URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT

COURSE: Integrated Infrastructure Planning

READING ASSIGNMENT 2

Summary of Relational infrastructures in post-colonial urban worlds Abdou Maliq

Simone

Prepared By: Jerusalem Sintayehu

ID. No: - ECSU2102647

Submitted to: - Professor Samson k.

Jan, 2023
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

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 Summary
AbdouMaliq Simone’s “Relational Infrastructure in Postcolonial Urban Worlds” is a book
chapter in Infrastructural Lives, and provides a broader context for understanding the art of urban
living with emphasis on adjustment, impromptu innovation (or “jugaad“), improvisation with focus on
understanding the negotiated and lived experiences of individuals that inhabit these postcolonial urban
“worlds.”
Simone’s bottom line appears to be this: contingent and contested approaches to the establishment
of relational-material infrastructure reflects the circumstances — and interpretations of those
circumstances — as individual attempt to anticipate each other and mitigate risks while gaining access
to relevant information and associated opportunities. The net result, we learn, is incremental
investment — a “pay-as-you-go” strategy for many people — as they incessantly repair worn-down
social and material infrastructure while also being “captivated” — or, in Simone’s terms, captivated
captures the notion that individuals will relate to and metabolize their infrastructural surroundings “as-
if” those surroundings were otherwise, seeing opportunities, say, in a chance relationship or perhaps
seeing an old tire as a group of sandals that have not yet been freed from their previous form. The
outcome appears to be that this results in a good deal of waiting for opportunities to be revealed and,
thus, their infrastructural surrounds appear — from the outside — to remain in a semi-permanent state
of unfixity or perpetually in an interim phase.

Introduction: relational infrastructures

Urban infrastructure has become a major focus of recent debates on the rapid urbanisation of our
planet. Some researchers have been made to examine the nature, politics and experience of
contemporary urban lives as everyday infrastructural experience. Infrastructural Lives thus examines
how geographies, rhythms, politics, economies, cultures, natures and power relations constitute the
everyday urban experience in the production and reproduction of urban infrastructures. A focus on the
everyday is a powerful means of revealing the rhythms that in large part constitute urban life, in
equality and change. The everyday is both a key domain through which practices are regulated and
normalized as well as an arena for negotiation, resistance and potential for difference. The main
starting point is the social infra-structures that residents develop and use to make viable forms of
inhabitation, Simone identifies „relational infrastructures‟ as critical here, i.e the relations that
constitute the constraints and possibilities of inhabitation.

These relations enable movement, and „articulated in various forms in order to construct circulations
of bodies, resources, affect and information’ Simone’s emphasis on infrastructures as relational is not
itself new it is a position taken up in different ways by a range of work on infrastructure that
emphasizes the mutual imbrications of technology, What is novel here is Simone’s emphasis building
on his previous work on how everyday interactions render social infrastructures as anticipatory
relations that involve forms of speculation and risk as people seek to consolidate or expand on
opportunities. For the „users‟ of these social infrastructures, There are connections between Simone
and Rao’s approaches and other work on how everyday infrastructures are known and adjusted,
speculated about and differently put to work. This chapter of the book raises a straightforward but
important question: what is infrastructure? There are at least two critical concerns here that the book
has pointed out.

 The first concern is the need to consider how experience and perception condition how
infrastructure is known and lived.
 The second concern identified in the book is to resist viewing infrastructure as a straight
forward thing.

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In the so-called majority urban world of today, the trajectories of change some-time seem univocal, at
others, all over the place. Memories of national imaginaries of slights and wounds, power grabs and
nagging liberations both harden and fade away. Speeds of transformation are deceptive in their
manifestations. The chipping away of residential and commercial districts built up over many years to
accommodate a great diversity of activities and people produces multi furious dispositions different
gradations of gentrification, renewal, decay, resurgence, and dissipation. The specifications of land
use, the conditions of tenure, the financial procedures for accessing housing, and the calibrations of
labour markets are structural devices that generate a specific framework of possibilities.

Residents do not simply adhere to norms and rules either as prescriptions for action or as frameworks
for deciding what is viable or not. In part, this is because what those norms and rules consist of is
usually defined in majority terms are distillations of specific interests of the powerful. They become
instruments of silencing in face of the “weight” that norms carry as the crystallization of the best way
of doing things, and where refusal of adherence is a judgment (bad) of the individual who refuses
rather than a judgment of the norms themselves.

