1 thought on “Shannon Mattern on Maintenance and Care”

1. Sarah Garnett Kinniburgh November 25, 2018 at 2:33 am

   I really appreciate how Mattern does not reduce infrastructure to a metaphor, but instead considers its material, physical, and tangible iterations across industries and fields of study, including — and beyond — underpinnings of the digital. As this awareness of all types of infrastructure encourages us to think about different types of work and labor, from ecologies of care to maintenance work on data, Mattern’s article offers an example of how we can “study the unstudied,” an approach that “opened a more ecological understanding of workplaces, materiality, and interaction, and underpinned a social justice agenda by valorizing previously neglected people and things” (as Susan Leigh Star writes in “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 379). Mattern’s example of the New York City Housing Authority and its negative feedback loop of budget cuts, neglect, and sanctions, directly affecting around 5% of the city’s population but rippling out into neighborhoods and generations, demonstrates the urgent importance of this fundamentally engaged and social way of thinking about infrastructure.

   On the topic of neglect, however, Mattern floats the idea that “not every road should be repaired,” and I think this notion deserves closer attention. My knee-jerk reaction was to disagree, strongly; the passive construction of “should be repaired” glosses over who decides if that repair takes place at all, not to mention who eventually will do the work to conduct the repairs, and raises the ethical, social, and political dimensions of allowing failing infrastructure to fail, on what timeline. (With the early mention of housing in Mattern’s article, I’m thinking about Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg and Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 by Richard Keller, or maybe Evicted by Matthew Desmond, or any other book that demonstrates the proximity of “disaster” studies to everyday housing policy, but this concern about failure applies to all types of infrastructure.)

   Right after this line, Mattern introduces the work of geographer Caitlin DeSilvey, who “encourages us to embrace entropy within the built world, to ask ourselves for whom we engage in preservation, and to consider cultivating an acceptance of “curated decay” where appropriate” (all italics in original); Mattern later mentions discard studies as it intersects with media and design, introducing the work Jenna Burrell, Jennifer Gabrys, and Ginger Nolan. These two ideas — curated decay and discard studies — gave more nuance to the idea that “not every road should be repaired” as they led me to think that certain aspects of failing or failed infrastructure (to use the word broadly) might have an aesthetic, ecological, and/or social function, maybe even one that outweighs the problematic power dynamic of deciding which repairs are necessary. Curated decay and discard studies also helped me think through the paradox that preservation, maintenance, or repair might not always be the most productive or ethical route in the first place, encouraging me to rethink the absolute necessity of upkeep and maintenance in different cases of infrastructure. In a way, this paradox reminded me of what I have heard and read of Obstruction by Nick Salvato or Subnature by David Gissen, both of which consider how to conceptualize byproducts (in very different ways, as these titles consider intellectual/artistic work and industrial/architectural settings, respectively), and how decay can be part of the design.

   Still, DeSilvey’s “where appropriate” is a critical caveat, and I cannot shake the knowledge that the decision to maintain infrastructure — whatever that means in this context — will not always be a democratic one. The concept of curated decay can address the history of housing policy in Paris and how the development of the space of the chambre de bonne — and, arguably, the associated breakdown of civic infrastructure for those who occupied it — would eventually result in death for some of the city’s most vulnerable residents in the twenty-first century. This space did not develop on its own; it was designed, deliberately, as part of the skyline and social landscape, and those who did not have a say in the design or the decay suffered the consequences, without a say in if their “road” would be repaired or not. This is where I think about my conversation with the cashier at Court Street Grocers on Thanksgiving Eve, commiserating about ever-changing POS technology and the “planned obsolescence” (his phrase, not mine!) of Apple products, or else about the various tweets floating around my feed, whether related to net neutrality or voter suppression or Flint’s water supply, essentially saying: “[The system/capitalism/American political culture] isn’t broken. This is exactly how it’s supposed to work.” Mattern writes that manufacturers may be designing their products to last, or else prevent them from entering a “repair and remix economy,” and that certain types of workers are increasingly drawn to models of “anticipatory repair,” a fascinating thread to follow. At the same time, some companies and organizations and systems of power are in the business of designing products to break or fail after a certain time and when these objects seem to break, they are in fact working as they are supposed to. To Mattern’s point, then, that “not every road should be repaired,” I am mostly curious about why the road/bridge/data/device/structure is in disrepair in the first place and for who: who is it working for and who is it not?

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