Values Science, Technology & Human: Experiments Disastrous Publics: Counter-Enactments in Participatory

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Values
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Disastrous Publics: Counter-enactments in Participatory

Experiments
Manuel Tironi
Science Technology Human Values published online 4 December 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0162243914560649
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Original Article
Science, Technology, & Human Values
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Counter-enactments DOI: 10.1177/0162243914560649
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in Participatory
Experiments
Manuel Tironi1,2
Abstract
This article explores how citizen participation was methodologically devised
and materially articulated in the postdisaster reconstruction of Constitución,
one of the most affected cities after the earthquake and tsunami that battered
south central Chile in 2010. I argue that the techniques deployed to engineer
the participation were arranged as a policy experiment where a particular
type of public was provoked—one characterized by its emotional detachment,
political engagement, and social tolerance. The case of Constitución, however,
also shows that this public ran parallel to other forms of being a public not
aligned with the experiment’s assumptions. More broadly, the article argues
that while disaster studies need to acknowledge the generative capacities of
public participation, science and technology studies should include disasters
as a particular setting for participatory experiments.
Keywords
public engagement, political experiments, counter-enactment, disasters, Chile
1
Instituto de Sociologı́a, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
2
CIGIDEN - National Research Center for Integrated Natural Disaster Management
Corresponding Author:
Manuel Tironi, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Campus San
Joaquin, Santiago 7820436, Chile.
Email: metironi@uc.cl

2 Science, Technology, & Human Values
Introduction
When in 2010 an 8.8-magnitude earthquake and a subsequent tsunami
battered south-central Chile, Constitución, a small coastal town in the
Maule estuary, became the site for one of the most innovative and expensive
public participation projects in Chilean history. The Sustainable Recon-
struction Plan, or PRES for its acronym in Spanish (Plan de Reconstrucción
Sustentable), devised to cope with the massive destruction of Constitución,
included an ambitious strategy to engage citizens into the postdisaster
rebuilding of the city. In contrast to traditional top-down practices, the
PRES was thought to inaugurate a new generation of planning policies in
which the participation of citizens and local groups would play a fundamen-
tal role (Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo [MINVU] 2011). A myriad of
technologies—from surveys and online forums to public meetings and open
referendums—were deployed to ensure the involvement of mauchos1 in the
planning process.
This article explores why PRES’s public participation, in spite of its
ambitions, failed in significant ways. I claim that the cause of this fail-
ure is not to be found in the inability or reluctance of the PRES to
include the citizenry, but on the type of public imagined with, inscribed
in and enacted by the participatory technologies put forward in Consti-
tución. Thus, while the story of PRES Constitución is one about hollow
engagement exercises and variegated forms of social exclusion, the
main concern of this article is not the precariousness of public partici-
pation in neoliberal times, but the generative affordances of participa-
tory experiments—and how disasters may enrich our understanding of
them.
In pursuing this objective, I show to what extent the story of Consti-
tución also offers an opportunity to strengthen the link between science
and technology studies (STSs) and disasters studies. My claim unfolds in
two ways. Insofar PRES Constitución was a material arrangement in
which the phenomena under scrutiny—a public and its opinions—was
provoked into being, the case of PRES Constitución indicates to what
extent disaster studies may benefit from incorporating the STS-inspired
debate on political experiments. In turn, the story of Constitución also
suggests that disasters challenge the STS scholarship on public engage-
ment and political experiments in ways that have not yet been fully
acknowledged. As situations of radical material disruption, disasters
emerge as settings for public engagement that need further attention from
STS scholars.

Tironi 3
More specifically, in this article, I suggest that mauchos were assumed

by and enliven in the participatory technologies of the PRES as a public
emotionally detached from immediate needs, politically engaged as assumed
by liberal democratic principles, and mobilizing high levels of social toler-
ance. Based on ethnographic data,2 this article describes the mismatch
between the theoretical public instantiated by PRES Constitución, and the
other modes of being a public in Constitución. Like the experiments of the
natural sciences and economics (Hacking 1983; Muniesa and Callon 2007;
Rheinberger 1997), engagement exercises provoke into being the objects
sought to be observed. But the public experimentally envisioned by the PRES
ran parallel to other public forms that the disaster had helped to make visible.
The enactment of publics encountered counter-enactments: outside the
experiment are found other—and contentious—modes of establishing prob-
lems, doing politics, and evaluating risks.
To account for these two entangled stories—one about experimentation
and the other about a setting that disrupted the experimental effect—in the
next section I describe the main features of the PRES and the political con-
ditions in which it unfolded. In the third section, I briefly examine the rel-
evant STS literature on participatory experiments. Here I point out the
limitations of this literature but, also, how it may contribute to disaster stud-
ies. In the fourth section, I turn the fieldwork material in order to explain
how crucial assumptions regarding the nature of participants were inscribed
in PRES participatory technologies and how, as well, they were conten-
tiously challenged. Finally, in the concluding remarks, I discuss some of the
ethical and practical challenges involved in the use of STS theories in
applied interventions.
PRES Constitución: A Political Experiment

