Book cover for The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures

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Copyright: © Authors 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14296/gljm4371

Number of pages: 298

Number of illustrations: 16

Publication date: 5 October 2022

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The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures

Jonathan Alderman (Editor), Geoff Goodwin (Editor)

Published in association with: Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

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From houses to roads, infrastructures offer a unique lens through which to explore social and political change. Serving as an important conduit between states and citizens, infrastructures provide governments with a powerful tool to mould subjects and control populations. Yet, at the same time they also give individuals, communities, and movements a platform to challenge the state and forge alternative forms of citizenship and politics. Infrastructures therefore shape social and political relations in unexpected ways and never dutifully follow the scripts of politicians, bureaucrats, and engineers.

Latin America provides fertile terrain to explore these issues. The region has been subject to extensive foreign intervention for centuries and much of its infrastructure has primarily been constructed to benefit colonial and imperial powers. Yet Latin America has also seen widespread resistance to colonial-capitalist expansion, and infrastructures have been central to these diverse struggles. Drawing on recent empirical research, this cross-disciplinary book demonstrates the value of analysing social and political change through infrastructure. The authors explore a diverse range of Latin American infrastructures, from a sparkling new tram network in Ecuador to a crumbling old nuclear plant in Cuba. Building on the empirical chapters, the editors demonstrate the value of conceptualising infrastructure as a relational and experimental process. In addition to making a novel contribution to global infrastructure debates, the volume offers important new insights into Latin American history, society, and politics.

The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures is…a fascinating study of the centrality of these projects to political culture in this region. This collection offers a novel and original cross-disciplinary way of analysing Latin American politics.

—Gavin O’Toole, freelance journalist and editor of the Latin American Review of Books, UK

Latin American Review of Books

This interdisciplinary collected volume offers a theoretically up-to-date analysis of Latin American infrastructure. …[offering] new readings of bigger issues such as armed resistance, informality and sustainability. …In sum, it is a heterogenous but thought-provoking volume that offers a clear political interpretation of Latin American infrastructure and discusses recent theoretical developments in infrastructure research.

—Frederik Schulze, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, University of Cologne, Germany

Bulletin of Latin American Research

Foreword. The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures

Penny Harvey

Introduction: Infrastructure as Relational and Experimental Process

Jonathan Alderman and Geoff Goodwin

1. Dreams of an anchored state: mobility infrastructure and state presence in Quehui Island, Chile

Diego Valdivieso Sierpe

2. ‘They want to change us by charging us’: Drinking water provision and water conflict in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Julie Dayot

3. Water storage reservoirs in Mataquita: Clashing measurements and meanings

Ursula Balderson

4. Planning a new society: Urban politics and public housing in Natal, Brazil

Yuri Gama

5. Contested statebuilding? A four-part framework of infrastructure development during armed conflict

Clara Voyvodic

6. Competing infrastructures in local mining governance in Mexico

Valeria Guarneros-Meza and Marcela Torres-Wong

7. ´Somos Zona Roja´: top-down informality and institutionalised exclusion from broadband internet services in Santiago de Chile

Nicolás Valenzuela-Levi

8. The contradictions of sustainability: Discourse, planning and the tramway in Cuenca, Ecuador

Sam Rumé

9. The record keepers: Maintaining irrigation canals, traditions and Inca codes of law in 1920s Huarochirí, Peru

Sarah Bennison

10. The Cuban nuclear dream: The afterlives of the Project of the Century

Nicole Fadellin

PDF: 9781908857989

EPUB: 9781908857972

Read Online: 9781915249548

Paperback: 9781908857958 / 298 pages / 229mm x 152mm

Jonathan Alderman (Editor)

Jonathan Alderman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany

Geoff Goodwin (Editor)

Geoff Goodwin is a Lecturer in Global Political Economy, University of Leeds, UK

—Gavin O’Toole, freelance journalist and editor of the Latin American Review of Books, UK

Latin American Review of Books

—Frederik Schulze, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, University of Cologne, Germany

Bulletin of Latin American Research

Subject: Languages, Cultures and Societies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies

BISAC codes: SOC008050

Thema codes: JP

Keywords: capitalism, citizenship, colonialism, infrastructure, latin america, protest, resistance, state, urban development

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