Mimetic zones
In variegated neoliberal urban conditions, probabilities, accountancy, and the stochastic modelling of
risk are the things that really matter not only because they are the instruments that work with
large assemblages of data and uncertainty to specify the positions, the hedges, and the arbitrage that
are critical for any urban economy, but also because they are the seemingly proficient instruments of
dissimulation they cover up for the fact that no one knows quite what is going on. This efficacy is
derived from the way they make everything count, everything accountable; the ways in which large
volumes of raw data can be scrutinized in order to establish the visibilities, the patterns that are
worthy of being discerned, that will constitute the locus of intervention

In this process, the “devices” associated with the incursions and re-compositions engineered by global
capital such as speculative finance, cut-and-paste modularization of spatial products, trans local
configurations of production mechanisms, and the privileging of surface manoeuvres emptied of
historical reference also are appropriated by collective actors as a means to substantiate practices of
creating space and opportunities that ensue from different logics and aspirations. Under certain urban
conditions, residents of lesser means and subject to the arbitrary constrictions on anticipating the
future due to race, ethnicity or other attributes have often used the very bodies of household and kin to
hedge against uncertainty. Spreading out across different locations, institutions, careers and
exposures, households extend themselves across different sources of opportunity.

Practices of the incremental

Inhabitation in urban postcolonial worlds has depended on practices of incrementalism, where
residents seem to add on to build environments, livelihoods, and social networks "a little bit"
at a time. The incremental has long been a feature of sites and services programs where basic
demarcations of plots and skeletal services were provided that would be "filled in" over time through
the initiatives and resources of the poor themselves. These increments could be viewed as stages
of some larger goal. Instead of committing resources and efforts to the realization of a "complete"
project, these increments are instantiated to elicit particular kinds of attention and recognition.

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Residences may be added onto or altered, small financial investments may be made in selling items
in front of the house or in a wide range of other commercial ventures, and investments of
time and effort may be made in running various social welfare or political programs as a means of
testing waters, indicating that someone is "on their way" somewhere or available for subsequent
investments. The interest in eliciting attention and recognition is not so much to issue a signal that one
has "arrived" at a particular status or destination, but rather to make "something" happen without a
clear notion about what will happen as a result. The point is not so much to consolidate a position that
then has to be defended, but to communicate that movement is underway as well as to launch a
vehicle through which an individual or household can move.

Temporal increments and acts of captivation

Looking at the situation of residents across the postcolonial urban world today, it is possible to
construe them of a large sense of disappointment. All of the effort that urban majorities have made
disentangling and individuating themselves in order to become eligible for different inclusions,
access, participation, security, and accumulation often produces a sense of dissipation a sense that
"this is nowhere," and that it is too late to do anything about it. If this is the case that disappointment
has not yet been incorporated as a debilitating recognition of inadequacy and bad calculations
then what kinds of practices have residents relied upon to continue to produce viable spaces of
inhabitation? It may be enough for now, but as the city grows more complicated, competitive, and
opaque in terms of the powers that drive it, anticipations of change always had to be incorporated
into decisions about what to do and whom to do it with. This is a sense of the incremental, of
forging moments of accomplishment and assessment, and then moving on. Especially in cities
where it becomes increasingly difficult to know the widening range of factors and places that affect
what it is possible for one to do. It is important to have a sense of timing, not to settle in too much
with a given way of doing things and with a specific set of cooperates.

Infrastructure and urban life

Infrastructure is a complex surround. Urban residents put together and are themselves put
together through a continuous interchange of materials and the expressions these interchanges
make possible. These are expressions of physical exertion, visible arrays, and symbolic
arrangements all of which constitute possibilities and constraints for what can be done. Infrastructure
exerts a force not simply in the materials and energies it avails, but also the way it attracts
people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capacities. Thus, the distinction between
infrastructure and sociality is fluid and pragmatic rather than definitive. People work on things to
work on each other, as these things work on them. The long-term stability of the spaces in which the
intricate economies described in this chapter take place the land, built environment and local
enterprises will probably require various forms of corporatization. The collective choreography of
highly differentiated transactions will have to also take on consolidations able to at least slow down
the onslaught of big development and speculation. These are all technical devices that have been put
to work to concretize the aspirations of low- and middle-income residents across the cities of the
majority world.

Reference

olga saprykina (2003), Transport infrastructure optimization method based on mimetic algorism

simon Buckingham shu (2012), Mimetic: an infrastructure for meeting memory

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