The life of things. Exploring frictions between water and mobility infrastructure in Buenos Aires' underground.

DHAN ZUNINO SINGH

Santiago de Chile

Workshop; Governing the Inorganic: Materials, Infrastructures and Care; 2015

Universidad Alberto Hurtado

Most of infrastructures beneath cities are conducts for governing flows (of people, vehicles, information, energy, water, waste, and so on). Buenos Aires sanitary works (initiated by 1868) became along with gas pipes, telephone lines, subways, and pneumatic tubes a complex network living together with "nature" but not without frictions. The writer Ezequiel Martinez Estrada said that "in Buenos Aires it also rains from the bottom up" referring to subterranean streams ("revenge of the Pampas") which as a repressed archaic element returned into city flooding it. After recent tremendous flooding, urban scholars claim that Buenos Aires, located in the River Plate estuary, must be conceived as ?hydro-city? because until now it has built up "ignoring" the power of water by flattening the terrain (originally more uneven), waterproofing it with concrete, piping several streams which used to cross the city, and so on. Following the ideas of Vibrant Matter (Jane Bennett), Infrastructuring (Gabrielle Schabacher), Disruptions (Steve Graham) and Urban Metabolism (Swyngedow) I aim to discuss in this workshop the life of urban infrastructures, the power of water and the city as a hybrid space through an empirical and theoretical analysis on leaks, damp patches, and floods caused by subterranean waters and rain in Buenos Aires' underground. I will look at how water (in its multiple ontologies) was took into account (or not) in the planning/construction of the underground railways (1911-1944), the frictions and disruptions caused by water and how this infrastructure needs to be maintained. I argue that the subsoil of the city is a good example to illustrate the hybrid character of the urban as well as the frictions caused by the power of things and human agency; the underground as a political arena where the engineering hubris can find resistance.