Dwelling Urbanism: City Making through Corporeal Practice in Mexico City 9783035618310, 9783035618228

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Bauwelt Fundamente 166

Edited by Elisabeth Blum Jesko Fezer Günther Fischer Angelika Schnell

Christian von Wissel Dwelling Urbanism City Making through Corporeal Practice in Mexico City

Bauverlag

Birkhäuser

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Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

1 Infrastructural Practice and the Making of City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 1.1 Practicing the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

28

1.2 Social Practice, Body Space and Materiality as Mediator . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

38

1.3 Making and Thinking Space through the Practicing Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

42

2 Citying, Mexico City and Studying the Practice of City Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 2.1 Making Sense of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52

2.2 The Case of Urbanising Mexico City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59

2.3 Studying the Materiality of Space and the Corporeality of Practice . . . . .

68

3

Providing Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

3.1 Infrastructures That Live: Doña Margo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85

3.2 Handling Movements: Eduardo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

90

3.3 Forging Opportunities: Ivan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95

3.4 Facing Insecurity: Margarita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

99

3.5 Labour of Conjunction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

4

Growing Houses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

4.1 Breaking Ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 4.2 Growing Custom-made . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 4.3 Investing the Living Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 4.4 Collectivity Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 4.5 Labour of Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 4.6 Paper-Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 4.7 The Proof of Growth Is in Houses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

5

Riding the Highway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

5.1 Wrestling with Buses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 5.2 Riding Buses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 5.3 Managing Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 5.4 Labour of Travel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

6 City Making through Corporeal Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 6.1 Dwelling Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 6.2 The Plasticity of Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 6.3 Informality as a Form of Urbanisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 6.4 Re-Rethinking Urban Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 6.5 Making Centrality and Its Movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

The residential estate Provenzal del Bosque.

The self-built settlement Colonia Antorcha.

The highway and country road.

The urban development (fraccionamiento) Sierra Hermosa.

Introduction

This book aims at rethinking the becoming of cities from the perspective of their corporeal making. It does so by delving into the thick of urban living in Mexico City, uncovering the everyday, infrastructural practices of self-made urbanites when building their houses, creating jobs on the street and forging and riding opportunities through space and time, in short, when making their living and their city with what they have at hand. We encounter this inventiveness of city-making on quiet neighbourhood streets in extensive housing estates, on the dusty building sites of self-help community organisations, and on the highways that tie these, and other, locations together and into the region of an urban-urbanising realm. As we meet the everyday makers of city from these sites it will become apparent how corporeal practice constitutes the urban, how it sediments into material form, produces and adapts houses and, in all of this, grows the life-bearing and life-creating infrastructure of the process we call city. This I describe as dwelling urbanism, as the making of city in corporeal practice, which entails also a specific knowing of the city, one that can be captured by the verb citying, rooted in consequential ­socio-material making. Inside Urban Becoming Víctor and I meet at one of the streets to the rear of the Sierra Hermosa development located in Tecámac, State of Mexico, in the northern stretch of the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico (ZMVM ). He is selling fruit and vegetables from the back of his van, attending a few customers and waiting a little while before packing everything up again in order to move on. “This neighbourhood is only about seven years old,” he tells me in a moment of rest. “Here, neighbourhoods grow very fast.” Our eyes pass over the row of houses that mark the limit of the development and out onto the fields and other estates and emerging settlements at the distance. Surely, what characterises the urbanising realm of Mexico City is its uneven spatial development as well 17

as the extraordinary pace of this transformation: the area we are overlooking in 2010 will be covered by the building works of the new residential estate Provenzal del Bosque only a year later, partially inhabited after two years and ‘finished’ – if that can ever be said to be possible – with its approximately 3,000 dwelling units in 2014. In other words, what Victor and I are witnessing at the very beginning of the research for this book speaks both of an urban becoming, and of the centrality of this becoming to the wider urban process: it is precisely here that global urbanisation materialises in the form of ever more houses, neighbourhoods and streets that will inevitably shape things to come on our planet. This is why the multiplicity and swift changes of the socio-­material conditions that Víctor and I behold in this scene are the first ground on which this book unfolds. The second ground is laid by considering Víctor’s work as a one-man mobile grocery shop. Víctor has found a way of turning the peripheral position of the neighbourhood – and his own position and mobility within it – into a business idea, providing what is missing on a makeshift basis. The way he came to his work, he tells me, was by searching for opportunities with, and within, what he had at hand: “There are no jobs here. So you have to look for a way to make one, you have to be creative in your searching [hay que buscarle].” This searching by doing is a key inventive practice when it comes to making ends meet in contexts of urban becoming. What Víctor found was how to introduce himself into the situation as the means by which to respond to its structural deficiencies. Now he employs himself as infrastructure, as a live/living infrastructure by which he participates in rolling out and s­ ustaining the city-in-becoming. It is for this kind of engagement that Abdou­Maliq Simone (2004b, 410–11) introduces the notion of “people as infrastructure”, to describe a making of city in terms of cityness, that is, in terms of an active and immediate making of consequential conjunctions (see ­Simone 2010; Sassen 2010). At the same time, I propose shifting the focus even further, thus taking into view not only people as infrastructure but their precise doing in infrastructural ways, as a verb. This is because I argue that particular attention needs to be paid to the body at work when enacting itself in infrastructural ways, bringing into focus both the corporeal labour that 18

infrastructural practice implies and how the making of cities is essentially a practice of citying. The third ground of this book becomes apparent in the questions that ­Víctor and I pose ourselves while contemplating the material and social becoming of the city – becoming both around us and through our actions. What understanding of city is there to be derived from Víctor’s particular emplacement and intervention in the unfolding space and time of Mexico City? In the ­following I will argue that turning to infrastructural corporeal practices ­a llows rethinking urban becoming from the viewpoint of those living in and with its social and material circumstances. Urbanising environments, then, come into view not as crisis or problem but as the matter (material ground and concern) of life lived – a perspective that can help to address the critical questions that planetary urbanisation poses not only to the prospect of cities but also to how we make sense of them. The way we see cities relates ­d irectly to how we allow ourselves to address them with policies and actions, as David Harvey (1996, 38) has asserted; yet seeing cities with the eyes of those who, on the basis of daily practice, participate directly in their becoming still poses significant challenges to governance and planning. How do people see and feel the city when making it with and through their bodies? Seeing cities through the lens of their corporeal making contributes to this discussion by introducing what I call dwelling urbanism; a notion I derive from the anthropological p ­ erspective of dwelling Tim Ingold (2000) uses to frame the world-making e ­ ngagement of human beings in and with their environment. Making and Thinking City Through Infrastructural Practice Rethinking the urban through corporeal city-making entails the need to closely review the practices that we can speak of with regard to their capacity to make city. This is why I commence my argument by turning to the n ­ otion of doing infrastructure. Infrastructures, both physical and practised, are key to describing the working of cities and their sociality, exerting and channelling movements of all kinds (see Simone 2015, 375–76). They are also key to what it means to make 19

a living in cities, which becomes particularly apparent under those conditions characterised by a lack of physical components, as is the case in urban peripheries (see Amin 2014, 143). In this light, practising oneself as infrastructure, I argue, is an important means by which dwellers of urban-urbanising lifeworlds make centrality by making connections. By inserting their own movement into the movement of others, as Simone puts it, people engage in “incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections”. This is how cities are made through direct engagement with the social and material constituents of the environment. Highlighting the corporeality at work in such making, the findings in this book describe three types of infrastructural city-making labour. These are a labour of conjunction, a labour of ­presence and a labour of travel. Beyond the local, turning to infrastructural corporeal practices also responds to contemporary processes that impact on social relations far beyond the context of urban-urbanising Mexico. Arguably, what people accomplish on the streets of this and other cities in Latin America and the global South is at the forefront of a global condition of uncertainty. Fritz Böhle and Margit Weihrich (2010, 14), for example, point to how social actors who face a condition of advancing individualisation, when social institutions “lose their action-guiding and problem-solving power” and “cognitive planning reaches its limits”, increasingly need to accomplish their integration into society on their own; and in doing so, the authors continue, individual subjects increasingly rely on e ­ mploying their “ability to establish fluid orders based on the body” (own translation). From this perspective, individual corporeal practice in general ­acquires infrastructural qualities and becomes a key resource for dealing with “uncertainty, ambiguity and insecurity” (ibid., 11, own translation),1 far beyond any urban context or the particular urbanising context of this book. At the same time, Elmar Altvater (2005, 54) discusses infrastructural practices – albeit by shifting the focus towards the notion of the informal and without engaging with corporeality  – as the violent “expression of structural adjustment to global market forces”. He reveals informalisation to be a global project of governmentality that makes people circumvent manmade 20

constraints in order not to be excluded from society (ibid.; see also Altvater and Mahnkopf 2003). Critically engaging with informality and with the entanglement of the formal and the informal, therefore, remains a recurrent theme in the analysis of infrastructural corporeal practices, and is picked up throughout the book. Last but not least, I argue that infrastructural corporeal practice also entails a particular way of thinking space and the city. I do so by drawing on Paul Carter’s notion of “material thinking” (2004) by which he describes a coming to know the world rooted in the body and accomplished by handling the world’s materials in practice. City-thinking, too, is a practice of the body, a coming to know with one’s hands and feet of the position and fields of action and possibility one has within the wider urban context. As mentioned already in the encounter with Víctor, this perspective on cities apprehends them in light of their cityness, that is, on the ground of people’s own corporeal making of c­ onsequential connections. This notion of cityness, finally, is mobilised predominantly as an analytical category in, or associated with, the global South.2 It is explicitly regarded as depicting what the Western notion of urbanity has difficulty seeing (Sassen 2010, 14) – or, for that matter, what Western urban theory (and politics) rejects seeing because it haunts its attempts to regulate the unruly unfolding of social space (Simone 2010, 3, 8). Bringing cityness into view can therefore be understood also as a project of “cognitive justice” in the sense proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2013, 731–32; 2014), that is, as bringing to the fore those epistemologies that have been systematically suppressed. Likewise, turning to cityness contributes to a global project of theory production that fosters “disrupting the narrow vision of a (still) somewhat imperialist approach to cities” in which cities of the global South are kept outside the rubric of those cities in which theory is built (Robinson 2002, 532). Turning to infrastructural practices of urban becoming in the global South, and addressing their achievements not as some kind of “not yet cities” (ibid.) but, instead, as ordinary (Robinson 2006) ways of doing city, of citying, can contribute to understanding how city dwellers worldwide make and think city in corporeal practice. 21

Outline of Chapters Following this brief introduction, chapter 1 sets out the theoretical foundations for the arguments of this book. It asks how to address the city through practice, and its inhabitants as the practitioners of their own and the city’s ­u rban becoming. This comprises turning to inventive urban practices, reconsidering the notion of informality and introducing the conceptions of people as infrastructure and cityness. The chapter furthermore dedicates attention to the basic elements of practice theory, body space and the role of materiality and corporeality in both. It closes by discussing the particular dwelling perspective that is grown through making, and the thinking that arises from handling materials in practice. Chapter 2 explores how to make sense of cities in light of ongoing urbanisation and of the wholesale transformation of the planet that this urbanisation entails. The chapter foregrounds the importance that lies in turning to urban peripheries as decisive spaces of urban becoming, engages with the history of making sense of such urban-urbanising territories and explores the theoretical ground on which to shift the perspective from city to citying. The chapter introduces the case study sites and provides the rationale for their selection. The book takes Mexico City, and above all its north-north-eastern peri-urban realm, as the starting point for the discussion. In this environment of urban becoming the subtle ways of making-do by which people forge themselves and the city are not only strongly present but are also highly visible in the emerging social and material urbanising space-time. In addition, chapter 2 outlines the mix of methods employed for this research. Cities are surely made by people – but how can we actually reveal this in analytical ways and bring into view the corporeal-material implications of such city-making? To answer this question I briefly elaborate on the significance of visual, sensory and creative research as methods that resonate both with studying the corporeality of practice and with doing so inside the urban socio-­ material (­u rbanising) world. Chapter 3 is the first of three empirical chapters. In it I follow self-employed practitioners of the streets into their ways of forging opportunities out of their local social and material circumstances. From street-vending to on-site 22

recycling, the employed practices of these self-made (informal) businessmen and women are interrogated with regard to how they come to make and think city through particular forms of what I call a labour of conjunction. In this chapter we meet Doña Margo converting a former bus stand, her time, herself, her family and her neighbourhood into the resources of her business. We meet Ivan forging opportunities with his working body out of the rubble heaped up by execution errors in the (formal) production of housing. And we accompany Eduardo and his wife in handling movement at their juice stand in order to move along with the changing movements of their neighbourhood. Last but not least we meet Margarita as she shoulders all alone the risks of ­i nfrastructural practice, which reminds us of the hardship that living with uncertainty can also entail. Chapter 4 turns the attention to the maker-residents of progressive houses that are either self-built or self-adapted to personal as well as collective needs. Again, this making of houses is interrogated with regard to the labour it implies, that is, with regard to a labour of presence that describes a second aspect of the corporal practice that lies in city-making. In particular, this chapter ­v isits the case of the restaurateur Santa who employs her house as the active infrastructure by which to enact her infrastructural self. It also engages with the city-making labours accomplished by the settlers of the informal settlement Colonia Antorcha. These settlers not only have to build their houses and the streets of their neighbourhood with their own hands, and to demand the provision of urban infrastructure in collective demonstrations, but need to secure also their right to stay and to remain part of the group by making sure that their names and plot numbers are registered correctly and stay on ephemeral registration lists over time – an activity which I call paper-work and which in itself is accomplished only by the laborious work of the present body while, at the same time, allowing the social movement organisation Antorcha to keep its members in place by establishing the rule of a permanent state of uncertainty. The last of the empirical chapters, chapter 5, turns to the road, directing its ­attention to practices related to commuting and to socio-materially enacting the highway as actually commutable. In this chapter, different expressions of 23

a labour of travel are analysed, once again, with regard to what kind of city they make and allow to be thought, and how they do so out of corporeal practice. First, a bus-stop made by nothing else than stopping buses is analysed with regard to the labour – as well as the dangers and uneven accessibility for men and women – implied in flagging down and boarding buses along a stretch of an intra-urban highway. The experience of riding the bus is then reviewed with regard to the bodily perspective it enables over the self and the city flying by the side window. Last but not least, this chapter turns to those urbanites who make the highway their resource and opportunity by employing themselves as one of its acting constituents. The labour of the checker (checador) and kicker (pateador) is essential for making the highway work as the means by which commuters access the wider urban region when aiming to extend beyond the local. They help regulate the flow of buses, facilitate the coming together of buses and passengers and prepare the physical space itself in order to best fulfil its functions. Hence, these two roadside practitioners accentuate how the bus stop made by stopping buses emerges as the working of practiced cityness. The chapter closes by discussing the thinking of city that is grown by accessing it, overcoming its distances, navigating its spatial unevenness and practicing its visual comprehension, all of which are accomplished while being on the move (both boarding and riding buses). Chapter 6, finally, describes what I call dwelling urbanism: a way of making and thinking city that grows in/from lived engagement with the world and thus entails a distinct perception rooted in socio-material, relational practice. Based on the findings of the empirical chapters, I propose seeing the city/citying as the working of infrastructural practices, as a verb, while at the same time uncovering the corporeal-material implications of this relational becoming of city and its practitioners. Drawing on the bus stop from chapter 5, I first discuss how this occurrence of practice also triggers reconsidering the nature of architecture and urban form as rooted in a double plasticity of space (see Malabou 2000, 2008). I then turn to considering informality as a form of urbanisation and challenge the formality-informality nexus. Thirdly, I engage in a dialogue with the theory of urban planning. Following the implications of my argument I propose rethinking the thinking and acting of urban 24

planning towards outlining planning as a handling of movement on the move. In that course I discuss the potential of dropping (fixed) plans in planning in favour of strategic practice, plural activism and care. Accordingly, the book closes without closing, opening up once more the discussion so as to consider a ­labour of citizenship by which to achieve a more complete participation of urban practitioners in making centrality and its movements.

25

Notes

1

The authors define these three categories as follows: “Uncertainty [Ungewissheit] is characterised by the condition that one does not know what parameters are relevant for making a decision; in situations of ambiguity [Uneindeutigkeit] it remains open what goal to set for oneself; and acting under conditions of insecurity [Unsicherheit] means that one does not know what those will do of whose actions the success of ones own action depends.” (own translation).

2

Sassen (2010) for example refers to ‘immigrant vendors’ on the streets of New York.

26

1 Infrastructural Practice and the Making of City

27

The aim of this first chapter is to lay out the theoretical grounds for embarking on this book’s journey. Accordingly, I will discuss insights on how people accomplish their lives in urban-urbanising conditions and bring them together with our knowing about the corporeality and materiality of practice-space interactions. More specifically, I will focus on the inherent perspective that inhabitants of cities have on processes of urbanisation; introduce a body of literature on doing life in conditions of urban becoming that developed in response to Mexico City’s urban growth; and carve out the dimension of physical effort entailed in practices accomplished with the body in socio-material space. In terms of outcomes, this engagement with the theory leads to putting forward the notion of infrastructural practice on the ground of the concept of cityness as well as in light of discussions on informality. In addition, it fosters identifying how everyday urban corporeal-material practice is essentially also a way of thinking our own and the city’s becoming by engaging with its socio-materiality. Together, this city-making and city-thinking through corporeal practice builds up to introducing and discussing in chapter 6, at the end of the journey, the notion of dwelling urbanism. Its concrete expressions, multiple forms of corporeal labour and implications for our understanding of cities as processes of practice, as citying, will be analysed and discussed throughout the chapters that lie in between.

1.1

Practicing the City

In order to delve into the thick of city life, I will first review a body of work on Mexico which has studied ways of inhabiting the urban process in conditions of marginalisation. These ways of doing with unfavourable urban circumstances I describe as inventive practices of urban becoming. I do so by drawing on Michel de Certeau’s study of the “invention of the everyday” through an “art of practice” (de Certeau 1988).1 Focusing on this possibility of everyday invention, I am deliberately placing the individual practitioner of space at the centre of the analysis. In this regard, Alicia Lindón (1999, 27–28) highlights that, contrary to the Marxist term alienation, which favours the study of the 28

everyday through the lens of structures that impose their force on how lives are lived, invention is a term rooted in a phenomenological perspective that foregrounds the “creative capability of the individual” (own translation). Inventive practices of urban becoming The unprecedented influx of rural migrants into Mexico City during the 1950s to 1980s was accompanied by much academic analysis. For the purpose of this book’s argument, however, I will focus only on those works that addressed the everyday lives of these new city dwellers. In addition, I will read these studies in light of their more or less implicit descriptions of practices of urban becoming, of the inventive ways of doing by which people in conditions of poverty, marginality and rural-urban migration make their (new) urban lives. In The Children of Sanchez (1963), Oscar Lewis focuses on the multiple methods employed by family members in order to overcome circumstances of ­scarcity and hardship. In doing so, he identifies poverty also to be a “design for living” (ibid., xxiv), emphasising by this the “resilience and resourcefulness of the poor”, in the words of Harvey and Reed (1996), who sought to rehabilitate Lewis’ work, which over the years had been criticised for supposedly “blaming the victims of poverty for their poverty”. Much to the contrary, Lewis draws attention to how “[f]requent buying of small quantities […] as the need arises”, as well as pawning, borrowing, recycling and the organisation of collective credit mechanisms (tandas) help mitigate and improve precarious (urban) lives (Lewis 1963, xxvi). As “artful everyday tactics” – to borrow an expression from de Certeau (1988) – these ways of doing with their particular inventiveness for making a living in cities and thus for interfering in cities by making connections, resurface time and again in the infrastructural practices under examination in this research. Twelve years after Lewis, Larissa A. de Lomnitz, in her work How Do The Marginalised Survive? (2011 [1975]), describes how people in conditions of marginalisation establish “networks of exchange” by which they circulate goods, services and, above all, personal favours among relatives and neighbours in order to “positively resolve the problem of adaptation in a ­hostile urban environment” (ibid., 25–26, own translation). These networks of exchange 29

speak already of practices of collective integration into social lifeworlds, as I will discuss in chapters 3 and 4 – albeit by focusing specifically on their corporeality. Lomnitz, furthermore, frames marginality as the sum of economic, cultural and physical distance from the city while nevertheless being subjected to its structures (ibid., 22). To this, Janice Perlman (1979, 91) adds that the term marginality blurs the complexity of centre-periphery relations because the position of distance from the modern, formal economy that it ­describes is precisely how the marginalised are integrated into the system on a precarious basis.2 This discussion, too, will come to the fore in several moments of analysis throughout this book. A third study of importance for our topic is Wayne Cornelius’ work (1975) on how the urban poor are engaging in relational processes of political apprenticeship in order to either assimilate into or manipulate the system of urban governance. In the course of his analysis, Cornelius points to the decisive role played by the urban context (ibid., 4). Much of the differences in political formation among neighbourhoods he explains as variations in group consciousness based on distinct social and political structures and forms of organisation as well as levels of integration into the metropolitan complex.3 Based on these variables, the author distinguishes specific “differential opportunity structure[s]” of each neighbourhood, which he defines as the “range and frequency of opportunities for political involvement to which people have access by virtue of their residence in specific communities.” (ibid., 133). Importantly for the context of the present research, Cornelius’ structures of opportunities combine material, practised and imagined aspects of the urban: the socio-material conditions, the active assessment of needs and threats and the quality of expectations that a given group allows itself to articulate (ibid., 226–230). In other words, what people do with the city – and how they come to make city by making themselves (see Harvey 2008, 23) – is tied to what their (partly self-made) urban context allows them to think they can do. Hence Cornelius’ work points already to how city-thinking is inscribed in city-making practices and vice versa. Last but not least, in Housing by People, John Turner (1976) draws out the ­d ifferences between what he calls the “supportive shack”, accomplished in a local and self-determined housing system, and the “oppressive house” of the 30

social housing industries provided through “pyramidal structures and centralizing technologies” from above (ibid., 37, 51ff.). Making this distinction, Turner reassesses the value of housing, concluding that the cost-benefit balance is more favourable in self-help housing due to the higher degree of freedom of decision over the use of financial resources and the ability to cover part of the costs in kind (ibid., 79–80). Self-built housing does something for its occupants instead of simply being something for them: it acts as a resource and activates other resources like people’s own handiwork and the inventive use and recycling of materials (ibid., 51ff., 96–97). How this is so, and how this is accomplished in corporeal labour, I will discuss in chapter 4. Turner’s study, nevertheless, is to be regarded as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it helped to see physical houses as active and responsive devices employed by resident-builders in order to support their survival. On the other hand, by identifying ‘the enemy’ in the state – instead of a more qualified acknowledgment that it is a particular mode of urban and architectural planning rather than welfare as such that can cause social housing to be a burden to its inhabitants – he opened the door to co-opt auto-construction into a neoliberal agenda: Turner’s study influenced the World Bank adopting a policy of aided self-help and has therefore been criticised for being implicit in a governance regime that overtly transfers urbanisation costs and risks to dwellers (see Harris 2003). In any case, Eckhart Ribbeck (2002, 48) reveals that self-building is “efficient yet not spectacular” when it comes to providing adequate room with adequate means for its residents. Reconsidering informality What I have introduced so far as inventive practices of urban becoming is frequently addressed also under the notion of informal activities, a notion originally shaped in response to predominantly Latin American experiences (see Varley 2013). The concept, however, needs careful examination as to what it depicts and how it is being used (ibid., 2013; see also Lombard 2012, 32–33). Doing so allows us to bring into view the specific practices mobilised under its label as more than barely being the means of survival of those in want or struggling with their urban-urbanising conditions. 31

Urban informality is predominantly interpreted in three ways. First, it is ­regarded as a deficiency of planning and “lack of proper urban policies” that demands eradication and prevention through the promotion of strong local institutions (UN -Habitat 2013, 6). From this perspective, informality is labelled a ‘problem’ at the same time as a positive vision of the democratic state is upheld as something that needs to be extended into those territories that nestle on its margins. Second, informality is often understood as resistance, mobilising, for example, the connotation of an urbanism that is in its essence anti-state (see Varley 2013, 7, challenging this perspective). Third, urban informality is regarded as a deliberate form of governance that produces “grey spaces” and populations that are “neither integrated nor eliminated” (Yiftachel 2009a, 88, 92). In this sense, Huamán Herrera (2014, 71) frames the informal as an unjust and violent “business model” based on irregularity while “generating multiple economic and political gains” (own translation). In any case, a growing number of authors, such as Altvater (2005), regard the sphere of the informal to be decisive for future urban development in both the global South and North. The argument they make is not solely quantitative – half of the built-up area of Mexico City’s metropolitan area, for that matter, has its origin in informal settlements (CONAPO 2000, 41–65) – but even more analytical and political. Edgar Pieterse (2008, 3), in this regard, sees the benefit of engaging with the informal register in its calling for “a more provisional approach before one pronounces on either what is going on, or what must be done to improve the quality of life and freedom in a city”. So what exactly is urban informality? Framed either economically (as activity to provide for a livelihood: e.g. Soto 1990), spatially (as a distinct type of settlement: e.g. Brillembourg et al. 2005; for Mexico e.g. Aguilar and Santos 2011), or denoting a particular building process (e.g. Turner 1976), what underpins all these conceptions is placing a legal framework at the heart of their respective definitions. In so far as informality is employed to speak of the production of houses this includes making ownership the focus of attention (for Mexico City see Cruz Rodríguez 2001; Duhau and Schteingart 1997; see also Wigle 2010). Other contributions centre on material form as the common denominator, albeit doing so at the risk of homogenising local specificities and 32

reducing the phenomenon to a stereotypical image of the ‘favela’, a simplification that Varley (2013, 8) rightly criticises. Equally reductionist in its scope is locating the informal ‘outside’ of the formal when rather it needs to be regarded, in de Soto’s (1990 [1987]) words, as an “exceptional legal system”, placed not against but rather continuously intersecting with state rule. And Marie Huchzermeyer (2004) adds to this the question of whether it is the “contravention of laws” that drives people into informal activities, as de Soto had it, or rather the “lack of rights” – a question I will pick up in chapters 4 and 6 together with Armando Cisneros Sosa’s (2014, 211) concern about how informality generates “structural precariousness” and weakens urban citizenship through establishing conditions where “pecking orders rule” (own translation). Edgar Pieterse (2008, 2) concludes that informality is a “pervasive ­system of … unjust structures of opportunity”, thus closing the circle on Cornelius’ work examined above. The conceptions of informality presented here point to the fact that informal registers also need to be understood as expressions of global transformations. Elmar Altvater (2005, 54) identifies informalisation as part of the world’s structural adjustment to the processes of globalisation and (planetary) urbanisation. In this view, informality is systemic to advanced capitalism (Sassen 2005b, 85) and effectively the expression of a “new regime based on the permanent condition of insecurity” (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2003, 20, own translation). In other words, informality is highly attractive to the formal economy and state rule because many of the costs and risks of urbanisation are delegated to the individual practitioner of informal actions, a point raised by Gregory Wilpert (2003, 112) when describing informality as a “neoliberalism from below” and discussed with evidence from Mexico, for example, by Jachnow (2003, 90–91) as well as Gilbert and de Jong (2015, 520). The present book, too, takes concrete situations of urban-urbanising Mexico City as a case study in order to speak to informality with regard to its theoretical implications – and it does so from a novel angle by shifting the perspective away from any attempts to classify the actual practices that are being accomplished when working under and with conditions of informality; and towards the city-making and city-thinking that emanates from such doing. 33

Undoubtedly, navigating the adverse conditions of uneven spatial development requires effort and endurance of the body as much as it sparks a generative, consequential, city-making engagement with what is at hand. This is what the present research is about. The accounts in this book promote a careful balancing between the inventiveness (see Pieterse 2010, 42:8) and the, ­often underestimated, costs implied in urban laborious making.4 People as Infrastructure5 Shifting the focus from informality to urban laborious making now brings to the fore a reading of processes of urbanisation that turns away from categorising people’s activities into fixed types or demarcated spaces and instead interprets their actions according to the practices that they actually accomplish (for a similar approach see McFarlane 2012). By putting practice first, informality emerges as nothing more, yet also nothing less, then a particular mode of urbanisation (Roy 2005; Porter et al. 2011). This urbanism we can describe as based on ad hoc, site-specific and just-in-time negotiations (see e.g. Alfasi and Portugali 2004). In other words, the practices of urban making (formerly described as informality) are but a way of making ends meet, resolving current needs by aligning concrete resources with concrete local situations on the basis of the opportunities they afford. They are ways of improvising, understood here both in light of their “specific productivity” that reveals, and in light of their “performative praxis” that deals with uncertainty (Bormann et al. 2010, 12, 14, own translation). As the (uncertain) performance of uncertainty, (informal) city-making practices are necessarily emergent and “temporary in nature”, yet not, for that reason, necessarily spontaneous and unstructured (Varley 2013, 12). I will engage with these aspects in more detail in chapter 6. For the time being, what needs to be stressed is that these practices build on experience, codes and intuition in combination with appropriating and reappropriating what lies at hand. This allows thinking their ways of doing in line with what Tim Ingold (2000, 5) frames as “practical enskillment”, that is, as “the embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents”. At the same time, these practices of urban making resemble much of what Michel de Certeau (1988) describes as a 34

particular way of “making do” in and with a given urban social and physical situation. From his account we can thus infer how they bring into play “a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using” (de Certeau 1988, xv, emphasis added). This argument is taken up by AbdouMaliq Simone (2004a, 24ff.), who develops it further in his analysis of “people as infrastructure” in which he reveals the making of connections, and putting these connections to work, as the foundations of urban life (Simone 2004b). In Simone’s words (2004a, 3), those who live in and on constellations of uncertainty employ themselves as the resource by which “to reach and extend [themselves] across a larger world and enact [their] possibilities of urban becoming”. The “flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents” that result from this practice become an infrastructure in their own right, “a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city” (Simone 2004b, 407–8). What Simone does by turning to people practicing, and through their practice constituting city, is to turn the dominant view of infrastructure on its head: it is not physical infrastructures that afford social interactions that are of concern, but social “architectures of circulation” (Tonkiss 2015, 389) are placed in focus as they materialise in the conjunction of things and (practising) bodies. This shift in focus is not to ask about the “social work that infrastructure does”, but rather to emphasise the “social work that does infrastructure”, as Fran Tonkiss (ibid.) suggests. Still, when Amin (2014) describes (physical) infrastructure in light of the first question as a “lively” “gathering force” and “political intermediary”, the infrastructural practices, the living infrastructure, that respond to the second question, and which are at the heart of this book’s research, nevertheless gather and mediate the urban ­social just the same. Simone’s notion of people as infrastructure sheds new light on inventive urban practices as outlined above. These have been studied before, yet they have not been analysed with regard to the role they play in urban becoming. Research questions like that, for example, of Larissa Lomnitz (2011) have stayed on the lines of how the marginalised survive in spite of the lack of city. Now, with Simone’s shift in focus, other questions can be formulated like: how is 35

city being made by putting the margins to work? Thinking infrastructure as human, and people as the infrastructure that sustains city life, has the potential to abandon our fixation with ‘the city’ and to redirect our concern to city-making as a practice (see Charles Lemert in Simone 2010, xi). Furthermore, inventive urban activity can now be understood as infrastructural practice by which objects, spaces, persons, ideas and ways of doing join up in specific modes so that in their combination they become beneficial for their practitioners. In chapter 3, I will introduce such practices as ways of accomplishing opportunity work; and I will do so by examining the physical, corporeal-material labour they entail. On cityness At the same time, considering the practitioners of urban space to be their own living infrastructure allows for rethinking city also in a broader sense. This leads me to turn to the notion of cityness, a notion employed to describe a distinct, more action or practice-centred quality of the urban than what Western theory came to mean by urbanity (Sassen 2005a, 2010). John Pløger (2010), aiming at capturing such cityness in a similar move, frames the living and ­doing of cities under the notion of “urbanity-in-becoming”. The (Western) notion of urbanity goes back to Luis Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, published in 1938, in which he establishes a “minimal” sociological definition based on the relative size, density, permanence and heterogeneity of a settlement in order to describe what a city is. These values, he suggested, constitute a condition of urbanism that is decisive in the formation of a way of life distinct to a rural/provincial other (ibid., 8). Despite earlier critiques, for example by Herbert Gans (2005 [1968]),6 a general notion of urbanity emerged from this discussion which Thomas Sieverts (1997, 32, drawing on Edgar Salin 1961) pins down as a “cultural-societal way of life” characterised by a “special quality of the enlightened, bourgeois city” which was meant to signify a “tolerant, cosmopolitan attitude” (own translation). From there, the social and cultural dimension of urbanity has often been reduced to merely denoting built density and has been (re)produced and commodified as a scenic image of the city (Sieverts 1997, 32, 166 footnote). In its 36

essence, furthermore, the concept urbanity clearly defines ‘the city’ on the basis of modern European experiences. Accordingly, today, this interpretation is having contradictory effects. On the one hand, the notion of urbanity has lost much of its usefulness for making sense of the post-Fordist postmetropolis (Soja 2000) as well as of all the other urban-urbanising territories of ordinary cities (Robinson 2006) worldwide. On the other hand, it still fosters a colonial attitude of picturing urban realities of cities in the global South as spaces of want and deficiency in the mostly unacknowledged comparison to a European norm. In response, cityness is introduced, for example by Saskia Sassen (2005a, 1), as “an instrument to capture something that might easily get lost” to the Western eye. Drawing on Massey’s work (1999), Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2002, 2) describe cityness as “spatial configurations” that are “generative” on the basis of “intense social effects resulting from ‘dense networks of interaction’ within them”. That is to say that cityness is where multiple people, spaces, things, activities and ideas intersect and, together, make city by inciting multiple relations (Simone 2010, 3). It is a concept that aims at resisting any cultural charges and, in contrast, proposes looking at nothing more, nor less, than ‘actual’ activity taking place in space and time. Cityness, thus, brings into view the making of intersections – and these intersections are understood to be, above all, “consequential” (Sassen 2010, 14–15, 17), as it is through them that novel urban constellations unfold. This making of city and, therefore, of the city understood as always and essentially being in-the-making, is key to the definition of cityness. Simone (2004a, 4) thus describes it as a “state of emergency”, as the city’s perpetual becoming in practice. This focus on the generative effect of practice, of citying, is what distinguishes cityness from its mistaken cognate urbanity, which in its shorthand reduction has come to be both culturally charged by taking cities of the global North as its norm, and conceptually detached from human agency although it originally aimed at denoting precisely that of cities, which is related to doing. Essentially, furthermore, cityness cannot be taken for granted but needs to be renegotiated constantly: a “simultaneous promise, threat, and resource” that has to be enacted both with and against the spatial, social and physical 37

adversaries that limit its unfolding (Sassen 2010, 3, 17).7 Inventive urban practices like those introduced above – often insufficiently captured with regard to their theoretical promise as merely informal activities – I argue, speak of those registers of urban life described by the notion of cityness. This is, that they build living infrastructures which come into being through practices that are both relational and generative. I will speak of these infrastructural practices of the people who enact themselves as infrastructure in the empirical chapters 3 to 5. Essentially, they are ways of doing in emergent urban conditions as well as ways of making these conditions. Surely, they also give rise to political implications. In this regard, Simone (2010, 8–9) asks why Western conceptualisations of the city predominantly reject recognising cityness as part of the urban experience: because what cityness describes is what “haunts” Western attempts to keep (urban) life “in line” both operationally and theoretically. Chapter 6 will engage with these implications.