In February 27, 2010, an 8.8-Richter scale earthquake and a subsequent tsu-
nami battered south-central Chile. It was the sixth largest earthquake in
recorded history. The quake partially devastated five large cities, forty-
five mid-size cities, and more than 900 rural villages (Bresciani 2010). Con-
stitución (pop. 53,785, INE, 2011), a coastal city 365 km south from San-
tiago and 85 km north from Cobquecura, the earthquake epicenter, was
one of the most damaged. While the earthquake devastated most of its
adobe-made and historic buildings, the consequent tsunami destroyed the
first five blocks facing the city’s riverfront. In total, 100 neighbors died
in Constitución, 1,789 housing units were partially destroyed, 1,200

suffered irreparable damage, and 80 percent of the city center was ruined
(PRES Constitución 2010a).
The central government—the first right-wing office in the post-Pinochet
era—rapidly rejected all calls for a major state intervention. Such an
extended catastrophe required fast, effective, and flexible responses—
responses that the state was unable to give, the government argued. The
solution was to create entrepreneurial public–private taskforces formally
independent from any planning agency: the PRES.3
These plans had four fundamental characteristics. First, each PRES was
configured as a consortium integrated by the Ministry of Housing and
Urban Development, the local municipality, and a private donor financing the
plan. The government assumed that private donors would be local entrepre-
neurs, and thus promoted this requirement as an effort to secure bottom-up,
locally embedded initiatives. In practice, however, private donors were
mostly large corporations with negligible ties to the affected localities.4 Non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) and local citizen associations heavily
questioned the figure of the private donor for the thin line demarking altruist
help from image laundering and real estate speculation (Cociña 2011).5
Second, the PRES were usually organized around an architectural firm
hired by the private donor but accountable to the consortium. The architec-
tural firm was also in charge of public participation, for which often expert
professionals were hired. However, PRES were not legally binding. And
while PRES architects were in charge of designing a vision for the city’s
reconstruction, they were not responsible for the actual construction of pro-
posed projects. Third, the PRES had to be delivered in ninety days. The def-
inition of this deadline was based on the assumption that three months was
the temporal threshold demarcating the ‘‘emergency’’ phase from the
‘‘reconstruction’’ one. The existence of a tight deadline also imbued the
PRES with a sense of accountability and executive decisiveness much pro-
moted by the government.
Finally, and crucial for the political feasibility of the plan, PRES had the
mandate to secure a participative process. Indeed, public engagement
played a central role in the PRES scheme. And PRES Constitución became
the poster child for what seemed a historical policy innovation. The private
donor in the case of PRES Constitución was Forestal Arauco, one of the
largest wood producers in Chile and, with one of its main operations located
in Constitución, the economic engine of the city. Today, a rather functional
city, Constitución was until the 1960s a seaside resort for the region’s upper
classes, who were attracted to the city by its long, dark-sand beaches and its
stunning natural environment. In the late 1950s, Arauco installed its

Tironi 5
cellulose plant. The plant brought wealth to the city but most mauchos
blame it for the deterioration of Constitución’s natural beauties and the
withering of its touristic appeal. Thereafter, mauchos have an ambivalent
relation with Arauco, and thus its involvement in the postdisaster recon-
struction of the city was not agreed with the community. Rather, the govern-
ment swiftly accepted it for both the ‘‘local’’ nature of the donor and the
large donation Arauco was willing to disburse. Indeed, Arauco decided not
only to fully cover the costs of the PRES but also to transform the rebuilding
plan into memorable initiative that would represent the firm’s engagement
with Constitución.
The PRES model was innovative in many ways. The flexibility of its
operational and financial scheme allowed to hire Elemental, an interna-
tionally renowned Chilean architectural firm, and ARUP, a prestigious
London-based engineering firm. A traditional state-based intervention
would have never been able to match the technical quality achieved in
Constitución. Moreover, reconstruction plans are usually narrowed down
to emergency needs and immediate achievements (Henderson 2011).
Thus, the long-term focus of the PRES was a unique policy advancement.
Additionally, and perhaps more important, the strong and explicit commit-
ment to public participation disrupted Chile’s planning regulations, which
lack significant participatory spaces and procedures (Tironi, Poduje, and
Somma 2011).
But paradoxically, as soon as it was launched in April 5, 2010, five
weeks after the earthquake, PRES Constitución was bitterly criticized
for its lack of citizen engagement. Several collectives were skeptical
of the process, and many refrained from participating. As will be
explained later, a general sense of apathy and rejection regarding the
PRES took over the city. The presence of Arauco lurking behind the
PRES, the giant corporation that had ruined what was once a fine resort
city, was for many a discouraging sign. The powerful timber and
teacher unions were skeptical of what seemed image laundering from
Arauco. In neighboring regions, such as Dichato, the disaster had trig-
gered a wave of citizen mobilizations. The unions’ leaders, largely from
the Communist Party, were interested in replicating those popular con-
testations, rather than in teaming up with corporate powers. Although
they were eventually convinced by the PRES’ intentions, their position
was more passive observation than active involvement. For those not
involved in local politics, the PRES seemed detached from their every-
day concerns. Despite all the efforts to promote the plan, many neigh-
bors didn’t even know about the PRES.

