INFRASTRUCTURE COLLECTIVE ON DEPENDENCE, DISENCHANTMENT, AND DIVERSION

Abstract

Mobility infrastructures materialize the everyday life shared by hundreds of millions who live in Latin American urbanised areas. In other words, they expose important disputes related to the notions of common and the practice of commoning as they articulate daily micropolitics and macropolitics at economic, cultural, and social levels. This paper discusses the constant and implicit construction of concepts around the idea of collectivity by taking into account both the implementation and the daily use of infrastructures. This work outlines two types of project conventionally applied in Latin America, namely “hyper-mobility” and “hyper-immobility,” based especially on the realities identified in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. We analyze notions of collectiveness that emerge from such projects: economic dependency, for the former, and disenchantment about everyday politics, for the latter. We discuss, then, the universal ideas of “good urbanity” which are often understood as mandatory precedents for Latin American realities. Finally, we propose a third kind of approach, labelled “hacking”, which suggests reinforcing existing collective diversion powers within the infrastructure’s nodal spaces as a project for “spatial activism.”