1.2

Social Practice, Body Space and Materiality as Mediator

Stepping right inside the thick of life lived in cities, and Mexico City in particular, has brought me to engage also with the theoretical foundations by which we can reflect on the role and agency of the body when accomplishing infrastructural practice and making city by producing cityness. The fruit of this engagement is what I briefly present in the following. This is to say, that in order to be able to ask about the physical labour that practitioners of urban-urbanising space need to carry out when employing themselves as infrastructure, and about the meaning of space that they acquire through this corporeal-material practice, I will turn to the analytical lens provided by practice theory and discuss the perspective that emerges from taking into view practising bodies when emplaced in, and working upon, the urban-­ urbanising realm. Within the social sciences, turning to practices is founded on the analysis that these describe the “smallest unit” of the social (Reckwitz 2003, 290; see Ortner 1984). The social, in this view, is constituted in a specific way, namely as 38

an “experienced ‘nexus of doings and saying’” (Reckwitz 2003, 290; drawing on Schatzki 2008 [1996], 105); that is, as the recurring linkage of behavioural acts that can be both material and verbal and “are held together by an implicit understanding” (ibid., 290, own translation; see also Hörning and Reuter 2004, 15). Accordingly, practice theory places the influence of structure and norms in effecting the social ‘after’ the effects caused by direct action (Reckwitz 2003, 286–87). It is through our interpersonal acts that social structures are created, which only then come to shape in turn our actions (see Giddens 1979). Social events, as Gregor Bongaerts has it (2007, 249), are in this sense first and foremost “activity in execution” (own translation). To this Andreas Reckwitz (2003, 290) adds that such a conception of practiced sociality gives rise to the particular attention to both materiality and corporeality: practices are essentially always “movements of the body” and the “skilful handling of things” (own translation) – as well as the handling of material relations of all kinds – and as such point to a specific double materiality of both the practicing body and of the materials that are brought into relation. This double materiality speaks of a characteristic situatedness of practice in both the space and time of its enactment (ibid., 294–95). The analysis of this double materiality of practice, that is, of the corporeal handling of material relations and things in time and space, has subsequently led to considering also the importance of non-human participants in the constitution of the social world; and to think about how exactly these “actants” enact their participation by coming together in multi-nodal, socio-technical and socio-material “actor networks” (Latour 2005). This is done in the name of a so-called ‘new materialism’ (for an overview see e.g. Coole and Frost 2010) or ‘material turn’ (see Bennett and Joyce 2010; Mukerji 2015), in the course of which scholars have asked about the material agency (see e.g. Bolt 2007; Weltzien 2016) of the thingly world. In urban studies, the influence of Actor-Network Theory (ANT ) is discussed under the notion of assemblage urbanism (Farías and Bender 2010). Furthermore, sociologists of space speak of the structuring power of the material world or, more broadly, of the structuring force of the materiality of social reality (see Löw 2009, 345–46). With regard to the agency of the built environment, Martina Löw (2009, 352) 39

concludes that city and architecture “are both socially constructed, technical-­ material structures that are not only the result of, and compulsion to practice but that, due to their varying materialities, shape also different practices and through these practices trigger different pictorial interpretations” (own translation, emphasis original). In other words, physical space structures social life and is itself structured by social practice unfolding within and upon it (through planning, building, corporeal-material handling, criticism and so forth). Löw (ibid., 353) calls this the “duality of space”, Edward Soja (2009, 2–3) the “social-spatial dialectic” (albeit without the pronounced reference to the role of materiality) that needs to be taken seriously when Seeking Spatial Justice (Soja 2010). Employing assemblage urbanism with such an aim, Colin McFarlane (2011, 667) brings into view “the depth and potentiality of sites and actors in terms of their histories, the labour required to produce them, and their inevitable capacity to exceed the sum of their connections.” However, even though McFarlane rightly points to the labour involved, Hilary Angelo (2011, 572) puts out for consideration that assigning agency to things as if it were an ­i nherent property hinders understanding the work of mediation they actually accomplish. I will pick up on both the labour, and on materiality as its mediator, throughout this book. Furthermore, I will engage with how the perspective of material agency is supplemented by the recourse to (old and new) phenomenology.8 This puts the emphasis on the human body and its perception and ability to be concerned with and to tune in to the unfolding of socio-material life (see e.g. Schmitz 1994). The fundamental thesis of phenomenology is that humans can know themselves and the world by no other means than through their beingin-the-world, that is to say, only by actively interweaving with their specific, and ­a lways also material, lifeworld condition. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty (2002 [1945], 112ff., 215–16) speaks of “bodily space” and of the “perceptual experience” (of things, bodies and the world) that can only be made by and with the body. I would argue that Henri Lefebvre (2009, 33, 40) takes up this idea when he describes space as a social product that arises in the interplay of “spatial 40

practice” (perceived space, espace perçu), “representations of space” (conceived space, espace conçu), and “representational spaces” (experienced, or lived space, espace vécu). On the role of the body according to this threefold spatial production, Lefebvre writes (2009, 170–71, emphasis original): Before producing effects in the material realm (tools and objects), before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space. […] Bodies – deployments of energy – produce space and produce themselves, along with their motions, according to the laws of space. By this, Lefebvre (2009, 194) places the body in the centre “both as point of departure and as destination” of space. This is to say that his conception of space is essentially founded on bodily practice, because it is only through bodily occupation and for the activity of living bodies that social space exists (Lefebvre 2009, 169, 191). With his writing, Lefebvre thus inserts a wider discussion on bodies as the site of the social9 into the realms of (social) space and the city. Here, in cities and social space, bodies come into view as both the subjects and as the objects of social production, a discussion that Elisabeth Grosz (1995, 92) picks up when indicating how the social production of bodies is to a great extent also a spatial production: “It is our positioning within space, both as the point of perspectival access to space, and also as an object for others in space,” she highlights, “that gives the subject a coherent identity and an ability to manipulate things, including its own body parts, in space.” And explicitly bringing corporeal materiality into view, Edgar Pieterse (2010, 11), drawing on research from urban Africa by Mamadou Diouf (2003), reminds us of how bodies register and make readable for others the ways in which urban lives and emergent socialities are forged with and on the body. That is to say, that the bodies of urban practitioners are in themselves a decisive territory of cityness (Pieterse 2010, 11). Simone (2010, 58) elaborates on this that “[t]he body is not simply a container or a physiological support […] but rather a tool to shape and convey particular affects and objectives, as well as an 41

instrument to attain a particular consciousness of what one is.” In sum, I argue, these considerations point to the double characteristic of a corporeality of the social, as outlined for example by Böhle and Weihrich (2010, 12), indicating in its essence that human beings have bodies through which they become social objects and instruments, yet they also always are bodies through which they perceive and comprehend with their senses and feel their way f­orward in the world in practice.

1.3

Making and Thinking Space through the Practicing Body

The bodily practice and double characteristic of both materiality and corporeality discussed above resonates with Tim Ingold’s (2000, 3) conception of the “organism-person”, which he describes as a “singular locus of creative growth within a continually unfolding field of relationships,” and whose corporeal-material, practised perspective on the world is precisely that of dwelling.10 By “dwelling perspective” Ingold (2000, 5) denotes a specific, relational apprehension of human-world relations that “situates the practitioner, right from the start, in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of his or her surroundings.” Dwelling perspective Ingold’s dwelling perspective draws on Martin Heidegger (in particular 2001 [1951]), for whom dwelling describes a being-in-the-world that is also a making11 and knowing of the world. It also mobilises the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002, 121, 215–16, 239), who frames as a “primacy of perception” the particular knowing which the body has of the body and world through the body. Catherine Malabou (2008) confirms these old and new phenomenological approaches by revealing that all intellectual conception emerges in ­relation to biological processes of the perceiving body. Arguing from the ­perspective of contemporary neuroscience, she explains that in the brain neuronal and mental activity describe a plastic continuity – at the same time receiving and bestowing form (Malabou 2000, 203) – that weaves organism and 42

person, body and world together in an ongoing, multiple process of biological and, at the same time, cultural consciousness of the self and world (Malabou 2008, 55–77). The advantage of drawing on Ingold’s anthropology of the Perception of the Environment from 2000, is that it allows us to weave lines of connection between bodily practice and the perspective on the world (and city) this practice enables. Essentially, Ingold (ibid., 153–54) accentuates how worlds are not (intellectually) constructed “before they are lived in”, but that “the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, only arise within the current of their life activities” (emphasis added). This activity, a making, is to be understood accordingly as a “growing” and “nurturing” of the world accomplished with, through and for the body, rather than as a building, or constructing, of previously conceived designs (ibid., 153ff.). Likewise, thinking is to be understood not as an activity of the mind, detached from the environment and its becoming, but as a relational process of knowing, a coming-to-know of the world while making it – again – with, through and for the living, practising body. In this view – and applying this view to the context of this book – making city, then, implies not the building of houses and infrastructures in itself, nor the pursuing of possibilities and the establishing of relations in itself while acting as infrastructures. This is to say, it does not describe city-making in terms of people bringing these elements and activities onto a substrate that is the environment. Rather, making city in a dwelling perspective denotes the bodily engagement in a “process wherein both people and their environments are continuously bringing each other into being” (ibid., 87). Ingold therefore refers to such making (of city) through bodily practice as a “poetics of dwelling” (ibid., 11),12 that is, as a creative, productive way of making the world through inhabiting it. Angela Giglia (2010, 2013) develops a related understanding of inhabitation when turning to the progressive urbanisms by which metropolises like Mexico City come into being. She, too, derives her conceptions from an anthropological perspective on concrete urban situations as well as from phenomenology and practice theory, framing inhabitation (habitar and habitalidad) as 43

the “relationship of human beings with space”, where “[t]o inhabit means to interpret, use and bestow with meaning the space that surrounds us” (Giglia 2010, 340). Essentially, in her approach, to inhabit space is “to be present in space”, which in turn allows for a “domestication” of space, that is turning it into places, through endowing human beings with an “awareness of the position the subject occupies with regard to a specific spatial environment […] with which the subject can locate itself in space” (Giglia 2013, 171). This leads back to Elisabeth Grosz’s argument introduced above; it is important here, however, to highlight the nuanced precision with which Ingold’s dwelling perspective goes beyond Giglia’s notion of inhabitation with regard to the role and possibility of practice: in Ingold’s view, domestication of the environment is only partially the point, as space is not there before (poetic, world-making) practice but emerges in synchrony with this practice in mutual unfolding. Another approach that resembles the city-making co-emergence of practice and space that Ingold aims at bringing into view is Michel de Certeau’s “poetic ways of making do” (1988, xv) which conceives of everyday inventiveness as an “art of practice” and, as mentioned before, which Simone (2004b, 409) draws upon when framing his notion of people as infrastructure. De Certeau (1988, xix, 37) describes such practice as tactical ways of operating in everyday (urban) life, as “clever tricks” or “manoeuvres […] within the enemy’s field of vision” and as the “victories of the ‘weak’ over the strong (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.).” This conception, I argue, places the emphasis on the actors (of co-emerging space), battling, as it were, with their tactics and strategies for shaping the space and things to come; and does not explicitly conceive of space as previously laid out as the battleground of such action. Drawing on Malabou’s (2008) notion of plasticity again, and translating it into the formation of space and life as I will do in detail in chapter 6, this is to say that practitioners of space do not simply adapt to the conditions of space and follow the opportunities it presents, but enact themselves as the resources by which to both create the world and to overcome its previous creations with and through their bodies. To give form to space, to (re)model and restore space by means of practicing it, yet also to destroy it or to passively adapt to 44

space, to remain immobile or to be crushed by space, are the multiple possibilities opened up by this perspective (Malabou 2000, 204).13 Material thinking As stated above, Ingold’s dwelling perspective, apart from the insights it provides on making, conceives also of thinking as a relational process of knowing that is accomplished with, through and for the living, practising body. This, Ingold (2000, 154) contends, extends to fostering an understanding in which “meaning […] does not cover the world but is immanent in the contexts of people’s pragmatic engagements with its constituents” (emphasis added). Such live engagement with the world and city, once again, relates to Angela Giglia elaborating on urban inhabitation. Giglia (2013, 172) refers to Bourdieu’s conception of the habitus as the result of (embodied) practices by which practitioners of social space constitute “structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1977, 72) in which they are then set to apprehend concrete socio-material space from out of concrete socio-material spatial positions. This leads her to differentiate between distinct forms of urban inhabitation that produce distinct types of urban space, and vice versa – a relation that in its interaction constitutes distinct “urban orders”, that is, space and practice-bound sets of rules and perceptions (Giglia, 2013, 174–5).14 In the following chapters I will introduce three such orders and engage with the making and thinking of city they entail, highlighting the specific perspectives that their ordinary dwellers ­nurture through corporeal practice. Here then can we turn to Paul Carter’s work (2004) in order to bring into view the particular knowledge creation inherent to these practices of dwelling. Carter argues that acts of material making entail a specific kind of knowing, one that is a coming-to-know-in-practice and which he frames as “material thinking”. He develops this term while analysing art practice as research and, even though introducing art practice at this point might seem far-fetched, the relevance of Carter’s approach to the topic of this book is readily demonstrated. Ingold (2000, 11), for example, suggests that “what we in the West would call ‘art’ should be understood not as ways of representing the world of experience on a higher, more symbolic plane, but of probing more deeply 45

into it and discovering the significance that lies there.” The making of art thus is also a way of thinking about the making of the world; and if this thinking is accomplished in working with physical materials it can be described as material thinking. From there, and by translating Carter’s notion into wider contexts of material making, Barbara Bolt (2010, 29) describes the knowing inherent in the engagement with material things more generally as “a very specific sort of knowing, a knowing that arises through handling materials in practice”. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2002), in turn, elaborates on the praxis of experimentation in the natural sciences, art and technology. Doing so, he explicitly frames such handling materials as “thinking with the hands” while making things (Rheinberger 2001, 79, own translation). These conceptions of a particular knowing rooted in hands and materials coming together in practice, I argue, can be extrapolated to life lived, that is to both the (human) living body and to wider (urban) socio-material situations. In a similar move, Amin and Thrift (2002, 86) draw attention to the fact that “hands are crucial means of thinking the world, pathways of understanding”. They remind us that “[t]here is almost no urban practice in which hands are not richly implicated” (ibid.). Surely, this insight applies also to the ways in which the partici­ pants of this research resourcefully practice the urban-urbanising environment, as well as to practicing the very study of such urban practice in light of its consequential city-making. In chapter 2, therefore, I will expand on the sensory-visual methods that I have employed for this research. By way of concluding this introduction to the theory involved, I propose that material thinking directs attention also to the making of knowledge more broadly. By this I mean addressing knowledge as a practice of knowing i­ nstead of treating it as a thing. Any acquisition of knowledge, just as all ­expressions of culture and society, practice theorists assert, is always accomplished in and through practice (see Hörning and Reuter 2004, 10; Reckwitz 2003, 290). It was Ludwik Fleck (1929, 426) who stated that knowledge is not acquired by passive contemplation nor by getting hold of a somehow previously given insight; but rather, that “knowledge acquisition is […] a mode of reshaping and being reshaped, in short, a mode of making” (own translation). Creating knowledge, as Rheinberger (2001, 79) takes up this argument, 46

is a mode of literally “tapping around” and into new ways of seeing things, a “mode of feeling one’s way forward” (own translation). For the purpose of this research, this means bringing into view the materiality and corporeality of all acts of knowing – including those of thinking city out of the practice of making it. In this light, Carter (2004, 5) cites Thomas de Quincey (1888, 137) arguing that “reasoning … carried on discursively [is to] mediate […] that is, discurrendo – by running about to the right and the left, laying the separate notices together, and thence mediately deriving some third apprehension.” Running from right to left, making ends meet and, by way of doing so, thinking what each of these ends might possibly entail is what this book set out to do both together with practitioners of space in concrete socio-material situations of urban becoming in Mexico City and by threading lines of meaning back and forth on its pages.

47

Notes

7

Arguably, cities can never be taken for granted as Matthew Gandy (2011) reminds us by drawing on the work of Ruth Glass (1964, xiii).

8 1

The French original is titled: L’Invention du Quoti-

times also discussed as a distinction or even as an ­alternative to ANT.

dien: Arts de Faire. Speaking of invention also draws on Edgar Pieterse’s (2010) work on cityness as ­discussed below. 2

For further discussion see for example Inclán (2013, 37). In addition, the attribute ‘marginal’ – like the ­attribute ‘informal’ as discussed for example by Lombard (2012) – fosters the internalisation of negative properties in those who are being addressed by the term while, at the same time, it professes a paradoxical desire to lead those sectors of society “into the very system which is producing the social and economic situation” of their exclusion (Perlman 1979, 92, 247-48).

3

namely aiming at overcoming the Cartesian distinction between mind and body (ibid.). 11 Note that Heidegger uses the term building, instead of making, from which Ingold distinguishes his conception of dwelling. 12 This use of ‘poetic’ draws on its Greek origin as ‘poïesis’ which denotes a making in the sense of ­creation (see Carter 2004, 2; Sassen 2006, 2). 13 Malabou (ibid.) develops these possibilities by with different material properties can also be an ex-

cio-economic homogeneity and compositional sta-

plosive, thus alluding to “those concrete shapes in

bility, its social, political yet also physical integration

which form is crystallized (sculpture) and to the

into the metropolitan complex, the (shared) origin

­annihilation of all form (the bomb)”.

ties that are being faced. For a critique of too light-headed accounts of informality see Roy (2011) as well as Varley (2013). In particular in cities of the global North, blessed with more affluent urban conditions, there is the danger of romanticizing informality and picturing it only as more innovative (because of its supposed inherent flexibility), more sustainable (because of its supposed openness to self-determination and recycling) and, ultimately, as a state-defying way of making city as opposed to formal planning. I will engage with these assumptions throughout the book. The notion “people as infrastructure” was first ­defined by AbdouMaliq Simone (2004b). Gans (pp. 49-50) rejected Wirth’s “ecological ­concepts” of ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’, as well as the variables that Wirth employed in order to account for distinct sociality, arguing that values such as population number, density and heterogeneity merely ­portray distinct environmental conditions to which humans adapt.

48

example Stadelbacher (2010). 10 Ingolds ‘entry point’ however is a different one,

­pondering on the synthetic material of plastic which

and the size and nature of the problems and necessi-

6

For an overview on the body in social theory see for

density of the population, the neighbourhood’s so-

well as party political divisions and competitions,

5

9

Cornelius’ variables (p. 124-33) include size and

of the residents, the shape of internal hierarchies as

4

What I am presenting here as a supplement is some-

14 Apart from reminding us of Soja’s “socio-spatial ­dialectic” (2009, 2-3) introduced above.

State of Hidalgo Tizayuca

Tecámac

State of Mexico

Federal District

Urban fabric of the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico (ZMVM) in 2005 with the north-north-eastern development axis through the municipalities of Tecámac and Tizayuca. Source: own drawing adapted from Taller Especial/Flor Marín, UNAM, 2002.

2 Citying, Mexico City and Studying the Practice of City Making

51

This chapter introduces to the matter of concern – the making of cities – the matters of facts – socio-material space – and the methods employed for engaging with city-making practices and with the thinking of city they entail. I begin by describing the current urban situation and why it is pertinent to ask about the ways in which we make sense of it. I will than provide a brief account of contemporary Mexico City or, more precisely, I will introduce the urban-­u rbanising realm of its northern metropolitan area together with the specific research sites of this study as the concrete spaces and lived situations from which I draw my arguments. Finally in this chapter I will discuss the mix of methods by which I suggest exploring the corporeality and materiality of city-making practices together with their enactment in (urbanising) space.

2.1

Making Sense of Cities

Like most books on cities written in the early twenty-first century, this book, too, emphasises the important quantitative and qualitative transformations we are witnessing in light of the advancing urbanisation of our planet.1 Why so? Is it really so hard to grapple with the consequences of the industrial-urban revolution by which we steer ourselves further and further into the Anthropocene, the geological epoch shaped by mankind? – Frankly speaking: yes, it is hard to come to grips with the things to come on Earth.2 Not only because we are dealing with an open-ended multiplicity of processes that are both juxtaposed and constantly reshaping, but because we are still struggling to adequately address this stream of processes at all (see e.g. Soja 1992; Harvey 1996; Amin and Thrift 2002; Brenner and Schmid 2015). And even if we would know with certainty how to guide our actions towards a more sustainable urban future, once inside the political arena we find it extremely difficult to come together, decide and put into effect joint actions. Hence, despite a growing awareness of the indissoluble relationship between the self, the city and the planet, most of us go about our business as usual – including those of us who work in the dedicated academic fields. This is to say, following Brenner and Schmid (2015, 156–58), that popular ways forward in urban studies and, particularly, 52

urban planning either hail the city as the engine for solutions built on yesterday’s promises of growth and modernisation, or that they reduce answering the conundrums posed by the urban condition to a (simple) question of improved and expanded (big) data analyses and technological fixes. But is it really possible, let alone desirable, to centrally govern our interventions in the unfolding changes by rolling out (only) one (master)plan – from a theoretical outside – over the multiplicity of heterogeneous processes that together cause the world to revolve? Rather, what we need instead is to acknowledge the “ontological incompleteness” of cities (Amin and Thrift 2016, 167) and to follow it through from the inside of the city’s becoming, that is from the perspective of dwelling in it with all its ecological, socio-material, natural-cultural thickness (see Ingold 2000). This means to even deeper engage in the ever-ongoing debate about what constitutes the urban and how does it do so on the ground of the social and material conjunction of people, cities and our (limited) planet. In Amin and Thrift’s words (2016, 4): we need to “see the city from inside out […] because cities work from the ground up.” For example, urban areas are now home to the majority of the world’s population and are expected to increase their share to 60 per cent by 2030 (UN -Habitat 2002, 8, 2013, 6). Yet, as territorial entities they no longer cohere in recognisable units – neither in administrative terms nor in terms of life lived (Amin and Thrift 2002, 8; Amin 2007). Nor do cities cohere statistically which makes international comparisons difficult and thus obliges us, as S ­ atter­thwaite (2007) reminds us, to handle overall claims regarding the state of the world’s urbanisation with caution.3 In addition, and despite their undeniable growth in size and population numbers, urban areas in their physical extend still cover ‘only’ a minimal area of the Earth’s surface, estimated by Burdett and Rodes (2011, 10) at about two percent – if this can be measured at all given the lack of a clear definition. At the same time, concentrating the world’s economic activity, energy consumption and CO2 emissions, cities are identified as a decisive cause of global warming, affecting the wider world directly with their production and consumption patterns, and therefore, in a bold but necessary spin, are discussed also as key to the mitigation and (­human) survival in face of the planet’s encroaching ecological crisis (see e.g. Davis 2009). 53

In light of these contradictions, we may conclude from this debate that the popular shorthand of an ‘Age of Cities’ or ‘Urban Age’4 demands careful examination with regard to who, where and what is actually turning urban, to how this process of urban becoming is taking shape, and how to make sense of it. This directs our attention to the periphery of cities and to the people who live there. Here, in what is referred to as the peri-urban realm where ‘the city’ overlaps with its hinterland,5 the quantitative and qualitative transformations of planetary urbanisation become strikingly material, putting under severe pressure the ecological and social sustainability of city-regions – and thus the planet (see e.g. Allen 2006; Satterthwaite 2007). Urban peripheries, furthermore, exemplify with the extraordinary pace of their transformation how cities in their social and material compositions are essentially always characterised by movement and change (see Harvey 1996). Last but not least, as “uneasy phenomenon” (Allen, da Silva, and Corubolo 1999, 3) the peri-­u rban realm speaks of everyday conditions marked by different expressions of deprivation and shortcomings – for example the simultaneous “loss of ‘rural’ values” and “deficit of ‘urban’ attributes” (ibid.) – and thus allows us to bring into view what might actually characterise the urban and city-making in practice and everyday life. In sum, urban peripheries with their particular peri-urban materialisations and dynamics hold up a mirror to the eyes of any city, and the way we make sense of them in general, by evidencing the centrality of fringe spaces to the urban process at large (Hoggart 2005, 2) – and they do so particularly in the global South, where the frontier of planetary urban becoming is currently unfolding. For example, Pieterse and Parnell (2014) point to the global impact that the (local) urban expansion of African cities will have; and a World Bank report estimates that by 2030 cities in developing countries “can be expected to triple their land area, with every new resident converting, on average, some 160 square meters of non-urban to urban land” (Angel et al. 2005, 1). This means that many of today’s and tomorrow’s urban dwellers will not simply live in cities but in territories – as of yesterday – at the fringe of sprawling agglomerations. In this light, zooming into the periphery of Mexico City provides a sound example with global contemporary processes impacting on the 54

city’s escalating “expanded periphery” (Aguilar and Ward 2003), leading to what Adrian Guillermo Aguilar (2008, 134) calls “another type of city” in the process of becoming. Urban peripheries at the centre The rise in the physical extent and the increase in complexity of the social and material composition of urban peripheries is the result of a worldwide and comprehensive restructuring of urban form and relations from metropolitan-centred to regionally dispersed patterns (Scott 2011). In broad terms, since the 1980s, combined suburbanisation and globalisation processes have fragmented and dispersed, or regionalised, city-suburb as well as city-hinterland relations.6 As a result, the socio-material fabric of urban agglomerations dissolves into territories and constellations that exceed the definition of sprawl7 by incorporating essentially also ‘other-than-urban’ sites and processes. Though initially conceived by drawing on examples from the global North, this rise of urban peripheries also increasingly characterises urbanisation processes in the global South (Scott 2011, 300). In terms of overall numbers and the pace of the development, today it is Asian, Middle Eastern and increasingly African urban areas that ride the wave of global urbanisation (see Pieterse 2008, 18 ff., drawing on UNFPA 2007). In sum, the current urban process sees a gravitational shift of population and land-use to the fringes of ­agglomerations, a multiplication and expansion of intra- and inter-urban relationships, and a thoroughgoing social restratification on a planetary scale. This has led to a debate on the supposed ‘loss’ of the city to peripheral conditions (see e.g. Borja 2005; for Mexico see e.g. Iracheta and Eibenschutz 2010). I will engage in this discussion in the next section. For the moment, what is beyond doubt is that planetary “peripheralization” (Soja 1992, 122) – that is, that the social and political making of geographies that “now push us away from the centres of power” (ibid.) – transforms the socio-material habitat of many. Furthermore, as the discussion of cityness in chapter 1 has already shown, the culturally charged socio-political role-model of the ‘European city’,8 put forward by some as a possible solution, has little to offer to make sense of the (ever new and expanding) edgelands most of us now call our 55

home. With its specific conjunction of a self-assured civic society, of public space and of commerce it is but a “marginal regional variation” (Becker et al. 2003, 7, own translation) of what the city has been, is, or could become. Hence, the exploration of whether the emerging postmetropolis entails a “sea change in how we live in cities and experience urbanism”, as Edward Soja (2000) ­a rgues, is a key question underlying the analysis of this book. This brings us to briefly reflect on what perspectives are commonly mobilised when speaking of urban peripheries. Making sense of them, as is often the case, according to their territorial expression and in relation to concepts like marginalisation, poverty and lack of mobility reveals that urban peripheries are mostly conceptualised in contraposition to (unaccounted for) notions of a centre (Nivón Bolán 2005, 141–45). In this regard, John Galtung (1971) describes centre-periphery relations as “imperialistic” structures of interaction. Their inscribed hegemony affects even the way we look at peripheries, often distancing them as ‘other’, as ‘bad’ or even as ‘failed’ when looked upon from the vantage point of an idealised centre (Foot 2000). In order to overcome this violence of the centre-periphery dichotomy, others deliberately turn to the macro-regional scale. In doing so, urban peripheries appear as nothing more nor less then one element among others in the overall urban process (Nivón Bolán 2005, 145). This is to do justice to the multiplicity and complexity of transformations as well as to recognise the agency of the periphery itself with regard to these processes. What is disputed then is the notion of centrality with regard to the territorial scale in which it has an effect, that is, according to Ramírez Velázquez (2007, 71) either as a city-centred centrality or as a centrality anchored in the region. In this light, Jean Gottmann’s (1961) “megalopolis”, Christopher Bryant’s (1982) “regional city” and Allen Scott’s (2001) “city-region” concepts, as well as Edward Soja’s (2000) “postmetropolis” are all concepts that aim at making sense of the multiplication, transformation and geographical transferral of urban centralities into peripheries and the regions they span. In similar fashion, the “exopolis” of Greater Los Angeles (Soja 1992), the Lombard-Venetian “città diffusa” (Dematteis 1998), or the “Zwischenstadt”, the interstitial city that is, of the Rhine region (Sieverts 1997), too, describe urban peripheries as critical third spaces with specific city-like 56

but not-like-the-cities-we-used-to-know characteristics. Peripheries, in other words, are essentially being considered as acquiring new, different – not necessarily desirable – but certainly original urban centralities (for Mexico City see Aguilar 2008). Most famously it was Edward Soja (1992, 94–95) who tried capturing in forceful language the urban peripheries “oxymoronic ambiguity, their city-full non-city-ness” through which centrality became ubiquitous and “the city without” was suddenly “nowhere yet now/here” all around us. Inside citying This transferral and ongoing emergence of what we could coin as peri-centrality allows us to turn to urban peripheries in light of the central perspective of this research, that is, to the making and thinking of city that manifests itself in the everyday engagement with their social and material constituents and conditions. This implies problematising a series of terms that are commonly taken for granted. First, the analytical usefulness of the notion ‘city’ has been called into question in times of its regional diffusion. While Harvey (1996), as well as Brenner and Schmid (2015), ask whether we should think of cities not as bounded territorial objects any longer but as socio-spatial processes, Davidson and Iveson respond (2015) that the city nevertheless serves for denoting an emancipatory political project that is being mobilised by social movements in order to claim citizen rights to participate in the unfolding of our global urban condition. In this second argument, there is the risk that the city, like public space, is taken to somehow foster a culture of civility and civic responsibility or to bring about political formation per se, when rather both the city and public space are sites of latent potentiality that can be stirred in all kind of directions in the event of the “plurality of things happening” (Amin 2015). On the other hand, speaking of this or that city in particular, that is speaking of any concrete urban-urbanising location instead of (seemingly placeless) urbanisation allows us to direct attention to “how politics actually takes place” – namely only by aligning universal values and/or rights with their concrete enactment in particular time and space (Davidson and Iveson 2015, 658, drawing on Rancière 1999). This includes acknowledging cities as 57

relational force fields of human and non-human inter-dependency and, in doing so, shifting attention also to the social agency of both these agents’ intrinsic materialities (Amin 2007; see also Amin and Thrift 2016). Most important for the theoretical foundation of this book’s argument, then, is the emphasis all these authors place on thinking cities/urbanisation as active socio-spatial/ material making. Hence I suggest dropping the term city for the time being and instead thinking of what it aims at describing as citying, as a verb. Secondly, it is precisely the notion of periphery that is called upon with regard to advancing our understanding of what constitutes city life and how it comes about. AbdouMaliq Simone (2010, 40) rejects the idea of the periphery’s clear location in space, suggesting instead that it is a space characterised by social and theoretical in-between-ness, a contact zone and “buffer” of what is included and excluded when speaking of cities and thus destabilising their formal conceptualisation. Consequentially, the periphery is a “potentially generative space”, a space “where different ways of doing things, of thinking about and living urban life, can come together” (ibid., 40–41). In a similar move, Ananya Roy (2011) calls for exploration of the analytical potential of the periphery for writing “subaltern” urban theory. The “promise of the concept of periphery”, she states, is “to demonstrate various foreclosures that complicate political agency and to call into question the conditions for knowledge” that constitute the ground on which we aim to understand the city and its life lived (ibid., 232). To move on in search of the city and its making, that is, in search of citying, I therefore suggest adopting an inside perspective and applying it to a concrete peri-urban, peri-central case study. This, I argue, makes it possible to contribute to the debate by turning to tangible socio-material situations – and following these situations into the praxis-spatial consciousness they afford.9 Hillary Angelo (2011, 571) argues that “the sociomaterial” does provide both the “terrain of mediation” for coming to terms with the contemporary urban condition and a way into “understanding the production of the physical world and social consciousness as two essential – and inseparable – sides of contemporary urban life.” Inside, then, refers to the point of view taken when actually being emplaced in socio-material space and deriving one’s perspective in 58

active – and corporeal-material – engagement with the environment. I have laid out the foundations of this approach in chapter 1 by drawing on the work, among others, of Ingold (2000) and Pink (2009, 23). What I mean by this is drawing near the urban periphery as lifeworld instead of keeping it at a distance when framing it, for example, as socio-material or, for that matter, as a statistical or conceptual ‘problem’ as much of the urban planning literature does. In other words, the inside view I propose turns to the materiality of the periphery’s territorial expression and to the practice of its social implications. It explores the centrality and agency of urban peripheries as the frontier and mirror of urban processes at large and emphasises the thinking of city that emanates from engaging with the periphery’s socio-material conditions. This book, therefore, responds to Eduardo Nivón’s (2005, 148) call to look inside urban peripheries in order to reveal them as “spaces in which the most relevant cultural contradictions of our times make themselves apparent” (own translation). This entails asking: how is urban becoming in places we describe as urban peripheries (in Mexico City) practiced? And how, through such practice, is city/citying actually grown and perceived with, through and for the body?

2.2

The Case of Urbanising Mexico City

The Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico (Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México, ZMVM ) provides the discussion with a suitable case study. Despite the attribute ‘city’ in its name, the twenty-first-century Mexico (City) is an urban agglomeration outnumbering, outpacing, and outreaching what a so-called traditional conception of city might possibly behold (see e.g. Krieger 2001, 2006). Mexico Citying, then, understood according to this book’s theoretical lens as a process of urban becoming, stretches over some 1,600 square kilometres of continuously built-up land, covering – and continuing to cover – former lakes, farmland and wooded hills running over igneous rock, rivers and canyons.10 As of 2005, this urban region covered 76 boroughs and municipalities in three federal entities: the state called Mexico City – which 59

until 2016 held the legal status of a Federal District or Distrito Federal (and thus is still referred to colloquially as “D.F.”) and which contained the city called Mexico in its territorial and demographic entirety more or less until the 1950s –; the eastern third of the State of Mexico, surrounding the D.F.; and the southern tip of the state of Hidalgo.11 At the same time, this urban process called Mexico is more or less contained in a single valley,12 thus giving rise to its denomination as the ZMVM . This urban-urbanising valley is what we refer to when we talk about Mexico City being a city of twenty million inhabitants. Beyond this valley, the ZMVM is merging into an expanded urban system with the two neighbouring agglomerations of Toluca, capital of the State of Mexico, and Pachuca, capital of Hidalgo state, giving rise to the Central Mexican Megalopolis.13 Mexico City’s peri-urbanisation is driven by the decentralisation of urban functions and populations (see Aguilar and Ward 2003; Ward 1998, 1991). This development, driven by both local and regional policies as well as global economic processes,14 continues to shift the distribution of the region’s population from centre to periphery with nine million people living in the region’s central state of Mexico City (formerly known as the Federal District) compared to eleven million, as of 2009, living in the surrounding two states (COESPO 2009, 3). While this growth pattern has led to certain decision-making powers being gradually transferred towards local government level on the periphery,15 it has also put the city’s hinterland under severe pressure: during the 1990s, collective agrarian land, the Mexican ejido, has lost both its constitutional protection and its economic revenue and then saw its mass conversion into extensive urban settlements fuelled by a speculative housing finance system from the year 2000 onwards (Jones and Ward 1998; Iracheta 2010; Ziccardi and González Reynoso 2012). As a result, massive formal citification16 is today incorporating rural land into the urban system in addition to the informal building sector that, too, transforms fields into houses and has done so even before the effect of these dramatic changes became visible (Varley 1985). Noteworthy in this regard is the excess of new housing in comparison with the actual increase in population numbers. In Tizayuca, Hidalgo, for example, where this research is in part located, the growth rate of new 60

dwelling units between the years 2000 and 2005 was double the population growth over the same period (Delgadillo 2010, 53–55), while self-built housing activity for those without the prospect of obtaining housing credit equally expands. As a result, the placement and displacement of people, commodities and capital that we witness in Mexico’s periphery responds to the contradictory yet complementary forces of agglomeration, fragmentation and dispersion by which the footprint of the city continues to both intensify and diffuse. This is the tale of what Aguilar and Ward (2003, 4) describe as “region-based urbanization as opposed to city-based urbanization”. It is also what Nivón Bolán (2005, 144) addresses under the light of Mexico City’s comprehensive peripheralisation, that is, as a process in which the experience of living in a state of peripheral conditions is being multiplied.17 However, when it comes to territorial expansion, the ZMVM still remains fairly compact if compared to other agglomerations worldwide. Comparing the city-region with that of Los Angeles, for example, reveals that the Mexican megalopolis occupies only half of the territory of its Californian counterpart while being one-third larger in terms of population. Elsewhere (Wissel 2012, 2013), I have described as compact peripherisation the contradictory urban processes of Mexico City’s agglomeration, dispersion and fragmentation in a relatively confined territory. Summing up, we can state that Mexico City undergoes the extension, multiplication and transformation of urban peripheries in close proximity. This implies the paradoxical experience of an increase of peripheral conditions that are squeezed together in space. The citying of Mexico can thus be described as the simultaneous practicing and experiencing – by growing numbers of inhabitants – of both peripherality and cityness: a combination of causing and being subjected to the effect of expanding geographical distance and of an increasingly complex kaleidoscope of socially produced centre-periphery relations (Nivón Bolán 2005, 155) while, at the same time, being thrown together (see Massey 2005) in relative proximity and density and actively growing ­manifold consequential, cityful conjunctions. This results in a particular socio-material composition of the ZMVM , where urban, sub-urban and rural territories and spatial features, as well as ways of 61

life, are juxtaposed with industrial compounds, federal (military) exclusion zones, wastelands and ecological reserves as well as all their corresponding and diverse social affordances. Furthermore, this Mexico Citying is currently witnessing the simultaneous development of both formal and informal urban growth, inscribed in fragmented and contradictory urbanisms with their respective practices of planning and doing city. Housing materialises either on the foundation of self-built principles in under- or un-serviced settlements, or in the form of mass-produced, credit-driven and private enclaves (see chapter 4). It does so in more or less equal parts (Castillo 2007, 184), and both within or around patches of agricultural and other so-called – and for the time being – ‘non-urban’ land. This situation establishes the empirical ground on which this book commences: the materialisation of a morphological, demographic, functional, economic and social kaleidoscope of bits and pieces of a Mexico Citying, emerging with discrete, generative centrality out of the simultaneous expansion and fragmentation of the urban periphery. Addressed by many as “spatial crisis” (Iracheta and Eibenschutz 2010), it seems pertinent to examine how this city-in-the-making manifests itself in lived, socio-material space, how people actually contribute to its making and how they make sense of it. Witness areas of the urban process The research at the heart of this book is based on multiple sites that stand for specific socio-material situations that in turn compose the fabric of Mexico City’s urban-urbanising periphery. Following Duhau and Giglia (2008, 16), I treat these sites as “witness areas” (áreas testigo) of the urban process at large. By witness areas these authors mean spaces with particular material and social characteristics that represent different “orders” of inhabited space (for example the social housing estate, the residential compound, the historic village and so forth) each of which affords a particular experience of the city as a whole (ibid., 15–17; see Giglia 2013). In this sense, Colonia Antorcha represents a self-built, informal settlement (albeit, as we will see, with a particular institutionalised form of organisation). Sierra Hermosa stands for the mass development of affordable housing as it has proliferated in Mexico 62

City since the turn of the century. And the Mexico City-Pachuca highway represents a traffic infrastructure that connects the aforementioned sites in the municipalities of Tecámac and Tizayuca. The selection of these case study sites was based on their specific physical ­appearance, social organisation and relative proximity to each other in space (fig. 2.1.). Sierra Hermosa is an urban development (fraccionamiento) in the affordable housing market segment built by the Casas Geo development company (fig. 2.2., see also the images at the front of the book). It is characterised by its exposed location at the fringe of the continuously built-up urban fabric. Its 7,153 housing units form an urban expanse measuring approximately two kilometres by 300 metres, reaching out into surrounding rural and other un-built land (which in the official planning documents is designated as a future public park).18 The development is located south of the town of Tecámac, in the municipality of the same name, in the State of Mexico. It was officially inaugurated in 2002 and is designed to accommodate a maximum of about 34,000 inhabitants. In terms of population numbers it can thus be regarded as constituting a town in itself. A small market hall and an administrative unit at the centre of the development, as well as two schools (primary and secondary) and a weekend tianguis (street market) that occupies the median strip of the access street provide for its inhabitants’ basic needs. In addition, houses along the access road have gradually been converted into small shops and workshops (hairdressers, a carpenter, restaurants and so forth) while several misceláneas, small corner shops, are operated from the neighbourhood’s more peripheral houses. At the same time, the neighbourhood does not ‘feel’ like a town – at least it does not for the researcher’s Western eye, which is why he is concerned with making sense of the site’s “city-full non-cityness” (Soja’s term). Clearly, the majority of Sierra Hermosa’s residents are working elsewhere during the day, and those who are not are looking for ways of putting themselves to work in order to make a living. Outside the entrance to Sierra Hermosa lies the old Mexico City–Pachuca country road (see images at the front of the book). To either side of its tarmac, mechanic workshops, supermarkets and other roadside utility shops offer essential goods. Also lined up along this road are the entrances – gated to 63

Fig. 2.1: Satellite image of Tecá:ac and Tizayuca with principal research sites marked in red. ­Additional research sites­and places of interest marked in white. Source: adapted from Google Maps, I­ NEGI, 2016.