Producing Publics: Enactments, Counter-enactments,

and Disasters
The apathy of neighbors clashed with the quantity and quality of public
engagement apparatuses devised in Constitución. The participation scheme
of PRES Constitución included most notably the Casa Abierta (Open
House), a space for citizen consultation located in the city’s central square;
Foros Hı´bridos (Hybrid Forums), a series of open meetings designed to
combine ‘‘different knowledges, different ways of knowing’’ as defined
by the PRES public participation coordinator; and a city-wide referendum
(more on these three technologies later). Additionally, PRES Constitución
conducted seventeen public meetings with diverse local constituencies, sev-
eral open online debates, permanent surveys, and at least three public pre-
sentations to socialize the work plan and its achievements.
The inability of public participation procedures to engage concerned
individuals in and after disasters usually has been linked to problems in
their political distribution—that is, how decision-making capabilities are
allocated between experts and communities and between dominant and sub-
altern or minority groups within communities (Pearce 2003; Pelling 2007).
However, PRES Constitución’s participatory techniques were explicitly
designed to avoid political unbalances. Foros Hı´bridos, as it will be shown
shortly, are a clear example of this attempt. Rather, it seems that the mis-
match between PRES Constitución’s participative exuberance and its recep-
tion on the ground is related to how the participant public was assumed by
and inscribed in the methodologies of engagement deployed.
STS has identified the ways publics are produced by the techniques
sought for their participation. Public participation, as situated technological
arrangements, replicates the inventive process of laboratory experiments
well studied within the discipline (Hacking 1983; Stengers 2000; Shapin
and Schaffer 1989). Just as experiments in physics or biology provoke into
being the neutrinos or bacteria they manipulate, the methodologies utilized
in participatory processes—from focus groups to online referenda to com-
munity assemblies—do not limit themselves to draw publics into an inter-
active arena; these methodologies help to enact them as well (Felt and
Fochler 2010; Girard and Stark 2007; Horst and Irwin 2010; Irwin 2001;
Lezaun and Soneryd 2007; Marres 2012; Marres and Lezaun 2011; Michael
2009). As Braun and Schultz (2010, 406) claim, in public participation exer-
cises, the public ‘‘is never immediately given but inevitably the outcome of
processes of naming and framing, staging, selection and priority setting,
attribution, interpellation, categorisation and classification.’’

Tironi 7
PRES Constitución can be understood as an experiment. Its participatory

methodologies shaped the public that was invited to participate. Or put
another way, informed by particular hypotheses about political behavior
and civic attitudes, methodologies were designed that assumed the presence
of a particular theoretical public, which was then forced into existence.
Publics, however, are not inert entities inclined to be acted upon. Parti-
cipants may challenge the experiment’s assumptions, and STS has identi-
fied the mechanisms through which participant publics articulate various
and contentious forms of self-performation and reperformation (Michael
2009; Felt and Fochler 2010). However, comparatively less attention has
been paid to how these participatory experiments deal with publics outside
the experimental setting. The focus has been on those participants already
enrolled in the participatory exercise, not on the problematic relations put
forward with and by those that do not match the epistemic, political, or
moral assumptions of the experimental apparatus.
Disaster studies have suggested that ontological and epistemic mis-
matches multiply in situations where the vital and immediate integrity of
the world is disrupted. Publics were excessive in Constitución: instead of
finding a well-tempered and unitary public that conformed to the experi-
mental assumptions, the experiment encountered contentious and recalci-
trant publics rejecting the experiment’s call. Although this contentious
environment may occur in any experimental intervention, disasters inten-
sify them. When the bases of everyday life collapse and the world can
literally not be reckoned (Erikson 1978; Lakoff and Collier 2010; Oliver-
Smith 1999), social life expands and multiplies, overflowing preexistent
parameters (Clark 2012; Tironi 2014). Linear temporalities are blurred, new
actors are brought to the political force, and the contours of the public
sphere are rearranged. Disasters, in brief, ‘‘can in part be understood as a
kind of narrative implosion where there [is] not simply meaninglessness,
but also too much meaning, an excess’’ (Law and Singleton 2006, 9).
Thus, disasters represent a setting that has not been fully acknowledged
by STS-inspired research on political experiments. Disasters provoke the
multiplication of publics, problems, and meanings. However, the literature
on political experiments has often relied on laboratory exercises where this
surplus is tamed: in vitro participatory arrangements in which conflicts are
usually projected as one or multiple ‘‘scenarios’’ that are either discon-
nected from the participants’ everyday lives or staged preemptively in the
expectation of a crisis yet to come. Moreover, this crucial point has been
neglected in the emergent ‘‘Disaster STS’’ literature (cf. Dowty and Allen
2011). This scholarship has rightly stressed the need for pre- and

postdisaster participatory plans and the tensions arising from the way expert
and nonexpert knowledges are played out within these plans. But the disas-
ter itself as a particular type of setting for public participation has not been
taken into account. As situations of radical uncertainty, disasters change the
ways participation is done and the challenges it confronts, and thus push for
the expansion of STS theories on public engagement. Disasters in general
and the case of PRES Constitución in particular open up an opportunity
to explore the experimental affordances of public participation in diverse
settings. In the next section, I turn to Constitución to explain this process.
One Plan, Three Publics

The PRES rested on a sophisticated methodological architecture. However,
the PRES found that citizens on the ground did not perform as projected by
their theoretical assumptions, creating zones of political conflicts. In what
follows, three of these zones are described.
Disentangled Publics
The earthquake and tsunami disorganized life in Constitución in profound
and violent ways. Normal life, as a neighbor put it, was broken:
The earthquake changed a lot our ways of living. It’s going to cost a lot to
return to how it was before . . . psychologically we are all damaged. For me
the most terrible thing, beyond that my house was ruined and the material
losses, is the psychological damage. You end up bad mentally, and you can’t
live your life normally. Only recently [7 months after the earthquake] I’m
normalizing myself.
While almost 80 percent of the city center on the ground and several dozens
of people disappeared, the first months after the earthquake in Constitución
were marked by angst, distress, anxiety, and grief. ‘‘The third day [after the
earthquake] I managed to find a cigarette, I sat on a rock and I cried,’’
remembers a fisherman. ‘‘Now I have my son going to the psychologist and
my wife too,’’ he continues.
Those who lost their houses were relocated in campamentos (emergency
settlements) that soon became shantytowns. Thus, in addition to the psycho-
logical unrest produced by the disaster itself, entire families had to crowd in
one-bedroom emergency housing units without water, using communal
chemical bathrooms and away from the Constitución city center. Robberies

