptions of their own labor and how it relates to infrastructure in a context of structural austerity and rapid socio-material change. To do so, the article separates the analysis of repair practices from the logic of maintenance, challenging widely shared conceptions of how they relate to each other. Two distinct contributions are made possible by this move. On the one hand, it allows for a more detailed conceptualization of the work that repair labor does in relation to infrastructure and to other socio-material processes that are constantly shaping it. On the other, it enables an exploration of what I call the logic of adaptation, a form of infrastructure repair that is based not on returning objects and relations to a previously officially sanctioned order, but instead on fashioning normality as an ongoing process made possible through improvisational and incremental work. Exploring this logic, I argue that the endurance of urban infrastructure and of urban modernity requires the ad-hoc work of patchwork and of adaptive repair labor
Adaptation (eye · Austerity · Citizen journalism · Conceptualization · Context (archaeology · Ethnography · Geography · Improvisation · Modernity · Political science · Process (computing · Relation (database · Sociology · Work (physics · Computer Science · Engineering · Law · Psychology · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Water Systems and Optimization · Artificial Intelligence
Desynchronizing the Digital Factory
“Living Amoeba of an Organization”
Neighbour‐Based Organisations as Social Infrastructure
Planning the Liveable If Not the Ideal
The Analog City
Co-producing maintenance and repair
Experiencing is learning
Making repair reparative
Construir y reparar frente al desabastecimiento
What counts as infrastructural labour? Community action as waste work in South Africa
Under construction – towards critical perspectives on infrastructuring and infrastructured labour in Africa
Working with water
Repair and care
Engineering as Tinkering Care
Caring for Groundwater
Occupations as reparative urban infrastructure
Working with, against and beyond the state
Doing the work
Vital mobilities
Informal infrastructuring
The politics of tied aid
To complete modernity or to embrace heterogeneity? From historical inequality towards an uncertain future for water infrastructure in Mexico City
Rethinking the urban South? Centering “unprecedented” risk and repair
Cuando Colón baje el dedo”
Sustaining housing through planned maintenance in remote Central Australia
Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures
The Logistics of Waste
The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism
Urban metabolism redux
Remembering the river
Urban infrastructure patching
Killing us with slow poison
Infra‐culture and infrastructures
Survival and confrontation
Living with fragile infrastructure
Preparing surfaces for shredding
Historicising sanitation work
Patchworking platforms
The right to repairable energy
Spaces of (in)formality and the politics of infrastructural labor
Urban political ecologies of housing decarbonisation
Orchestrating energy transitions
Multiscalar politics of infrastructural labour
Infrastructure in formation
Working toward infrastructural citizenship
Repair, maintenance, and ordinary politics
People die in six ways and each is politics
For and against climate capitalism
Kites, billboards and bridges
Working with the end of water
The temporal fragility of infrastructure
Urban maintenance as compromise
Restoration as world-making and repair
Who builds Shanghai's fiber-optic network? Thinking urban infrastructure through migrant construction labor
We Women Are Suffering
Encountering infrastructural interruptions and maintaining transnational lives amongst foreigners in China
Making (Slowly) as Method
Missing power
Infrastructural Care
Demanding Water
The Promise of Infrastructure
Social Power and the Urbanization of Water
Splintering Urbanism
The Fabric of Space
Beyond the Big Ditch
Pipe Politics, Contested Waters
Capturing the waters
Water in Mexico City
Small technologies, big change
Normalizing Transantiago
Mapping operation and maintenance
Electricity services always in the making
Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Cultivating the Nile
Tool-power
Hydraulic City
Incremental infrastructures
Material worlds? Resource geographies and the `matter of nature
Maintenance Work and the Performativity of Urban Inscriptions
States of maintenance
The Engineer and The Plumber
Disrupted Infrastructures
Fetishizing the modern city
Cyborg Urbanization
Landscapes of Disaster
The living building
Citizenship Prepaid
Leaky States
People as Infrastructure
Cities of Uncertainty
Out of Order
Challenging state modernity
Subjectivism in Sociological Research
Pressure
Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam
When infrastructures attack
| Unique citing works | 59 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 11,8 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 58 |