Colonia Antorcha Colonias Diamante and La Gloria

Tizayuca (city)

Mexico City – Pachuca country road

Mexico City – Pachuca highway

Base Aérea bus stop

Tecámac (city) Sierra Hermosa Provenzal del Bosque

San Pedro Atzompa

Ojo de Agua

Héroes de Tecámac

5 de Mayo bus stop San Pablo bus stop

Villas del Real

Fig. 2.2: Sierra Hermosa. Street with houses in different stages of expansion.

a greater or lesser extent – of the many and differentiated residential compounds that make up the urban fabric of the northern stretch of the ZMVM . On the road itself, what is most prominent is the number of minivans (colectivos), inter-urban coaches and taxis moving up and down the spine of this urban expansion axis as well as to and from the separate gated communities, estates and low-income neighbourhoods. Another 500 metres further on from the entrance to Sierra Hermosa, on the other side of the historical village of San Francisco Cuautliquixca, the Mexico City–Pachuca federal toll highway runs parallel to the country road. This road is protected from the surrounding houses, streets and corresponding activities by an embankment and crash barrier. It cuts through the peri-urban realm with only a few but, as we will see in chapter 5, significant points of connection to the local territory and life: a realm of speed and linearity that 65

Fig. 2.3: The express toll road cutting through the urban fabric near the San Pablo wayside bus stop described in chapter 5.

is accessed by travellers on particular spots by no other means than stopping buses (fig. 2.3.). Notably, it is just as crowded with vehicles providing mass transport as the country road, albeit the proportion of inter-urban full-size coaches is significantly higher. Finally, Colonia Antorcha is located outside the town of Tizayuca, in the municipality of the same name, in the state of Hidalgo (see images at the front of the book). It lies further north than Sierra Hermosa yet is tied into the system of urban fragments by the same country road. The emerging colony19 lies at a distance of 100 metres from this road, surrounded by grazing land and fields. To its south, a few houses are scattered over a territory that is referred to as the, similarly embryonic, emerging neighbourhoods (colonias populares) of Diamante and La Gloria. Access is provided by a narrow dirt track or simply by walking across the field. In 2011, the settlement consists of three parallel 66

Fig. 2.4: Colonia Antorcha. View along the front row houses with sole electricty connection.

streets with self-built houses in their initial state. To the rear, an extension is traced out with chalk in the dirt. A sole electricity cable provides power to one single house in the front row (fig. 2.4.). By 2015, houses have grown, water and electricity infrastructure has been formally brought in, and the s­ ettlement has doubled in size. Colonia Antorcha is one of two settlements in the municipality organised by the social movement organisation Antorcha Popular, the urban branch of Antorcha Campesina, founded in 1974 (MAN 2013).20 This makes the colony distinct to the majority of informal settlements in Mexico and elsewhere as it is not the norm to encounter similarly strong internal organisation of its residents, who are in fact resident-members of the social movement. At the same time, several neighbourhoods in Mexico City and throughout the country did have Antorcha Popular as the driving force of their foundation. Melba, 67

Antorcha’s local leader in Tizayuca, presents the organisation as a benefactor of the deprived by helping them to self-organise, a view that is supported also by the organisation’s website (ibid.). The principle purpose of the urban branch is to secure land for members to build their homes. Furthermore, the envisioned development includes setting up transport and schools for their settlements and members. At the centre of the neighbourhood that is being discussed in this research a piece of land the size of a football pitch has been set aside and each household has contributed a small plant to initiate the growth of a future park. The movement’s principal modus operandi is by organising members to form a political mass that can uphold claims made on their ­behalf. Every now and then, settlers and aspirants are obliged to travel to Pachuca or Mexico City in order to march for their rights before political institutions, a practice I will discuss in chapter 4.

2.3

Studying the Materiality of Space and the Corporeality of Practice

The research for this book is based on ethnographic fieldwork, which took place at regular intervals over a period of six years as well as during a three-month residency in Sierra Hermosa at the midpoint of the process. For this engagement with life lived I employed a combination of methods with a particular emphasis on visual-sensory techniques of data collection and analysis that derive from visual and sensory sociology as well as from strands of creative research21 that focus particularly on ways of material knowing. First to mention as method are perceptive explorations that combine “walkabouts” (Clark and Emmel 2009)22 and “participant sensation” (Howes 2006) within a framework of “material thinking” (Carter 2004, 8). These explorations allowed me to take the body of the researcher as the point of departure for reflecting on the corporeal experience of the socio-material urban-­u rbanising realm. Wandering myself by foot and by bus through the urbanising environment, I argue, makes it possible to come to know space through practice and thus provides a path for accessing spatial practitioners’ 68

dwelling perspectives more generally. Following Rhys-Taylor (2010, 231), sensory-visual explorations provide “an embodied understanding of the traffic between the researcher’s own body, and the sensoria and social forms constituting the field.” This is to say, they make available in the body of the researcher a material and practised understanding of how concrete socio-­ material conditions affect both what can be done within, and what can be thought of, these precise conditions. This permits tracing the corporeal effort accomplished by “bodies at work” (Wolkowitz 2006). It also grasps the materiality of space and allows its agency to be mapped. In order not only to accompany and register perceptive explorations but to awaken their investigative potential, this composite of methods furthermore includes photography and video recording as a way of seeing and deliberately working with a ­ udio-visual outputs as the material data for analysing and representing bodily practice and urban material becoming. Secondly, my perceptive explorations have been informed by and, vice-versa, also enhanced multiple conversations with street vendors, job-seekers and creators of opportunities, with residents, home-builders, neighbours and fellow travellers – both within the principal research sites as well as in surrounding locations. I am well aware that personal experiences made, for example, by means of perceptive explorations cannot speak for the experiences of others. Therefore I bring them into dialogue with well-established social science interview techniques to fill the gap. Some of these encounters developed into follow-up interviews; others into experimental “walking interviews” (Clark and Emmel 2008; Jones et al. 2008; see also Kusenbach 2003, 463) as well as into their adaptations that could be framed as “bus ride interviews”. Semi-structured interviews with key institutional representatives helped to both bring forth my questions and to verify any given answers by means of triangulation. In the following I will delve a little bit deeper into the origins, scopes and limitations of the three methodological strands that inform my research.

69

Visual sociology What is visual sociology? There are many answers to this question but I will focus on two in order to cut a long (and evolving) story short: for one, Michael Guggenheim (2013) suggest that we have visual sociology as a special subfield of sociology because “for whatever reason, sociology is assumed to be a purely textual discipline” of which all other forms of researching, analysing and telling are othered as “strange, not really sociology, not really scientific, or [they are] simply forgotten.” Secondly, visual sociology can be taken to mean at least three things: (i) the sociological study of visual products, (ii) the qualification of sociological research by means of visual techniques, media and devices or (iii) the production of visual research within sociology. If being asked to choose from these approaches – well knowing that they describe at best theoretical poles that in the messiness of the research practice necessarily collapse into each other – then the research of this book engages with the latter of the three. This is to say that my starting point is to take the visual as a way of doing research, thereby drawing on work for example by Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman (2004). I then go another step and take seeing, that is, the act of visual encounter, as a practice by which sighted human beings establish their place in the world, and know of this world and its continuous becoming. This move is sustained by bringing in theorists like John Berger (2008 [1972]), James Gibson (1986), Elisabeth Grosz (1995) and Tim Ingold (2000). Last but not least I focus on this practice of seeing when enacted in the condition of the urban. These three steps are what set my approach apart from, for example, those analysing the city as a visual product that can then be scrutinised with regard to the cultural, political and ethical production and meaning it contains.23 In sum, doing research by seeing entails understanding visual practice as an integral part of a wider set of senses employed for the analysis of everyday space and life. Before discussing the working of these senses in detail further below, however, I will briefly provide some insights on the variety of how the visual informs this research. I used a small, fully automatic and light-sensitive digital camera that takes pictures and video and can be operated, if required, with one hand alone. The many images gathered on its memory card, I argue, depict 70

my particular interests in the field in relation to how it unfolded through my research. Letting the lens follow my eyes here and there is what I call doing my seeing with the camera. In the next stage, the immediate (and partly automated) coding and continuous accessibility afforded by digital photography supported working with images (as opposed, for example, to analysing their meaning). This working with images took shape in four distinct ways: first, the images and videos taken served as my fieldwork notes that helped me stay attuned to my sites of intervention. Rhys-Taylor (2010, 32) suggests that still photography acts as a memory-aid “fully able to rekindle synaesthetic memories and associations”. Together with the moving images and audio recorded on video they helped me reconstruct the context of my explorations even when I was at a distance. Second, they also made it possible to incorporate their material sense data into the analysis. Following Back (2012, 32), I listened to the background noise of my fieldwork and thus was able to reveal, for example, the material texture of buses rushing in and out at the wayside bus stop in chapter 5. Third, the extensive register of all kind of things noticed – houses, objects and people (including their absence), practices, surfaces and textures, and so forth – allowed me to identify the ­physical mani­festation of change and permanence by going back and forth through my chronological archive and pulling things out time and again for comparative analysis. Both intentionally and by chance (when things/situations/etc. attracted my attention afresh due to specific material qualities) I came to take pictures of the same fields, roads and houses over several years. The documentation of their changing appearance, or their surprising continuity, posed questions I could then carry back to the participants of this research in follow-up interviews (see Suchar 2004). Forth, when reproduced in this book, my images aim at inviting the reader into seeing what I have seen, that is, they aim at making a given yet fleeting situation “accessible for others who were not co-present” – regardless of how poor and subjectively constructed this photographic representation of real-world situations might be (Guggenheim 2015, 359). Fifth and last, I also move beyond such mimetic understanding of the visual, as Guggenheim (2015, 359) frames it. That is to say, I deliberately employ my imagery as a practice for thinking and telling, that is, as a way of 71

doing the analysis, interpretation and communication of my research findings. Most notably, it was by editing long video observations that I could study in detail the movements of the body, for example, of the people working with the flow of buses that I describe in chapter 5.24 Likewise, in the same chapter, the physical, multiple and fleeting interplay of materiality and corporeality in the meeting of buses and travellers, I argue, is far better apprehended in edited video than in my textual accounts, which with their linear word-by-word structure fail to convey the pace and simultaneous nature of actions.25 In a similar manner, it was by overlaying my documentary fieldwork-photography with hand-drawn wire-frame-like sketches that I could focus on the agency of houses, for example, in chapter 4. These interventions help me point to the physical adjustments and extensions that infrastructural houses receive over time.26 Employing sketches as a technique for analysis is informed by architectural practice where manufacturing lines is at the heart of materialising thoughts on paper. At the same time, these drawings allude to Ingold’s (2007) argument that walking, observing, thinking, telling and writing all proceed along lines – lines that, like imagination, describe “the creative impulse of life itself in continually bringing forth the forms we encounter” (Ingold 2010, 23). This is to say, as Ingold (2013) furthermore suggests, that my particular approach to drawing as visual research sits between conventional classifications of either architectural propositions or the register of perceived gestures. Rather, my drawing is a searching for how houses are grown while simultaneously articulating this growth. In that sense, the sketches invite the viewer to look with them at the images they intervene, not to look at them as if they were the representation of a design (ibid.). Sensory sociology The second overall strand of methods employed for this research draws from sensory ethnography and art practice as research. Sensory sociology, above all, is a commitment to pay attention to what often goes unacknowledged, namely that all social research, and empirical research more broadly, is made “through the medium of the senses” (Simmel 1921). As with visual sociology, the persistent exclusion of the senses from much of mainstream 72

sociology can be regarded as the constituting condition for this subdiscipline’s existence (Guggenheim 2015, 346–47). In this regard, participant observation, for example, implies tuning in to informants and their lifeworlds not only by means of vision and speech, but also more broadly through touch, smell, taste and hearing, as well as by the researcher’s own bodily practice, sense of balance, thermo-sensitivity and proprioception (see Coffey 1999, 59; Rhys-Taylor 2010, 10–11; Guggenheim 2015). However, such an “attuning our bodies, rhythms, tastes, ways of seeing and more to theirs”, as Sarah Pink (2008, 193) has it, goes mostly unacknowledged when ‘findings’ are translated into the form of a coherent text. Pink (2009, 23) therefore introduces the notion of the “emplaced ethnographer”, aiming to attend more fully to the sensory encounter with the material environment that is doing fieldwork. She suggests that by occupying “similar, parallel or related places to those people whose experiences, memories and imaginations” ethnographers seek to comprehend “can provide a basis for the development of ways of knowing that will promote such understanding” (ibid., 23, 43). Undoubtedly, studying urban bodily practice meant practising the city and its becoming myself. First, this entailed travelling the length and breadth of the field. Following David Howes (2006, 121–22), much of this travelling can be framed as “participant sensation”, that is, shifting the emphasis from (visual) observation alone to perceiving with all the senses while participating in a research encounter. Not only was journeying by bus, colectivo van and taxi, as well as journeying at different times of day and using all possible routes available to me and my fellow urban navigators my entry point to the subject and its inherent corporeality and materialisation, but the highway and bus became key research sites in themselves, as chapter 5 testifies. Secondly, I employed walking – as well as standing still and riding the bus, and doing so alone and together with participants in walking interviews as described above – as the research technique at the core of my sensory-­ visual ­explorations. These ambulatory practices – mobile and immobile – I regard as self-experimental, and by this I mean emphasising the researcher’s own body as a media device employed for the investigation of practice and space. Jean François Augoyard (2007, 6 [1979]) describes how “vagabondage 73

(off-track, deroutant, and unremarkable)” is particularly apt to thinking “­everyday life through its own logic”. Likewise, as Clark and Emmel (2009, 9) put it, their own sensory awareness allows researchers to “feel what it is like to walk around a place”. Through this walking practice I was able to pay close attention to what we can call an ecological approach to bodily perception, drawing on Ingold (2000) and Gibson (1986) who argue that perception is the achievement of the body while moving in and with the environment. ­Research ­accomplished in this line, accordingly, emphasises how such “fieldwork on foot” (Lee Vergunst and Ingold 2006) entails the particular perception of dwelling.27 The possibilities of creative research With regard to the third strand of methods used for this study, attending to a bodily doing of research is supported also by insights that take practice – and in particular art practice – as a specific path for the production of knowledge. In this light, Graeme Sullivan (2005, xi–xix) suggests that artistic practice offers “unique insight into the human knowing and understanding” by following imaginative and creative, while nevertheless rigorous paths that are complementary, for instance, to the social sciences. In a similar move, Paul Carter (2004, 7) reminds us that despite a “research paradigm in which knowledge and creativity are conceived as mutually exclusive” research always involves imagination and creativity as it sets out “finding something that was not there before” or “was already there (and merely lost)”. This is particularly the case, he continues, if research is practised as “a method of materialising ideas” (ibid.) for which he introduces the notion of “material thinking” – a notion I introduced in chapter 1. Carter derives this concept from the analysis of the making of art, conceptualising such making as a practice of asking “[w]hat matters? What is the material of thought?” (ibid., xi) – and Barbara Bolt (2010, 29), likewise discussed in chapter 1, takes up this question, spelling out the making it describes more broadly as a “tacit knowledge […] grounded in material practice”. Drawing on these insights, the contribution of material art practice to urban research, I argue, lies precisely in thinking city through the making of matter, that is, thinking it through corporeal engagement with the 74

materiality of urban space. “Ordinary experiences” as well as “cognitive aspects of the arts”, Bob Catterall (2013, 123) agrees, make up a “university of the street” that contributes to the critical potential of urban studies by fostering “de-academicised curiosity” and expanding its agenda. From a different point of entry, Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) extend this discussion by introducing what they call “live methods” in the social sciences. Their call is to employ methods that are – among other capacities – “in touch with the full range of senses and the ‘multiple registers’ within which social life is realized” (ibid., 11). Such live methods, Back (2012, 33–34) further specifies, would explore and incorporate also “more artful” ways of thinking and narrating sociology and thus allow an opportunity for “expanding the vantage point for social observation” and for incorporating “new strategies for […] affecting and persuading the audiences of sociological work”. During my research, this potential of creative research with live methods became strikingly apparent: again and again, my interview questions failed to find suitable ways into the heart of the matter, circling around the lived experience of corporeality and materiality in abstract concepts that were disconnected from this vitality. Most of my conversation partners could not follow my poor attempts to put into words my concern with urban corporeal labour and the making and thinking of city. Yet both they and I were constantly practising this kind of effort of the urban body working within and upon its surrounding. Employing live methods, therefore, helped me penetrate the limitations of the other, more conventional ethnographic techniques. Both the questions and the answers I was pursuing revealed themselves in “the doing of social life” (Back and Puwar 2012, 11, original emphasis) at the same time as they kept quiet behind words. Only by thinking through practising could I sharpen my concepts and learn to communicate them in my conversations. Micro-politics of body and space Last but not least, any research endeavour is shaped also by the relationship of what is fore- and backgrounded from the analysis. Gender, race and the ­experience and perception of urban violence are among the most significant aspects that despite their importance had to remain at the margin of my 75

main argument, which coalesced around the physical labour that people undertake when accomplishing their urban lives. Practices of the body, and the politics of such practices, necessarily play out through race, class, sexuality and gender. This becomes apparent, to say the least, in Judith Butler’s (2004, 21) important discussion of the body as the site both of “doing” and of “being done to”. It holds true certainly also for the specific practices under review in this book, as has been pointed out with regard to informality, for example, by Büscher (2011, 11). Fran Tonkiss (2005, 69–72, 94) argues that these categories all affect the perception and use of urban space as much as they “become visible in the city […] through modes of spatial practice” (p. 111):28 this is why the injustices attached to race, class and gender are among the central concerns of critical urban studies (see Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer 2009). Yet, despite this assertion, I argue that in the present research they could be kept at bay, in varying levels, from the centre of my focus. On the one hand, race and class did not surface as significant categories in this research. Research participants were not differentially racialised nor did they differentiate themselves and their fellow urbanites in any way through race.29 Likewise, although different socio-economic layers among urban developments and across different settlement types were clearly acknowledged, these did not play out in the socio-spatial consciousness of the research participants’ own position and perceived fields of possibility when nurtured through practice. Differences in research participants’ socio-spatial consciousness occurred with respect to the varying forms of group organisation or the physical appearance of neighbourhoods and their levels of enforced privacy, yet not directly on the basis of class. Thirdly, my own whiteness did not intervene in terms of race but in terms of the academic/middle class privilege (see Moreno Figueroa 2010) I enjoy and exhibited by coming ‘out here’ from central Mexico City (the Federal District) to hang around and take pictures of neighbourhoods that most of the people I met regarded as not worth mentioning (especially when they interpreted my presence as that of a European tourist). With regard to gender, on the other hand, I argue that focusing on the physicality of corporeal urban practice is a novel approach and therefore requires the full attention of this book. In much urban theory, space and practice 76

remain immaterial and actors remain without living bodies even when these bodies actively do things or experience in flesh and blood the active doings of others. For that reason, I looked at the very laboriousness of everyday urban becoming, that is, at the sometimes painstaking effort of urban practice that makes people sweat and their backs ache. This means looking at both female and male bodies without differentiating among them explicitly. At the same time, it means acknowledging also that certain practices are achieved more often, or that they are achieved differently, by either women or men. As we will see in chapter 3, for example, those practices that allowed adjusting to or incorporating additional family duties – above all child-care – were predominantly those accomplished by women. Accordingly, the wrestling with buses I come to discuss in chapter 5 was accomplished equally and in equal amounts by both men and women but wrestling with buses with children – which perhaps tellingly I seldom witnessed – was a concern expressed predominantly by women. Gender and family roles thus make a clear difference in terms of the type and particularity of infrastructural work being accomplished and I will point to these differences throughout the analytical chapters. In overall terms, my findings resonate with existing research on the role gender plays with regard to employment, housing and movement in Mexico City (see Salazar Cruz 1998; Varley 2010; García Canclini 2013). Yet another aspect of the politics of body and space that plays out in urban/ peri-urban Mexico City is the matter of quotidian violence and insecurity. At the time of this research and writing, fear reigned in different ways in the city and country of Mexico, and this had an impact also on my research practice and findings. Most sadly, the violence originated by organised crime and by the Mexican state declaring a so-called ‘war on drugs’ impinged on all aspects of private and public life everywhere in the country. Yet also the “ecology of fear” (Davis 1998) of what may arguably be considered the usual nuisances and risks associated with urban conditions (traffic and pollution, structures and practices of social exclusion or confronting the “untameable unknown” to pinpoint just a few of the most commonly mentioned) affects people’s living conditions – and it does so both objectively and subjectively, that is, on the basis of real and perceived grounds (del Olmo 2000; for Mexico 77

see Wondratschke 2005). Nevertheless, permitting fear to take over the questions I pursued would have led to a different book; and I say so despite the fact that Edgar Pieterse (2010, 9) calls on us to “stare terror in the face” (doing so “without any anticipation that it will come to an emancipatory end”) if we want to advance in “re-describing the city” and in “taking cityness seriously”. Yes, violence and the fear thereof actively intervene in the organisation of the territory, co-author the micro-politics of urban practice and inscribe themselves into the urban imaginary – as well as on the bodies of the practitioners and thinkers of city – wherever and in whatever amounts they make an appearance. And they do so, yet again, in unequal ways: far too often discriminating in particular against women, the elderly, non-white and people with different capacities. However, my main aim with regard to the intervention of fear was to pay attention to, but not be inhibited by violence as an underlying condition of both the practices and the materialisations of urban becoming in Mexico. This, finally, points also to the ethical implications of my research. Above all, safeguarding the anonymity of the research participants was a sensible issue given the close attention to concrete sites and practices, and their visual documentation and representation, that both my research interest and the methods taken from visual and sensory sociology require. Informants were recruited spontaneously and consent was obtained orally at the beginning of each encounter. Minors were not included in the research yet it is here that the particular concerns regarding the ethics of visual research practices become apparent: children were present at the sites of my research and were present also discursively while actually being physically absent. This is to say that parents expressed their concern about their children’s safety even if these children did deliberately not appear in my pictures (above all, due to the widespread fear of kidnapping). I responded to these concerns by concentrating my photography on the material conditions of the spaces researched as well as by asking practitioners for their consent prior to taking their image. Nevertheless, taking images of houses and empty streets, too, is a political affair and sits necessarily within the local, and changing, state of fear. While in 2009 taking images was less of an issue, in 2015 it was very much so, due to 78

the general deterioration of trust in the public realm in light of the perceived and real increase in ‘conventional’ as well as organised crime (in particular, research participants mentioned the rise in burglaries and the dealing and consumption of drugs). 2018, finally, saw a slight relaxation of the participating resident’s concerns. With the administration of President López Obrador, inaugurated in December 2018, hopefully, this trend will continue and bring further improvement to local conditions.

79

Notes

12 Technically, it is more correct to speak of the endorheic basin of Mexico as this is what characterises it: the lack of a natural exit for its water. As of 2016, the politically defined ZMVM includes also areas that are

1

For an account of the scale of the transformation see e.g. UN-Habitat (2002).

2

See for example Davis (2009) as well as Hodson and

Conurbation Region (RCCP) when including also the

Marvin (2010) on the relation of urbanization and the

metropolitan areas of Puebla, Cuernavaca and Tlax-

anthropocene; see Dibley (2012) as well as Crutzon

cala into one urban macro-region (COMETAH 1998,

(2002), Steffen et al. (2011) and Zalasiewicz et al. (2010) on the definition and impact of the anthropocene in general terms. 3

Satterthwaite points out, for example, that the term city lacks clear definitions regarding what it includes in terms of its territorial extent, physical form and ­social processes.

4

5 6

For the dissemination of the term Urban Age see e.g.

first ever municipal development plan not before the year 2003 (SDU-GEM n.d.). 16 The term draws on the definition by Häußermann et tion” (Verstädterung), referring to the quantitative,

Schmid (2014).

material transformations caused by the growth of

For an overview on the birth, scope and use of the

­urban populations, and “urbanisation” (Urbanis-

term peri-urban see Adell (1999).

ierung), defined in line with Lefebvre as the qualita-

For a detailed account of this process, as well as its

tive, socio-cultural transformations of society.

implications, see e.g. Dematteis (1998) as well as

17 For a discussion on the concept of peripheralisation,

Defined here as continuously built, low-density and

For a definition, respectively discussion, of the concept see Siebel (2004); for a critique of the concept

albeit in a different context, see e.g. Kühn and Weck (2012). See also Naumann and Fischer (2013). 18 This and the following data is based on the official planning documents provided by the local administrative unit and the municipal planning office. 19 The Mexican term colonia (also colonia popular)

as global role model see Becker et al. (2003).

generally translates to “settlement” or (poor and

For a similar approach see Giglia (2010) taking into

working-class) “neighbourhood”. The notion of a

view the informal city and the progressive urbanism

colony of the urban set within a still-largely rural con-

by which it is produced and apprehended.

text is however intriguing in the context of this re-

10 The citying of Mexico does so including the small

search. It makes particular sense also with regard to

­island where the original city of Tenochtitlán – a me-

the way in which the social movement Antorcha

tropolis in its own right – was founded by the Mexi-

­Popular operates, as will be discussed in chapter 4.

cas/Aztecs in 1325 and destroyed and refounded by the Spaniards in 1521. 11 These and the following definitions and numbers are based on Garza (2000b), SEDESOL et al. (2007)

20 The movement/organisation is also referred to as Movimiento Antorchista Nacional (MAN) which translates as “National Torch Movement”. 21 For a general account of the possibilities of creative

and COESPO (2009). They all refer to data from

research in the social sciences, referred to by the

2000, 2005 and 2009 provided by INEGI and

­authors under the heading of “live methods”, see

CONAPO. As of January 2016 the Federal District

was converted into a federal state with the name Mexico City (see EUM Presidencia 2016). The year 1950 is presented as the birth of the metropolitan

80

(2011). 15 For example, the municipality of Tecámac issued its

al. (2008, 22) who distinguish between “citifica-

Kahn (2004).

9

Guarneros-Meza (2009) and García Balderas

its theoretical shortcomings see Brenner and

car-dependent settlement type. See Glaeser and 8

24). 14 For supportive evidence and discussions see e.g.

Burdett and Sudjic (2007); for a critique regarding

Foot (2000). 7

geographically outside this hydrological basin. 13 Scholars furthermore speak of the nation’s Central

Back and Puwar (2012). 22 Comparable to “go-alongs” that have been conceptualized by Margarethe Kusenbach (2003). 23 An important representative of this second line of

area according to Garza (2000a, 240) and Negrete

analysis is Peter Krieger (1999, 2009) who has

Salas (2000, 248).

­developed his approach by studying the “visual

construction” in particular of Mexico City (Krieger 2001, 2004, 2006). Rooted in image science, a ­discipline that emerged out of approaches within art history, the author describes this analysis of the visual manifestation of the built and lived reality of cities as a “contemporary urban political iconography” (Krieger 2011). 24 The video can be viewed at https://vimeo. com/68771398. 25 The video can be viewed at https://vimeo. com/68771024. 26 For a similar use of wire-frame drawing and photo­ graphy see e.g. Luque (2014). 27 Once again see Ingold (2000). For a detailed ­research on walking and its contributions to ethnography see also Ingold (2004b, 2004a) as well as ­Ingold and Vergunst (2008). 28 As well as by modes such as “symbolic coding of space”, interactions that include “material divisions and exclusions in space”, and “‘micro-geographies’ of the body”. 29 This is not to say that Mexican society is not highly marked by multiple constructions and manifestations of racism (see e.g. Saldivar 2012).

81

3 Providing Lives

83

Welcome to Sierra Hermosa. Welcome to life lived on the streets of Mexico City. Welcome to the city made in corporeal practice. In this first of three empirical chapters we will meet residents of the urban neighbourhood Sierra Hermosa and its urbanising surroundings in order to follow them in their everyday efforts in forging opportunities out of their local social and material circumstances. What these people do, simply speaking, is make their living. Yet in doing so, they also provide a path into thinking their making as a making of city. They practice concrete socio-spatial situations, which through this practice co-emerge. Martina Löw (2009, 352) coins this as “duality of space” (own translation) by which she refers to the reciprocal action in which s­ patial structures are made in practice as much as they shape practice. In this sense, the people we meet in this and the following chapters are what de Certeau (1988) calls practitioners of space, “ordinary” men and women who through their everyday “ways of operating” (ibid., xi) become the co-creators of both their lives and their city. In their acts of creative everyday making they leave their marks on the city in ways of forging and adapting interactions that channel both their own movement and the movement of other co-authors of space. This is to say, that they work along and across existing infrastructures and ­establish new infrastructural relations by putting themselves in action as ­i nfrastructural beings. As mentioned before, AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004b) notion of people as infrastructure is the starting point for my engagement with these people’s lives; its endpoint is to show how it is in this infrastructural employment of the self that city emerges both materially and as a set of ideas, that is, as a thinking of city accomplished in practice. For analytical reasons, this chapter is divided into two sections: first, I will provide an account of the bodily practice by which key informants provide for their lives in and around Sierra Hermosa. This first section presents a picture of how inhabitants employ themselves as live infrastructure and how, in consequence, city is being made by such self-infrastructural practice. The second section then focuses on the specific thinking of city that emanates from such practices. With regard to the theoretical lens we should note that the guiding interest is not to answer the question of how people master adverse urban conditions (for 84

such accounts we can refer to the ethnographies, for example by Oscar Lewis (1963) and Larissa A. de Lomnitz (2011 [1975]), which I presented in chapter 1) but rather to shed light on how the employment of the self is accomplished through the actual work of making consequential intersections, and how such accomplishment constitutes a founding principle of urban becoming. Cityness, not socio-spatial injustices with their conditions of poverty or marginalisation, constitutes the overarching concern under which this book delves into investigating city-making practices. From there, the second lens through which I will analyse the making and thinking of city enacted in people providing for their lives is the distinct perspectival access to socio-material space entailed in each urban practitioner’s own hands and body. The research presented in this book makes apparent that any participation in and contribution to cityness, be it moneyed or deprived, sophisticated or not, is accomplished through what I call a labour of conjunction. This is the case because any practical dealing with socio-­ material constellations is possible only on the ground of concrete corporeal engagement with the world at hand. This line of analysis is routed in the ­material groundedness of practice – the decisive influence that the material condition of a given environment exerts on social activity unfolding within it. Following Tim Ingold (2000), this means taking into view how the city is grown in live engagement; drawing on Paul Carter (2004), this shows how the city is thought by handling its materials with the body in practice.

3.1

Infrastructures That Live: Doña Margo

We meet shortly after noon on the empty street that leads deep inside the ­Sierra Hermosa estate. The sun is burning and the only shade is where Doña Margo is sitting and, so it seems, where she is waiting for the researcher to pass by. Doña Margo is selling clothes and, in order to do so, she has adapted an unused bus shelter into her comfortable street vender’s stall: she is sitting on the concrete bench surrounded by trousers, shirts and blouses laid out next to her or hanging from the roof of the simple concrete structure (fig. 3.1.). In a 85

Fig. 3.1: The bus stand and surrounding pavement and walls that Doña Margo has made the shelter from which she acts as living infrastructure.

basket underneath the bench she also has some food as well as a container full of water, of which she offers me a glass as soon as I come closer. Doña Margo invites me to sit and refresh myself and, naturally, we start talking. She is a pensioner who boosts her family budget by selling clothes – right here, at the converted bus stop, which she has made her centre of operations. There are five of these stands, originally built to serve as the formal public transport terminal of Sierra Hermosa. However, the outline of the city’s transportation infrastructure developed differently, and the mobility hub connecting the estate with the wider urban field was informally established further down the road. Instead of buses, a market is now held once a week and the use of the five bus shelters as stalls has become the permanent marker of this deflection. This transformative performance is what requires our attention as it holds multiple implications and outcomes. 86

First, getting hold of such a privileged site for doing business, and holding on to it, Doña Margo tells me, is a profession in itself: permits have to be paid or, if you know how, have to be circumvented. This implies knowing the rules and knowing how to play them. For example, tricksters, who falsely claim to be charging for these permits, need to be identified and scared off. Acquiring this specific knowledge, and putting it to work in one’s favour, often depends on individual dexterity which expresses itself for example in nurturing friendly relationships with authorities while warily concealing the special arrangements these entail. In other words, specific street vendor’s skills and knowledge are needed in order to engage in complex negotiations located in the overlap of the formal and the informal. You have to defend yourself, show them … so they know who they are messing with. Personally, I don’t let them get away with it … This is why I tell people: look, everyone finds a way to defend themselves … And then people ask me, what do you tell them so they don’t charge you? And I say: What do you want to know? It’s a secret. Secondly, time and energy need to be expended too. This entails the only seemingly banal activity of showing presence in space. In order to use the bus shelter as her market stall during peak hours of customer traffic, Doña Margo has to lay claim to her customary right also during less lucrative times of the day and week – including the midday hours when the sun is burning hot and only a few people (like myself) come walking by. In this regard, the time spent at the stall without making sales counts as her investment in future periods of busy selling. That is, if she did not spend long hours here each day she would not be able to be here at all. In addition, Doña Margo uses this downtime in order to establish and nurture good relationships with her clients – a practice that Israel, a further resident of Sierra Hermosa with whom I walk the streets on a different occasion, refers to as “getting along and selling” (congeniar y vender). Accordingly, our conversation is punctuated by Doña Margo continuously greeting passers-by: “buenos días, cómo le va, que le vaya bien”.1 Some of these passers-by are already customers, others are people she simply knows by sight, one of them was me. 87

Thirdly, Doña Margo explains to me, while these relationships are important to her business they also reap benefits for the neighbours. In practising her business, Doña Margo sees most, if not all, of what goes on in this part of ­Sierra Hermosa: no researcher or thief or anyone else can pass by without being intercepted or, at least, noted. Sitting out time, therefore, is also a way of providing the area with a service of vigilance based on the social control that her eyes and ears can provide. In this sense, her argument recalls Jane Jacobs’ (1993) famous claim about the active role of sidewalks and those who use them in providing safety to cities. Fourth, to make this down time even more productive, Doña Margo has found yet another function to fulfil while she occupies the bus stand: she also helps her son and daughter-in-law by looking after their two children during the day. As her son and family live nearby, their arrangement is that the older child has to report to her when he goes off to secondary school, which he attends in the afternoon cycle. For the younger child, attending the morning cycle, she has lunch and water ready when he comes back from primary school at noon. This way, both her working time and the working time of the children’s parents need not be reduced in order to look after the youngsters. With this double function of her work she directly supports the “network of exchange” (Lomnitz 2011, 25–26) of her family’s survival unit. In return, so to speak, Doña Margo lives rent-free, as she tells me, at her sister’s place in another section of Sierra Hermosa. Undoubtedly, Doña Margo is entangled in a specific matrix of domestic favours and obligations that speaks in a particular way of her being a woman, mother and grandmother. These relationships, Salazar Cruz (1998, 131, own translation) confirms, lead to “a differentiated use of urban space and to differentiated displacement practices according to gender”: female lives circulate much more around domestic sites than those of men; not only in order to look after their own homes and children but also because employment for many poor women involves providing household labour and childcare in other parts of the city – or, as in our case, providing it right here, on the street. Worth mentioning, furthermore – although Doña Margo does not speak about it – is that such family arrangements bear the risk of dependency and conflict. In this regard, Glucksmann (2012), for example, 88

provides insights on the interconnections between informal working conditions on the one side and family structures, gender relations and intergenerational relations on the other. In sum, by running her business, Doña Margo, beside serving herself, provides valuable services to her family and neighbourhood in three ways: offering a shopping facility, social control and childcare. This shows how her actions bear fruit beyond the mere individual plane, thus constituting a node within multiple relations. Accordingly, we can concur with Simone (2004b) about how it is people themselves who provide the infrastructure they need in order to make ends meet in this or any other situation. In acting out her social relations in concrete space, Doña Margo herself is the infrastructure that sustains her business. She is a cornerstone of the infrastructure enabling her family to organise their survival and she is part of the infrastructure that provides the neighbourhood with safety. This function of being infrastructure is what Doña Margo plays out through making presence and time on the street of Sierra Hermosa. It is also what she achieves precisely through corporeal labour. Being infrastructure is the fruit of a practice – the fruit of a set of practices – that requires particular skills and knowledge as much as it is built on the use of one’s own body. It is a practice that is achieved as much as endured with the body – not least when sitting out all day in an adapted vendor’s stall in the heat. Furthermore, it is a creative practice insofar as it builds on existing material and social resources, which are either diverted in their function (the bus stand) or gainfully reconnected (family relations). Acting as infrastructure includes the possibility to hook up to existing infrastructures and to infrastructural remnants as much as to lay out novel infrastructural links and pathways. Essentially, then, Doña Margo is not only filling a gap left open by a lack of urban institutions, opportunities or equipment but moreover she herself constitutes these aspects in consequential ways. In making infrastructural connections productive in several ways and on several layers of sociality, she is making what sustains the city – not city as a fixed thing but city as a process in the making, as a “capacity to provoke relations of all kinds” (Simone 2010, 3). This is what I call the labour of conjunction, that is, the hard-working employment of the self as infrastructure through which consequential connections are made and sustained. 89

Undoubtedly, this making of social space in physical space is neither neutral nor inclusive to all. Doña Margo – as all infrastructures do – also exercises power over her family, street and neighbourhood by doing what she does and how she does it. In general terms, we can ascertain that with her labour of conjunction she is co-shaping, albeit with vested interests, the socio-spatial structures along which the sociality of the street and neighbourhood is unfolding. She is making city by making her own life and, as Hall (2015, 865–66) suggests, such “making of ordinary cities” is “not only a practice of social conviviality, but a cultural and political process”. A young woman passes by as if to make the point: Doña Margo exchanges some words with her and when the woman walks on she turns back to me commenting on what we can frame the miracle and challenge of living together, that is, on what Massey (2005) has coined the “throwntogetherness” of place in which we all play our part: We got to know each other just like this. It is nice knowing each other, isn’t it? (Nos conocimos así […]. Es bonito conocerse, verdad?)

