Negotiating networked infrastructural inequalities: Governance, electricity access, and space in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In cities of the Global South, universal physical access to networked infrastructures, such as electricity and water, is often presented as enabling the reduction of social and spatial divisions. Whereas most of the discussions in these cities have focused on the obstacles to networked infrastructure expansion, little attention has been paid to the increased universalization of the physical electricity network in several Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian cities. This article unpacks the discussions around the modern infrastructural ideal and its local reshaping by building on the case of Rio de Janeiro, which has achieved universal grid electricity coverage, but where strong urban inequalities remain. By focusing on electricity grid management in favelas, this article analyzes how infrastructural inequalities emerge within the network. It suggests that, in order to understand how urban inequalities are reproduced or mitigated through networked infrastructure, it is important to consider the governance aspects of managing infrastructure. It develops this argument by focusing on the multi-level and heterogeneous spaces of infrastructure governance, including both national and institutionalized arenas, and local everyday practices between local actors on the ground. This analysis shows how networked infrastructural inequalities emerge from negotiation processes in which the fragmented nature of the urban environment is embedded. Through this analysis, the article contributes to current discussions on the urban geography and techno-politics of infrastructure by highlighting the negotiated nature of infrastructural inequalities beyond the modern infrastructural ideal.

Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi

“…Attention to the simultaneous material and socio-political dimensions of urban infrastructure has been effective in broadening conceptualizations of governance to include an assemblage of both the human (institutions, politics, social relations) and the non-human (biophysical processes, environmental conditions, and unruly pipes and pumps) (McFarlane, 2008: 348). Research within this "infrastructural turn" shows how the materiality of infrastructure itself becomes an organizing force of governance, as infrastructural breakdown, disruptions, fractures, and fragments emerge from and shape social power relations, state power, and the regulation of key resources and services in the city (Amin and Cirolia, 2018;Anand, 2015;Pilo', 2021;Silver, 2015).…”

Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South

“…Negotiations and activism over water infrastructure are equally as important in this sphere. Here as elsewhere (see Pilo', 2021) infrastructural negotiation becomes a tool through which governable publics are reproduced. Infrastructural gains or losses may act as a material indicator of communities' enmeshment with systems of control, so that the ability to access or obtain such infrastructures or the loss thereof is indicative of both the citizenship claims of the public (see also Anand, 2017;Lemanski, 2020), but also the obligations of those who govern.…”

“…This includes research that is attentive to local histories and everyday practices and processes that do not necessarily fit received concepts in urban studies, and often intersect with, supersede, or modify and situate processes of capitalist urbanization. Studies in this SI on urban electricity (Pilo', 2021), water (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020;Alves, 2019;Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021;Truelove, 2021;Pihljak et al, 2021) and waste (Schindler et al, 2021) bring a situated approach to everyday urban governance, giving attention to local institutions, histories, diverse infrastructural configurations and multi-scalar power relations.…”

“…The original research in this SI demonstrates that "actually existing" infrastructural governance involves complex assemblages of human (economics, politics, institutions, social relations) and non-human (biophysical processes, material decay, environmental factors) associations (see also McFarlane, 2008: 348). Thus, our understanding of how cities are governed in the everyday must increasingly account for actors, practices and processes at registers that have too often received little scholarly attention: the electricians who shape patterns of inequality within the network (Pilo', 2021), the informal strongman who regulates local wells in particular neighborhoods (Truelove, 2019), and water governance actors who act as both the state and its outside at different points in time (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020;Pihljak et al, 2021).…”

“…Everyday practices that appropriate and territorialize the city (Fenster, 2005) create places where the influence of actors may wax and wane temporally or situationally (Palat Narayanan, 2019;Schindler, 2014;Truelove, 2021). Pilo' (2021) demonstrates quite clearly the ways in which materiality of infrastructures and their performance represent complex arrangements and negotiations of socio-spatial norms and the "negotiated order" of the city. In Rio de Janerio's favelas, territorialized control by gangs and militias was in part reproduced and asserted by preventing the electric company from entering the favelas to cut off illegal or non-paying connections.…”