Tironi 9
and episodes of prostitutions began to emerge in campamentos. The lack of

bathrooms became, for example, a dramatic need. ‘‘Even today [seven
months after the earthquake] we don’t have showers, and we have just one
chemical bathroom for everybody here, and we are a lot of people,’’ says a
man living in Puertas Verdes, one of the campamentos.
Soon, sentiments of confusion and discomfort transmuted into senti-
ments of frustration and disenchantment. People were mentally and physi-
cally exhausted after the breakdown, while, at the same time, none of the
promises made by national and local agencies were being implemented.
People needed to reconstitute their daily lives, gather (literally) their
belongings, and resituate themselves in a new and hostile environment. And
they needed water, private and clean bathrooms, diapers for their children,
and insulation to keep the cold out of their emergency housings.
But the PRES had a different perspective. The PRES did not deny the
commotion and the suffering, but assumed that mauchos, in the name of the
common good, could defer them. Or put another way, the PRES had a dif-
ferent public in mind: individuals that could distance themselves from
immediate pains, needs, and dreads.
This detached public was fleshed out in the PRES in two interrelated
ways. First, the PRES was a plan about infrastructural development. The
PRES’ master plan is summarized in Figure 1. The reconstruction, as it can
be observed, was defined mainly in physical terms: as the construction of
bridges, transportation systems, public buildings, and anti-tsunami protec-
tions. This definition was not arbitrary. Indeed, such materiality was attuned
with the political rationality of the PRES and its emphasis on accountabil-
ity. Thought as a massive and iconic public demonstration that needed to be
replicated, efficiency was a fundamental feature of the plan. Processes and
outcomes had to be measured, valued, audited, and prioritized—and phys-
ical projects allow for this type of metric accounting. Moreover, the PRES
had only ninety days to craft solutions. Thus by defining ‘‘reconstruction’’
as an architectural and engineering matter, the PRES not only secured tan-
gible and accountable objects around which to demonstrate ‘‘Excellence
and feasibility’’ (PRES Constitución 2010a) but also ensured the production
of solutions—renders, planimetries, topographic surveys—that could be
timely delivered in three months. Psychological disruptions, family disorga-
nizations, or identity breakdowns are, in contrast, much messier objects:
they would not have resisted clean accountabilities, clear-cut outcomes, and
straightforward solutions.
But the PRES was not just about the physical city. It was also about the
future city. This is the second way the detached subject was scripted in/by

Figure 1. PRES Constitución master plan (PRES 2010a).
10
Tironi 11
the PRES. Indeed, the final objective of the plan was ‘‘to think the city anew’’
(PRES Constitución 2010a).6 The PRES was devised as an exploration into
the city to-be-reached: a prospective inquiry into the modern, more efficient,
and greener Constitución of the next decades. Concomitantly, the PRES
stated without hesitations that one of its ‘‘operational conditions’’ was ‘‘to
focus exclusively on the reconstruction master plan, without expanding to
other issues, such as emergency demands’’ (PRES Constitución 2010b, 4).
Thus, the PRES was not—could not be—about the lack of showers, fam-
ilies living in tents, and drug dealing in campamentos—however pressing
these needs were. An ethnographic vignette describes this tension:
Constitución, April the 16th 2010—The launching of PRES Constitución and

its Casa Abierta. Forty-seven days have passed since the earthquake. The
governor, some deputies, a senator and most of the municipal officers are
there. Some citizens too . . . [When the event ended] a group of around seven
persons, mostly women in their forties approached Pablo Allard [director of
government’s Reconstruction Office]. They were upset. Angry. Very angry.
They demanded clear and fast solutions for their urgent problems. Fewer
speeches and more action, they said. You represent the government, and
we demand the government, the Chilean State, to act right now, they shouted.
Is our right, they exclaimed. Allard gave the conventional bureaucratic
response—we are working on that; the governor is in charge; we are making
our best efforts; a set of subsidies are being designed; trust me, be patient—
and left. The group, then, headed toward the professionals in charge of the
PRES’s public participation plan. They had planned the participation process.
Devised the different engagement methodologies. They had compartmenta-
lized and sequenced the process in order to have a smooth development. They
had imagined and projected the flow of events. And there they were in front
of an angry mob demanding things they hadn’t planned for. We need water.
My granddaughter is mother of three and she’s still living in a tent. We don’t
have food. I’m a single mother and I need diapers for my 6-month baby. And
we need that now, we are tired of waiting, we won’t accept any promises any-
more, we are not worthless humans, we don’t need yet another plan . . . In the
face of this unforeseen disruption, the ‘‘experts of community’’ organized an
informal public meeting and desperately tried to educate the angry mob on
the PRES’ objectives: the PRES is not about the emergency. We totally
understand your situation and we agree that it is unacceptable and we bear
with you, but we are here to think about the future of the city, how do you
imagine the city in the next 20 years, the long-term, not the immediate needs.
For that you should to go to the municipality, they handle the short-term, the
immediacy, the urgent. The PRES goes beyond that . . .