3.2

Handling Movements: Eduardo

Every morning, from the window of the little studio I rent, I can see Eduardo and his wife setting up their juice stall on the sidewalk of Sierra Hermosa’s single access street. Invited by the friendly atmosphere they create, I make it a habit to start the day’s research with a glass of their juice. Soon we become familiar and our conversation starts flowing. The first thing Eduardo explains to me is the rationale for their choice of location. According to him, “it works” (sí funciona), that is, it does pay off simply because the stall is situated on the main road. Yet coming up with this only apparently banal understanding is anything but simple. As it turns out, choosing the right site for street-vending operations requires deep knowledge of what is actually going on. As we have seen with Doña Margo, it implies skills and a commitment to investing time and the body in order to set up a street vendor’s stall on the lucrative streets. Accordingly, if sustaining down time is 90

too costly, many opt for opening their miscelánea or food stall out of the frontroom window or garage in whatever side street their houses are located. This way, vendors can do other things while still attending their businesses. Hence, what Eduardo refers to is not the practice of making connections that we have seen in Doña Margo’s case, but the practice of pursuing and riding opportunities – which includes anticipating or warding off also possible adversaries to these opportunities’ unfolding. Eduardo and his wife came to Sierra Hermosa because they were looking for a way to get by. They had just started their own family and after checking out several neighbourhoods in the area they thought this one provided the right spot for them to try. One key for the decision was the possibility to draw on their extended family networks, namely Eduardo’s uncle living close by, for setting up the logistics of their business. But they also researched the possibilities held for them by the local situation. Eduardo describes the first activity for initiating their life as start-up entrepreneurs as follows: First we came and saw what the movements are like (vimos como iba a ­e star la movida). Again, what seems common sense when commencing a business is actually worth analysing in detail. What Eduardo describes is a conscious act of seeing movement which in turn is a key practice for making a living here and elsewhere. It is also revealing in theoretical terms: seeing movements is the confirmation in life lived of what is often difficult to grasp when trying to describe a given urban situation: things move. The city, as much as life, is neither stable nor fixed but a process in constant evolution. The fact that any observer of social space is placed in a particular site and moment, and thus constrained to an incomplete perspectival access to the city, is often confused with the city itself being a thing set hard and fast. David Harvey (1996, 38) therefore rightfully asks whether our “obsession with ‘the city’ as a thing” is actually limiting our ability to engage with “urbanization as a process”. The practice of city life has taught Eduardo just this: setting up a business, any business, is no one-off intervention but requires continuously intervening in the movement of things. It is acting, a verb; not action, a noun. In other words, 91

running a business is movement and the practice of movement – and it is in this regard that Eduardo and his wife knew that they would have to align their own movement with the movements of others. Ingold (2000, 88) elaborates how all things and social formations emerge through “practical movement” and “within the relational contexts of the mutual involvement of people and their environments”. He also reminds us that practicing such movement within movements requires skill by which he understands “the capabilities of action and perception of the whole organic being (indissolubly mind and body) situated in a richly structured environment” (ibid., 5). Such active corporeal involvement is what Eduardo expresses by pointing to the necessary ­conjunction of their physical presence at the place and seeing its movements. Eduardo then recalls the development of their entrepreneurial activities. He and his wife started out with a sweet shop, which they operated outside their house: “something that would have several options, that would work”, as he puts it, because it would be sufficiently common yet rare enough to intervene in the economy of the neighbourhood. Encouraged by their initial success they soon moved on: they saw the movement generated by the local school and tried tapping into it (fig. 3.2.). Schools are remunerative for street vendors because of the numbers of pupils and parents consuming. So Eduardo and his wife changed products and set up a juice stall outside the main entrance together with all the other vendors. Yet things moved differently outside the school. Competition is higher and so is the determination to control it and make a profit on this control. As soon as they moved their business to the school, Eduardo and his wife got into trouble with the operativos run by the local police, which required them to get a permit for selling in public – something they now hold. But the formal law was not the only law that was being enforced outside the school. In addition to the permit from the municipality, they were obliged to seek the approval of the school’s head teacher, who turned out to be the person deciding who gets what piece of the pie outside the school’s premises. When Eduardo and his wife refused to pay a bribe they had to move to the main road, 500 metres away from the school, in order to be left in peace with their stall. This is where we now talk over fresh orange juice each morning. 92

Fig. 3.2: The street in front of the school with its material movements from which Eduardo and his wife seek their ­opportunities.

When Eduardo tells me their story, we come to the conclusion that it is a process of learning by doing that they had to go through in order to get to where they are now. Yet when I suggest the need to know many things, especially the informal laws, Eduardo strongly disagrees with my wording: it is not about knowing as such, he corrects me, but about “knowing how to handle it” (no saber sino saberlo manejar): Because you can acquire knowledge (el saber uno lo aprende), but handling things (manejar las cosas), this is more complicated. Because nobody knows, or rather, nobody tells you. This is yet another aspect where seeing movements is of great importance: apart from describing the city as movements within movements that have to 93

be brought into conjunction, what Eduardo indicates is that a specific practice of knowing, a skill of knowing, is needed to participate in this urban alignment. Knowing, too, is a “making process”, an “active, lively engagement into relations” as the epistemologist Ludwik Fleck (1929, 426 own translation) affirms. It is a coming to know, not a pre-existing and fixed thing passed on from A to B; a dynamic and relational process “arising directly,” as Mar­chand (2010, 2) further elaborates, “from the indissoluble relations that exist between minds, bodies, and environment.” As a skill of both action and perception, knowing (that is knowledge as a verb) is “regrown in each […] through training and experience in the performance of a particular task” (Ingold 2000, 5). The knowing of the street vendor, in sum, can therefore be described as a practice of seeing and handling movements while being on the move oneself and following the movements of others. In de Certeau’s terms (1988, xix, 37), street-vending is a tactical way of operating, a “maneuvering” in which the practitioner of space cannot fall back on a stable position, nor can he or she take a distance from the movements of “the enemy”. In a material sense, we can also compare it with the “working knowledge” with its particular “feel” that Harper (1987, 118) describes as a practical knowing of the “elasticity of materials”. The author refers to the feel of a mechanic repairing cars, which in our context would translate to the feel of the street-practitioner handling the street and its movements.2 Opportunities have to be identified and then pursued either by navigating relations as they emerge or by warding off adversaries as they interfere, seemingly, out of the blue. Paraphrasing Eduardo’s words, hands have to grasp movements, both one’s own movement and those of others, in order to channel them in the right direction. Clear-cut knowledge is surely too slow and square – ‘dead’ that is – as everything is alive and ambiguous and suddenly upon you. Following this description of Eduardo’s practice, the role of the living body comes to the fore. Eduardo and his wife have come to know about how to handle their opportunities by inscribing their living bodies into the movements of the neighbourhood, school entrance and street. They have gained distinct perspectival access to the social and material conditions of Sierra Hermosa by the way they have positioned themselves within these conditions. Yet they have 94

surely also become objects in space for others. As Grosz (1995, 92) asserts, it is from within this particular twofold bodily positioning that their sense of the self, their sense of their space of possibilities and ability to manipulate things arises. At the same time, Knowles (2011, 138) reminds us that this positioning in practice resembles a navigation that is not fluid, as it is often claimed to be in the study on mobility, but implies bumping into things and stumbling over textures that mark the path. Only in engaging with the materiality of movement do Eduardo and his wife build and access what Cornelius (1980, 148) has described so well as their local “structures of opportunities”, that is, the ­i nfrastructural relations that both converge in and emanate from their own actions and positioning in space.

3.3

Forging Opportunities: Ivan

On my research walks across the fields and around the housing compounds that have risen in their place, one day I meet Ivan on a derelict site next to the entrance of the gated estate of Provenzal del Bosque (fig. 3.3.). Ivan is standing on top of a pile of rubble separating reinforcement steel from concrete with his sledgehammer. Nearby, a couple is at work on another pile, and there are plenty of piles still waiting. When we start talking, Ivan is ­welcoming but not particularly excited about the interruption. By way of speaking with his working body he repeatedly points me to the fact that his earnings depend entirely on the time he actually spends swinging the hammer: time that he is now losing to the interview. So while I try to make my questions quick, he interweaves his answers with extended periods of ­hammering. Ivan lives in San Pedro Atzompa, the historic village neighbouring Sierra Hermosa, and is the child of a stock farmer. He comes here once a week, in his “leisure time” as he describes it, whenever the development company of Provenzal del Bosque is dumping its reinforced concrete rubble. We are conversing about the transformation of his surroundings, the use of land and the logic inscribed in the development company advancing urbanisation not only 95

Fig. 3.3: The heaps of rubble with their scrap reinforcement steel that Ivan mines as his opportunity work.

by building houses but also by spreading debris on former farming grounds. When the conversation shifts to the value systems at work in these relations he makes the following comment: Everybody earns what he finds (Cada quien va ganando lo que ­encuentra). One day, he tells me, he saw the development company dumping their rubble and from then on started mining it in order to make money from the recycled steel. A simple equation, it seems, in which the quantity of a given resource equals the profit that can be made. Yet his comment, I would suggest, refers less to the amount of scrap reinforcement steel that can be sold for recycling, than to the ability to see rubble as an earning opportunity; and it speaks of the capacity and strength needed to turn it into one. What provides us with a hint 96

for such an interpretation is the word he uses to describe the earning enabled: the Spanish verb encontrar (finding), whose meaning implies to come upon, discover or to obtain by search and study. Finding, like seeing before, is itself a practice in its own right; and as such, drawing on social practice’s specific double materiality (see Reckwitz 2003, 290) discussed in chapter 1, it necessarily implies the body in action and thus physical labour. It is in this sense that Ivan’s so-called leisure time, which he spends hammering, is of interest because of its highly visible corporeality: opportunities, his practice shows us, have to be physically made and require the effort and endurance of hands and the body. Literally, you have to roll up your sleeves and swing the hammer; in other words, opportunities are forged by what is actually, and physically, done. This material doing can come in the form of sitting in the burning sun making connections, as in Doña Margo’s case, in observing and responding to movement like Eduardo does, or, coming back to Ivan, by turning the debris from new construction into a livelihood. Accordingly, the distraction of the interview does not mean he is falling behind the others – there is more than enough debris for all of them to capitalise on – but he is losing time for his own opportunity work. At day’s end, the steel Ivan recycles in five to seven hours brings him some 80 to 100 pesos.3 Observing Ivan in his doing, we come to recognise that there are huge ­d ifferences between opportunities and the physical work they entail. Mining ­opportunities with the hammer is surely one of the most arduous, which is revealing in several ways. First, thinking about the arduousness of his labour points to the costs of fading strength and health implied in forging opportunities. Ivan is a strong man but inevitably some day his back will hurt from his work. The heavy reliance on his body is surely to be considered a risk factor for his infrastructural practice, weighed against the benefits, as he describes them, of flexible working hours and being one’s own boss. The cost of the worn body we also encounter in the case of Doña Margo, where long hours of physical presence is exchanged for synergies of reciprocity and the possibility of connections; or in Eduardo’s case, whose trial-and-error approach requires a lot of effort – both social and physical – in order to get a grip on handling the ambiguity of the circumstances. Such effort (esfuerzo), put into making ends 97

meet, we will come across again in chapter 4 in relation to the actual making of houses. Both here and there it speaks of the corporeal labour accomplished by working bodies – be it while making the city or while carrying out any other form of work (see Wolkowitz 2006). Ivan confirms that if there were better jobs for him to do he would not be “battling like this” (batallando) with the debris. However, in his less arduous other occupation as a clown he is struggling in turn with an unstable income and irregular contracts. He is booked for parties only once in a while, so his main workday is Sundays when he performs tricks, zany magic and juggles in the central plaza of the village of Tecámac. Hence here he is, once a week, swinging the hammer outside the Provenzal del Bosque estate. Second, if we compare Ivan’s work with that accomplished by Doña Margo it is striking to see how Ivan rides the opportunity he is able to find, that is, how he jumps from one opportunity and occupation to the other when he sees it coming. This is in stark contrast to Doña Margo who is tied to street-vending as the one occupation at hand that allows her to adjust to and incorporate ­additional family duties – in this and most cases that of child-care. Sitting, waiting and selling clothes allows women to be mothers or grandmothers in addition to being self-made businesswomen. Gender and family roles thus make a clear difference in terms of the type and particularity of infrastructural work being accomplished. Finally, Ivan’s work recycling reinforcing bars is not the only job he is doing on the land adjacent to his village and the new urban developments spreading around it. According to seasonal requirements he is still working the fields in the original sense of the meaning. Cultivating crops implies work just as hard as swinging the hammer, he assures me, yet it is recycling steel that pays much better if seen in direct comparison. This we might call the irony of the urban hegemony: even in the form of rubble, that is, in the form of junk materials, errors of execution and demolished housing, citification – the material transformation of the territory that urban growth brings about (see Häußermann, Läpple, and Siebel 2008, 22) – pays more than agriculture. Cities, this example shows us, are not made from scratch but by turning upon themselves in endless variation; and novel opportunities emerge from other 98

possibilities backtracking, diverging or closing down. This understanding can be sustained by looking at the re- and up-cycling that is part, for example, of much of early-stage self-built housing or of informal waste management in Mexico and elsewhere. But I am not pointing here to the material cycle of resources alone, to the seven lives, for example, that waste has in Mexico as artist Francis Alÿs (see Rocha 2010) has so insightfully pointed out, able to be converted into income seven times. Rather, I am interested in the additional, hidden values that those mining the city’s waste or debris relate to the material they convert into potentialities. Francisco Calafate-Faria (2013) has unearthed these values, for example, for the case of waste-pickers in Curitiba, Brazil. Occupying “a crucial economic position after consumption and before production” these workers, Calafate-Faria concludes, ascribe alternative values to solid waste when collecting, separating and preparing it for retail; values that might be concerned with the environment, social justice or charity, in addition to the economic revenue resulting from reintroducing waste into market cycles (ibid., 335). Such hidden values, I argue, come to the fore also in the relations of reciprocity and exchange knitted together in, with and for the city that we find in the modes of urban labour discussed here. In this sense, forging second and third (and so on) lives out of things, like Ivan does with steel, reveals itself as yet another way of making consequential and, in so doing, burgeoning intersections among people, things, materials and spaces. This contributes to a city making described as the heart of cityness.

3.4

Facing Insecurity: Margarita

A few days after my conversation with Ivan, when I come by the site again, both the scrap metal and Ivan have gone. Instead, opposite the huge gateway to the Provenzal del Bosque estate, I meet Margarita, who is watching over a display of metal goods. Margarita’s job, she tells me, is to offer potential clients from the gated community the products that a local blacksmith has deliberately designed for them: above all, protection grilles for doors and windows and special locking systems for additional security. Margarita is not supposed 99

to do the actual selling of these products as they need individual adjustment and she cannot give prices for that. Her work consists in simply being there, demonstrating the blacksmith’s designs and establishing contacts. On good days, she hands out some leaflets; on bad days she does nothing. The rest of the time she sits next to the few objects on display (fig. 3.4.). Time works differently for her than for Ivan, yet for both of them it works through the body. While for him the amount of reinforcement steel, and thus of money, he collects is directly proportional to the time spent swinging the hammer, she is paid for her presence on the basis of a fixed amount of hours. As a result, she covertly tries reducing the actual time spent on site as this works directly in her favour. Willingly she tells me how she tries coming late and leaving early in order to fight boredom. When I meet her, she is working on a piece of embroidery: I bring it to avoid boredom … Only by doing you don’t get bored so much, you kill a little bit of time (Solo haciendo no se aburre uno tanto, mata uno un poco el tiempo) … I also get to read. A bit. But it is very frustrating (desesperante) to be here … It’s not pleasing at all to be sitting on the same spot all day … There are long lapses where there is just nothing, you fall asleep or … [just think about how difficult it is] going to the bathroom. But what can you do? The need is great. The need is great, indeed: Margarita is a mother of two, with the older daughter soon to become a mother herself. Currently, she lives separated from her husband because they do not get on very well. Like Ivan, Margarita earns 100 pesos a day – on the days she works – and like Ivan she did not receive much formal education. She dropped out of school in the second year of secondary education because she got pregnant and now her daughter is in the process of repeating her story: dropping out of school (albeit at high-school level). Margarita has been working at the entrance gate for a month. In her former job she was painting street signs for one of the large development companies in Tecámac, making 1200 pesos per week, three times more than what she is making now. But Margarita lost her job with December approaching because, as she claims, “they sack people to avoid paying the Christmas bonus”. Now, 100

Fig. 3.4: The street corner where Margarita displays her employer’s metalwork.

Margarita is killing time for a modest income. She could also turn to her family network, as she tells me. But she is a strong woman, and proud, and does not want to receive the charity of her father. He offered to give her the same amount as what she had earned at her former job, but they have their quarrels since she left school against her parents’ advice. Since then she has preferred to make her own way in life, independent of her parents. Any work that comes around is good, because each time, the situation is worse. But hey, here we are! You have to face making your life (Hay que ­enfrentar a hacer la vida). You have to stand on your own feet.

101

Margarita makes two strong points drawn together in one statement: you have to make your life and you have to face this making. Both insights are true in the socio-material conditions of Tecámac as much as they are true everywhere else. Most importantly however, they provide a particular sense also of how things can turn out wrong. As we have seen before, knowing how to handle and how to work out one’s opportunities is a process of learning (by doing); yet this process can also meet serious drawbacks or even fail; not only because of one’s own errors but also because the circumstances were unfavourable. Either way, you have to face your life and “drag your life forward” (sacar la vida adelante) as Margarita frames it. This is to say that one has to carry on by carrying it, your life, with you with all its weight. Once again, this is particularly the case for women. As a mother, she shoulders her special responsibilities. Her husband ‘simply’ walked out the door; but not so Margarita: I can’t just throw everything into the gutter. I am the mother of my children. It all depends on me. Margarita’s case therefore speaks of the uneven risk distribution and new forms of oppression playing out violently when people rely on forging their opportunities on the basis of being their own – and only – infrastructure. Alt­ vater and Mahnkopf (2003, 20) highlight how informal and precarious employment conditions constitute a deliberate regime based on permanent and comprehensive insecurity. And Isabell Lorey (2015, 1) adds to this the need to understand precarisation in order to understand the politics and economy of the present, as it is not a marginal phenomenon but “an instrument of governing” that “embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation” precisely by placing subjects under the rule of “insecurity and danger”. “Precarisation”, the author continues, “is a threat and coercion, even while it opens up new possibilities of living and working. [It] means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency” (ibid.). It is in this light that we can see what it means to be facing insecurity: while Margarita’s as well as the other practitioners’ work constitutes the provision of new, additional or formerly lacking city functions, the risks they take are excluded from being institutionally 102

shared by any formal social and economic security measures; the risks of making city in practice they carry solely on their own shoulders (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2003, 24–25). With regard to her use of space, finally, we can conclude that Margarita is pushed from one place to another by the state of insecurity in which her life is caught. Other than in the case of Doña Margo, who claims control over space and transforms and reconnects it to her needs, Margarita does not have the capacity to gainfully intersect the lines along which she lives with the surrounding social and material resources in order to expand her possibilities. Yet while her own “network of exchange” (Lomnitz 2011) remains truncated she nevertheless makes space by making presence and through her presence enables the connections of others, namely the blacksmith and his clients.

3.5

Labour of Conjunction

Accompanying Doña Margo, Eduardo, Ivan and Margarita in their everyday activities, we have seen how practitioners of the street make connections and align and tie their living bodies into the movement of other bodies, things, practices and spaces. Such making of lives through infrastructural practice, we have also seen, is how city, too, is made in practice. This is why I frame these practices as urban labour and, in particular, as forms of a specific city-making labour of conjunction. As with all practices, the characteristic of such labour is its double materiality – that is, the materiality of both body and things by which practice is rooted in physical work and in the physical environment being worked upon (see Reckwitz 2003, 290). As such, the labour of conjunction nurtures the growth of a particular sense of the space and time in which it unfolds, one that emerges in the indissoluble union of each practitioner’s corporeal self, practice and ready-to-hand life world (see Ingold 2000). As has been discussed in chapter 1, Carter (2004, xi) therefore speaks of a material thinking that occurs in the process of making. Interrogating the knowing of this thinking through making, the examples presented in this chapter suggest three notions of city that come to the fore in 103

the particular practicing we have witnessed: notions that imply understanding the city as actively grown, as laborious and as immediately affected by one’s actions. These notions are theoretical lenses in order to describe how the members of this case study make sense of their environment by laying hands on it and intervening in it with their own lives. They stand here as both central to and paradigmatic of the principles of the practice of city-making, that is, of how enacting oneself as infrastructure is tied to making one’s city, which, subsequently, is tied to thinking it in practice; in one word: to thinking the city as a doing, as citying. Actively yet self-dependently growing the city The first understanding of the social-material context that can be derived out of the labour of creating and sustaining consequential conjunctions is the notion of the city/citying being actively grown. When Doña Margo transforms a bus shelter into a business location she not only shapes her surrounding but also understands it on the ground of making her time and social relations become productive. It is through self-initiated and self-sustained infrastructural work that she draws her family members, clients and neighbours into generative relations; and ‘her’ city thus emerges around her by constituting a node through which she aims to channel as many lines of activity of other practitioners as possible. Likewise, Eduardo and his wife enact and think ‘their’ city when building the financial foundations of their new family life on the basis of seeing and intercepting movement with a fruit juice stand; and Ivan when forging opportunities, creating alternative values and generating income out of rubble. Even Margarita, though less creative when sitting out and facing the regime of insecurity that governs her life, does intercept the city’s lifelines with her labour of conjunction, drawing life towards her and thinking the city on the ground of the connections she is able to make. Following Ingold (2000, 87), this indicates that the city is grown through these practitioners’ infrastructural engagements, taking on evolving forms that are “neither given in advance nor imposed from above, but emerge within the context of their [human beings’ and the environment’s] mutual involvement in a single, continuous field of relationships”. 104

Locating the micro practices of Doña Margo, Eduardo, Ivan and Margarita in an overarching framework, we could now emphasise how the participants in this research are placed with their lives in the context of an urbanisation project that does not bring about the formal opportunities that the city might have offered in previous decades4 or might possibly continue to offer in other parts of the metropolitan area (as suggested by some of this research’s informants). However, regardless of the doubts raised with respect to the inclusiveness of such narratives,5 in any case such framing would picture self-infrastructural practices essentially only as a consequence of the lack of formal infrastructures and urban equipment. There is no doubt that social injustices are deeply marked in Mexico City (and elsewhere) and one way to respond to their violence is by overcoming their spatial bias through employing oneself in the quest to turn deficiencies into opportunities. However, this reading of people as infrastructure does not go far enough in its analytical potential and attends only to what is most visible precisely in the absence of traditional manifestations of (fixed) infrastructure. A more nuanced view is that people always enact themselves as infrastructure, personalising or adding to other structures already in place regardless whether these are interpreted as sufficient or not. Stepping out into any city’s realm of movement always means causing a shift in the ever-changing relational fields that emerge, alter, amplify or close down with one’s own interception. Cityness, “the city as a thing in the making” (Simone 2010, 3), thus lies at the heart of all urban socio-spatial configurations with their genuine capacity to generate worlds of intense interaction (see Massey 1999) and to “juxtapose nature, people, things, and the built environment in any number of ways” (Amin and Thrift 2002, 3). On the level of individual lives, this is to say: in the city actively grown there are o ­ pportunities to be sought, always and everywhere. Yet in distinction to conceptions that focus on the provision of fixed infrastructures, the opportunities revealed through the lens of city practice are not provided by the legal or administrative (formal) framework, nor by the (equally formalised) ­societal solidarity based on citizen rights and obligations;6 but they are provided essentially by each and every practitioner on their own and in accordance with their ability to enact themselves as infrastructure and to unearth 105

and activate the relational potential that lies in this active engagement in and with the world. This allows spelling out two critical considerations regarding how infrastructural practices are commonly framed: on the one hand, notions like ‘makeshift’ and ‘informal’ that are often ascribed to practices like street-vending need to be assessed with regard to the (informal) making they actually depict. Importantly, it is not a making of interim solutions in the face of want or under the effect of austerity urbanisms (see Tonkiss 2013) that characterises infrastructural practice; nor are these practices in any way ‘abnormal’ to how city life is being lived despite the fact that much of urban governance aims at othering and excluding from formal view those unruly practices it cannot control (see Simone 2010, 12). Rather, practices like street-vending or resourceful recycling are but one expression of how people actively nurture themselves and their surroundings in the course of life lived by causing and channelling movement of direct and mutual engagement with the environment. As forms of urban labour, these practices are therefore situated inside the very foundations of the city as process. This is why they come under attack under those attempts of (formal) planning and (monopolised) governance that aim at shutting the city down, mid-flight as it were, in a fixed state. On the other hand, city practices – and informal practices for that matter (see Varley 2013) – need to be considered critically, too, in order to prevent them from being idealised. Unfortunately, as with everything, there is a price involved in making city on the ground of one’s active self-engagement. That is, operating as live infrastructure does not mean that people build structures that are equal in terms of access and benefit, or that are in any way fair in how they allocate actions and outputs and thus distribute securities versus risks. Rather, collaborations grown and sustained through urban labour are biased, egocentric and subject to abuse and domination, just as all infrastructures are.7 People as infrastructure act on and for their own when acting out their city, even if benefits are purposefully spread in order to increase personal gains. Accordingly, Simone’s notion does not describe people working together but how individual players make productive connections precisely without transferring into them any liability for what they do and don’t do, or 106

for the precariousness that accompanies it. Doing infrastructure is the work of everyone alone – and thus the risks taken rest essentially on the shoulders of each individual alone (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2003). Furthermore, it is a form of urban acting that translates into everyone standing alone to be blamed in the event of crisis and catastrophe: if you fail, it is entirely your fault – this is the ghost that haunts Margarita! According to the neoliberal logic that underpins the self-making subject and city, if you do not make it, you should ‘simply’ have worked harder (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2003, 25; drawing on Wilpert 2003, 112). The city as laborious endeavour The discussion of an active, self-reliant but also self-dependent growing of city points to a second relevant aspect when describing the perception of the self and the city/citying derived from infrastructural practice: this is the material thinking that lies in an actual accomplishing of hard work. Growing city in active engagement is an activity of tough physical labour, and with this labour the idea of the city being grown is enveloped in sweat and the aching of the body. Through putting our effort into our existence is how we experience being in the world as living beings – be it in the urbanising landscape of Mexico City or placed in any other socio-material constellation. This is what I aim at describing with the notion of the laborious endeavour that is growing the city in practice and that I have been discussing in this chapter under the term ­urban labour, and more specifically as labour of conjunction. At this point I want to interrogate this laboriousness of city-making practice further, due to possible misunderstandings in light of the use of other terms like self-made and do-it-yourself ( DIY ) in recent urban conceptualisations. There is a risk that these categories could be taken as synonyms for one another. This is not the case. What I introduce as a making by employing oneself as infrastructure and making-things-meet with one’s own hands differs essentially from those perspectives usually filed under notions like self-made and hands-on urbanism.8 Contrary to the debate here, what these other accounts do is tell the story of inhabitants organising themselves in order to participate in or take control of the planning or building of 107

their homes and neighbourhoods. The terms self-made and hands-on thus resemble the idea of active deciding and executing one’s share in the urban process. Furthermore, self-made and hands-on in these accounts allude to notions of care, craftsmanship and spirited, good-hearted engagement in local conditions, which are put forward as positive values on the ground that making something by hand or taking on a task in joint action is doing ‘good’, or at least is doing better than other ways of effecting urban change. To this regard, and precisely because I am deeply sympathetic with taking a dedicated stance towards fighting the injustices of today’s urban world, concerns need to be raised: ascribing positive connotations by default to notions like care, craftsmanship and the zest of action can lead to idealising what is intended to be done at the expense of neglecting to account for the material and social effects – good or bad – that are produced by the actual doing. Crafting and caring for gated communities, for example, is not precisely what would make for “the good city” as Amin (2006, 1013ff.) envisions it on the foundation of “four registers of urban solidarity[:] repair, relatedness, rights and re-enchantment.” Likewise, and most relevant for the present analysis, it is the material and social constraints inscribed directly in crafting and caring that demand our attention. The corporeal laboriousness entailed in actively growing city by enacting oneself as live infrastructure is one such compulsion. This is what is at the heart of the meaning of making city, of citying, with one’s own hands in our context. The notion of urban labour describes a city-making enacted by plodding and plodding on with the socio-material bedrock of the city’s and the practitioner’s own becoming. This is what is characteristic of all practice: that it is material in two ways, as the body acting and the physical environment acted upon. Weaving and sustaining ties with family, clients and neighbours (Doña Mago); laying hands on movements to make them come one’s way (Eduardo and his wife); mining opportunities (Ivan) and facing insecurity while shouldering its risks (Margarita) – not to speak of enduring heat, squeezing juice by hand, hammering concrete and killing time – all come down to the living body doing physical work and thus to what qualifies citying, and the cityness it creates, as essentially laborious. 108

State of emergency: The city as the sum of its immediate ruptures The third relational understanding of the city/citying and one’s own position (better: movement) within it is informed by the immediacy of effects evoked by urban labour. This draws attention to the relations of time and presence in which the process of city-growing unfolds. Analysing how practitioners of the street think their city through corporeal practice allows us to address the urban/urbanising process from the perspective of the spatial practitioner him- or herself. Edward Soja (1992, 113, 94) once characterised peri-urban continuums (in his case that of Los Angeles) as the frontier land of urbanisation being at the same time “nowhere yet now/here”, that is, materialising hard and fast yet seemingly out of the blue and cut loose from established structures of territorial hierarchy. This particular collision and oxymoron of space and time he grapples with in the notion of nowhere-now-here, I suggest, is useful not only to describe the transformation of the “postmetropolis” (Soja 2000) and its socio-spatial production and reproduction but can also be employed to deepen our understanding of the practices of a labour of conjunction. Growing city is an activity always of the here and now. At the same time it is both happening everywhere and taking on multiple, changing forms and thus difficult to trace and pin down in analytical terms. Ivan gives an impression of this unpredictable and fleeting instantaneousness: the moment the construction company dumps its debris is the very moment at which the opportunity to convert it into a modest earning arises. Material situation and ­labour of conjunction are directly linked in time and space. However, they are not tied to each other on the ground of stable laws or the like. Repetition is not guaranteed but varies according to the spontaneous coming together of a hypothetically infinite number of practitioners, things, locations and occasions, that is, of human and non-human actors and their place and time of action, when thrown together in space and animating it in mutual engagement. This I call the hidden dimension of Soja’s (1992) poetic framing of the (postmetropolitan) city: not only does it denominate the transformation of the “exopolis”, of the peri-urban space and process in particular, but it describes also what is at the core of cityness, that is, of what it means to experience the city practiced. Now! Here! Always around but nowhere in particular, moving 109

simultaneously in multiple directions with the movement of infinite other of its expressions: this is how the city – that is, multiple cities in juxtaposition – ever emerges ­i mmediately and fleetingly around each practitioner and along his or her lines of live action. City/citying is happening right where Doña Margo appropriates a bus shelter and diverts it into the node from which to weave her relations. ­Margarita’s and Eduardo’s wayside stalls instantaneously transform the street into a place of conjunctions where things and people meet. Yet, if these presences do something live/alive and on the spot then they also vanish the very instant that their actors leave the scene of their enactment. This is why Doña Margo puts so much effort in preserving her presence also across those hours of the day that are slow for her business. And expanding the argument in order to make the case: even digitally mediated presences – which this research did not record – have their immediate effect in material space by means of a particular manner of corporeal engagement with the environment, exemplified in the absence of attention to the concrete socio-material surroundings that is the price for being somewhere else virtually. In other words, accessing the city through the mediation of online devices, too, is inevitably a corporeal practice with its material and social characteristics that cause immediate ­effect in the place in which it is enacted. In way of concluding this first empirical chapter, the practitioners we have met so far thus allow me to draw a connection to Ruth Glass’ findings decades earlier in a very different urban setting, namely London. The city, any city, Glass emphasised from her research, can never be taken for granted (see Gandy 2011, 4), essentially because the city is “too vast, too complex, too contrary and too moody to become entirely familiar” (1964, xiii). It is this, the city’s ‘moodiness’, I argue, that we can frame today as the working – in corporeal-material labour – of countless consequential conjunctions of cityness. “[U]nruly yet dynamic intersections of differences of all kinds”, Simone (2010, 12) describes these conjunctions. The city/citying as the practice, arena and outcome of cityness, then, has to be taken as day-by-day engagement and thus as a “state of emergency” (Simone 2004a, 4), as an ongoing “rupture in the ­organization of the present”, in practice. 110

Notes

1

‘Good day’, ‘how do you do?’, ‘I hope you are doing fine’.

2

I will come back to the elasticity of material space – or rather its plasticity – in chapter 6.

3

In 2016, this is equivalent to approximately five ­Euros. By comparison, the official minimum wage for non-professionals established for Tecámac for the same year is 61.4 pesos per ordinary working day (CNSM 2012).

4

It can be argued, for example, that migrants who ­arrived to Mexico City from their villages in the 1950/60s still encountered favourable conditions that provided them with formal opportunities to ­improve individual living conditions while from the 1980s onwards this prospect was no longer equally available.

5

Becker et al. (2003, 8–9), for example, argue that the idea of the city offering genuine opportunities to its citizens has always been to a significant extent ­illusory or, at the least, biased with regard to class, gender and race and born out of the grand narrative of European (urban) modernity, exported to Latin America and living on in contemporary discourses and enterprises of the region’s modernisation.

6

According to Becker et al. (2003) this we could frame as the more or less fulfilled dream of a Continental European project of the city anchored in ­c­omprehensive social security systems.

7

In this, live infrastructures resemble on the individual level what for formal, built infrastructures can be ­described as their inclination to being elite-centred. Compare the discussion on planning in chapter 6.

8

For an example, see the publications by Ring (2013) on Berlin co-housing or by Rosa and Weiland (2013) on community initiatives that aim at upgrading urban living conditions in Mexico City and elsewhere.

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4 Growing Houses

113

If the last chapter looked at the labour of conjunction, of making city-full, citying connections on the local neighbourhood streets and surrounding fields, this chapter now engages with the labour implied in the making of houses and with how people through such making and houses try to stabilise their existence in the city made in practice. Houses, too, are practised with the body. They emerge out of movements that are individually and collectively aligned and thus can be apprehended as the socio-material manifestation of infrastructural work while acting themselves as supportive infrastructures. I will begin this chapter by asking about the moment that dwellers embark on the process of the physical making of their houses. I will then turn to the making of houses as such, showing how they are accomplished either from scratch – in what is referred to as self-built housing – or from a pre-existing starting point – the so-called turnkey houses – yet stressing how houses are always characterised by their work-intensive progressiveness. Thirdly, I will analyse how houses are made out of the physical presence of their occupants’ bodies as much as they are made out of conventional building materials; and fourthly, I will draw attention to the nurturing of community that supports the making of houses. Together, these aspects frame the infrastructural synergy of houses and inhabitants, a relational becoming by which residents put their houses, their making of houses and their occupation of houses to work as part of their own infrastructural practice. This is what I call the labour of presence and it materialises in what Simone (2011, 364) has framed as “living architecture”, that is, as buildings employed as mechanisms to secure spaces of intersection and manoeuvring. What this labour of presence reveals is that houses are forged out of bodily praxis and, in turn, support this praxis. Houses are literally grown, both in light of their incremental manufacturing over time and in accordance with Ingold’s notion of a relational engagement with the social and material constituents of the environment: houses, Ingold (2013, 47ff.) asserts, are always grown. This growth process, however, becomes particularly visible in the incremental house. What the labour of presence implies, furthermore, is a particular way of materially thinking the city out of the corporeal practice of growing houses; and it implies critically reviewing how the laboriousness of this practice can also be used against the 114

makers-users of houses themselves. Last but not least, I turn to houses as the material proof of their growth, and thus as a valuable source of data for this research. Furthermore, and throughout this chapter, I will engage with conventional notions that describe self-built housing as informal: by putting bodily praxis and its material groundedness centre stage I challenge the commonly drawn opposition between the formal and the informal.

