Cementing Relations: The Materiality of Roads and Public Spaces in Provincial Peru

Abstract

This article sets out to analyze how concrete is implicated in the transformation of public space in provincial Peru. While concrete enhances a state's capacity to produce reliable, predictable structures, there are also significant limits in relation to its connective capacity in both the material and social domains. Ethnographic attention to the relational dynamics of concrete reveals how its promise to operate as a generic, homogeneous, and above all predictable material is constantly challenged by the instability and heterogeneity of the terrains to which it is applied. The image of power that concrete affords is thus a compromised one, as the stability and predictability of this substance is secure only insofar as it is surrounded by and embedded in specific relationships of care.

The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

“…Concrete is another universal building material with particular tactile qualities that shape ambient life. Harvey (2010) argues that in the case of road building in Peru, concrete rubbed against Andean conceptions of dehydration and vitality. Concrete was considered distinct because as a substance it is mutable but irreversibly hardens by drying (Taussig 2004), operating in an Andean region where techniques of dehydration (mummification) have been central to the stored vitality of the dead (Harvey 2010, p. 38).…”

“…The idea that an infrastructure is a language or, more usually, a set of cultural competences to be learned is explored in several works(Harvey 2010, Khan 2006, Lea & Pholerus 2010, von Schnitzler 2008, Winther 2008. Usually this notion centers around the failure of people to have "learned the language" of living in a modern way (Lea & Pholeros 2010), accusations often levied by government officials and engineers who imply that people do not know how to take care of the technologies they have.…”

The Promise of Infrastructure

“…Nevertheless, at the same time, we do not attribute to the materials of infrastructure either a primacy or an in de pen dent existence that is discrete and beyond ( human) history (Larkin, this volume). Thus, Penny Harvey (2015) points out that "the point of interest is not simply that materials always carry their own vitality (Ingold 2012) or exert a degree of autonomous force or agency (Bennett 2010), but rather that this force is never generic, nor is it simply material." Concrete, steel, copper, and the other materials of infrastructure are historical forms that emerge through and with social systems of ideology, meaning, and imagination.…”

How to Mend a Fragmented City: a Critique of ‘Infrastructural Solidarity'

“…The TransMilenio system and other infrastructures are routinely abstracted into forms because it is useful and even elegant to do so, and because we are conditioned to think of complex technological systems in terms of their most iconic and visible parts (their ‘architectures of circulation'). In this sense, what Larkin () has called the ‘poetic' mode of infrastructure, the way in which technologies such as road systems (Harvey, ) can move us emotionally, impacts upon urban theorists as much as it does upon urban subjects. Little else, I submit, can account for the ubiquity in urban theory of the democratic metaphor of the open, interconnected city of encounter and social mix, and the relative paucity of attention to what would be required to produce and reproduce these ideal forms.…”