The PRES was designed assuming a disentangled public, citizens able to cut
themselves off from their world, and its multiple connections. In order to
function, the plan needed participants capable of putting on hold their fears,
anxieties, and torments. The plan needed participants not talking about
chemical bathrooms, psychological disturbances, and diapers, but about
future infrastructure, urban visions, and sustainability. But, as the PRES’s
director of public participation recognizes, ‘‘it was super difficult for us
to explain and communicate the difference between the emergency and the
long-term planning.’’ Indeed, these detached neighbors were hard to find.
They were stubbornly attached to their complex and messy worlds.7
Civic Publics
The PRES, in order to function, also rested on a simple but highly proble-
matic assumption: that individuals would (want to) participate.
The experimental setting of the PRES tried to secure the existence of a
civic public in different ways; first, by making the success of the plan
dependent on the participation of the citizenry. ‘‘We are planning the future
of your city,’’ reads on the PRES’s website, ‘‘That is why your participa-
tion, and the participation of the whole community, is crucial. If we all con-
tribute with our ideas and opinions, the plan will be much better’’ (PRES
Constitución 2010c). The message was that without participation, the
reconstruction would fail. ‘‘By far the most important [challenge of the
PRES], is to have a very active participation from the citizenry’’ claimed
Marcelo Tokman, executive director of the PRES (PRES Constitución
2012). Thus, neighbors bore a burden; they had a duty, a responsibility. The
PRES, to hold as such, required something from them, expected from them
to behave in a certain manner: publics had to be civic.
The enactment of this civic mindedness depended on what the PRES
called the ‘‘nonorganized citizenry’’ (PRES Constitución 2010b, 4), the aver-
age neighbor not affiliated to any collective nor particularly interested or
skilled in voicing her opinions. The PRES assumed that this public, although
apolitical, could be easily politicized and engaged in the decision-making
process. These were, in PRES’s words, ‘‘ordinary neighbors willing to partic-
ipate’’ (PRES Constitución 2010b, 4. Emphasis added). The PRES thus
assumed that the civic ethos of these ‘‘ordinary neighbors’’ was waiting to
be switched-on and that the task of the PRES was to ignite the process and
to elicit this participative subject.
In engagement exercises, the definition of the participant subject usually
depends on theoretical principles framing, explicitly or implicitly, a model

Tironi 13
of the homo politicus (Lezaun and Soneryd 2007). The PRES, in this case,
utilized actor-network theory and more specifically the concept of ‘‘hybrid
forums’’ as devised by Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2009)—and brought
to the plan by the PRES public participation coordinator, who had recently
read Callon et al.’s book.
Callon and his colleagues define hybrid forums as public arenas arising
in sociotechnical controversies. They are forums ‘‘because they are open
spaces where groups can come together to discuss technical options involv-
ing the collective,’’ and are hybrid because the groups and individuals
involved are heterogeneous, ‘‘including experts, politicians, technicians,
and laypersons,’’ and because ‘‘the questions and problems taken up are
addressed at different levels in a variety of domains, from ethics to eco-
nomic’’ (Callon et al. 2009, 18).
But while in Callon et al.’s account, hybrid forums are events that arise
spontaneously and disorderly, PRES Constitución attempted to engineer a
methodological apparatus. Following Callon et al.’s cues, one of the most
important participatory apparatuses developed by the PRES was called, pre-
cisely, Foros Hı´bridos (Hybrid Forums). These Foros Hı´bridos were
designed to secure the participation of ‘‘ordinary citizens.’’ The methodolo-
gical architecture of Foros Hı´bridos was as follows: they were (a) delibera-
tive meetings conducted in Casa Abierta in which (b) one specific issue
related to the reconstruction process was debated. The requisite was that
these debates (c) had to be ‘‘open’’ (everyone could participate disregarding
their age, sex, class, ethnic background, or political position) and (d) ‘‘sym-
metric,’’ where ‘‘all positions (the technician and the layperson, the repre-
sentative and the represented) [have] the same hierarchical status’’ (PRES
Constitución 2010b, 25). To this end, each Foro Hı´brido had to be inte-
grated by (e) a technical expert on the issue at stake and (f) at least one citi-
zen counterpart with hands-on and experiential knowledge—usually drawn
from affected individuals and collectives, while the task of the PRES team
was (g) to make sure that every voice in the debate was heard and accounted
for. The assumption, hence, was that if the proper experimental setting was
in place (the space, the chairs, the open invitation, the adequate balance
between technicians and laypersons in the room), democracy could be
enacted (Lezaun 2011): people—ordinary citizens—would engage and
participate.
But this engaged public was far from evident. First of all, the catastrophe
proved that if mauchos had a civic ethos, it was well hidden behind hercu-
lean uncivic behavior. Indeed, the disaster triggered a myriad of sponta-
neous collective co-ordinations, but most of them illegal. Robberies,