4.1

Breaking Ground

Given the pace and territorial expansion of the urbanisation process we call Mexico City, most houses in the northern stretch of the ZMVM are established on what was previously farmland.1 This land has to be transformed and put to work by means of a series of actions that can be accomplished out of two theoretically antagonistic yet systemically intertwined modes of urbanisation, that is, out of what we are used to calling formal and informal urbanisms. In both these registers, land has to be acquired and developed: it has to undergo a change in legal status; and it must be fenced, subdivided, sold and covered with buildings in order to be converted into actual houses and brought to life as yet another emerging neighbourhood of the sprawling metropolis. Describing the formal and informal registers with their, at times, surprising interdependencies is a significant task in its own right, one that I have briefly engaged with in chapter 1. The question, however, of whether any of the abovementioned steps is accomplished within, outside, or under some third space of the law – or, for that matter, if the phenomenon needs to be framed rather as an issue of lacking basic urban rights (Huchzermeyer 2004), as I will discuss in chapter 6 – is, for the moment, beside the point for describing the bodily implications for those who live in and with houses in this or any city. More important, already, is to keep in sight how practitioners living in conditions of urban becoming navigate back and forth the two registers of the formal and the informal in order to make the most out of both. In this regard, de Soto (1990) has shown how people create and employ temporary emergency solutions while Altvater and Mahnkopf (2003), among a growing 115

number of other urban scholars, point to the alternative forms of organisation that can rise and persist under a political project based on informality. Most relevant for this research, however, is revealing the distinct operational logics and time frames of involvement under which key actors come to build houses; because these allow me to point to the corporeal implications of the resident-makers of such homes. This is to ask: how and when do development companies and inhabitants, that is, planners of space in contrast to practitioners of space, intervene in the process? According to a simplified working definition, (formal) housing developers like the company Casas Geo,2 centralise all activities of preparing and working the land before selling the finished houses at the end of this work order. This mode of production is called a “vertically integrated system” (Inclán 2013, 104) and is split into more than 60 different stages including the allocation of mortgages, the operation of factories that produce building materials and the provision of post-sales services. In the opposite, so-called informal model, which we might refer to as a horizontally integrated system, it is the dwellers themselves who accomplish all these steps – albeit in a different, less linear fashion, that is, simultaneously and in an incremental manner. Dwellers in this second model do so under a scheme of collective and up-front ‘financing’ based on their own engagement. That is, they don’t pay for finished turnkey houses but by building their houses themselves from the first moment onwards. What emerges from this comparison is that formal and informal roadmaps to housing overlap in what they achieve yet can be substantially distinguished by the moment when the actual residents enter the process. Accordingly, they can be differentiated with regard to how each process is executed, sustained and paid for through the use of the residents’ own bodies. Señora Santa, for example, is a resident of Sierra Hermosa. She arrived in her new house three years after the development’s first construction phase had been handed over to the first inhabitants. This was in 2005. Santa remembers that, back then, the houses made a very good impression on her. They were beautiful, she tells me, and the estate in good shape, as there were not yet so many people living in the neighbourhood. Today, she and her family still like living in Sierra Hermosa, yet Santa does explicitly mention that they bought 116

their house here not because they specifically wanted to, but because they had to make use of their state workers’ housing credit scheme3 and found Sierra Hermosa to be the best option they had. What is revealing from this account are three things: first, residents of Sierra Hermosa enter the above-mentioned process of the production of houses at the stage of completed houses which, in the case of Santa, are described as aesthetically pleasing. Secondly, the material condition of the neighbourhood is also laid out before people move to the estate and is positively perceived precisely because the roads, sidewalks and buildings are new and still match their original designs, as they have not yet been altered or worn down by use. Thirdly, the house is financed mainly by a mortgage that is granted on the condition of previous and future employment. Payment for the house and urban infrastructure, we can thus say, is ­accomplished off-site, which in our case means that Santa’s husband is working for a state institution.4 Very different indeed are the experiences and payment schemes of residents of the self-built settlement Colonia Antorcha. Here, residents physically enter the stage long before turning the key to their new home. They not only physically produce their houses themselves but also produce the material condition of the neighbourhood, in parallel to their houses. And they need to produce social conditions amenable to being able to work on the above-mentioned two physical frontiers. Accordingly, people in this mode of production pay for both their houses and streets through the employment of their living bodies on the precise site where both physical structures are being erected: they enter, establish and sustain a group of settlers, lay out the streets and plots, fight for the provision of public services while at the same time enduring their absence, usually for many years. They buy, collect and transport ­every piece of building material and put up the walls and roof of their houses partly by their own work. In other words, they enter the process right from the very beginning; breaking ground themselves, collectively, by means of their own presence and engagement with, through and for their bodies. In this way they come to experience a starting point of their houses that is very different from that of the formal housing scheme. They engage in the process all the way through, and this engagement is profoundly rooted in material 117

practice. One of the women from the group of early settlers in Colonia Antorcha describes what it was like to be among the first to come and live in their neighbourhood-in-the-making: When we arrived there was nothing there. Just like now: we don’t have ­water or electricity, nothing. We arrived to nothing more than the soil of the ground (Venimos así a como está la tierra). What we learn from this quote is that the physical engagement is not only different but profoundly unequal with regard to the labour conditions that making homes in one scheme or the other implies. Angela Giglia (2010, 341, own translation) therefore speaks of the “long and arduous process” of “domestication” that is producing and dwelling in the informal city. Two men whom I interrupt building a house to the rear of the settlement provide a vivid picture of the implications of such living with ‘nothing there’ while engaging in progressive urbanisation: Right now I haven’t had a shower in two days. Imagine what it is like to come home [all covered in dust and sweaty] and to make your bed linen and everything dirty.

4.2

Growing Custom-made

Turning to the bodily making of houses also brings to the fore their material conditions and how these conditions change over the years. What becomes apparent is that the notion of the completed house implicit to Santa’s earlier description is only partially true. Rather, houses in both Sierra Hermosa and Colonia Antorcha are hardly ever finished.5 They develop and change with, through and for the needs of their occupants. Regardless of whether they are built from nothing or moved into as a (supposedly) ready-to-use building – or starting from any point in between6 – houses are transformed by their inhabitants in accordance with the uses these occupants make of their homes and in light of what they can make happen and how they can make their homes 118

happen. In other words, houses function as infrastructure to provide for and sustain the lives of their residents – and they do so custom-made. Here again, the interplay of formal and informal registers presents complex nuances. For example, Castillo (2007, 183) has pointed to the process of counter-directional development and, eventually, convergence of formal and informal housing. Houses that start out from informal situations are gradually developed to meet formal standards as land ownership is regularised and formal urban infrastructure, equipment and services are brought in over the years by the state, private sector or through the work of the resident-builders themselves. Likewise, yet in the opposite direction, houses that start out from a formal situation are gradually transformed to meet the needs or aspirations of their inhabitants. Thus, ready-to-use buildings take on the characteristics of informal housing as they are expanded and adapted; and they do so often knowingly in violation of the relevant construction laws, land use regulations and specifications in neighbourhood preservation and environmental protection codes.7 However, while this convergence of formal and informal housing holds true, it does not capture the relevant point in the context of this study. The de­ scription of the formal turning informal and vice versa misses the fact that in both modes resident-builders develop their houses by taking the same ­d irection: that of pursuing, building, sustaining and continuously adapting the ­basis on which their lives are made. “Somos iguales” – we are the same – one of the members of Colonia Antorcha argues while pointing to the communality that lies within the difference between the two modes of housing: while some people build, others rent – but all people struggle the same with getting on. Therefore, rather than persisting with thinking in terms of an analytical dichotomy between the formal and informal, what counts here is that in both modes the growing house is employed as the material extension of each occupant’s individual opportunity work, that is, as an active infrastructure enhancing self-infrastructural activity. “[H]ousing is an activity and a vehicle for personal and community development” John Turner (preface in García-Huidobro et al. 2008, emphasis added) reflects on such infrastructural practice and its architectural outcome; and speaking of spaces 119

and processes of intersection and manoeuvring in the city, Simone (2011, 364, 362) frames houses equally as “living architectures” that are employed as instruments or machines for acting out and maximising potentialities in an (urban) “environment also in the making”. Therefore, when acknowledging this concurring making of the self, the house and the city, we can turn to Ingold’s (2013, 47ff.) general account of how houses are being build: elaborating on the inevitable “kink” between “the world and our idea of it”, Ingold rejects framing the house as a fixed thing, suggesting instead that residing is never a matter of “taking up” a living in something “that has already been constructed” (ibid.) but of participating in the “flow of materials” by which any object is nothing but a momentary stoppage in the “formative history” of life (ibid., 20, 21).8 The houses of Sierra Hermosa are paradigmatic in this sense. According to the economy of scale of mass-produced urban developments, most houses resemble a common prototype: in this case, a single storey, two-bedroom terraced house with a surface area of 45 square metres plus a ten-square-­metre parking space and small courtyard. This size is regarded as being “very small” or “too small” by most of the participants of this research although it corresponds to the legally established average for a low-cost (popular) two-bedroom dwelling in Mexico (see CONAVI 2010, 55). From the very beginning, therefore, the delivered unit is seen by its occupants merely as a basis on which to build on according to individual needs and financial abilities. In the particular case of Sierra Hermosa, the developer anticipated this growth and prepared the houses not only to allow, but also to encourage their enlargement. This is achieved by preparing the structure from the outset to receive a future second floor: the foundations and walls are calculated to bear the additional weight and the ceiling of the living room is designed to be easily broken through in one corner in order to allow for a future interior staircase.9 Despite these preparations, the formally anticipated direction of growth is not necessarily the first to be followed when adjusting the initial structure and floor plan. Rather, the house first swells towards the street, walling in and roofing over the area originally designated as an open-air parking space. 120

According to local bricklayers who share their experience with me, this is for two reasons: on the one hand, residents want to increase their security and privacy by establishing a solid garage for their vehicle and putting up a separation from the street for themselves. On the other hand, and more importantly in our context, it is towards the street that additional space is most needed, precisely in order to convert the house into an active agent that helps provide a livelihood. It is by increasing the contact zone with potential clients that the investment in additional space pays off best: carpentry workshops, hairdressing salons, restaurants and, time and again, local convenience stores (misceláneas) are what houses, generally speaking, are first extended for, not additional bedrooms. Thus the formal growth plan is left aside for the time being in favour of an informal yet more productive conversion of the house into an opportunity infrastructure. Santa, for example, is using the kitchen and living room of her house as a restaurant.10 With respect to her own and her neighbours’ economic situation, and to the changes that her neighbourhood has undergone in past years, she tells me: Almost everybody is looking at how to set up a business. […] This is the situation: you need to work, to set up a business, like I did, in order to get by. [Because] unemployment is devastating.11 According to both Santa and the bricklayers, what is consciously budgeted into the equation of such informal conversions of the formal house is both paying fines to the municipal council for violating building regulations and losing the developer’s guarantee on the edifice by altering its structure in ways the construction was not designed for. Of necessity, the expected return on this informalisation of formal starting-conditions and growth-plans must exceed these costs, showing once again how informality is a zone of penumbra, a “gray area which has a long frontier with the legal world and in which individuals take refuge when the cost of obeying the law outweighs the benefit” as de Soto (1990, 12) frames it. As if this were not enough, further costs arise, in particular those of growing step-by-step which implies paying higher prices for smaller quantities of the same building material, as well as enduring longer 121

construction times. This is to say, the positive payoffs of an economy of scale, as in formal mass-production, cannot be aspired to. On the other hand, growing step-by-step also means that initial costs are very low and the house as opportunity infrastructure can thus unfold in direct correlation to the infrastructural capacities of the resident-builder. In Santa’s words: People invest little by little in the concrete blocks needed for construction; they enlarge their homes slowly […] because they grow with all the ­l imitations they face (por que también crecen con toda las limitaciones de uno). Sometimes you simply can’t, you don’t have the money to buy building materials. Finally, the house is an opportunity asset also when employed as a commodity. Houses can of course be sold at a profit, as Santa did with their former home in Ajusco, central Mexico City (Federal District), before moving to ­Sierra Hermosa. If things go well, the incremental house is incrementing in value, too: first, because the house itself is accumulating brick-by-brick investment and, secondly, the surrounding neighbourhood is consolidating and thus improving in terms of formal services provision. Thirdly, with rising levels of both (material) city and (social) cityness, that is, with increasing numbers of houses and thus people with whom to engage in consequential relations, potential clients multiply and business opportunities grow.12 Hence, the house as infrastructure works also as a tool for inhabitants to speculate on urbanisation just as the formal developer and their shareholders do – albeit on a very different economic scale.

4.3

Investing the Living Body

Most importantly for the argument of this book is the implication of the resident-makers’ bodies in growing, sustaining and paying for their houses. Shifting the view from Sierra Hermosa to Colonia Antorcha, we find that houses here too are active infrastructures and financial vehicles. They, too, provide the operational ground and investment for a (better) future in addition 122

to being a home – only, as mentioned before, starting the building process from scratch and thus leading to a different corporeal relationship between housing practitioner and practiced house. That is to say, when formal financial payment goes down, social and corporeal ‘payment’ takes up its place in ­accordance to varying forms of organisation and precariousness.13 Ziccardi and González Reynosa (2012, 30) make a similar case, arguing that the production of informal houses is profoundly social in character as well as based on a “payment mode of self-financed individual self-production” (own translation). More than in other production modes, these authors emphasise that it is the “effort (esfuerzo) of the household” (ibid., 29) that ­accomplishes progressive building. Likewise, Varley (2002, 457) raises the point that the cost of self-building is not only financial but also “physical and emotional, a product of the ‘suffering’ (sacrificio) entailed in building from scratch in an unserviced area”. What the present analysis aims to add to this is to follow up on the corporeal dimension of such effort and suffering/sacrifice. In order to do so, two important considerations need our attention. First, it is not to forget that when social relations nurture and sustain incremental housing, these do play out differently among the sexes. Martha Schteingart (1997, 790), for example, recalls from her research on poverty, living conditions and health in Mexico City that “the time, effort and sacrifice” of many of the new urban settlers was “particularly evidenced in the stories of women” (own translation). And Ann Varley (2010, 92) reminds us of how property is to a great extent “family property”, which means that despite women’s particularly high amount of actual labour put into growing the material foundations of the family, their ability to possess property titles in return depends largely “on their status as wives and mothers” and thus lags far behind that of their husbands, or of men in general.14 I will pick up this lead below with regard to what I call the (in)stability of houses when unsecured tenure is being used as a tool for governing through insecurity. For the moment, my aim is to simply point to the physical labour such house-sustaining social negotiations entail – as well as to the labour implied in the actual building of houses and neighbourhoods – and to raise awareness for the differentiated roles of 123

female and male bodies when emplaced always in specific gendered situations and contexts. Second, it is important to avoid the pitfall of oversimplifying the terminology used to describe the phenomenon of informal housing production. It is well known that despite terms such as self-built, residents do not necessarily build with their own hands. To the contrary, the informal housing sector is a market like any other, with its own specialist division of labour (see Jachnow 2003; Ziccardi and González Reynoso 2012).15 Accordingly, modes of production that can accurately be described as ‘do-it-yourself’ are employed in certain cases of land occupation, at determined moments of the process, and in some aspects of the actual construction work only. What is however a constitutive characteristic of self-produced housing is the emphasis on work accomplished directly by the user-proprietor as well as by the use of workers’ hands. This is what I want to call attention to: the productive but arduous use of the body – male and female, whether literally labouring or otherwise engaging in action – when growing houses. I do so by looking at how time is employed in growing houses. Where money is short due to conditions of poverty and marginalisation or due to the lack of formal employment opportunities and limited access to political participation in order to change things, time is one of the few resources that people can invest in improving their situation. Yet time – as we have seen in the previous chapter already – is not free of work, either. Time to invest has to be made by actual physical labour, by the effort and sacrifice of living bodies. The first facet of time invested by bodily work we find in the construction technologies employed in the self-building process. As a result of step-by-step building, and of limited financial resources, much of the actual building of houses in Colonia Antorcha is hand-made (even though not necessarily made by the resident-owner him- or herself). Foundation ditches are excavated with spade and pickaxe and concrete is neither brought by lorry nor mixed by electric mixers but stirred together with a shovel. Building materials in general have to be organised and brought to the construction site in much more time-consuming and corporeal ways – as well as cost-intensive ways when we look at the price of each unit – than in the formal, mass-produced 124

and industrialised production of houses. Water has to be brought in by road tankers or collected from rainwater and cement is bought in individual bags ­according to the progress of the construction and financial possibilities of the owner. As a result, construction work is slow and often interrupted by periods of downtime – in addition to being hard work (fig. 4.1.). The second facet of time involved in the making of homes is less obvious. It consists in the actual bodily presence that is being invested. This is, homes on the margin are made to a great extent by sitting them out. Extra-legally claimed land has to be secured and, while the regular status of the occupation remains unclear, the means to provide this security comes down to materially occupying it with the very body of the claimant. De Soto (1990, 24) has described the informal acquisition of property for housing purposes as a three-tier process that first and foremost builds on the physical presence of individual settlers. Only if presence is secured individually, then, in a second step, the growing population size of the settlement can gradually support the group’s claim for land. In the final step, one that can take several years or decades to arrive, official actions – for example bringing in a formal electricity or water supply – provide for an extralegal recognition. Additionally, and throughout these three stages, while a basic home has been established and is progressively advanced, the presence of one of the members of the household at any time during the day is often the only means at hand to secure the owners’ possessions from theft.16 Occupying space with and for the body, therefore, is the first and most accessible measure to guarantee the foundation and growth of the self-produced house as the basis for subsistence. In Colonia Antorcha, now, this investment of time in the form of presence made with the body is institutionalised in several ways. First, 24/7 physical presence on the construction site is only one aspect, and a less pressing one, as the organisation has other means to watch over homes and belongings: Antorcha exercises a strong neighbourhood regime with an extensive cadre of block wardens who control social behaviour, deliver orders and information and report back to the movement’s authorities. In the words of the local leader, Maestra Melba, this system of government is about providing people 125

Fig. 4.1: Investing the living body: hand-based construction technologies employed in self-built housing in Colonia Antorcha.

with “someone who directs yet who also takes care (quien dirige pero también quien se preocupa).” One of the wardens adds to this, that in the everyday cohabitation of the settlement this implies that wardens “also check that people are keeping their plots tidy and that they comply with settling down here (que ya se vengan a vivir).” Hence, secondly, we can see that members are effectively obliged to be present: Antorcha asks them to move in within three months from the moment they are allocated a plot, precisely because the organisation aims at reaching and maintaining stage two of de Soto’s description: if the settlement is left under-inhabited for too long, all further claims lose their political weight. As a consequence, settlers need to accomplish and endure breaking the ground with the body as described above. Thirdly, and in response to the strong governance of the social movement organisation, there is the body-time that people invest as a means to acquire and maintain group 126

membership, which, in turn, they rely on for nurturing their houses. Once a week, both residents and aspirants for future building plots are obliged to participate in the settlement’s general assembly in order to pay their dues, receive relevant information and discuss matters of general concern. In addition, all actual and aspiring settlers are expected to participate in Antorcha’s political struggle. This implies travelling to Pachuca, the capital of Hidalgo state, and to central Mexico City, in order to demand attention to their needs and demonstrate strength before the political institutions. In other words, the basic foundation of the relationship between settler-members and the movement is trading participation in the organisation’s struggle – and commitment to its causes – in exchange for the allocation of a building plot. Effectively, this means that complying with the different obligations that are established and strongly demanded by the leaders is almost a full-time job in itself. A c­ ritical bystander, a street vendor selling his product on the occasion of the movement’s weekly assembly, explains why the particular housing model of Antorcha does not work for him: A building plot like these would be brilliant to have but in order to get one you need to spend a lot of time on it. You need to support the organisation, go to the sit-ins, to the demonstrations … you need to go wherever they ask you to so you can provide your support (hay que ir a donde lo llamen a uno para apoyar). And no! I don’t have that time. That is why I didn’t want to become a member. Either I dedicate my time to this or I go to work (o dedico mi tiempo a esto o trabajo). So it’s better I go to work. That’s how it is. As a matter of fact, therefore, becoming and remaining a member of Antorcha is in itself a form of corporeal work. Protracted meetings (fig. 4.2.), tedious bus rides and physically demanding marches and sit-ins (plantones) have to be practiced and endured, in addition to investing time and money to make them happen. Failing to comply with these obligations ultimately leads to being crossed off the waiting list or, for those already settled in the neighbourhood, to being expelled from their plot of land. I will return to this issue further on. 127

Fig. 4.2: Investing the living body: Sunday assembly of the colony’s settlers and aspirant settlers.

4.4

Collectivity Work

The third facet of invested body-time is the time members of Antorcha Popular are asked to spend on community work. Settlers and aspirants are organised to jointly serve the community through participating in regular work duties (faenas) by which the physical conditions of the settlement are first established and then improved. Together, members level the terrain and prepare the layout of the future building plots and streets (fig. 4.3.), or they plant trees and build and extend the facilities of the school that is also run by the Antorcha Movement. I have referred to such self-accomplished breaking of ground above: where no formal developer is centralising the provision of urban equipment and services, dweller-practitioners themselves – right here and now and with their bodies – have to provide these with their presence and hard work. 128

Fig. 4.3: Collectivity work: The fruit of the previous Sunday’s community work is the layout of the settlement’s future park.

Houses, it therefore becomes apparent, are clearly not the achievement of any one individual alone but the fruit of a growing process that involves many hands and bodies. Just as with the families, neighbours and customers we have met in the previous chapter, social connections are established and maintained for and with houses in order to set up “networks of exchange” (Lomnitz 2011, 25–26) or to tap into the resourcefulness of the material condition. Only in this sense is it that we can speak of housing (the verb) as an infrastructural practice by which practitioners (of houses) make city by making their own home. In the following I will therefore look also at those practices employed by residents in order to support the growth of their houses, and their lives, through forging certain modes of social assemblage. I will address such nurturing of neighbourhoods under the notion of collectivity work. Importantly, this collectivity work, as with the growing of houses itself, implies 129

hard corporeal labour. Antorcha’s obligatory work duties exemplify this. They show how people and houses need to be gathered with, and intersected into, further conjunctions of people and houses in order to sustain them. They therefore make a strong case for collective acting being a key ingredient for providing lives and growing homes – and thus for our understanding of cityness and the bodily labour it implies. Undoubtedly, the level of organisation among each particular group is decisive for the expression, intensity and success of the collectivity work that is being practiced. Likewise, particular requirements and priorities guide the activities of each specific collective. Yet despite these obvious differences, we can nevertheless state that the need for people to combine efforts in order to strive in the city made in practice holds true as much for the turnkey housing sector as it holds true for self-built housing. Identifying and pursuing common interests are vital aspects for the praxis of both accomplishing opportunity work and growing “living” (see Simone 2011) or “helpful” homes (see Turner 1976). This means that the infrastructural work of each individual can be boosted by aligning it to the infrastructural work of fellow urban practitioners;17 and what holds true for positive experiences also applies to negative occurrences when differences need to be negotiated and conflict within the group requires resolving. In the case of Colonia Antorcha it is the social movement organisation that establishes and exercises strong control over how the collective is being enacted through the individual work of its members. Outcomes are defined beforehand and all action is driven in channelled paths towards achieving them. Settlers, in turn, ‘repay’ the movement with dues, time and commitment, for the service provided for organising the group and its struggle. Any breakaway action, accordingly, leads to isolation, remediation and, eventually, ­expulsion. Different is the case at the other end of the housing spectrum, for example in the formally developed, gated community Villa del Real that is located near Sierra Hermosa on both sides of the highway we will visit in chapter 5. Here, residents are organised in a legally constituted neighbourhood association, based on written bylaws. These organise all kinds of aspects of the estate’s 130

social life, from prohibiting street-vending inside the premises to the colour scheme of the façades and the size and material of the window frames of the houses. Meanwhile in Sierra Hermosa, in the middle ground of the housing spectrum where there is neither strong leadership nor legal texts institutionalising the formation of the collective, pulling people together relies on individual efforts of persuasion emerging in response to specific concerns. Here, in particular, connections have to be made on the basis of people’s own infrastructural work, establishing individual ties in laborious processes of face-to-face or, with more precision, of body-to-body formation of local publics. Wayne Cornelius (1975, 133) described the decisive role of such shared-­ interest collectives as the “differential opportunity structure” of emerging ­settlement groups, hence explicitly addressing them as social infrastructures. He did so in the specific context of political participation, yet his findings speak to the case of collectivity work as a form of city practice, too. Cornelius refers with the term to the “range and frequency of the opportunities” that dweller-makers of a settlement have – and that they need to grow by employing what they have at hand: themselves – in order to participate in their neighbourhood’s becoming and urban integration. This opportunity structure is then employed – that is, again, practiced – on the basis of people’s experiences regarding the extent to which their needs can be met by collective ­action (ibid.). Summing up, it becomes apparent that collectivity work rests on significant neighbour-skills similar to the street-skills of the informal vendors’ opportunity work described in chapter 3.18 Doña Margo has found a memorable slogan for them: conocerse y convidar, that is, “getting to know each other and treating each other benevolently”. Yet while praising the benefits of such work, she also points to the obligations, as well as to the inscribed dependencies that such commitment to mutual support structures imply: I treat them benevolently and they treat me benevolently (yo convido y ellas me convidan). This is what I tell them: in a gated street (privada) you should love each other as if you were family. Because: who will be there for you if something happens? You have to get on well (Tienen que llevarse bien). 131

Santa confirms the importance of these skills and practices of collectivity. In her words, it is about “making yourself known and building friendships (Uno se hace conocer y también hace amistades).” At the same time, Santa provides a picture of how difficult the actual making of collectivity can be. She once tried to set up a neighbourhood committee in order to protect the appearance of the houses in her street but which came to nothing. All the work put into creating collective awareness, in setting up meetings with neighbours, identifying options for action and reaching out to authorities, was not rewarded. The centrifugal forces among neighbours were stronger than Santa’s capacity to bring and hold people and concern together. As the result of this failed attempt, she now feels condemned to stand by and watch as the general aspect of her immediate surroundings, according to her, ­deteriorates.

4.5

Labour of Presence

So far in this chapter I have analysed how houses in the northern peri-urban realm of Mexico City are grown through corporeal labour in a combination of actual construction work, body-time invested in making presence and work put into neighbourhood networks. This is what I refer to as the labour of presence, a particular expression of city-making practice by which material and social connections are established and maintained for and with houses – and on the ground of corporeal work – so that we can speak of housing (that is, house-growing, the verb) as an infrastructural practice by which practitioners (of houses) make city by making their own homes.19 In what follows I will discuss the specific perspective that emanates from this labour of presence as well as the social and political consequences that can derive from it. This is to ask: what role does the infrastructural house and its making in bodily work play in practicing, as well as material-practically thinking, the relationship between the self and the surrounding urban condition? Angela Giglia (2010) confirms that there is a specific apprehension of the urban that derives from concrete practices of dwelling. The analysis of both 132

the immediacy and of the uncertainty of the relation between dwelling practitioner, society and space will provide answers to this question. The city coming now/here To start with, growing houses and employing them as infrastructure implies aspiring to people’s possibility of improving their conditions through working out the opportunities they have. The labour of presence contains a suggestion of a capacity to make possibilities happen through the effort put into houses, a backing track of hope and faith placed in individual as well as collective urban becoming. Surely, why would one grow a house, why would one work in sustaining one’s presence or, let alone, why would one make city, if it were not to move ahead or, at least, to continue making do? In light of these considerations, the first understanding of city/citying that shines through the labour of presence thus cherishes the city as the stage and object of “struggles over life” (Davidson and Iveson 2015, 657), and it does so not despite, but precisely in response to the physical, social and theoretical ambiguity that continuously expanding as well as shifting urban-urbanising environments give rise to worldwide. As laid out in chapter 2, it is in this sense that Davidson and Iveson have claimed the usefulness of the term city even in a world – a planet – that as a whole is becoming more urban. In other words, we can ascertain that the city is the aim when the ground is urbanisation – and each individual house is a tool, then, that maker-dwellers use in order to build their path. Accordingly, the city – understood as citying – is thought in practice as selfmade and as brought into being, both of which rely on physical, bodily work. It is a city-in-the-making, experienced as socio-material immediacy; and this particular framing reveals an important nuance with regard to how exactly this becoming of city is being envisioned: for one, urban possibilities do not come upon the residents of progressive houses as something that is detached from their lives and that is introduced by someone else, from some kind of outside, as somehow ‘new’. Rather, the city comes precisely by growing it in the here and now, by drawing connections and laying hands on movements – as we have seen in chapter 3 – and, certainly, by employing houses to help them to do so, as this chapter has shown. 133

Bringing in Latour’s examination of modernism and the anthropocene, this implies understanding the urban possible not as shining ahead of the dweller-makers as a preconceived, more or less distant, utopian future that awaits being put on history’s stage through the act of any kind of revolution, but understanding the urban possible as the practitioners’ self-made prospect, their carefully bringing about and bringing forward the “shape of things to come” (Latour 2010, 485; see Dibley 2012). Latour refers to ‘prospects’, in distinction to ‘future’, as that which humanity can see of its becoming at the very moment it realises both the possible destruction of the planet and its absolute control over it. In this line of thought, one could thus enter into debate on whether Lefebvre’s expression (2008) of the “urban revolution” – as well as many other accounts of the city in urban theory – conceals this particular outlook on the interlocked relation between the self and the city by painting the future of cities (regardless of its possible consequences) as the dawn of something that lies ahead and not as the practice of actually shaping its prospect – today as much as we did yesterday and will tomorrow. Elaborating even further on the experience of urban immediacy revealed in thinking city as citying I draw on Simone’s notion (2004a) of the “city yet to come” which he coined for the makeshift urban becoming of African cities. However, in my use of Simone’s concept I deliberately drop the word ‘yet’ from the quotation and reframe the future tense ‘to come’ into the gerund, that is the performing verb form of ‘coming’, in order to address the specific nearness in time and space of this urban process with due precision: it is not the case that the city has to be made first in order to be, but that it is present already, and in live action, in the very process of its making. Soja has coined the expression “now/here” (1992, 94) for this extraordinary instantaneousness of urban-urbanising environments that resist being captured under conventional, Western definitions of what a city is, has been or, for that matter, is supposed to be. I therefore use the notion of the city coming now/here precisely to refer to an understanding that sees city/citying as a path of own and collective making, as city-practice, that is, as something – and this something’s performance – that is looked in the eye while unfolding through us and in line with our corporeal acting. 134

Finally, I also read the growing of houses and their employment as infrastructures in terms of Ingold’s (2000, 5, 153) notion of a dwelling perspective: both in Sierra Hermosa and in Colonia Antorcha it becomes apparent how the world – here: how urban-urbanising socio-ecological relations and their respective material thinking – emerges out of active engagement with the constituents of one’s own and one’s lifeworld’s becoming, that is, in our case, out of making houses and neighbourhoods, the self and the collective, with and for the living body. Experiencing uncertainty To the same extent that city is perceived as unfolding according to the direct engagement of its multiple makers, it is also perceived as indefinite and vague, that is, as an unknown, never-walked-before path that has to be laid out and navigated day-by-day in order to be of existence and to lead somewhere, somehow, forward. This is how the city as practice is understood as the continuous experiencing of uncertainty, as a wide and constantly emerging field of possible, yet also ambiguous and fleeting relations – and of which some are brought into alignment in order to materialise in a house (itself in the state of ongoing becoming). At the same time, this very house made of relational lines is put in action itself in order to engage with and extend one’s infrastructural opportunity work into the field. Front windows that are now operated as convenience stores, former garages that instead of cars host the installations of a hairdresser shop or living rooms and kitchens converted into home-restaurants speak of this infrastructural employment. In a similar way, Doña Margo and Eduardo, whom we met in chapter 3, rely on their own and their relatives’ houses in order to anchor and expand their infrastructural operations. Street vendors’ equipment and merchandise need to be stored and prepared at home and the street-vending activities are often made possible and enhanced thanks to the relative proximity to the node of family and neighbourhood support networks – as we have seen, for example, through additional child-care provided by Doña Margo in addition to selling clothes. However, houses in Colonia Antorcha and Sierra Hermosa vary in their conditions and in the processes of their making – and these variations, in turn, lead 135

to distinct intensities of how uncertainty can be felt. Houses in both neighbourhood types represent their owner’s patrimony (patrimonio), that is, the property asset by which inhabitants in Mexico and elsewhere aim at securing their own and their families’ survival in the event of age, illness or any economic hardship. Yet despite this similarity in the potential stability both types can provide, the material engagement with the house itself is very different. This is rooted in the distinct levels of ready-to-use-ability of the houses. Put simply, in Sierra Hermosa owners move into basic but fully equipped homes.20 Both houses and streets are completed in advance and thus receive newcomers with certain formal services, which inhabitants therefore do not need to provide informally through their own infrastructural, bodily work. Furthermore, residents hold legal titles to their properties from the outset. In Colonia Antorcha, to the contrary, newcomers start inhabiting nothing more than an empty and dusty piece of land: When we arrived there was nothing there. […] We brought our stuff and once we had everything here we started paying for the house. We were very few, maybe some four or five families who lived here from the very beginning. All this was baldío (fallow/waste land), just like the land over there. Hence, as this quote shows, it is the precariousness of the initial stage of the house, the legal instability and the prolonged period of enduring the lack of basic services that marks the difference. In Colonia Antorcha people are obliged to move in to their allocated plot at most after three months. As a result, they start out in very basic huts, often using cardboard, wooden pallets and plastic sheeting for the walls and roof. They start by inhabiting the very soil of the ground, as research participants described it, and even though in most cases this initial state is relatively quickly overcome, the subsequent proto-house made from cement blocks normally provides nothing more than a single room and outdoor cesspit for the entire family (see e.g. Ziccardi and González Reynoso 2012, 29–30). Consequently, in Colonia Antorcha, the emerging city is felt first as an antagonistic and inhospitable place – yet one that is nevertheless being inhabited and made welcoming. The house, 136

as humble as it might be in the beginning, proudly stands against the prevailing unknown. In this act of claiming and cultivating land to become urban, the experience of uncertainty entailed in the labour of presence resembles the active growing, hard work and immediate effectiveness of the labour of conjunction discussed in chapter 3. At the same time, it points to the individualisation that is to be found at the bedrock – and that is at the bedrock despite the need for nurturing collectives – of all such city-self-production. Yet what I have described earlier as the failure to socialise the costs and risks of urbanisation (doing so by drawing on Altvater and Mahnkopf 2003; Jachnow 2003) is presented by Maestra Melba, the Antorcha Movement’s local leader, as the benefit of each member’s labour of presence: You come here through hard work (llegan con esfuerzo) and day-by-day you will be making your home. […] Everybody is working for him- or herself (Cada quien trabaja para lo suyo). Hence, regardless of competing value systems that might be applied for understanding the situation, the progress of each house is in effect essentially perceived as the sole responsibility of each resident-builder on his or her own. This is despite the fact that, as shown above, it is social relations that are the foundations on which houses are grown. Therefore, they cannot be regarded as permanent, but rather emerge as the conjunctions of one’s own and other peoples’ lives. Consequently, houses also include the possibility of being left behind if this relationship is not sufficiently beneficial: residents of both Sierra Hermosa and Colonia Antorcha repeatedly express how they try, have tried, or missed keeping alternative options open. This is to say, that they read the local constellations, assessing how these constellations provide or do not provide the ground for them to work out the opportunities they seek. Potentially, if they don’t make it here, they might well make it elsewhere. Potentially, also, they are always ready to jump, incorporating spatial mobility into their lives: in 2012 Santa is thinking of selling her house in a few years time – but two years later, in 2014, she has changed her mind. Margarita, similarly, would follow any job, anywhere, she tells me, and Israel claims to be only residing here temporarily. As soon as he finds a new job, he insists, he will look 137

for a place closer to his future employment. Certainly, this openness to moving on stands in direct opposition to the investment already made in the site, to the legal and financial difficulties implied in selling and buying houses and to the shortage of alternative options that can be envisioned (see Varley 2002, 456–57).21 Yet houses, with or without infrastructural amendments, are put on sale, left abandoned or traded for something similar elsewhere, and the body-time and membership fees of several months or years are written off as a failed investment if other options seem more feasible. It is out of such inherent nomadism that another distinct socio-material consciousness of the city made in practice emerges: that of (potential) transitoryness, in which uncertainty is experienced either as choice or as the lack of it. Because, the mobility this transitoryness suggests often remains imaginary or, for that matter, is the result of force.