pillaging, and looting: the earthquake produced all sort of uncivic conduct
in Constitución. The arrival of humanitarian help to the city was another
moment where the civic ethos of mauchos reveled much complicated than
assumed by the PRES. When the goods donated by corporations arrived in
the city, a woman recalls, ‘‘instead of people helping each other it was
worse because of ambition, in the sense that those who could grab some-
thing would grab anything just like that, and the one who couldn’t would
end up with nothing.’’ For many residents, this was nothing but surprising.
Rampant individualism, many claim, abounds in Constitución and therefore
transforms the PRES into a naı̈ve adventure. In neoliberal times ‘‘nobody
cares for anybody,’’ concludes a street vendor, thus ‘‘how could one think
that people would want something better for the city?’’ he continues con-
necting the uncivil behavior of many neighbors with the longer social and
political history of Constitución and the country at large.
It soon became clear that ‘‘ordinary neighbors’’ had indeed little—if
any—political interest. The PRES final report estimated that 470 people par-
ticipated in Foros Hı´bridos. This represents only 1.6 percent of total residents
aged nineteen or more: the immense majority of adult residents did not par-
ticipate in the engagement exercises devised by the PRES. Political participa-
tion, neighbors explained, is simply not a priority. Life is too hard, there is too
much work, and domestic problems are too many to be interested in civic
issues. ‘‘I’m not very communicative with people, I live my square meter and
that’s it . . . from home to work and from work to home, and it’s has been
always like that’’ asserts a working-class women in her forties trying to
explain why she didn’t assist any of the PRES activities. High levels of dis-
trusts toward political and collective institutions among mauchos did not help
either. ‘‘I’m not registered in any union or in any other participation thing.
Those [organizations] are just compadrazgos.8 They arranged things just for
them, the leaders . . . they are the only ones winning,’’ says a fisherman.
Thus, the participants in Foros Hı´bridos, far from being ‘‘ordinary neigh-
bors,’’ were NGO, civic, industry, or union leaders. ‘‘[The people assisting to
the PRES activities] were usually [community] leaders, because very few
common people arrived to the forums and meetings,’’ confirms a union offi-
cial. Moreover, in spite of the millionaire investment in broadcasting and
communicating the PRES and its activities, many neighbors never heard
about the PRES. ‘‘I have no idea about that thing,’’ says a fisherman whose
house had been destroyed by the tsunami when asked about the PRES. ‘‘I’ve
heard about that around and all. People talks about the PRES, but the truth is
that I don’t know what is it about. Neither knows my husband. The word, yes,
but what it means, I have no clue,’’ recognizes a street vendor.

Tironi 15
In conclusion, the PRES assumed the existence of an ordinary neighbor

that would behave civically; that if all obstacles were removed, she would
eagerly participate in all the political forums devised by the PRES. But the
engaged public was hard to find: its members looted supermarkets after the
disaster, were individualistic, distrusted institutions, had only a vague idea
of what the PRES was, and, most importantly, they hardly participated in
PRES participatory activities.
Cosmopolitan Publics
This [PRES’s public participation activities] is to return to the basics . . . it
brings us to something very basic, it brings us to a common-sense issue: to
sit down to talk with our interests displayed on the table, transparently (PRES
public participation coordinator 2010).
The citation is from the PRES’s public participation coordinator, and it

resonates with a debated issue in planning (Forester 1989) and political sci-
ence (Dryzek 1990): what are the prerequisites for truly dialogical and dem-
ocratic deliberative arenas? One answer is cosmopolitanism: it is only by
entering a properly conditioned political arena divested of any particularis-
tic attachment tarnishing our global understanding—or, what would be the
same, by disclosing up front our local filiations—that a consensus can be
reached and global problems managed (Beck 2004).
Foros Hı´bridos were, in this sense, cosmopolitan. The PRES not only
assumed that publics would eagerly participate and that in the name of a
superior public good, but they also would set aside their immediate needs.
The PRES also assumed that mauchos, energized by their civic duties and
energized by the techniques of democracy put in place, would set aside one
of the most pervasive collective fractures of contemporary Chile: class
differences.
PRES Constitución sought to design a methodological apparatus in
which class differences would be left outside the deliberative arena. The
spatial arrangement and geographical location of Casa Abierta, PRES’s
center of operations and its main symbol, was crucial in this endeavor.
Casa Abierta was an assemblage of two emergency housing units
designed by Elemental, a prestigious Chilean architecture office. These two
spaces were utilized for hosting Foros Hı´bridos and other meetings, while
the roofed patio between the two units housed a permanent exhibition of
visual information about the PRES and was utilized for larger community
meetings (Figure 2). Casa Abierta was strategically located in Constitución’s

Figure 2. PRES Constitución Casa Abierta (Elemental 2010).
Plaza de Armas (main square), thus in the city’s civic and economic heart,
surrounded by the cathedral, the post office, and the town hall. Aligned
with traditional democratic thinking in political theory (Habermas 1989)
and urban studies (Sennett 1977), the assumption was that nowhere was
the liberal ideal of a democratic public better represented than in city cen-
ters. The location—in Constitución urban core—was an explicit demon-
stration of the PRES’s commitment to be a citizen project, open to and
reachable by all people disregarding age, gender and, especially, class.
But instead of mitigating class differences, the location of Casa Abierta
in Constitución’s downtown unveiled them. Very few people actually went
to Casa Abierta. Or better said, very few poor people did. And one of the
main reasons was that Constitución’s downtown, against PRES’ expecta-
tions, was not viewed as a cosmopolitan and public territory. ‘‘It was nice
that they had a space here to share with people . . . but not everybody [from
La Poza] was willing to come there,’’ says a resident from La Poza, the fish-
ermen impoverished neighborhood, recalling the functioning of Casa
Abierta. Why not? ‘‘People [from Centinela] don’t even have money for the
bus to get there,’’ says a Centinela neighbor, Constitución’s poorest neigh-
borhood. A local radio DJ gives a broader explanation:

Tironi 17
[To conduct meetings in Casa Abierta with people from Centinela] is like
inviting them to a meeting in the Hosterı́a [affluent hotel] . . . But everything
got centralized in Casa Abierta. Would they go? That’s their world [in
Centinela], they have their friends there, their whole environment is there.
Casa Abierta embodied a world that reminded mauchos of how large were
class differences separating participants from nonparticipants. This is why
one of the main complaints against the PRES was that it did not go—not
physically nor symbolically—to these other worlds that stubbornly clashed
against the plan. The PRES was an immobile plan, or as an officer from the
fishermen union recalls,
The PRES arrived to the plaza de armas, but they should have hopped into a
micro [bus] and should have visited the different neighborhoods and should
have organized meetings with people in the different neighborhoods. They
didn’t do that.
But class disparities were not the only fracture the PRES sought to elim-
inate. The plan also expected to reduce—if not dissolve—knowledge hier-
archies between experts and laypeople. Inspired by Callon et al.’s call for
epistemic symmetry, this was the crucial objective of Foros Hı´bridos. But
in Chile, epistemic differences are almost inevitably class based. Thus,
Foros Hı´bridos’ main challenge was, in practice, to make sure that opi-
nions from low-income neighbors would not be discarded by expert
elites—and that concerns rose by the former would be properly debated
by the latter.
However, (class-based) epistemic hierarchies remained still. Some notes
extracted from the fieldwork:
Casa Abierta is a chaos. But a creative one. PRES professionals have landed
in Constitución. You can tell by our Mac laptops, stylish clothes and skinny
bodies. And by our energy. We are committed, we are enthusiastic and self-
confident. We know what to do . . . Arup sent an architect from Milan and two
engineers from Madrid. Imma, one of the Spanish engineers, says that she
urgently needs the hydrographic survey of the city . . . Architects from Ele-
mental have a meeting with Constitución’s planning director. They discus
about what information they already have and what information they need
from the planning office.
PRES’s professionals were strange. As with Casa Abierta, they were from a
different world, a more sophisticated, globalized, and affluent world. Not

surprisingly then, as a fisherman rightly observed, ‘‘people were scared’’ of

them. Indeed, most didn’t even understand them. ‘‘To the people that comes
from the countryside,’’ says the local radio DJ,
you may show them this [an architecture design], ‘look at this view, check
this project,’ but they won’t understand a thing. You have to speak to them
in their language . . . you don’t have to teach them statistics . . . But here they
take them to the PRES [Casa Abierta] to talk about the percentage of
destroyed houses.
The result was that low-income lay residents—fishermen, peasants, the

unemployed—never talked. The participatory apparatus designed by the
PRES was to make them speak, but it failed. Confronted by incomprehen-
sible, affluent, scary professionals, most mauchos preferred silence. A fish-
erman explains the situation. ‘‘In the PRES [activities] I never heard [poor]
people talk, maybe because of their personality, their shyness. But I always
saw media professionals, aldermen, people of an affluent level.’’ A commu-
nity leader from La Poza, remembering his experience at Casa Abierta, con-
firms this hierarchical logic: ‘‘You come to these Foros and there may be
40 people in there,’’ he says, ‘‘but those who talk are always the same, those
that are more involved in the [political] issues, the leaders, and they make
you notice the [knowledge] differences.’’
Thus, Foros Hı´bridos were thought to produce a cosmopolitan public
stripped from any class impediments but encountered resistances and het-
erogeneities. The experiment ended up staging an unequal participatory
arena in which dialogical and symmetric principles evaporated. For many
people, in fact, the PRES and its Foros Hı´bridos were lived as a schooling
experience. To attend one of these participatory exercises was like attending
‘‘very monotonous meetings, without life . . . like going to school to be
informed . . . You arrived, you sat, and that’s it. We finished. Nothing else
to say.’’
Concluding Remarks
I have argued that PRES Constitución put forward a participatory experi-
ment: a technological arrangement whose success depended on its capacity
to provoke into being the public that was supposed to participate. Within the
PRES, the public was articulated as a collective not only eager to participate
in the postdisaster reconstruction of the city but also capable of deferring
its immediate needs and class prejudices. However, this disentangled,

Tironi 19
civic, and cosmopolitan public was hard to produce. The disaster unleashed
behaviors, meanings, and ways of being a political citizen that clashed with
the expected public of the PRES. The engagement apparatus rested on a par-
ticipative neighbor, but many of them proved to be passive, self-interested,
apolitical, and, often, unruly and ruthless. A future-oriented public was har-
nessed, but mauchos needed bathrooms and diapers and were embroiled in
all-too-worldly preoccupations. And while every effort was made to secure
a participatory experiment in which ordinary subjects would leave class dif-
ferences behind, class inequalities appeared everywhere—in the location of
Casa Abierta, in the bodies of experts, in the language of planners. Outside
the well-maintained premises of the experiment, in the messiness of the
catastrophe, Constitución was populated by a multiplicity of ‘‘disastrous
publics’’ behaving in unexpected ways.
I also argued in this article that the case of Constitución enriches an
STS-sensitive approach to disasters. First, these results show that disaster
studies and management need to acknowledge the experimental capacities
of participatory technologies. Public engagement is not only a problem of
empowering or including an actor or community but also of formatting what
an actor is, how she has to participate, which is the context of action, and
what is the inventory of possible problems and solutions she can (and
should) address. Second, the case of PRES Constitución indicates the need
for expanding the inventory of settings of participatory experiments. Public
participation is affected by its material context and the nature of its object of
inquiry. Whether public participation is done in domestic spaces (Marres
2012) or in open, in vivo situations (Callon 2009), these settings demand
specific political arrangements and shape the way participatory apparatuses
are designed. So far, STS scholars have been productive cataloguing the dif-
ferent modalities of public participation (Lengwiler 2008; Rowe and Frewer
2004) and the types of engagement participants involved in—and per-
formed by—participatory exercises (Braun and Schultz 2010; Lezaun and
Soneryd 2007; Michael 2009). Now we need to engage in a critical inven-
tory to map the different settings of participatory experiments. A disaster, I
have argued, is one of these settings—and insofar we live in catastrophic
times (Guggenheim 2014), a particularly important one.
I conclude with one observation. The case of Constitución points at the
tensions arising from the application of STS theories and models to intervene
in the real world. In Constitución, Callon et al.’s ‘‘hybrid forums’’ played a
central role, both as a set of theoretical principles and as an applied model for
citizen engagement. The main question here is not whether the engineered
model was faithful to the author’s original conception (translator, traitor,

cautions the Tuscan proverb). The critical issue is what assumptions about
politics and democracy were brought along by Callon et al.’s model in its
journey from Paris to Constitución—and to what extent did those assump-
tions shape the way PRES Constitución imagined its participant public.
Hybrid forums invite us to accept (and embrace) the inventiveness of tech-
noscientific controversies and the distributed forms of politics they produce.
But they also commit to an abstract and republican idea of democracy and the
‘‘common good’’ (Marres 2007). In hybrid forums, participants are readily
prepared to voice out their demands, associate with their peers and participate
in the political sphere. They are engaged, active, civic, and assertive. Thus, as
Gross (2011, 863) puts it, Callon and his colleagues ‘‘cannot hide a certain
romanticism as regards the democratization of science and uncertainty.’’ And
this romanticism was transferred to Constitución. Here the cautionary note
goes for PRES’s planners and their uncritical adoption of theoretical pro-
grams, but also for STS scholars: if our models may travel and be applied
in diverse settings and in a myriad of ways, universal claims and generalized
hypotheses have to be carefully calibrated and agnostically revised.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Malik Fercovic and Sebastián Garcı́a for their fieldwork assistance
and to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions on a previous
version of this article. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the CSISP
Salon, Goldsmiths College, University of London. I am grateful to Noortje Marres,
Laurie Waller, and David Moats for organizing that meeting and for their insightful
feedback.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by FON-
DECYT Iniciación 11100034 and by the National Research Center for Integrated
Natural Disaster Management CONICYT/FONDAP/15110017.
Notes
1. Gentilic for Constitución.
2. Fieldwork included my own involvement as ‘‘external consultant’’ for the PRES
public participation team. In that condition, I traveled to Constitución every week

Tironi 21
between April 16 and July 30, 2010. Further visits were made in late 2010, mid-
2011, and early 2012.
3. In total, six PRES were launched: PRES Curicó, PRES Juan Fernández, PRE
Talca, PRES Licantén, PRES Pelluhue, and PRES Constitución.
4. An extreme case was Talcahuano, a port and industrial city heavily damaged by
the tsunami. There, a PRES scheme was proposed with the support of Cencosud,
owner of the largest supermarket chain in Chile and infamously known by their
precarious labor conditions and antiunionist measures. The PRES encountered
intense resistance among social organizations and was never implemented.
5. In the case of Talca, tensions between the PRES—funded by a large holding with
real estate interests in the region—and social organizations triggered the emer-
gence of an alternative, citizen-led postdisaster participatory plan (see Tironi
2014).
6. The mobilization of entrepreneurial discourses and programs in postdisaster
reconstruction is not new. Planners deployed a similar ethos, for example, in
the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (Rozario 2007) and post-Hurricane Mitch
Honduras (Stonich 2008).
7. Ethnographies on post-Katrina New Orleans (Steinberg and Shields 2008) and
the 2004 Asian tsunami (Hastrup 2011) indicate similar patterns of affective
attachment.
8. From compadre, godfather or mate, meaning informal (and sometimes illegal)
economic or political arrangements between friends.
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Author Biography
Manuel Tironi is an assistant professor at the Instituto de Sociologı́a, Pontificia
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More specifically, in this article, I suggest that mauchos were assumed

PRES Constitución: A Political Experiment

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Producing Publics: Enactments, Counter-enactments,

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PRES Constitución can be understood as an experiment. Its participatory

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One Plan, Three Publics

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and episodes of prostitutions began to emerge in campamentos. The lack of

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Constitución, April the 16th 2010—The launching of PRES Constitución and

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In conclusion, the PRES assumed the existence of an ordinary neighbor

The citation is from the PRES’s public participation coordinator, and it

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Figure 2. PRES Constitución Casa Abierta (Elemental 2010).

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surprisingly then, as a fisherman rightly observed, ‘‘people were scared’’ of

The result was that low-income lay residents—fishermen, peasants, the

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Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MEMPHIS on December 4, 2014

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MEMPHIS on December 4, 2014

PRES Constitución. 2010b. ‘‘Plan de Participación Ciudadana.’’ Santiago, Chile.

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