4.6 Paper-Work At this point I want to come back to the way in which the living body is employed for making the house and settlement in the particular case of Colonia Antorcha.22 As mentioned before, both residents and aspirants for future building plots need to attend the neighborhood’s general assembly, participate in the movement’s political struggle and fulfil their share in neighbourhood work duties. All these forms of labour need to be accomplished – and often endured – with the living and working body; not least because any failure to do so ultimately leads to being deprived of the customary, extralegal right of presence granted by the organisation. I will make my argument by analysing how resident-makers of houses are able to produce reliable social and material conditions for their existence through their labour of presence. Turning to such a ‘stability’ of houses, it quickly becomes apparent that regardless of how hard people toil in growing their houses, collectives and neighbourhoods, all three remain essentially fragile with regard to the security that the labour produces to sustain its achievements. This, I argue, is rooted in the ephemeral, and deliberately obscure, it seems, register of participation by 138

which the organisation governs the group. Negotiating access to these registers, and negotiating the permanence of one’s registration on them over time, is what I call paper-work – and this paper-work can be explained in light of the particular relationship that exists between people, society and space in a city made in practice. The following is the situation: first, from the perspective of what is referred to as formal urban development, the social as much as physical stability of houses in Colonia Antorcha is undermined by the current situation that the settlement is located on what the official land utilisation plan of Tizayuca (as of 2015) still allocates as farmland. Accordingly, all building activity is regarded as (formally) illegal and the institutionalised process of (formal) regularisation has not yet commenced.23 Secondly, houses are not fully secured to their resident-builders because they are to a great extent debt-financed, that is, in the case of Colonia Antorcha, financed by means of a combination of individual micro-credits, membership in unregulated savings clubs (tandas) and, most importantly here, obligations to comply with Antorcha’s rules and to participate in its political struggle. This last debt, thirdly, means that the uncertainties systemic to informally produced and financed houses find their cause above all in the improvised character of the practices by which tenure is negotiated: as it turns out, it is a multitude of hand-scribbled papers and small bank vouchers that hold informal ownership in place. All obligatory participation and commitment – referred to as the settlers’ “payments” by a critical bystander – are registered in nothing other than ever-changing notebooks and on loose sheets of paper. In the hands of the block wardens and other staff members of the organisation, these lists hold the single and ultimate proof of mandatory attendance at the neighbourhood meetings, political activities and other obligatory events. They are also the single and ultimate proof of the mandatory dues paid for printed material and transport to and from the political activities. Hence their importance is enormous: the effect of one’s name missing from the list can lead, eventually, to the loss of one’s house and plot. This importance, finally, is mirrored in the effort put in the corporeal labour that is inscribing and maintaining one’s name on respective papers: hence the notion of paper-work.24 139

Every Sunday, after the weekly gathering, settlers and aspirants alike group around the two or three coordinators (block wardens, assistants to the local leader or other representatives of the Antorcha organisation) in order to pay their dues and to check that last week’s payments were correctly recorded. People move inside the circle, wait for long periods or work their way to the front by using their arms and body to push and squeeze themselves forward. If they stay behind they start turning to whoever is standing next to them in order to exchange the bits and pieces of information that they were able to catch. Once at the front, they need to make their cash-payment to the hand of one organiser while providing their name and last week’s registration number to another. At this point, trouble repeatedly arises around inconsistent recording methods. Names cannot be found on the list, last week’s registration numbers don’t coincide with this week’s, and coordinators and aspirants/ members accuse each other of poor memory or negligent recording. If the problem cannot be solved, it is referred to higher authorities either by making a quick note on the back of the list and thus postponing the case or by sending the complainant to the leader of today’s gathering in order to present his or her case a second time. The record-keepers warn that only if approval from these higher instances is forthcoming will the list be changed; yet comparing the presumed stability of this organisational claim with the actual messiness of the list’s keeping, written under the pressure of several people aiming to make their payments and solve their cases, it becomes obvious that the process is prone to errors. And when it comes to the record of participation alone, that is when there is no transaction of money involved that makes these swift encounters between operator/list-keeper and registered person a bit more tangible, then opinions frequently differ with regard to whether or not this person or that person was seen or not at a previous event. On these occasions other participants are called upon as witnesses to prove one’s past presence and old lists are dug out to be checked again in order to be compared with new claims. Video recordings and photography (fig. 4.4.) of these hands-on negotiations exemplify the corporeality and fragility of this paper-work in general as much as they provide a very concrete taste of the particularly unstable relationship between the presence and agency of the body, the material house 140

Fig. 4.4: Paper-work: a woman claiming missing documentation of her previous payments.

that is to be secured by these actions and the constituent social institution of Colonia Antorcha. The discrepancy between the presence of the body and its fleeting record on paper revealed here extends also to the material world of building houses more broadly: on one occasion, settlers had to donate one cement block per building plot for a new classroom for the local school that is also self-organised by the Antorcha movement. This single cement block represents a tangible payment to the community – yet the proof of each contribution was translated into ‘tenuous’ numbers, tallies and check marks on several lists maintained by different staff on loose sheets of paper. Here again, it is these notes that count towards remaining in good standing with the movement; as for securing one’s membership and future in the settlement, the growing pile of cement blocks on the site of the future classroom is of no use. Translated to houses, this means that regardless of 141

how solid the construction of each settlers’ home is, if their participation and commitment is not corroborated on paper, their rights and history can easily be annihilated in the hands of those who control the documents. At the bottom line, then, it is not their physical existence that secures houses in Colonia Antorcha for their user-makers but social relations and the unstable recording thereof. Settlers do not have to pay with money, materials and bodily presence and participation alone, but also have to make sure that their names and plot numbers are registered correctly and stay on the list over time – which in itself is accomplished only by the laborious work of the present body. The settlers’ presence at different events of the organisation is first translated into names and numbers on paper and through this translation then made the object of ongoing negotiation. This conversion from (bodily) presence to (fleeting) register we can thus frame as a practice of both governance and its contestation. Governing through insecurity AbdouMaliq Simone (2004a: 4, 7) describes informality as a “state of emergency”, as a condition that is generative, ergo emergent, yet that by being entangled with the formal is also a way of holding people in relations that make them governable. This means that those that hold formal powers can employ informality as a political tool to exert their powers; and this tool, that is, informality as a political regime, builds precisely on establishing a “permanent state of insecurity” as Altvater and Mahnkopf have argued (2003, 20, own translation). We have encountered the working of insecurity already in chapter 3, in the case of Margarita, who stoically shoulders the risk of being a mother and her family’s only (living) infrastructure by herself. The case of Antorcha now shows in similar fashion a particular mode of governance through creating conditions of precariousness, of deliberately forcing people to “liv[e] with the unforeseeable, with contingency” (Lorey 2015, 1). To start with, to the inside of the Antorcha settlement and members’ cohort, group unity is constructed by means of strong leadership and by employing the discourse of poverty and resistance (MAN 2013 and interview with local leader).25 In exchange, so to speak, of this ‘service’ of group cohesion, the 142

movement demands unconditional loyalty, that is, the absolute dedication to the social movement’s cause in general and to the progress of the settlement in particular. This loyalty has to be proven by each member, not only in the mandatory participation in assemblies, community work and demonstrations, as mentioned above, but also and most importantly by expression of ‘true commitment’: in her Sunday addresses, Maestra Melba, the movement’s municipal leader, is making this point while rousing participants for the following day’s protest. Your [level of] participation will show me who among you is committed (quien esté con compromiso). For me the people who do it only out of obligation are of no use. I need those who do it out of commitment to the just cause. Listening to Maestra Melba reveals a practice of governance based on subordinating members to the group. In the style of grand narratives, Antorcha pictures the world in a clear-cut dichotomy where “We, the Poor”26 stand against an overwhelming system of oppression maintained by the government and elite. Compliance is constructed as a matter of no choice and the group is tied together on the grounds of domination, allegiance and a narrative of adverse conditions that can only be vanquished in unity. In addition, these politics of cohesion are kept deliberately hazy – exemplified in the obligation to demonstrate true commitment measured on the arbitrary ground of the personal judgement of the movement’s leaders. In sum, the ground on which Antorcha’s governance model is built is a persistent state of insecurity regarding (i) the rules of the organisation, (ii) the success of the settlement, and (iii) the prospect of people’s own application for membership and building plot allocation. At no time is it clear to aspirants when they will receive their building plot, how much it will cost in total, or whether they will ever receive it at all. This is because the organisation itself does not know for sure the outcome of its political campaigns or of the informal, extralegal operations it undertakes in order to occupy land and hold on to it as the place to live for its members. Yet even more so it is also the case because creating and maintaining insecurity itself is the tool by which ever truer commitment can be demanded in order to keep the movement going. This I call a regime of governing through insecurity and, most importantly in the context of this book’s argument, this regime builds on the labour of 143

presence that resident-users of houses in the neighborhood accomplish and need to accomplish as their only viable option for growing and nurturing their existence.27 Governing through insecurity essentially rests on the exploitation of the labouring, city-making body; because it is through corporeally growing houses by way of incremental building, through making presence by investing time with the body and, in this case, through negotiating membership by working the lists that people are deliberately worn out while leaving them with the idea that no other way is possible than assuming individual responsibility for their urban becoming. As outlined above, keeping one’s name on Antorcha’s multiple waiting and participants’ lists is both essential and requires hard work, yet at no time does it guarantee that one’s name, and attached customary right to grow one’s house and existence, will still be there the following week.

4.7

The Proof of Growth Is in Houses

By way of a conclusion to this chapter I want to briefly sketch out how houses are the material proof – regardless of their failure to secure their makers’ existence – of the work that their resident-makers put into them. Houses effectively evidence the occurrence of labour of presence, and they do so despite their instability in practice that I have just laid out. Houses in urbanising Mexico City, we have seen in this chapter, are the material extension of their inhabitants. They are infrastructural machines that help to secure the livelihood of their occupants and wider families precisely because these user-producers grow their houses in a custom-made fashion. Houses are active tools as well as important assets for manoeuvring in contexts of uncertainty – albeit emerging from differing levels of material engagement and often founded on unstable social relations and on unreliable forms of registration. Consequently, as conjunctions come and go, houses not only grow according to the growth of their builder-users but can also remain the same for years or decline when people’s circumstances, capacities or luck change in the evolving city. This shows us that incremental houses – regardless of their provenance in industrialised mass-production or in progressive 144

self-building – nevertheless give certain material and social endurance to the infrastructural practices of their inhabitant-makers. As has been confirmed above, this is the case despite the fact that this stability is anything but stable as it is laboriously sustained through the living body and constantly re-negotiated in an array of social relations. These range from investing bodytime, to nurturing the collective, to accomplishing paper-work in order to prove one’s own existence. In other words, in order to grow houses residents need to ­accomplish what I call the labour of presence – yet, at the same time, houses themselves support and expand this presence, and its laborious making, both materially and as the operational node from which to access all kinds of r­ elations and frameworks.28 Drawing on this agency, the growing of houses describes distinct perspectival access points from which residents of the urban-urbanising realm materially think their own and their surrounding’s becoming. The two principal perspectives afforded are (i) materially thinking the city/citying as unfolding in immediate relation to its making and in line with the engagement of its everyday makers, and (ii) as appearing in nuances of uncertainty, of ambiguity and insecurity, continuously unfolding as real or imagined paths of becoming that might or might not be taken. Finally, houses are characterised by their quality of providing material proof of their own existence. This is to say, that houses are the memory of their infrastructural agency and of the infrastructural work and bodily effort that has gone into them. The analysis of this memory, stored in the material conditions of houses, was made possible through wire-frame sketches that helped me reveal their material development over time on the basis of my documentary photography. These drawings that are presented together with the images they intervene in the following pages both search for how houses are grown and articulate this growth (fig. 4.5. to fig. 4.11.). They invite the viewer to look with their lines at the effort that was put into houses as infrastructure, not to look at houses per se. Last but not least, they provide a visual inventory of houses and their transformations in Sierra Hermosa and Colonia Antorcha specifically, following with the pen the growth of façades from both of these two neighbourhoods between December 2011 and July 2015. 145

146

147

148

Page 146/147: figs. 4.5.–4.8: Visual inventory of houses and their transformations in Sierra Hermosa: (almost) original ­design, need to set up a business, informal extension to the front, and formal extension of a second floor.­ Figs. 4.9.–4.11: Visual inventory of houses and their transformations in Colonia Antorcha: outline of a building plot, early stage of the incremental house, and ground floor in the process of consolidation.

149

Notes

7

This transformation of formal houses applies to the development of terraced, single-family housing. In the case of multi-storey apartment buildings, transformations are very much restricted to the ground

1

2

This is in rough distinction to the eastern parts of the

floor or sometimes balcony conversions (see Luque

ZMVM which expand to a great extent over former

2014). High-rise apartment blocks thus have been

lake beds and to the south and west which occupy

described by Turner (1976, 52) as potentially being

former woodlands and ravines.

“socially oppressive” when it comes to meeting the

Casas Geo, officially named Corporación Geo, a successor to Orvi Construcciones, was the biggest

survival needs of low-income families. 8

­understanding of buildings as the thingly “flow of

exceeding 600,000 houses between the years

transformations” by analysing architecture through

1974 to 2012 (Inclán 2013, 103). The company was liquidated in 2018 after a change in the state

3

traced back to housing types put in practice as early as in 1958 in the today inner-city estate Unidad

Geo is the company that built the Sierra Hermosa

Santa Fe, developed by modernist architect Mario

­development.

Pani for the Mexican Social Security Institute IMSS

Loans are issued by either INFONAVIT (for salaried

(see Luque 2014). It can also be projected forward,

employees in general) or FOVISSSTE (for state

for that matter, to much-acclaimed contemporary

­employees) as is the case here. Workers, however,

proposals such as the provision of “half-a-house”

not only have access to but are induced to use the

for residents to complete by themselves by the archi-

system, at risk of losing their benefits (Monkkonen

tecture firm Elemental (2008). However, despite this

2011). They are obliged to contribute while at the

history of progressive building solutions in Mexico

same time imperilled by losing their rights again in

City and elsewhere – e.g. the United Nations’

case of unemployment. In general terms, the system

Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI, Experi-

is criticised because it restricts access to loans on

mental Housing Project) in Lima, Peru, 1968–73

the basis of stable employment, which many do not

(Land 2015) – the present example is nevertheless

have (Connolly 1998; Monkkonen 2011). It also

an exception to the norm of most formal social

­restricts people to certain types of housing that can

­housing produced in Mexico City and worldwide.

be purchased (Monkkonen 2011). Finally, financial

10 Albeit doing so as an interim solution while looking

interests dominate over social objectives in the way

for a different and better-located property to

Leaving aside Santa’s self-infrastructural practice

­formalise and boost her business. 11 For alternative ways to master the situation, that is,

for the time being: she contributes to the family

by overcoming the distance between ‘here’ and

household by running a restaurant business inside

­opportunities ‘otherwhere’ by means of commuting,

­employed to support household economies in the

6

The design of the Sierra Hermosa prototype can be

model heavily relied (Rodríguez 2018). Casas

their home. I will come back to how houses are

5

the lens of Actor-Network-Theory. 9

building subsidies system on which Geo’s business

the housing institutes operate (Coulomb 2012). 4

Latour and Yaneva (2008, 85) come to a parallel

housing developer in Mexico with an overall output

see chapter 5. 12 For example, Doña Margo, who we met in chapter 3,

following subsection.

runs her business opposite the busy pedestrian pas-

For a growth typology for self-built housing see

sage between the estates Provenzal del Bosque and

­Ribbeck (2002). In a consolidated neighbourhood

Sierra Hermosa; or see the case of a car mechanic

houses can eventually acquire a state of saturation

working on the shore of the freeway to Tizayuca who

(see ibid., 150).

increases his income in correlation with the increase

‘Site-and-service’, for example, is a developmental urbanisation strategy where the state, international

of traffic. 13 I will discuss this in detail below. Here only so much

aid agency or commercial developer provides ser-

that in Colonia Antorcha, a settlement that is still

vices like drainage, water and electricity to a site yet

lacking formal building permits, the price for a build-

does not engage in the actual construction of the

ing lot is MXN 30,000, which members pay to the

house.

social movement organisation in addition to getting

150

involved in it socially and with their bodies. According to settlers, this is about 20 to 25 percent of the price of a similar lot that does already come with

commenced and the range of building plots and houses on offer, both formal and informal, diversified. 22 This case, it needs to be highlighted again, is excep-

a ­formal permit, for example in the neighbouring,

tional for how the labour of the body is implicated in

and likewise only about emerging, colonia popular

securing one’s presence. That is, while the Antorcha

Diamante. 14 Collier (2007) adds to this account how the very ­notion of property as the foundation of bourgeois law is heavily gendered. 15 For a short but precise definition of the concept of ‘auto-construction’ see CONAVI (2010, 55). 16 This could be shown with regard to squatters in Nezahualcoytl (Álvarez, Rojas Loa, and Wissel 2007, 161) as well as in the inner-city borough of Benito Juárez (Wissel 2008). 17 A complementary approach takes into view how

model is not the norm for informal settlements with ­regard to the strong leadership exercised by the s ­ ocial movement organisation (see chapter 2), it nevertheless provides a particularly vivid example for how ­residents of urban-urbanising territories and constellations put their houses, their making of houses and their occupation of houses to work as part of their ­infrastructural city-making practice. 23 It needs to be noted here that informal process of regularisation – based on official toleration as it becomes visible in the introduction of services – can lead to

physical infrastructure in itself – visible or invisible –

“de facto security” without legal/formal property

can bring people together (see Amin 2014; Angelo

­titles (Varley 2002, 454). In the case of Antorcha

and Hentschel 2015).

­settlements, this de facto security applies to the set-

18 Without doubt, spatial, material and other contextual

tlements as a whole, while – as we will see below – it

(political for example) conditions in which people are

is not passed on to the individual members. For a dis-

set in neighbourhoods and neighbourhoods are set in

cussion of property titles and the formalisation of

cities also play their role in the accomplishment of practices. Getting to know each other, coming to-

house ownership see Varley (2010). 24 In general terms, documents have always to be

gether and aligning resources is undoubtedly affected

sought, kept, periodically presented and, at given

also by population density and geographical distance,

­moments, exchanged for other documents. However,

by political or administrative frameworks, as well as

in many of Mexico’s formal and informal securitisation

by environmental influences (for example heat and

processes the fragility of loose papers is striking. For

whirlwinds of sand and dust in the case of the north-

example the often imprecise and overly emended and

ern ZMVM) and the particular tangible and intangible

updated development plans used for selling building

assets (building materials, manual capacities, etc.) at

plots in emerging neighbourhoods like Diamante and

hand. These aspects distinguish local opportunity

La Gloria, located right next to Colonia Antorcha,

structures and thus shape specific, local ways of city-

seem to offer anything but a secure foundation for

ness yet their specific analysis from case to case is not part of the general argument on corporeal practice laid out here. 19 This resonates with Giglia (2010, 340) who in her

making a financial transaction for a piece of land. 25 This is different to other expressions of urban development to be found in the northern sphere of Mexico City’s Metropolitan Area. For example in the case of

analysis of the production and inhabitation of the

residential developments (fraccionamientos residen-

­informal city defines the notion of inhabiting as “place

ciales), built by sole contractors and sold formally un-

of presence” (own translation).

der credit schemes to individual house-owners, these

20 I have discussed Ingold’s critique of such a description above. 21 Varley (p. 457) thus concludes that people do not

often count with written neighbourhood statutes that (more or less) structure social relations as well as the physical appearance of each compound; or, in the

­envisage being able to move. This discrepancy in find-

case of colonias populares (so-called working class

ings, however, might be explained by the changing

neighbourhoods) that originate from a combination of

circumstances between the situation in 1985 (on

informal subdivision but formal sales of land owned by

which Varley builds part of her argument) and the

several private actors, new settlers mostly struggle

­situation during my fieldwork, that is after the massive

with organising themselves as a group in order to

conversion of agrarian into urbanising land

­advocate for the introduction, for example, of formal

151

urban services. With regard to the grounds for Antorcha’s discourse, furthermore, this book is not the space to discuss the existence of poverty in Mexico and the need to struggle against it nor to discuss ­Antorcha Popular’s social and political intervention. Rather, my focus is strictly limited to the way the ­organisation governs its members. 26 “Nosotros los pobres” is the title of a popular ­Mexican drama film from 1948 with film star Pedro Infante (directed by Ismael Rodríguez). 27 This technique also follows the lines of a political style that constructs and maintains submissive loyalty on the basis of incentives and rewards, championed in Mexico by the political party PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) (see Román 2014). Due to Antocha’s close relation to the PRI it can thus be argued, that through the social movement’s ­government of the settlement formal state rule is ­informally extended and executed (Wissel 2017). 28 Houses support the labour of practice also symbolically, for example by providing an address that serves as pivotal point in the construction of identities.

152

5 Riding the Highway

153

So far we have been following people in their making of local connections and in their growing of houses and the collectives that sustain them. Doing so, the research revealed distinct corporeal practices that together describe two overarching forms of a labour of city-making: that of making conjunctions and that of making presence. In order to expand our search for the citying by which the urban-urbanising environment of the northern ZMVM evolves, this chapter now turns to the road. More precisely, it turns to the Mexico-Pachuca toll motorway and the toll-free, historical country road that together connect the multiple settlements, neighbourhoods and residential compounds we have visited so far. The two roads lie parallel to each other with just a few hundred metres between them (fig. 2.1.). They cross over each other repeatedly, like a braid: two intertwined strands that give the landscape of Mexico City’s northern urbanising realm a predominantly linear experience. The movement these two roads create and channel speaks of extraordinary relationships between the city-region and its practitioners. On the one hand, the two roads exemplify what Johan Galtung (1971, 89) called the “feudal centre-periphery structure” where inter-regional interaction is monopolised by the centre. On the other hand, the two roads attract and bundle together all local movements of the periphery, too: everybody travelling from, to and within Tecámac and Tizayuca is to be found – albeit at different times of the day – on their combined eight lanes of tarmac. In this sense, the two roads become the linear centre of the north-north-eastern stretch of the ZMVM , the vibrant artery of life that makes city on the move and allows dis-

tinctive apprehensions of the urban rooted in a variety of practices that unfold on and with the highway. The two roads are the device par excellence by which both peripherality and centrality become manifest. More importantly, the two roads are where peripherality and centrality are being practised. This shift in focus has a significant impact: thinking the highway not as a built thing (alone) but as highwaying, as a verb and set of practices, means to challenge our understanding of transport infrastructure by reframing it through the lens of the living, acting body. Once again, I suggest doing so by engaging with Simone’s (2004b) notion of “people as infrastructure” and pushing it towards a special 154

attention of both corporeality and materiality. How, then, do practitioners of urban space travel near and far? That is: how is the social and material reality of the highway experienced by, and managed with and through the body while travelling? What these questions bring into view is asking about the corporeal practices that are needed in order to engage with the specific materiality of the road so to turn it into a resource, put it to work in multiple ways and grow one’s own life and the city/citying while riding the opportunities the road e ­ ntails.

5.1

Wrestling with Buses

The first site to visit along the two roads is a seemingly unremarkable stretch of the Mexico-Pachuca motorway passing between the historic villages of San Francisco Cuautliquixca and, a little further up the hill, San Pablo ­Tecalco (fig. 2.3.). It is a high-speed infrastructure in the conventional sense: two times two lanes of well-kept dark-grey tarmac, accurately marked with white strips, flanked by narrow hard shoulders and fenced in by streamlined guard railings either side of the carriageway. Yet while cars fly by at speed, coaches keep pulling in, rapidly coming to a halt, opening their doors, and pulling out again into the flow of traffic, taking with them traveller after traveller who continually move up the embankment. This site, then, appears to be precisely what ‘urbanauts’ – the perpetual navigators here of Mexico City’s north-eastern periphery – refer to as the San Pablo bus stop. Yet how exactly is it, this particular (wayside) bus stop? What makes it worth noticing is precisely the fact that it is not indicated by any (conventional) sign, landmark or any other marker in the physical landscape. Neither built design nor spatial layout point to this particular site’s purpose. There is no roofed bus stand or pedestrian bridge, for example, or any widening of the roadway into a lay-by, as we can find them in some of the other bus stops along the highway. In other words: the San Pablo bus stop (parada) is pure activity, social occurrence without being imprinted into physical form. It is a bus stop made by stopping buses, pure infrastructural activity, rather than 155

built infrastructure. Following on from Simone’s account of people employing themselves as infrastructure, and relating them to the site’s surprising ­absence of architecture, we might frame the bus stop as the work of people as architecture: physical structuring, materialising not in steel or concrete but in flesh and movement. This bus stop is not a building, as in a thing, but building, a verb, as in social happening. The materiality and corporeality of this happening of the bus stop are ­remarkable in several ways. In order to be able to take a bus, prospective ­t ravellers first have to climb up the embankment of the highway (fig. 5.1). This is a journey in itself: for the first metres people approach the site following the concrete ramp leading up from the residential street crossing ­u nderneath a nearby thoroughfare. After a few steps, however, the firm surface vanishes and a narrow path leads on through the bushes. Then people have to climb through a hole in a fence and cover the last few metres on a dirt track running up the slope in order to reach the tarmac of the carriageway. One could argue that it is just a few steps, but they are steps that require careful e ­ xamination of the terrain in order to set one foot before the other. Once approaching the top, the crash barrier is the next hurdle to be overcome (fig. 5.2). Mounted at the very edge of the road surface, it is too high to be easily stepped over when standing on the outside of the motorway. Thus physical ability is required in order to swing the body across and enter the road space. Children need to be lifted over and many travellers need a helping hand – not to mention those who are put off from travelling at all by this ­obstacle. Notably, on my first visit in 2011, loosely piled stepping-stones provided some assistance. By 2014, this had become a more durable step structure (fig. 5.3). Once inside the road space, the crash barrier now affords a second, very different usage: in relation to the road surface it is now only some 60cm high and quickly becomes a bench on which to sit and chat while waiting for the next bus to arrive (fig. 5.4). This is surprising, as the space that provides for the entire operation of the bus stop is only about two metres wide. Users confirm that feeling at ease requires a considerable amount of confidence with the situation and the constant movement of cars and buses (and people). 156

Fig. 5.1: The footpath leading to the San Pablo bus stop.

Everything is taking place in one spot at the same time: waiting, boarding the bus, meeting friends: all caught between the crash barrier and the (moving) bus (fig. 5.5). At the same time, taking the bus is regarded as an enabling experience, too. One bus stop user describes the operation as stressful and dangerous while at the same time being based on mutual interest and thus consideration: I feel fragile and physically vulnerable. The coaches are huge and fast. You are stuck in a corner. It is very noisy. It feels like the buses are coming right at you (te vienen encima). But what is surprising is that something so big and fast and alien to your body responds to your request to stop. The bus wants to pick you up, after all … And, you don’t have to wait long … 157

Fig. 5.2: Climbing into the areana of the bus stop with the help of some stepping-stones.

Another person familiar with the operation1 supports this picture by drawing on past events: Yes, there have been accidents. Right here, a bus crashed into this house. For the same reason: since this is not a [proper] bus stop, but there are a lot of people waiting, buses can’t pull over easily (como no es parada aquí pero es muchísma gente que espera, pues no se puede orillar muy bien). With the next bus approaching, attention shifts to the corporeality and materiality of movement itself.2 The first thing to observe is that the buses that ­facilitate the outer region’s integration with the city are not just any buses but specifically inter-urban, full-size coaches in distinction to the intra-­ urban minibuses (called peseros) that operate on routes located deeper inside 158

Fig. 5.3: Three years later, the stones have been converted into a more durable staircase.

the urban agglomeration. Second, identifying and flagging down the right bus involves a whole set of skills and requires quick responses: reading at a distance the small and often hand-written signs stuck to the windscreen of the bus, comparing the place names with one’s mental map of the region, signalling with the hand and, above all, noticing the subtle nod of the driver’s head and answering it with an equally slight gesture of the hand. All this has to be done, and completed, within seconds … because seconds later the bus is pulling in – right towards where the passenger-to-be is standing unprotected from the pace and mass of the oncoming vehicle. All at once, the bus is decelerating, opening its door, rolling along while people hurry up the steps, and picking up speed again even before the last traveller has made it into the cabin. What is left behind is the roaring of the motor and, often, a cloud of 159

Fig. 5.4: The guard railing serving as a bench while waiting for the next bus to arrive.

burned diesel – in which the next bus arrives. This fleeting yet very tangible encounter between human and machine is exceptional with regard to their relative masses, and the speed at which it occurs: approximately twenty tons of steel and aluminium moving in on the human body, missing it by less than 50cm of distance while snatching it away … Analysing this violent yet purposeful encounter, the crash barrier acquires yet another, third meaning. It materially demarcates the ring in which access to the city is physically negotiated with the body: an arena where opponents engage in close combat, which I suggest is comparable to Mexican free-style wrestling (lucha libre). Taking buses at the San Pablo stop is both about dodging and grappling with the oncoming machine, a highly material-corporeal 160

Fig. 5.5: Between crash barrier and moving bus: The narrow space for operations at the San Pablo bus stop.

activity by which bodies, human and artificial, evade and find each other in order to leave together. I call it a practice of wrestling because it relies on the particular acrobatics of rehearsed grappling holds and evasive manoeuvres. Bus drivers and passengers both depend on collectively rehearsed movements and embodied trust and proficiency to manage the situation: pulling away one’s head so as not to be hit by the rear-view mirror, avoiding the opening door and, importantly, in one and the same motion climbing up the steps into the moving vehicle. In other words: only by aligning the body and its movements to the body and movement of the bus can bus stop users merge in flight with the buses in order to overcome and make productive their peripheral position. Comparing this encounter to boxing would 161

limit the attention to how the blows of the oncoming bus are evaded. Comparing it to bullfighting would miss the specific goal of leaving together ­a fter the attack of the oncoming bus has been paraded as close as possible to one’s own body.3 The particular body-work involved in wrestling with buses becomes apparent in the account of travelling mothers, pointing also to how the highway, the bus stop and the opportunities they entail are ridden differently according to gender and family roles (see e.g. Salazar Cruz 1998). When you travel with children you have to make them become part of your body to be able to move. […] Climbing up into the coach has to be done very fast. You have to be very agile, be wide-awake … it’s complicated. It causes a lot of stress and physical work. In other words, you have to make an effort (hacer un esfuerzo). You start sweating in this kind of situation. From a complementary perspective, wrestling with buses also resonates with Henrik Vigh’s (2009) description of social navigation as “shadowboxing”. With this notion, Vigh depicts how people insert themselves in shifting social and political contexts, how they “attune” themselves “to the movement of the environment” by means of “a flexible and adaptive practice” (ibid., 423). In the case of the San Pablo bus stop, this movement of the environment becomes manifest, literally, in the buses pulling on and off the narrow hard shoulder of the highway. The point made, therefore, is that taking the bus at the San Pablo wayside bus stop underlines the bodily practice that is navigating the city’s socio-material terrain and constituting and enhancing it through acting as infrastructure. This is what I call the corporeal labour of travel. At the same time, jumping on and off the advancing bus, ducking one’s head from the rear-view mirror … these manoeuvres imply knowing the environment for and through the body and its movements. Such knowing, I argue, resembles Paul Carter’s (2004) notion of “material thinking”, introduced in chapter 1, by which the practitioner-maker of space – and of the city/citying – comes to know of the world through corporeal engagement with its materiality. 162

5.2

Riding Buses

After this hazardous struggle, the bus stop is forgotten surprisingly soon once inside the vehicle. It is left behind in the time and space of the highway, now that the actual journey to the city otherwhere commences. Every day, inhabitants of the ZMVM spend about one hour – at peak times two hours or more – on transportation, each way (see García Canclini et al. 2013, 43).4 Thus in comparison with the bus ride, the waiting time and time spent wrestling with buses amount only to a very short – albeit significant and significantly contrasting – moment of the overall experience of the northern peri-urban realm of Mexico City. Once you step inside … actually having to climb up the stairs [of the bus] (el hecho de tener que subir unos escalones) makes a difference. These highway coaches are expensive and relatively comfortable with large seats and high backrests. Few people stand in the aisle so you have a private space where you can take refuge from the state of being on the road (un espacio privado en el que puedes como refugiarte del estado de estar en la carretera). At the bus stop you are fully exposed. But inside, the coach protects you. It is a real contrast. This quote suggests that the bus ride itself now needs our attention. How do commuters experience the bus ride and what do they do while riding the bus? In the context of this book’s research this means asking: what are the material-corporeal experiences of the bus and how do travellers make their commute productive when expanding their range of action across the region?5 How does bus time sit within urban travellers’ days and lives? Gains and losses First of all, travel time is not dead time, but vital time invested in making a living (Hannam et al. 2006, 13). Most of the passengers use bus time to recover their strength by taking en-route respites from the day or the city. They sleep, doze or read the papers, or let their eyes glide over the urban landscape flying by. Even if they “kill time” (matar el tiempo), as José, a fellow traveller, 163

puts it during our bus interview, riding the bus is time spent rejuvenating the body and spirit.6 In addition, it is valuable time for travellers to reflect on the past, present and future of the city they inhabit (García Canclini 2013, 49). Furthermore, bus time is used to support self-made businesses. Peri-urban salesmen and women make their profit on the difference between a product’s cost at the central supply market and its retail price on the city-region’s outskirts. Bus time is therefore spent on labelling pirate music CDs, for example, or going through their orders and numbers. Israel, whose family works in the supply of local grocery shops, provides a picture of how distance and the structural dependency of the periphery are a lucrative trade. It is in low-income areas where sales are high because the people who cannot go to the supermarket necessarily buy at the local convenience store. That is why there are so many misceláneas in Sierra Hermosa. This is where people spend their money because they do not have enough income to travel to where they would pay less (deja ahí su dinero porque no tiene ingresos para irse a donde es más barato). The possibilities of the bus and bus ride thus find their counterpart also in certain operating expenses. Repeatedly, bus fares are described as a considerable hindrance to people’s scope for travel as personal and family budgets often operate on a hand-to-mouth basis. Accordingly, the cash burden is weighed against the other cost of travelling: time. Urbanauts of Mexico City’s north-northeast choose consciously between going “por arriba”, that is, ‘up above’ taking the fast yet expensive motorway, or “por abajo”, ‘down below’, riding the toll-free but much slower country road. Time is also the reason behind people leaving the peripheral neighbourhoods before sunrise in order to make it to their work places in the inner city ahead of the traffic jams. People on the margins start their day earlier than inhabitants blessed by centrality – and those riding the bus start it earlier than those driving their own car. “Those with fewer resources travel for longer,” Nestor García Canclini et al. (2013, 25) confirm, while at the same time pointing out that traffic congestion diminishes the privilege of the rich, as all inhabitants 164

are caught up in it (more or less) alike. For Tecámac and Tizayuca this means that 4.30 o’clock in the morning is one of the busiest times of the day – and taking the bus that early is an elemental experience of living on the periphery, as José explains. Everybody working, including my son-in-law, leaves at 4.30 am. If you leave at 6.30 am you’ll be hit by traffic. That’s another thing about living here. A third cost to take into account is that of the risks entailed by travelling the northern peri-urban realm of Mexico City. People are afraid of assaults and describe to me how the Indios Verdes transport hub, the road, night-time and the inside of the bus all hold their dangers. Santa, who we met in the previous chapter, for example, became a victim herself some years ago. As a result, she now emphasises the danger involved in taking the bus (el peligro de usarlo). This as such is a violent condition that practitioners of the urban have to face and ‘cost into’ the equation of everyday life. Furthermore, if we take into account also how the city is being used and experienced differently by men and women (see Tonkiss 2005, 69–72, 94), it becomes apparent how taking the bus is pervaded by unequal, if not unjust, gender relations. In this light, García Canclini (2013) suggests that the inner-urban itineraries of women are both longer and more complex than those of men: women not only incorporate places of work and home into their lives but also the school, after school childcare and most of the household’s everyday shopping, thus facing the need to make more frequent journeys back and forth between these places. Highwaying and the body These gains and losses affect the practice and experience of highwaying. Yet what plays out, too, are the material-corporeal as well as visual dimensions of riding buses. This is to ask: what are the material and audio-visual conditions of the bus and bus ride, and how do travellers relate to them and from them out into the urban landscape they move across? Leaning back in the (more or less) upholstered seats of the full-size, inter-­ urban coaches, or squeezing onto the narrow and often crowded benches of 165

the  minibuses, are both distinctive corporeal experiences. The engine ­v ibrations shake the vehicle and every acceleration and braking has to be resisted by the body. In addition, the surfaces of the highway and country road are felt differently. While the former is predominantly well-maintained tarmac, the latter is littered with speed bumps and often riven by cracks and potholes. Sound plays its role, too. Music above all, in some coaches a movie, as well as conversations with fellow travellers intervene in the experience of the bus ride. From the outside the noise of the traffic can be heard: the whooshing of tires, the squeaking of brakes and the sudden, determined sounds of horns near and far accompany the journeys. Undoubtedly, the individual reception of these material, kinetic and environmental influences varies from person to person. While José highlights the tediousness of riding the freeway because of the many potholes, Doña Margo claims that: Once you get used to it, you don’t feel it anymore. You cease experiencing the bus ride as tiresome (cuando ya se acostumbra usted, ya no siente que sea muy pesado). Nevertheless, between the lines, travellers agree on the necessity to relate to the material-corporeal dimension of the ride, be it either by suffering or adapting. Adding to this description of the impact that sensing the environment has on each person while being on the move, Santa shifts the focus towards the ­v isual perception of the urbanising landscape. She describes the bus ride as tiring not only because of the above-mentioned aspects but because what she sees through the window she regards as dreary: The bus ride is tedious, tiresome. I don’t like it. This stretch between here and Indios Verdes, I don’t like it because there are all these places selling car parts. It’s ugly, run-down and dangerous (ratero). It’s not kept well-ordered (arreglado). I mean: there is nothing you can appreciate. No, no, no. It’s not a landscape where you’d say: ‘oh, how beautiful’. […] It doesn’t have anything to make you say: ‘that’s all right’ (no hay un paisaje que digamos ‘que padre’). No, I don’t like the way it looks. 166

To sum up these aspects of practice and their corporeal-material and visual implications, we can conclude with Israel’s words on the corporeal labour ­i nvolved in travelling the city-region: To get from Sierra Hermosa to the Federal District [i.e. to central Mexico City] means getting up earlier, paying more and making a lot more ­effort (levantarme más temprano, pagar más dinero y hacer mucho más esfuerzo). Again, this making of effort implied in the bodily practice of riding the bus – and previously flagging down and boarding it – is why I coin the term labour of travel.

5.3

Managing Movement

Back at the many bus stops along the way, we come across yet another form of practising the highway worthy of note. Unlike most people who take buses to get elsewhere, some have turned the taking of buses itself into an opportunity for enacting and expanding their possibilities. This is the case of the numerous bus drivers for whom the growth of the city in size and population means an increase in traffic and business (this being the case, for example, for Edgar, who drives a minibus on the route between Sierra Hermosa and nearby Ojo de Agua). It is also the case for those I refer to as wayside transport professionals, that is, self-infrastructural opportunity workers who make the movement of buses and people their raw material and the tarmac of the road their place of (self-)employment.7 The first of these wayside transport professionals who enact consequential conjunctions – cityness that is – with their corporeal labour is the ‘checker’ (checador). His work consists in “controlling time” (control de tiempo), as one of them has it in our interviews; that is, in managing the steady rhythm of public transport operations along a particular road corridor of the city-­ region. The checker operates under both formal and informal working conditions, at formal and informal wayside halts along the main roads of both 167

inner- and peri-urban contexts, as well as at all officially established public transportation hubs. Juan is checker at the 5 de Mayo bus stop (fig. 5.6), a little bit further out than the San Pablo halt described earlier in this chapter. Juan was formerly employed by one of the bus companies until he realised that working as a checker on his own account was more rewarding. One of the major assets, as he explains to me, that he took from his previous job is that he knows all the drivers; the other, that here, at this particular spot in the direction of travel to ­Pachuca, people know him. Both these assets help him to secure his position as the sole checker on site, keeping possible competitors at bay. Juan describes his work as a service he is providing to drivers, for which he receives a voluntary payment of one or two pesos each. He helps them to maintain their distance, so that operations are spaced and they “know whether they are falling behind or closing down” on the previous vehicle (para que sepan si se abran o si se cierran). Knowing of, and carefully managing this in-between position of each bus between its competitors relates directly to the possible number of potential passengers waiting at the next bus stop. Both successful and happy with his job, Juan claims that, interestingly, he does not travel at all – at least not to the Federal District save on very rare occasions. This is because he cannot stand the traffic jams of the inner city, he says, when movement is hampered and does not run as smoothly as buses do here, at his check point in the peri-urban realm of Tecámac. I’ve lived here twenty-five years now and I rarely go to the Federal District for the same reason: there is a lot … how shall I say … I find it very difficult to go there because of all the traffic. When I come back, it’s with a headache. The ‘kicker’ (pateador) is the second wayside transport professional to have made the road and its movements his space and work of opportunity. I meet him at the San Pablo bus stop where passengers wrestle with buses – the precise encounter his business is based on. That is to say, that the kicker makes his living by bringing buses and travellers together with precision and in the shortest time possible, calling out the different destinations and advertising spare seats for a tip from the driver. The name of his profession probably 168

Fig. 5.6: The checker (checador) of the 5 de Mayo bus stand.

derives from American Football (very popular in Mexico, too), where the kicker is the team member in charge of scoring field goals and thus specialises on the precision of his kicks. His service is particularly appreciated during early morning peak hours, when several buses approach and swiftly stop at the same time yet the sun has not yet come up and it is therefore extremely difficult to decipher the many destinations written by hand on pieces of cardboard or directly on the windscreens of the approaching buses. I get people onto the bus. I help the buses (Subo a la gente. Ayudo a los ­c amiones) … because a hell of a lot of people depart from here every day. In the morning it is complicated to see which bus is which … and since people can’t distinguish them, operations slow down. 169

The kicker’s labour is less skilled than that of the checker as he has no books to keep and does not need to overlook the operation of transport as a whole. His work is not managing the rhythm of buses but supporting it at one particular bus stop by keeping things up to speed when demand is high. As the day unfolds and buses and passenger numbers ebb, he may well get on one of the buses himself, trying to earn a few extra pesos by selling sweets or simply nurturing his relationship with one of the drivers. This nurturing of good relationships is essential to his work, too. As with the checker, it is by knowing people and being known to people that he can claim his position and enact its possibilities. As with other jobs on the highway (mobile vendors and wandering musicians, for example), his operation depends on opening up space for it by navigating social relations that, likewise, keep opening and closing with the environment’s movements – here, that of the road and its urbanauts. In this light, both the kicker and the checker resemble the infrastructural work we learned about already when we met Doña Margo and Eduardo in chapter 3. Finally, I meet the checker of the airbase bus stop half way along the country road to Tizayuca (fig. 5.7). This time, it is mainly minibuses that are coordinated by his service, collective taxis (colectivos), as they are known colloquially, that operate on a local scale between the different (historic) villages and their sprawling neighbourhoods across the urbanising realm of the northern ZMVM . What I would like to highlight by focusing on his way of doing the job is that checkers often work as checkers and kickers at the same time. Expressed in numbers, he claims to coordinate the flow of some 200 vehicles that make stops at his bus stop several times a day. During peak hours, he tells me, he has to handle several vehicles and their customers every minute. Watching him juggle with vans and people, it becomes apparent what this means in terms of coordination and time management yet also in terms of corporeal skill and movement. With ease, it seems, he administers all the locations that together compose the peri-urban continuum held together by this particular road. He keeps the books and shouts out the many and repeating destinations – in addition to ­a nnouncing the available spaces on each bus. 170

Fig. 5.7: The transport professional at the Airbase bus stop working as both checker and kicker.

171

Zumpango, la Avenida, los Reyes. Zumpango, la Avenida … There are still some seats (hay lugares) … This one goes to Reyes village, Colonia Ejidal … This one is off to Santa Ana, San Pedro, Santa María Xalalpan … There are still some seats … Like the other wayside professionals we have met so far, the checker-kicker of the airbase bus stop does this with extraordinary agility of the body. Video documentation captures how he dances like a boxing champion: skipping light-footed, smooth and quick.8 He is continuously moving back and forth between the arriving and departing minibuses. He shouts and signals to the driver the interval with the previous bus, reviews his chart, opens the sliding door of the combi and turns to the prospective passengers while proclaiming the destinations. Than he moves to the driver’s door to report on current passenger development and rhythm of operations, exchanging some friendly words and receiving his payment. A few seconds later, he hurries back to the passenger door shouting out the destinations once again and providing a helping hand to the last person(s) making it inside the vehicle. With a sliding bang he shuts the door, and while the van picks up speed he takes notes of the d ­ eparture time in order to have all relevant information ready for the next ­vehicle to arrive and to repeat his dance. On special occasions, he takes extra time to greet the driver with a handshake.

5.4

Labour of Travel

We have come full circle in this chapter: taking and riding the bus and turning movement into opportunities to making a living on and with the highway. So what notion of the city, of citying, what sense of the self and one’s own position – and movement – in space emerges on the horizon of such practices? First and foremost, taking the bus at the San Pablo bus stop, riding it through the urban region or channelling its route as checker or kicker all constitute a city made in practice. These activities make city by making it happen, both 172

as the happening of the social, the event of people and things coming together, and as the materialisation of this happening in physical space. In effect, their primary intervention is shifting our understanding from highway to highwaying, opening up a window through which to engage with transport infrastructure not as a thing but as a verb. Second, practices like stopping and riding buses and managing transport ­operations once more reveal themselves as being the labour of self-infrastructural opportunity work. In this regard, they resemble other forms of corporeal city-making labours that we have come across in previous chapters in the context of street-vending and the making of houses. In the case of the highway, and of the movement work it entails, this is what I call the labour of travel through which urbanauts make themselves and the city/citying that they navigate. Thirdly, the experience and corporeal labour of day-to-day commuting is shown to be a constituent part of living in this and many cities. Mexico City, as García Canclini et al. (2013) agree, resembles the prototype of a City of Travellers. Here, spatial fragmentation, the lack of local opportunities and ever-increasing distances in a growing city-region force people to spend essential time of their day on the bus or other public transport. This is the case despite the periphery’s increasing centrality, as identified by Aguilar (2008). For example, even if 70 percent of journeys made from home to work remain in the northeast of the ZMVM (Ibarra and Lezama 2008, 139–41) this nevertheless confirms that centrality, too, is made up out of movement.9 By shifting the focus from journeys to journeying this chapter adds a nuanced understanding of the bodily practice involved in making such peripheral centrality, of citying the peri-urban realm we could say, by travelling the metropolis. Practicing access to the city In order to make my argument, my interest goes back to the wayside bus stop where all practice of journeying (commuting) began. Here, the crash barrier awaits our attention even before the actual wrestling with buses, indicating as it does the delicate line on which the operation of the bus-stopping-activity unfolds. 173

First, the guard railing marks a frontier between two worlds of movement, giving the highway its sense of linearity and speed. The guard railing separates the swift pace of cars from the slow and rambling velocities characteristic of pedestrian movement. Secondly, drawing on the highway’s promise to link up distant destinations, it works as a gateway between the local and an otherwhere – ‘the city’ in its conventional sense – that can only be reached precisely by stepping over the railing and, thus, from one world of speed into the other. Thirdly, when seen from the outside of the carriageway, the railing is the last and most difficult obstacle that has to be overcome when climbing up to the bus stop. It acts as a wicket gate separating those who are bodily able from those unable to access the space of potential of the highway, its movements and the promise of a ‘city otherwhere’ it makes. Finally, when seen from the inside, it also acts as a point of encounter where fellow travellers meet and construct a sense of common enterprise. In other words, the guard railing acts all at once as the marker, obstacle, gate and node of possibilities inherent to practising the bus stop. It exemplifies the multi-layered-ness of mobility to which Kevin Hannam et al. (2006, 11–12) have pointed while, at the same time, collapsing its poles in a single location when enhancing mobility as well as reinforcing immobility. With all these constituent contradictions, in sum, the guard railing (and bus stop it serves) is a site of citying already in itself, a micro socio-material space rife with cityness, even if most people come through it in search of the city somewhere else. How, then, is city being thought out of the material condition and bodily practice we find at the San Pablo bus stop? One facet, I argue, can be described as affording an oppressing perspective on the traveller’s own position and potential mobility in the urban realm. The bus stop is experienced as a bottleneck and affords thinking the city as that which lies behind it and can only be reached by physically and mentally overcoming violent barriers (that is, by passing the guard railing and wrestling with buses). Only then does the city become accessible when the bus stop is opened up for and through the body as a gate to mobility and expanded possibilities – providing travellers are not dissuaded altogether from the attempt. At the same time, an opposing aspect 174

can equally be thought out of the very same condition and practice. This second connotation of the bus stop as the bottleneck to the city can be described as an enabling perspective on the becoming of both the travelling individual and the city at large. This second view is rooted in the experience of the bus stop as a door that is swung open precisely through corporeal work, conquering all obstacles – even turning them into support devices as in the case of the crash barrier used as a bench – and taking on all adversaries and risks, for example, in the form of full-size coaches pulling in right beside the prospective traveller. Either way, this operation of the bus stop as a restricting gate and enabling door exemplifies, and sets in material form, what Soja (2009, 3) ­describes as the “socio-spatial dialectic”, a notion by which he reminds us that “the geographies in which we live can have negative as well as positive consequences for practically everything we do” (ibid.). Practicing distance Once the possibilities of the highway are accessed by passing through the bottleneck/door of the bus stop, the wider urban context is experienced as composed of concrete (socio-territorial) entities, set apart in physical space while knitted together through movement in the practice of highwaying. Taking the case of long-distance travel first, what moving back and forth between distant places reveals is that the city is made and experienced through repetitive, time-consuming, expensive and physically arduous journeying. Elevated travel costs, long travel times and often limited schedules make the city appear to its users-travellers to be constituted of remote and isolated localities. Citying, then, is understood as the work of connecting these localities in one’s travelling body because their integration into lived life is accomplished first and foremost through the corporeal labour of actually overcoming the distances between them in practice. Additionally, however, the comprehension of the integration of discrete sites through travelling is shaped by fear and exposure. Many, especially at night, experience the highway and bus as spaces of danger, where life is particularly vulnerable when on the move. Israel, one of the residents of Sierra Hermosa, for example, describes the experience as follows: 175

Here, what you do is that you go to the D.F. [Federal District] and thereby you expose yourself to risk. You expose yourself to assaults. The trip is ­expensive and tiring. What this quote furthermore uncovers is that Israel clearly thinks of a division between a local ‘here’ and the Federal District, i.e. central Mexico City, as a distant otherwhere; a division rooted in the difficulties implied in moving from one to the other. This resonates with the urban experience of those for whom the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, cited in Lindón (2006, 21), has coined the term prisoners of local space (own translation). The term refers to those urban/peri-urban populations that are structurally held in place by distance and poverty – restrictions that enter everyday life in form also of burdensome family obligations (see chapter 3) or the fear of assaults or kidnapping (see chapter 2). In the urbanising realm of Mexico City, with a public transport system that is arguably accessible and increasingly integrated,10 this might be less pressingly the case than in Brazil,11 yet reaching beyond the local on Mexico City’s periphery, too, depends on people’s ability to overcome any financial, gender, security and – essentially in this context – always also corporeal-material constraints. At the same time, it is pertinent to keep in mind that commuting is subject to contradictory effects and change: with the expanding territory of the city-region, practitioners of space cover longer and longer distances, spending more and more hours on transport. At the same time, highways and public transport are gradually being improved so that travel times are reduced, even as journeys start and end further and further afield. Likewise, the experience of distance does not replace the experiences of density and “massive interaction” that Nestor García Canclini et al. (2013, 25, 33) identify as fundamental to “metropolitan travelling”. Rather, the juxtaposition of these contradictory experiences constitutes how the city/citying of Mexico is thought out of riding the highway. Turning now to the physical appearance of buses provides an additional hint to what it means to practice long distances, and to think city through such particular practice. Buses that facilitate the direct integration of Tecámac and Tizayuca into the metropolitan core (by this I refer, for example, to those 176

buses that run all the way to the Indios Verdes transport hub) are inter-­u rban, full-size coaches. This is to say, similar models also provide long-distance services to other cities throughout the entire country. The size of the coach thus points to the ever-growing distances that have to be covered in order to reach from the centre to the extended periphery. In comparison, it is smaller units that operate on shorter routes: so-called peseros that could be characterized as intra-urban buses and that reach out from the Federal District ‘only’ to what is, by now, the inner periphery of the urban agglomeration (this distinction between metropolitan/inner and extended/outer periphery draws on Aguilar and Ward 2003, 9). At the same time, intra-periphery minibuses, called colectivos, connect neighbourhoods of the extended periphery to specific sites of peripheral centrality such as the capital village of Tecámac, the central supply market in Ecatepec or the terminal station of the Mexibus Bus Rapid Transport system in Ojos de Agua.12 On a local scale, the experience of distance is reproduced also when it comes to short journeys within the peripheral-urbanising everyday environment and lifeworlds. This is to say that the different fragments – the settlements, neighbourhoods and residential compounds scattered about the peri-urban realm under review in this book – are isolated also among themselves. In Colonia Antorcha, for example, the women who lived in the settlement from the very beginning of its existence describe how they had to take the bus to Tizayuca each time they wanted to go to the nearest shop. To the cost of each litre of milk, therefore, they had to add a return trip of almost an hour at the tariff of onesixth of the official wage minimum per day – a high price, surely, even though often mitigated, as reported by the participants in this research, by pooling journeys and setting up collective shopping lists. Only since 2013 has Colonia Antorcha had a local miscelánea, a small neighbourhood store at that time with a fairly limited range. By 2015 the number of small shops has risen and signs of specialisation and diversification of products can be observed (for example, one family now sells plants from out of their house and building plot). In a comparable experience in Sierra Hermosa, the restaurateur Santa describes how her quality of life is gradually improving with more and more supermarkets opening nearby, thus here too increasing choice and reducing travel time and costs. 177

The influence of time implied in these accounts needs our attention. Local positions within the wider urban context certainly change over time and thus show that no experience of the city is ever carved in stone. All interviewees recognise the transformations occurring when it comes to facilitating their basic needs. Increasing the range of provisions is also the achievement of those who turn distance and seclusion into a business opportunity precisely by travelling: roving vendors, both formal and informal, earn their living by capitalising on the difference in prices that is produced by structural isolation. They supply small convenience stores or sell fruit and vegetables, bread or plastic bags from a van or motorcycle. Their economic success rests on their mobility in distinction to the limited mobility, or immobility, of their clients. Practicing spatial sequencing When life moves back and forth between distinct entities, the artery that ­c onnects them is the road. As mentioned above, all urban, rural and other (industrial, etc …) fragments that compose Mexico City’s north-north-eastern landscape depend for their urban integration on the particular twinning of one fast yet expensive highway and one slow yet free-to-use country road that tie all movement together and into the wider region. Yet what is even more important is this road network’s only seemingly banal condition of linearity. It is this linearity that most notably structures the particular spatial organisation of the landscape into fragments all lined up on one (double) string of shared access – and practicing this linearity, accordingly, the spatial manifestation of the city is experienced and apprehended as sequenced. Following the logic of Island Urbanism (e.g. Duhau and Giglia 2008, 135; see also Urban Catalyst 2007), neighbourhoods in Tecámac and Tizayuca do not directly adjoin but are connected only with the highway and through the highway with the surrounding and wider urban field. This necklace-like structure of sequential units influences how people move across their socio-material environment and, accordingly, encourages thinking the city in practice as a chain of things and places. The road mediates each entity’s isolation; it connects them but only as channelled by the road and through distance. To get 178

from Sierra Hermosa, for example, to the immediately adjacent public sports ground it is necessary to leave the development and walk down the main road; only then is one able to enter the park. However, as the interview with Santa shows, this movement in ‘U’ – instead of a direct and much shorter connection – is regarded as the natural and only imaginable mode of connection between two adjacent elements of the lived environment. Santa describes it as “really close” though having to “take the bus”. This points to how the logic of island urbanism is internalised13 as channelled (dis)connections. If I go for a walk I go to the park, right here, to the sports ground … Yes, you have to walk or take a bus. But no, it is really close, behind the ­superstore [on the main road]. The analysis of the landscape as lined-up, and of the environment as a collated sequence of concrete city entities adds to Eduardo Nivón’s (2005, 155) ­description of the Mexican periphery as a socio-spatial “kaleidoscope”. The image of a settlement pattern made up of multiple and fractured urban enclaves endlessly reflecting each other still holds true in its general observation, yet the structure of ever-smaller units of the same is neither arbitrary nor chaotic. Rather, these enclaves resemble a system of discrete urban bits and pieces that all depend on the area’s two access roads at the same time as resembling an incremental privatisation pattern where (smaller) gated compounds can be found within (larger) ones and so forth. Over and over, navigating space implies being stopped by borders and negotiating passage through filters that continue to multiply inside the many compounds: socio-economic differences, cultural ambitions and fear, yet also the segregationist logic of planning under neo-liberalism, individualism and, consequently, island urbanism, all shape and subdivide the market and, with the market, fragment the territory (Borsdorf and Hidalgo 2010; Borsdorf, Hidalgo, and Sánchez 2007). For example, Villa del Real and Sierra Hermosa are both divided into sections of houses purchased under different credit schemes. In addition, they are divided into different types of streets, namely avenidas (main roads), calles (local roads), cerradas (cul-de-sacs) and privadas (private, gated streets). These types of streets allow different social activities to take place on them, thus constituting distinct 179

categories with regard to their spatial “openness” (Lynch 1995, 396).14 In addition, they correspond to different legal categories where the first three street types are part of the municipality’s public domain while the privadas constitute legally and socially privatised land under shared ownership of their respective residents’ groups (see AdT 2004). As with fragmented peri-urban space on the whole, the experience of space and its subdivisions inside each fragment is that of a sequence of access-controlled, socially and materially delimited entities. Any labour of citying necessarily has to deal with these cementations of structure, be it by capitalising on their logics, for example by converting a wayside bus stop into a business opportunity (or by selling on the main arteries or in front of the school, as seen in chapter 3) or by overcoming their constraints, that is, by wrestling with buses and riding the highway in order to expand personal reach. Practicing vision Thinking the city out of practicing the highway is also intimately linked to how the traveller’s vision and imagination travel too, while being on the road. Foregrounding corporeality and materiality, this implies shifting the focus to the material-social condition of the bus itself and to the perception the inside affords of what is outside the vehicle. García Canclini (2013, 43, 46, 57) suggests that while living the bus, travellers also appropriate the urban space they traverse through vision and imagination. Houses and cars fly by behind the windows of the bus and are loosely related to one’s own life or explicitly connected to reflections on the past and future of the metropolis (ibid., 46). The linearity of the road and the particular route the bus is taking conditions the visual apprehension of the city-space they cross. This city-space is addressed now as landscape. The term deliberately refers to the perception of space when apprehended by vision (Burckhardt 2006, 33). This is in contrast to the term environment used to denote the same socio-material space but when experienced in practice (see Ingold 2000). Differentiating between visual landscape and practiced environment allows the description of two ideal poles between which everyday space is incorporated into thinking the city/citying. 180

At the same time, seeing is a practice of the body too (see Gibson 1986; Ingold 2000). That is to say, visual perception is not distinct to, but essentially always a bodily practice in itself. Seeing the city as landscape is achieved while feeling the road and movement mediated through the bus seat. Furthermore, it is mediated by listening to an accompanying soundscape, which, in this case, is that of music, people conversing and the roaring of the engine. As a specific practice – that of seeing from the moving bus – the vision of bus travellers affords a particular kind of notion of the city/citying, one that is provoked as much as hindered, in a word negotiated, through the experience of distance and speed, through the material quality of the window-as-screen and through the corporeal-material relation between body and bus (seat). The practice of visual perception, hence, is an affair of two theoretical worlds. Through interpretative seeing the landscape-flying-by is incorporated into the individual construction of the self in relation to the traversed environment: both the city, even in its framed and fleeting apprehension and territorial incomprehensibility, and the seeing subject are established through the specific vision afforded by and emanating from the particular body and its particular positioning and practising in space while accomplishing the viewing (that is, sitting on the bus and moving quickly along the linear road) (see Berger 2008; Burckhardt 2006; García Canclini 2013, 62; Grosz 1995, 89, 92; Krieger 2004). Simultaneously, the “observational acuity of eyesight in watching and looking” is another achievement of the living body (Ingold 2010, 15). It is part of the perception by which we dwell in the world, a visual-bodily practice that does not represent “an external world”, but, like hearing, “participates in the inwardness of the world’s becoming” (Ingold 2000, 155–56). This kind of vision is responsive to the material conditions from which it emanates. Drawing on James Gibson, Ingold describes it as the perception of whole living beings necessarily being emplaced in material environments and as equal to these beings’ “own exploratory movement through the world” (Ingold 2000, 3). The city that we see, practiced as landscape, thus reflects onto travellers as the relational horizon of their lives, in tune with their own becoming and being in the world. It draws together the many facets, social and material, of 181

each urbanaut’s lifeworld, which are perceived with all the senses and juxtaposed with previous experiences and changing affects. Certainly, the subjective imaginaries that emerge from this can vary enormously according to the different commuters and their specific physical and emotional conditions, occupations and motivations for journeying (see García Canclini and Mantecón 2013). Interpretations thus range from tedious (Santa) to recreational (José) or, as Canclini (2013, 46) suggests, from adventurous and playful to critically reflecting on the urban condition, including the possibility of a therapeutic function in terms of overcoming isolation. Finally, when practiced as landscape, the city seen from the bus can be removed from one’s consciousness by reducing it to no more than the backdrop of each individual’s journey (ibid., 49, drawing on Alain Borer, 1987). However, even in this negation, the city/citying is present in sensorial-material ways as the weight – light or heavy, according to lived experience – that practising it brings to bear on each traveller. The accompanying images present this city/citying from the researcher’s personal perspective of looking-out-while-being-on-the-bus (fig. 5.8). They cannot reproduce the materially and corporeally emplaced practice from which they emerged, nor speak of any landscape of the city in general as it is practiced differently by every traveller (and mediated differently by every vehicle), yet they do provide a taste, I believe, of how inside and outside converge on the screen of the window and how interpretative seeing is intertwined with the explorative journey of the eyes of observational looking while h ­ ighwaying.

182

Fig. 5.8.: Landscape flying by: impressions of individual route-sensitive and linear visual appropriations of Mexico City’s urbanising realm when mediated by different vehicles.

183

Notes

travel the region in search of an income (own comparison and based on conversations with residents of São Paulo in 2008). 12 This is a rough distinction based on data collected at the Indios Verdes transport hub and bus stops along

1 2

This person is the ‘kicker’, whom I will introduce in

the Mexico-Pachuca highway. Certain peripheral

detail below.

neighbourhoods, however, are connected also di-

This can be apprehended on video at https://vimeo. com/68771024.

3

Interestingly, Sarah Pink has gone from studying

translation to urban space of the work of Catherine

bullfighting to studying material and sensory spaces

Malabou (2000, 2008) regarding the working and

of home to outlining the doing of sensory ethnography. Her research continuum, I argue, thus supports my comparison. (Pink 1997, 2004, 2009) 4

Of this hour when traffic flows, the bus time between Sierra Hermosa and Indios Verdes, the terminus of the inner city’s subway system, is about 35 minutes.

5

Others, for example, have asked about the emergence and agency of human/non-human affective ­atmospheres (see Bissell 2010).

6

This becomes apparent in both the topics we converse about and in José’s reflections on how he uses bus time: “I bring a newspaper, a book … something to kill time.”

7

This group of people can be understood as a particular sub-group of the “workers of the public street” defined by Crossa (2008, 478), albeit one that is not explicitly mentioned in Crossa’s work.

8 9

rectly to the hub via colectivo vans going all the way. 13 This observation anticipates my discussion and

See video at https://vimeo.com/68771398. These intra-periphery journeys, furthermore, support the argument about Mexico City’s wholesale peripherisation (see chapter 2), that is, about its ­simultaneous regional expansion and inner-metropolitan de-concentration and the experience this two-faced development entails, namely dealing with the city-region’s growing incomprehensibility whilst moving through the lives and landscapes it throws together (see Wissel 2012; drawing on Nivón Bolán 2005; García Canclini 2007).

10 Islas Rivera (2000) argues, that at the turn of the ­millennium the system was still urgently lacking integration. By 2018 new Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) routes and a regional train line, though far from being perfect, have been built. 11 The public transport network of Mexico City (public and private operated) can be regarded as relatively inclusive when compared, for example, with that of São Paulo. This is particularly the case with regard to comparably low travel fares that allow the poor to

184

making of individual history of the brain in chapter 6. 14 Lynch’s definition is a behavioral one: “a space is open if it allows people to act freely”.

6 City Making through Corporeal Practice

185

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the central intervention undertaken by this book is to speak of the city as a verb, that is, to speak of the city as a citying, as doing city. This final chapter now discusses what can be gained from shifting the view on cities away from its fixed constituents towards such a principle of practicing them. What benefit lies in foregrounding corporeal-material labour of urban becoming, the physical work implied in making city in everyday material-social situations? In the following I will raise four aspects for which I see substantial contributions: these deal with how to think about space, informality, planning and citizenship.

6.1

Dwelling Urbanism

Thinking the city through corporeal practice overtly departs from dominant attempts to apprehend and capture the city. For both methodological and political reasons, urban processuality – even if decidedly acknowledged – is predominantly addressed not directly but through locatable and quantifiable spaces and relations after they have been made. This is the case even though thinking the city as socially produced has a strong tradition in urban studies (see Lefebvre 2009). Amin and Thrift (2002, 157), for example, propose reimagining the urban “as an agitation of thought and practice” yet there are still relatively few explorations – such as the work of AbdouMaliq Simone (cited throughout this book) or Filip de Boeck (e.g. 2012, 2015) – that grapple with the making of city from inside its lived unfolding. In other words, most studies treat cities as the outcome of the social, that is, as the material things and social relations that exist only once practice is concluded (and which, in a second step, then constitute the ground for further practice to take place). Seldom are cities examined as practice-in-­a ction, as the weaving together of social and material intersections and the doing of infrastructures that make social space in real time and as materially concrete yet shifting situations. Accordingly, few are the accounts that see urban space and practice as indissolubly united and in process of ongoing, mutual and material becoming, as a live “inhabiting the urban” by means of 186

“amalgamation, i.e. of combining or uniting multiple entities into one form” (Boeck 2015, 53). The research of this book aimed at exploring such urban inhabiting, turning to the intimate relation between the quotidian corporeal making of cities and the implicit knowing of cities it contains. In doing so, it adds to our understanding of cityness, and of the social connections it fosters, first, by seeing the city through practice and, second, by bringing into view also the material constituents of the environment that people draw upon, put to work or circumvent when employing themselves as city-making infrastructural beings. By these material constituents I mean both the materiality of things, people and spaces, and the materiality of the practising body – that is, the practitioner’s own corporeality – when drawing these elements into deeds of infrastructural enactment. Practices, we have seen, are always negotiations of bodies and things in space and thus necessarily bound to a double, integrative, existence in both the social and the material world (see Reckwitz 2003, 290). In response to Ingold’s (2000) and Gibson’s (1986) writing I call this a relational, ecological understanding of the making and thinking of space and the city. Within the proposed shift from city-as-object to city-as-practice I particularly focus on the resources mobilised for and through the practices of city-making. Following research participants into their infrastructural doing – and coming to register how this activity serves constituting both themselves and their habitat through their mutual engagement – inspired this awareness. Speaking of resources is deliberately aimed at evoking all this term’s meanings, that is, from asset to facility, from expedient to initiative. In this sense, time is made a resource and employed resourcefully as much as family networks, specific social constellations and, in the centre of our attention, the practitioners’ own bodies and the work they can accomplish. Likewise, houses and multiple other specific features and materialities of the urban and urbanising environment – the plasticity of space to which I will come below – are made productive, too, by drawing them into people’s infrastructural practicing. Essentially, then, such creation and mobilisation of resources implies the work of the body in relation to the socio-materiality of the concrete situation. 187

I have come to frame such body-work as a labour of city-making or, in other words, as a corporeal-material labour of urban becoming. With this ­notion I refer to the physical effort that needs to be accomplished when socially and – indissolubly – materially producing urban space. In particular, I identify three different kinds of such labour: the labour of conjunction, the labour of presence and the labour of travel. The first of these labours describes the effort implied in nurturing, handling or unearthing opportunities or, inversely, in enduring their absence or disappearance (chapter 3). The second speaks of the effort of investing the body, work, time and social relations in the materialisation of houses (chapter 4). And the third shifts the attention to the effort that is put into expanding one’s reach either by overcoming uneven spatial development or by making it a resource in itself (­chapter 5). Taking these forms of urban labour together, they open up a path to recalibrate our view on urban-urbanising environments as fields and processes of practice. I capture this theoretical shift with the notion of dwelling urbanism, of which I introduced the theoretical foundations in chapter 1. Drawing on Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” (2000), dwelling urbanism describes a being in, and making of, the city based on each spatial practitioner’s direct engagement with all sorts of human and non-human materialities. This, in Ingold’s terms, denotes an understanding of the world – and thus the city – as a “meshwork” in and by which all the natural and social worlds’ elements mutually evolve, that is, as the lines along we conduct our “perception and action in the world”, lines that are “an extension of [each dweller’s] very being as it trails into the environment” (Ingold 2011, 91). Accordingly, dwelling urbanism apprehends city not as one single conception but as multiple and diverse, as well as unequal, live experiences of practice (see Giglia, 2010) – that is, in my words, as plural ways of laborious citying. And urbanisation is not only “the result of the advance of the colonising human presence in its eagerness to inhabit space”, as Giglia concludes (ibid., 366, own translation), but essentially the process of such presence and eager inhabitation by people who put themselves to work as infrastructural beings making cityful connections. 188

6.2

The Plasticity of Space

The San Pablo (wayside) bus stop, introduced in chapter 5, is such a coming together, as Ingold has it, of the lines along which life is lived in urbanising Mexico City. Its importance for the analysis of city practice has already been demonstrated. Here, now, I want to delve into how the corporeality and materiality of its making and thinking of city in practice sparks theoretical considerations also with regard to architecture, urbanism and socio-material space more broadly. I discuss these considerations under the concept of a double plasticity of space, that is, of a plasticity of space that is both social and material. This requires bringing into view three interlinked phenomena: first, the elusive constancy of the bus stop made by stopping buses – arising anew in each encounter of person and machine, yet describing a site and practice firmly located both in the space of the city and the memory of its practitioners; second, its immaterial materiality – presenting no material-built sign but the wholly corporeal-material movement of bodies and buses; and third, the gradual materialisation of these elusive-constant and immaterial-material movements: the fact that making a bus stop by taking buses does eventually solidify, to a certain extent, in the material space where this practice takes place. All three aspects are particularly striking in the case of the bus stop yet hold their validity also for describing the contradictory presences of, for example, Doña Margo’s and Eduardo’s street stalls discussed in chapter 3. Plasticity, Catharine Malabou (2000, 203) expounds, is characterised by being simultaneously “susceptible to changes of form” and “having the power to bestow form”. This double capacity of calling and responding upon the world is what makes the concept distinct from its mistaken cognate: flexibility. What is flexible is able only to respond, it lacks the agency to shape; yet what is plastic is essentially “‘formable’, and formative at the same time” (Malabou 2008, 5).1 Applying the term to the discussion on space, I find traces of it shining through already in both the urban geographer Edward Soja’s (2009) framing of a “socio-spatial dialectic” and in the sociologist Martina Löw’s elaborations on what she discusses as the “duality of 189

space” – expressing by this “the idea that spaces do not simply exist, but that they are created in action and that they, as spatial structures and e ­ mbedded in institutions, also steer action” (2009, 352, own translation). A further reference to the plasticity of space can be found in the writing of urban planner and theorist Kevin Lynch (1995, 409) who suggests that (urban) material space is plastic due to its ability to be actively used and manipulated. Here, however, I would add that while such active usability of material space holds true, it also, and at once, solidifies in specific forms or structures to which further transformations necessarily have to respond – be it by building on them or by altering or destroying them. This is what Malabou (2008, 15–16) stresses in her definition of plasticity when elaborating that the concept’s range is confined by two complementary limits: on one side, plasticity speaks of a configuration, indicating that plastic material “retains an imprint and thereby resists endless polymorphism.” On the other side, plasticity speaks of modification and is thus marked by the possible openness to transform the determination of its own imprints (ibid.). Coming back to the examples presented in this book, the socio-spatial and material-spatial permanent temporariness2 of the San Pablo bus stop is rooted in space’s very characteristic of being both malleable and evolving, that is, of being plastic. In light of my research, I particularly emphasise the material ­d imension of such reciprocal socio-material becoming of space. I do so by drawing on Carter’s (2004, 187) account of the “plasticity inherent to matter”, a notion he develops by extending the “principle of give-and-take” that rests in human collaboration to the collaborative interaction between matter and its makers. Hence, I propose translating Carter’s idea of a mutual give-andtake in material making to the generative relationship that exists between ­u rbanising socio-material space and its city-making practitioners. Plastic City The particular apprehension of the city that derives out of this malleability and power to mould of urban spatial matter is what I aim to capture with the term plastic city. It describes how the city is thought out of the siteand activity-specific emergence and solidification of those city-making, 190

corporeal-material practices that I have discussed under the notion of dwelling urbanism above. Traces of this Plastic City abound at the wayside bus stop. The kicker for example, in order to boost his conjunction work, has made some small but significant modifications to the material space of the immaterial, yet materially practiced, bus stop. He was the one who placed the few stones described in chapter 5 that now help to reduce the guard railing’s height that prospective travellers have to overcome (fig. 5.2.). What the kicker did was to read the situation and, within what he diagnosed as possible to do, to add what was missing to the social-material constellation. In his own words: It was me who placed those stones. I arranged them [to form the stairs]. I wanted to take out a section of the guard railing but the highway is subject to federal law. It can’t be done. As a result, the kicker’s intervention gives the permanent temporary bus stop the weight of a now materially solidifying presence: first, in 2011, these stepping-stones were loosely placed; then, by the year 2014, they had been cemented together to form a proper, albeit simple staircase consisting of a landing platform and two steps (fig. 5.3.). This consolidation resembles what could be called a work of proto-architectureing, that is, the active making of space that materialises in the becoming of an architectural prototype. This original mould of a stair now materially indicates a particular place in the social continuum of northern Mexico City’s peri-urban journeys, marking the bus stop made by stopping buses at this very spot where highway and footpath meet at the guard railing. But it goes further: in addition, the kicker takes care of his stones, assuring they do not come loose under people’s feet. He looks after their infrastructural working and after the opportunity they provide (both for him and for others). In the intervals between buses, and when he feels like it, he places himself next to the stairs and assists people to climb the barrier, offering a helping hand and some welcoming words to his clients. In other words, he is nurturing the bus stop with his labour. In so doing, he is consolidating the site both in the social and in the material sense, as well as strengthening 191

his own position as its (one and only) kicker. Formable and formative at the same time, the guard railing-stairs-kicker assemblage is a demonstration of ­socio-material space’s plasticity and the collaboration between highway and users in making the particular “city of travellers” (García Canclini et al. 2013) that is the ZMVM . The footpath up the slope is another example of this plasticity of the bus stop, albeit one for which it is impossible to identify a similar singular authorship. Rather, innumerable feet trotting up the hill – day in, day out – carve out the sandy trail. This way, users of the bus stop imprint their lives into the environment, materialising the first metres of their journey to the ‘city otherwhere’ by nothing else than journeying with their bodies. This journeying, as it is, starts with walking, “step by step”, in constant and continual, individual “ambulatory practice” that is moulding a collective, material pattern in “concrete space-time” as Jean Augoyard (2007, 5) has framed it in a very different urban context, that of a French modernist housing estate, though in light of the practice may be seen as similar. These examples show how “the forms of the landscape […] emerge as condensations or crystallizations of activity within a relational field” (Ingold 2004b, 333). Through the living and acting body, practitioners of the bus stop grow the bus stop in their socio-material lifeworlds and endow it with meaning (see Ingold 2000, 153). De Certeau (1988, 97–98) described walking in this sense as “[p]edestrian speech acts”, as a creative and “enunciative” art for practising and thinking the city through appropriating, acting-out and relating space, that is, as a form of urban making, “a poiêsis” (ibid., xii; see also Tilley 1994, 28). The city/citying that emerges from such enunciative practice is one that is understood as make-able, as a material space-time that can be moulded through practice – in addition to that it requires our reaction in practice – hence as the Plastic City. This moulding of the world by practising space, this solidifying what is ephemeral and liquefying what has become solid, is neither unique to this example nor to Mexico City or its peri-urban realm. Nevertheless, it is not by chance that the tangible manifestation of an intangible bus stop made by stopping buses can be found right here, on the frontier of the expanding 192

metropolis. The specific material condition of urbanising environments, I argue, is highly responsive to being moulded with the feet and thus to being moulded by means of the body, and bodily labour, of the spatial practitioner. It is particularly malleable by the soft forces of everyday life precisely because it is subjected also to wholesale hard forces (formal citification, capital accumulation, globalisation, etc …) transforming its land use patterns. Here, in the nowhere-now/here of the urbanising landscape, infrastructure (or the lack of it) channels movement, and movement sediments into infrastructure, that is, into the proto-architectural formation of the traces of self-infrastructural labour of conjunctions and travel. The continuous turnover and permanent-­ temporary becoming of such peri-urban environment affords the particular plastic condition that allows stones to be assembled into staircases and paths to be carved into bare patches of earth.

6.3

Informality as a Form of Urbanisation

In addition to thinking through the socio-material condition of formable-forming space, the notion of space’s plasticity also intervenes in the debate on informality. Most examples in this book are commonly described as belonging to the realm of the ‘informal’, understanding by that a set of practices by which those who are marginalised or excluded find a way around, or even resist, the constraints of ‘formality’ while dwelling in a state of unscripted, formless and perpetual flow (see e.g. Brissac Peixoto 2009). Varley (2013, 16) holds against such overtly external and inevitably homogenising readings that “dwell[ing] on informality as resistance or reverse colonialism romanticises it at the expense of a more prosaic assessment of the material constraints facing the urban poor and the resources they use to address those constraints.” The labour of conjunction discussed in chapter 3, the labour of presence examined in chapter 4, and the labour of journeying followed in chapter 5 all support this critique by allowing for the following observations: first, they all show that informal practices are not directed against the formal but are a way to tie into the formal on terms made available by self-infrastructural work in accordance with the given 193

circumstances. The corporeal practices described in this book all grow infrastructures, living infrastructures, which make city. The San Pablo bus stop, for example, is an expression of an intertwined individual and collective endeavour, and process, of modernisation, directed not against urbanisation but manifesting a particular form of urbanisation, as Roy (2005) expounds.3 Second, the bus stop’s immaterial materiality, once more, demonstrates that alternative routeing – let alone resisting marginalisation – is not a smooth affair of ‘flowing’ but a matter of hands-on, physical pulling and pushing. Here I follow Caroline Knowles (2011) in her analysis of how people navigate urban life, that is, how they tackle real encounters in real situations. “Journeys”, Knowles (ibid., 139) states, “matter and make matter, urban matter, in flesh and stone, and they forge the social interactions, social relationships and, ultimately, the social morphologies or viscous, if not solid, forms to which these things accumulate.” This account of urban navigation resembles what I have discussed above both as the double materiality of practice and as the socio-material plasticity of space. Knowles resumes that it is through the analytical potential of journeys – of which in this book we have looked at the particular labour of journeying in chapter 5 – that we can thus understand the fabric and fabrication of cities. Informality, in this light, becomes visible as a form of arduous, bodily urban labour that shapes material space just as its formal counterpart, that is, just as ‘official/formal’ urban development does. The difference being that informality does so not through tangible manifestations of things alone (houses, roads, built bus stops) but also in the form of intangible yet very material presences and movements: the practices of stopping buses, of making presence through paper-work (chapter 4) or of making business opportunities though a labour of conjunction (chapter 3). Third, the existence and persistence of a bus stop made by stopping buses, that is, still following the same example, the inconstant constancy of the San Pablo bus stop, shows how authorities are implicit in such auto-infrastructural process. Both federal and municipal authorities tacitly approve of the wayside halt despite its violating highway regulations. This discloses informality’s interiority to the state and the system; relating back to de Soto’s analysis (1990, 12) of the phenomenon when he described urban informality as practices by 194

which people operate “within a gray area” of the legal and the illegal. At the same time, and turning the perspective around, the example clearly shows how the state and its institutions can draw significant benefits from this inside relation. Oren Yiftachel (2009b, 250) has elaborated with detail how in grey spaces, and by means of deliberate grey spacing, conditions of informality or marginalisation are created “from above”. In the present case, what we can at least say is that the authorities hide from their responsibility to provide favourable urban conditions. They knowingly and actively externalise both the risks and the costs of modernisation and urban integration onto de-collectivised subjects who thereby live under “the permanent condition of insecurity” (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2003, 20, own translation). Gilbert and de Jong (2015) have discussed such instrumentalisation and “embeddedness of informality” in the production of space in Mexico City. How exactly this ­externalisation of responsibility works becomes apparent in a quote from a fellow user of the San Pablo bus stop: This stop has been here for years. It’s because people need it … [But] we need something safe, mostly because of the accidents. There is not enough space [for the operation of the bus stop]. At the same time, the highway authority did try to close down the San Pablo bus stop and to force travellers to use one of the formalised (materially marked) stops further up or down the road. But passengers reject this attempt of control over their lives and ways of citying – not as rejecting modernisation as such but as rejecting certain visions of (an orderly and fixed) city that are introduced from outside of their lived experience and needs. In sum, when drawing these considerations together, I argue that the San Pablo bus stop’s continuous happening provides an example of how the informal is not rejecting urban integration nor that it is (necessarily) unscripted and formless – as claimed, for example, by Brissac Peixoto (2009) – but rather how it is the working of well-established, skilled and rehearsed procedures of citying. Giglia (2010, 356, own translation) refers to this as the “collective construction of a social order”, based on practices of domesticating physical space and therefore exemplifying a “way of producing the urban from the ground of 195

its [ordinary] actors and not from its institutions”. The San Pablo wayside halt is such a socio-spatial order, made up of a collectively agreed-upon set of specific practices of urban becoming at a precise location in urbanising space. In that sense, it can be described as the work of collective urban improvisation, yet not at all, for that reason, as being arbitrary and chaotic. Fellow users of the bus stop thus describe it precisely as “improvised, yet established (improvisado, pero establecido). ‘Improvisation’ and ‘the established’, however, are usually understood as clearly distinct, if not opposing forms to organise particular processes. Thinking them together, therefore, is revealing for how to make sense of informal urban mobility or practice more generally (see Bourdieu 1977, 78).4 Christopher Dell (2007), when translating the concept from free jazz music to urban theory, points to the structured nature of improvisation, highlighting that it denotes a practice based on experience and skill, anticipation and being attuned with the other players, that is, with the other co-producers of space. Improvisation as urban practice, the author furthermore argues, is important for responding to the generally provisional and messy character of the urban (Dell 2011, 36, 45). At the same time, Bormann et al. (2010, 9) specify that improvisation is not determined by the absence of rules but “inaugurates processes at the border of rules, including the rupture with these rules, by which new forms and spaces of possibility for action are opened up” (own translation, emphasis original) – or can be opened up, I would like to add. Drawing on Alfasi and Portugali (2004, 31), finally, we can frame the bus stop made by stopping buses as being self-organised according to a “pull approach” to meeting the needs of urban mobility: buses stop as travellers draw them near so to be picked up along the highway. The two authors describe such relation as a particular mode of just-in-time planning and management, “highly suited to the open, complex nature of the self-organized city” (ibid., 30).5 It is in this sense of a particular mode of organising and shaping the urban that the infrastructural practice and process of the San Pablo bus stop is at the same time improvised and established: a particular mode of producing socio-material urbanising space by organising – in this example – the corporeal practice of bus-stopping. 196

6.4

Re-Rethinking Urban Planning

Understanding the city as made in practice, that is, (i) rethinking the city from the perspective of infrastructural corporal labour employed in its becoming, (ii) describing urbanising space as socially and materially plastic and (iii) discussing informality as a particular planning mode characterised by its established improvisation, all this guides me to engage in a dialogue with p ­ lanning theory with regard to how to intervene in the processes and practices that make up Mexico City and any city. As I have started to do above, this is to take practice as a window for engaging with the theory of urban knowledge and with the city’s nature of being. Rethinking the city as a verb, as a relational doing and evolving, is not to argue against urban planning but rather to critically review what is being mobilised in its course. Turning to infrastructural practice, I argue, reveals some of the assumptions produced and reproduced in and through much of the thinking and acting of urban planning (for example the continuing othering of informality). At the same time, it unravels urban planning’s working as a decisive operational vector by which institutional force is exercised. In this regard, understanding the city through practice supports a way of thinking that criticises conventional urban planning for realigning space predominantly to the needs of the elite and its regimes of governance and capital ­accumulation. Dwelling urbanism challenges apprehensions of the city ‘from above’ or ‘from outside’. In people’s everyday engagement in urban plastic space, infrastructural corporeal city-making poses questions regarding whose visions of the city are being pursued in formal planning and how these visions are generated. This is to ask: how are professional planners and urban planning institutions going to listen to the alive and unending nurturing of urban space in practice? And, furthermore, how are they going to listen to those practitioners of space who dwell on the margin of both society and ‘the city’ (understood here in a Lefebvrian (2008, 150) sense as “centrality and its movements”)?6 Surely, it is well known by now, that “planning work”, as Patsy Healey (2010, 225) frames it, is not merely “translating design ideas into physical form, or 197

scientific analysis into policy criteria and action programmes”, but rests instead on “complex back-and-forth processes of discussion, experimentation and challenge.” Yet, even if we take this as our starting point for rethinking spatial planning; and even if we establish as the ground for this endeavour the ambition – in the best-case scenario – that urban planning was to exercise an ongoing and democratic decision-making process, how far, nevertheless, are spatial planning’s visions detached from urban life unfolding (while, at the same time, channelling this very unfolding of life lived)? The case of the San Pablo bus stop provides an example of how lived practices of citying and formal visions of city can come to compete in their interpretations of how, and where, to make city. And in chapter 3, Eduardo and his wife suggested that their labour of urban becoming rests heavily on both seeing movement and handling it in practice so as to align their own movement with the movements of others. What if planning were able to achieve a similar sensibility with life unfolding from which to exercise its power? Revising urban planning through the perspective of citying As Brenner et al. (2011, 226) notice, what should be taken into consideration on the outset of any discussion on the contemporary global urban condition, and how to deal with it, is that the progressive urbanisation of our planet not only leads to profound climatic, material and biological changes, but also requires us to face the increasing “intellectual, representational and political complexities associated with grasping” them. This includes the question of how we can no longer view cities as fixed and territorially limited objects, but need to address them as either socio-spatial processes (see Harvey 1996; Brenner and Schmid 2015) or political-emancipatory projects (see Davidson and Iveson 2015, see also chapter 2). Yet here is where many urban planning attempts fail to effectively rewrite their, often unacknowledged, frameworks and planning directives. Ash Amin (2011, 638f.) therefore calls upon urban planning to recognise that the critical examination of the general transformations in which the city, society and planning are inscribed – for example: risk society, hyper-individualism, financialisation and digitalisation as well 198

as ecological and environmental catastrophe, to name just some from his list – needs to be the basis on which to be both attentive to urban complexity and capable of “offering a clear diagnosis of […] the matters of collective concern that must be addressed [in order to] improve urban living for the many and not the few”. To this concern, the notions of citying and cityness pen up alternatives by which to redetermine the parameters of our understanding of city. Through citying, the city is created in laborious practice as multiple consequential connections, that is, as cityness, as the diverse “intersection of differences that actually produces something new” (Sassen 2010, 14). And while, at first sight, this awareness thwarts those attempts of formal, Western urban theory and planning to control or regulate the development of socio-material space, it actually allows us to acknowledge in general terms how “no form of regulation can keep the city ‘in line’” because social space is characterised always by “unruly yet dynamic intersections among differences of all kinds to which the city offers both a setting and a cause” (Simone 2010, 3, 12). Furthermore, citying and cityness have the potential to take on the questions of our time directly by means of new ways of seeing and telling them. They do so, as discussed for example by Pieterse (2010, 9, 11), when the structural causes of daily violence come to the fore by looking at how such violence shapes the bodies of those affected. Rethinking the city through both citying and cityness, in this sense, has the potential to reveal alternative forms of knowledge to the Eurocentric, white and male-dominated knowledge production of Western formal planning. This makes it part of a project of urban “cognitive justice” in the sense that de Sousa Santos (2014, 237) has framed such an attempt: The idea of cognitive justice points to a radical demand for social justice, a demand that includes unthinking the dominant criteria by which we define social justice and fight against social injustice. It implies, therefore, going to the roots of such criteria to question not only their sociopolitical determinations but also their cultural, epistemological, and even ontological presuppositions. 199

Inscribed in apprehending the city through the perspective of citying/cityness, therefore, is also the aim of critically revising the mode of knowing and the form of being of urban planning. The thinking and acting of planning Any planning, including the planning of cities, is based on the aspiration to formulate in advance a desired – and desirable – state of the world and path to this state’s creation (Rittel 2012, 16). For its interventions, urban planning therefore strives for a sequence in which first to think and then to act in the world. Ignorance and spontaneity, is the concern, would otherwise lead to erroneous developments (ibid., 15). This sequencing, we can determine, applies to all planning approaches regardless of whether they seek to steer city life from a knowledge-based perspective or, by contrast, whether they rely and build on consideration and democratic consultation. Both these planning attitudes, which Amin (2011) calls the knowing and the deliberative traditions of planning, require in their core seeing the performance of planning as a temporal succession of knowledge and preventive remedial action. However, this linear approach of first thinking and then acting comes at a price: in order to anticipate reality, any planning must translate reality into models and concepts; yet these models and concepts in turn manipulate the reality they produce according to their specific thought patterns. The free choice that planning has with this conception-production of reality is at the same time the departure from its claim to objective validity: both the apprehension and the solution of a given ‘problem’ are mutually dependent on each other, which means that planning, despite its enormous impact on cities and city life, suffers from “a notorious lack of ‘sufficient justification’ to choose a certain course of action and no other” (Rittel 2012, 33, own translation). If we now compare this sequential thinking innate to planning with the way, for example, in which Doña Margo, Ivan or Eduardo in chapter 3 turn what they have at hand in the direction of what they want, then it first appears that they build on what conventional planning describes as its biggest sources of error, namely ignorance and spontaneity. At the second glance, however, we can see how Doña Margo and the others do effectively grow beneficial paths 200

that lead to concrete developments also with regard to their street and neighbourhood. The case is that planning theory, in its critique of what it cannot control, misinterprets the form of knowledge that these practitioners of space – and, in their own right, planners of local affairs – actually mobilise. That is, what planning belittles as ‘ignorance’ is in effect not lacking knowledge, but strives through the employment of an embodied, practical knowledge (see Bourdieu 1977) – as opposed to the theoretical, discursive knowledge expressed in formal, science-based planning. This practical knowledge locates thinking inside acting and thus operates upon the world in the unity of these two modes instead of separating them and pursuing one after the other. This is to say that Doña Margo, Ivan and the others think the becoming of the city, and the becoming of themselves inside and with this city, in practice. With their corporeal labour they make the city usable to them as a resource and, at the same time, set themselves in consequential connection – as in the concept of cityness – with this city that they make. Another challenge to the thinking and acting of planning is formulated in the example of the settlers of Colonia Antorcha presented in chapter 5. In accomplishing what I have termed paper-work, these practitioners of urban space implicitly question urban planning’s claim to domination and objectivity by showing how much of any material manifestation of existence is actually socially produced, and how deeply it depends on the labour of presence achieved with the body. This is to say, when turning to plans and plan-making, that the anticipation of the world captured within these, as Rittel (2012, 22) points out, is not based on universally valid criteria, but always on subjective reasoning and compromise of those people and planning bodies involved. By shifting our attention to the working of such reasoning and compromise, we can see how urban planning, according to both traditions described by Amin, does not differ that much from the (corporeal) negotiation of one’s own existence in urbanising space as sketched in the informal settlers’ paper-work. In other words, in formal planning, too, we can find the principle that planning agents aim at influencing the plan-making process through their actual presence; with the distinction that in the knowing tradition of planning many of the people involved or affected often remain excluded while in the deliberate 201

tradition they are drawn into the process on the basis of different levels of participation.7 Accordingly, those who are allowed to be present during the process are in a privileged position: only they have the opportunity to interpret the situation according to their views and interests, and to codify their interests in the planning tools they have in mind. This shows that spatial planning is certainly always a political endeavour; and, even more importantly in this context, that the state – understood here as the ‘supreme authority’ of formal planning – must in itself be apprehended as a “contested product of formal and informal practices of multiply situated subjects” (Marston 2004, 5). City dwelling instead of city building Extrapolating from this juxtaposition of how plans are generally made with the practical acts of urban becoming we can now formulate a fundamental revision of the thinking and acting of spatial planning. This is to ask: how can we critically reflect on the close relationship between urban planning and the building of cities and, in search of an alternative, turn our gaze to the practice of dwelling in cities? Throughout this book, I have discussed how Tim Ingold’s notion (2000) of a dwelling perspective describes the simultaneous being-in and knowing-of the world that emerges from the active engagement with, and inside the constituents of, the inhabited world. This dwelling perspective, it has also been mentioned before, stands in contrast to a building perspective in which the world is conceived as made in detachment from practical knowledge, that is, based on previously conceived images. The world made by building, in this anthropological perspective, is one that is applied to life from the ‘outside’ and ‘up front’ to its lived unfolding (ibid., 11ff.). The tool for such city-building is the plan. The plan fixes developments by formulating endpoints before the journey even starts. Planned target states of the city are formulated in plans not only as decoupled from actual states, but also, as it were, they act through plans from the future back to the present. The perspective of dwelling as it emanates from city-making practices, in turn, describes a knowing and shaping of the city/citying as ongoing practical and observational engagement in and with its constituents. This, we can 202

say with Ingold (in Välitalo 2012), is a “thinking through making”, a thinking by and in doing, in which the city is apprehended and grown through ­laying hands on, and employing one’s own body in current, actual and, in doing so, urbanising constellations. Thinking and making in this perspective are essentially a creative, that is, world-making, as well as unitary practice. ­I ngold goes on to say that such creative thinking nevertheless does rely on two complementary forces which in the art of making need to be combined: on the one hand, “thinking does have a habit of running ahead of making” as it contains what he calls “the forward moving momentum of the imagination”. On the other hand, when “working with materials close up there is a limit to how fast we can move”, precisely because “[m]aterials have their own friction, their own drag, they hold us back” (Ingold in Välitalo 2012). Accordingly, Ingold concludes, “the art of the maker who thinks through making” – and this, I argue, includes the makers of cities – “is to keep his or her eyes trained on the far horizon while still engaged in the labours of proximity” (ibid.). Outline of a planning informed by dwelling So what could be the spatial planning that corresponds to such thinking through making, one that qualifies its planning actions through direct engagement with the labour of urban becoming, thinking the city out of how its constituent connections are being practiced? To start with, thinking planning through dwelling shakes the foundations of the (singular) plan in planning. Instead of imposing on urban life today a version of tomorrow, multiple spatial processes must be followed along while they are unfolding so to imagine the many paths they are taking. This means that concrete urban experiences – of the like that we have come to know throughout this book – can serve as guidance for direction.8 Listening to these practitioners of space, and resting planning on the specific knowing entailed in their corporeal-material practice, would mean to engage productively with the “conflicting rationalities” that de Satgé and Watson (2018, 29) have identified as possible drivers of tension between formal, often placeblind planning and those place-bound, local populations who are targeted by its attempts. Consequently, de Satgé and Watson highlight the importance of 203

place and location in planning – and thus of people engaging in practice with the materials of which the city is composed – in order to “achieve the kinds of ambitions (social justice and equity, and sustainability) which it [­planning] usually sets itself and avoid the unintended consequences which so often ­ensue” (ibid., 1). Such a practice- and place-sensitive approach to planning makes it necessary to cultivate conversation – better, to cultivate many conversations. This understands planning first and foremost as specific social spaces of negotiation. If planning is to take on the perspective of dwelling then it needs to “consider its rescue interventions and their results”, as Giglia emphasises (2016, 341, own translation), “not as correct or successful in the abstract, but always in relation to the type of space in which they are carried out” – and, I would add, in relation to the specific practices by which these types of space are grown through the direct engagement of their dwellers. At the same time, it does not mean to simply seek for consensus as in collaborative or communicative planning, founded on the idea that the right form of dialogue would allow the parties to reach agreement and thus to produce positive planning outcomes (see Allmendinger 2017, 241 ff.; for a southern t­ heorists’ critique see de Satgé and Watson 2018).9 Rather, communication is understood here as a means of knowledge production in order to access the multiplicity of city-making-equal-to-city-thinking practices involved. John Pløger (2010, 335), in this light, calls on urban planners to “care more about doing detailed analysis of micro-social forces” – because the more perceptions are being heard and made, and the more material-social, corporeal engagements are therewith acknowledged, the better do they describe the complexity of the city becoming. Society and its political, administrative and knowledge institutions, in this view, must create a framework in which those who practice space (that is, those who grow and nurture the city through and for their bodies) can speak with the same rights and capabilities as those who ‘dispose’ of space (those who exploit the everyday city for aims of value extraction beyond everyday material-corporeal engagement). Right-to-the-city movements worldwide can stand as examples for expressing such a lived, corporeal perspective of (urban) dwelling. However, either these activist voices are not heard enough (or too 204

late) in planning processes or their aims are co-opted by those who do already hold the keys to “centrality and its movements” (Lefebvre 2008, 150). Accordingly, Sherry Arnstein (1969) unmasks the non-participation and tokenism of urban planning when power-holders retain their (exclusive) right to decide; and Peter Marcuse emphasises that (2009, 191): It’s crucially important to be clear that it is not everyone’s right to the city with which we are concerned, but that there is in fact a conflict among rights that need to be faced and resolved, rather than wished away. Some already have the right to the city, are running it now, have it well in hand (although ‘well’ might not be just the right word, today!). […] It is the right to the city of those who do not now have it with which we are concerned. Thinking urban planning from the perspective of dwelling thus involves learning in and with the world in order to shape it, and doing so both collectively (albeit not necessarily in consensus) and, at the same time and in particular, together with those structurally disadvantaged by planning. This requires what the sociologist Les Back (2007) describes as an “art of listening”, that is, the capacity and willingness “to record ‘life passed in living’ and to listen to complex experiences with humility and ethical care”. In a similar way, John Pløger (2010, 335) calls upon urban planners to be inspired to care, to walk the street with all their senses, to engage in dialogue with other ways of living and doing than one’s own and, in doing so, to cultivate a subtle understanding of the ever-emerging movement of urban life-in-becoming. This wish list for a truly “relational planning” (Healey 2007, 11), it is pertinent to notice, describes planning actions that in themselves are socio-material practices of the body working on and with the materials of urban life that planners should learn and employ. Hence, rethinking urban planning through dwelling urbanism entails the cultivation of planning skills and attitudes that are receptive of life and its unfolding. These would further include facilitating and moderating participation, accepting the challenges posed by multiple stakeholders as much as by the plasticity of space and working with non-­l inear progression; and it would include nurturing a sense of understanding of these planning issues and skills in the other actors involved, encouraging a sense 205

of caring that reaches beyond each individual movement. Because, speaking up for a perspective of dwelling in planning is not to advocate the proliferation of local initiatives that only pursue their self-serving interests. Rather, it calls for acknowledging and accepting the interests also of those co-planners who pursue other matters of concern than those held by oneself – including the possibility that these interests cannot be reconciled and thus unfold as antagonistic movements (see Mouffe 2008). What is needed, then, is to accompany the many processes of urban becoming without reducing their dynamics into momentary snapshots nor their complexities into biased simplifications which can than be extrapolated into the future and, according to planning’s “epistemic freedom” (Rittel 2012, 32, own translation), reinterpreted without substantial justification. Speaking in overall terms, a planning inspired by dwelling would thus drop the plan in favour of strategic practice, incomplete designs and participatory motivation, it would foster plural activism and shared steering instead of singular control over the process(es), and it would allow for vernacular, site-specific paths over placeblind solutions. This resonates with Jean Hillier’s (2007) outline of a “multiplanar theory to spatial planning and governance”. Hillier frames such an approach to planning as operating through “performance-based […] spatial planning schemes, policies and guidelines” that demonstrate an “understanding of the world through the networks it constructs and enacts” (ibid., 310, 312). Infrastructural practices with their consequential conjunctions of cityness describe such constructing and enacting of networks from inside dwelling. Undoubtedly, such a view of spatial planning and planning work does not bestow urban planning with easy fixes. To the contrary, it requires planners to reconsider their role and powers and to relinquish their certainties and control over both the process and what they perceive as desirable target states. In return, lived processuality, with its social and material spatial interdependencies and interactions, would not only be more ­t angible to urban planning but, above all, it would be made conscious and would be allowed to act as a marker. Urban development would be pursued as the effect of locally engaged adaptation and gradual accumulation, not as a detached better version of the city and the multiplication of norms and standards of which too many are too often 206

developed elsewhere. This is especially relevant if we look at those planning efforts in the global South that employ so-called ‘best practice examples’ developed in the global North, but it holds true also for planning attempts worldwide in which plural local interests need to be identified, pursued, evaluated and negotiated in relation to (democratically obtained) overall interests as well as in relation to those interests brought in ‘from outside’. Spatial planning informed by dwelling would result in a mode of “pull planning” as opposed to “push planning” (Alfasi and Portugali 2004), while ideally incorporating into the work and process all actors and their prospects as well as the spatial conditions involved. This means, as sketched out when discussing informality above with the example of the San Pablo bus stop, that development decisions would not be pushed as previously planned and conceived from outside, but pulled just-in-time and ad hoc out of life unfolding and inside this life’s socio-material constellations. Such pull planning is what scholars of informality and southern planning theory describe as “subaltern” (Roy 2011) or even “­i nsurgent” (Holston 2009) ways of planning and managing the processes of urbanisation (see Allmendinger 2017, 283, 285). Planning as the handling of movement Summing up this outline of an urban planning grown from the perspective of dwelling, we can state that such planning thinks the city becoming as the wandering of ways and their connections, not as achieving detached versions of it. This is a spatial planning grown through conjunctional prospects of practices of urbanisation rather than postulated as ‘the future’ and prescribed in this or that urban vision or plan (see Latour 2010, 485). Amin (2011, 640) speaks of a similar forward momentum along the interactions of people and matter as “[p]rogrammatic acting in an uncertain, and, we can add, trans-human world”. The pragmatic planning he derives from this is one that he describes as a multifaceted and ongoing journey, “freighted with contingency, constraint, and surprise, and therefore in need of continual audit, update, and adjustment” (ibid.). This, he continues, “is not to diminish the value of deliberative planning or multiple knowledges in an uncertain world” but to acknowledge and moderate the limits of human intentionality over space and 207

to “imagin[e] an urbanism able to work its way through uncertainty, hazard, and risk without compromising collective wellbeing and security” (Amin 2011, 640, emphasis added). I began this section on rethinking urban planning by referring to Eduardo and his wife moving along with movement in order to make themselves and their city. Their presence in, and prospect of, the city emerges from what Eduardo framed as seeing and handling movement in practice. This is a central skill for making a living on the edge of the city and society where physical infrastructure, employment, participation and safety are often missing or endangered. In a theoretical perspective, however, what Eduardo and his wife do is also the empirical verification of what in most accounts of the city is usually overlooked, namely that things – and thus the city in its entirety – are moving. What the two practitioners of urban becoming know is that not only do they have to set themselves in motion, but they need to write their own movement into the movements of others. This is how their practice speaks to spatial planning: not knowledge about movement but knowing on the move, as a verb, is what allows them to successfully handle the materials of life. This means that opportunities are grown, identified and pursued precisely by navigating them (see Vigh 2009) and by tying and untying them in consequential connections of cityness. Spatial planning from the perspective of dwelling sets out to similarly handle the movements of the city in order to work their way through uncertainty. It speaks of planning as a crafting culture, one that acknowledges and embraces the progressive open-endedness of the city/citying as multiple processes of multiple practices. By no means is this dwelling perspective on planning suggested to be the only approach to spatial planning or to provide the planning of concrete urban-urbanising situations with clear-cut directions. Rather, city-dwelling acquires its special significance by bringing into view the dual processuality of both the movement of planning and of the world in motion in which this planning is to interfere – not as the matter of which a ‘new’ planning school arises but as cutting across different planning approaches in order to address the concerns of an infrastructural, city-making, corporeal-­material practice. Perspectives and concepts developed out of life lived and space practiced help 208

­ llow to question the thinking patterns of urban planning. In particular, they a reflection on the way in which problems are diagnosed and solutions implemented along the way. Roy (2005, 150) is very specific about this need for critically reflecting the epistemology of planning, rightly stating that “policy ­approaches are not only techniques of implementation but also ways of knowing. Such forms of knowledge are a crucial ingredient of the ‘diagnosis and solution’ calculus of policymaking.”

6.5. Making Centrality and Its Movements By way of conclusion, making one’s home, neighbourhood and bus stop with one’s own hands and body (chapters 3–5), and rethinking socio-material space, informality and planning through such making (this chapter) thus comprises a corporeal practical mode of feeling forward the materialisation of the expanding city/citying. Such handling of the socio-materiality of space is to nurture the unfolding conditions of urban-urbanising environments. At the same time, handling space, things, other people and their movements is a growing of individual and collective prospects on the city, a city-thinking, by making urban space, and making oneself and one’s own position within space, from which to access this mutual growth. Dwelling urbanism, therefore, supports what Engin Isin (2008, 266) understands of the city as a site – and process – “that makes things possible rather than as a space in which things happen.” Doing city, we can argue with this author, materially enacts the social formation of citizens in such a way that it is through people’s engagement with the constituents of their urban habitat, through corporeal labour, that “social relations are produced, reproduced, and transformed” (ibid. 2008). In other words, making city through bodily labour is a way of materially claiming one’s right to participate in making things possible in the urban realm. This relates directly to what Henri Lefebvre (2008, 150) coined as the “right to the city”, that is, “the right not to be excluded from centrality and its movement”. Ash Amin (2014, 156–57), drawing on Caldeira, therefore concludes, that “the right to the city is also a matter of 209

claim through occupation, self-organization, infrastructural improvisation, and counter-vernaculars of inhabitation and design.” Furthermore, making city through making things possible also resonates with Huchzermeyer’s discussion (2004) on urban informality, in which she frames what I call infrastructural practices as concrete ways of doing, not to contravene laws, but, precisely, in order to work with the negative effects of a lack of rights. The multiple forms of labour of urban making identified in this book, then, allow us to further elaborate on Lefebvre’s “cry and [a] demand” for a right to the city (1996, 158). They show that the involvement in centrality that Lefebvre calls for is achieved also by making connections, by generating, channelling and intercepting the movement of people and things; and that such making of connections is a participating with the individual’s own body in what people and things do in and with the city made in practice. Suzanne Hall (2015, 865), in her analysis of migrant spaces in London, describes a similar practicing of urban space in terms of “a fundamental regard for making as a mode of participation” (emphasis original); a making which she finds at the core of both the ordinary city and in everyday existence. Mirroring the discussion on cityness, citying and dwelling urbanism, Hall concludes that “the street as a shared urban space” is “actively being made by migrants as they stretch their capacities and grow their networks across near and far places” (ibid.). Dwelling urbanism incorporates such migrant (Hall) and other forms of subaltern (Roy), insurgent (Holston) or informal urbanisms as discussed here and above. One aspect that these ways of city-making have in common is that in the making itself the makers continuously think ahead their own and their world’s becoming. This includes materially thinking also the “context of contexts”, that is, to consider the “underlying contexts and causes of urban sociospatial polarization, marginalization and deprivation” (Brenner et al. 2011, 234) by sounding out and handling in movement the unevenness of space as it materialises around us.10 “[P]olitics”, Davidson and Iveson (2015, 659) remind us, “does not occur within the abstract” but is a practice that brings the concrete (in planning that is the allocation and materialisation of space) into d ­ ialogue with the universal (for example equality and democracy). This 210

is why cities and their everyday material conditions and processes have long been identified as fundamental to the renegotiation of membership in society (see Holston and Appadurai 1996). At the same time, much remains to be studied and tested in relation to the corporeal labour of urban becoming in other places and times. The precise constellations of the urbanising landscape of the northern stretch of the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City, in which the case studies of this book are located at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are but one condition from where to speak to other elsewheres and elsewhens of planetary urbanisation. What is clear, however, is that addressing these conditions remains highly important; and nurturing the anthropological insights of dwelling in conjunction with the analytical potential of framing city-making through infrastructural practices has proven to be a fruitful path for taking on this enterprise. Towards a labour of citizenship So how to conclude the arguments of this book other than by opening up once more to the ongoing city-making and material thinking of the city entailed in dwelling urbanism’s infrastructural labour? Planetary urbanisation continues its expansion over greenfield sites on the fringes of existing agglomerations. If these peripheral developments are to be the ground – materially and literally speaking – for the beneficial development of its dwellers, then the citying – and citying possibilities – that they entail need to be better recognised. This includes attending to the infrastructural practices that material space affords in addition to seeing to these sites’ endowment with conventional material infrastructure. Policy actions, therefore, need to acknowledge and value infrastructural doing while not exploiting it so to transfer urbanisation costs to urban practitioners alone. The social and ecological sustainability of cities in general, and of their peri-urban realm in particular, requires joint action at all scales of intervention. This, in turn, requires doing justice to the corporeal experiences and, nurtured through these experiences, to the bodily practical understandings of people’s own and urban becoming. This is the reason why I wish to raise the question of a labour of urban citizenship as the final outlook of this book. 211

The notion of a labour of citizenship is to focus on the characteristic divergence between citizen status being formally granted and the effective exercise and everyday formation of citizenship. Such exercise and formation, I argue, is essentially a practice that once again needs to be accomplished also with and through the body. As mentioned above, making city through corporeal labour is a way of materially claiming one’s right to the city. In this light, José Esteban Castro (2008) suggests that in defending and recovering the (urban) commons, for example, there lies an “emancipating potential” (own translation) for overcoming the limits of a citizenship system based on capitalist relations and for transforming it into new social forms. At the same time, Aihwa Ong (2006, 6) reminds us that it is precisely when acting under the circumstances of contemporary (late) capitalism that we are induced “to respond fluidly and opportunistically” to its regimes of accumulation. For denoting how subjects deal with this regime by means of “flexible practices” she introduces the notion of “flexible citizenship” (ibid., 19).11 Here, then, the central intervention of this book clearly advocates asking about the body-work implied in enacting such citizen flexibility in urbanising and urban conditions. At the same time, it encourages to critically engage with the notion of flexibility itself. For Malabou (2008), as discussed earlier, flexibility implies the subject’s adaptation to the circumstances alone. That is to say that, in flexible citizenship, people are understood to go along with changing conditions while essentially lacking the capacity to enact change upon them. In this light, I suggest that turning to the plasticity of space allows us to rethink the possibilities of urban-urbanising human-material relations with regard to the struggle for centrality for which these relations can provide the ground. Simone (2010, 33, 40) suggests such a path in pointing to the entanglement that exists between periphery and possibility, of which I introduced the main argument in chapter 2. At the same time, James Holston (2009, 246–47) points to insurgent formulations of citizenship that do not emanate from taking the public square for its political articulation but that evolve primarily out of political mobilisations that tackle the precariousness of urban life in the place of its quotidian unfolding (that is at home, in the street or neighbourhood, and so forth). He 212

highlights how the issues of political struggle have shifted from those resolving around labour conditions to those claiming access to urban land, housing and, generally speaking, participation in city-centrality. What the current study adds to this is the insight that struggling for urban land and housing, too, is a question of labour; and a sense of the corporeal work implied in such insurgent citizenship could already be grasped in the labour of conjunction described in chapter 3, the paper-work discussed in chapter 4 or the labour of travel presented in chapter 5. These examples contrast with the more conventional forms of political struggle that Antorcha settlers, for example, are obliged to take on additionally in order to comply with their movement’s membership requirements, which consist of participating in demonstrations in front of the municipal town hall, for example, that is on the public square (chapter 4). Ultimately, however, acknowledging the labour put into claiming and maintaining citizen rights in any of these examples allows framing all forms of citizenship formation essentially as a verb, as a doing, which can and needs to be achieved in all possible urban-urbanising spaces and situations. At the same time, the corporeal labour discussed in this book exceeds the processes and conditions for which Holston (2009, 256–57) suggests speaking of alternative, “participatory practices”. Therefore, rather than limiting the notion of citizenship practice to explicit struggles of participation with regard to “housing, property, plumbing, day-care, security, and other aspects of residential life” (ibid., 246), I suggest broadening it to include also the growth of relational understandings of individual and urban becoming. This is to think the city/citying as a common good to which urban citizenship holds the key (see Castro 2008). In light of expanding urban-urbanising conditions and environments arising from planetary urbanisation, to acknowledge the corporeal effort and material engagement entailed in opportunity work, in growing houses and in highwaying is to lay a path towards forging more socially and ecologically just relations in the city-coming now/here.

213

Notes

11 Ong does so, however, by looking at “transnational practices” (as accomplished, for example, in the case of migration), hence at a different group of practitioners than in the present research.

1

Malabou develops this definition of plasticity by drawing on the writing of Hegel as well as out of her philosophical engagement with the working of the human brain. The brain, she illustrates, is at the same time the medium by which we act upon the world and the work of our world-making actions.

2

My use of the term here is merely temporal-spatial, thus distinct to that employed by Yiftachel (2009b, 251) when describing the “separating incorporation” of “gray spaces”. I will come back to this ­below.

3

See also the discussion by Porter et al. (2011).

4

In this regard, Bourdieu defines his notion of “­habitus” as “the durably installed generative ­principle of regulated improvisations” (ibid.).

5

The authors do so in distinction to a Just-in-Case approach to planning in which previously established instructions aim at determining, that is pushing, the use of space (ibid.).

6

For a similar discussion with regard to the particular need to address and improve the realities of the ­urban poor see Amin (2013).

7

For a seminal analysis of these different levels see Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) A Ladder of Citizen Participation.

8

Lefevbre (2009, 169–70), in this sense, has placed the acting human being at the centre of the production of space, demonstrating that all space – including its conception and representation in plans – has its origin in the body, in specific bodies “capable of indicating direction” and thus “demarcating and ­orienting space.” See chapter 1.

9

Allmendinger (2017, 264) summarises the foundations of communicative planning theory as understanding planning as a redistributive activity and participatory process and planners as political agents in their own right, that is not only moderating between interests but pursuing their own planning theoretical stances in the way they moderate between actors.

10 This is, I argue, despite these author’s scepticism who actually dispute the usefulness of what they call the “relationally overdetermined plenitude” of assemblage thinking (Brenner et al. 2011, 237).

214

215

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