Christopher R. Henke - Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power

Infrastructures Series

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Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims, Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power

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Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This work is subject to a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Subject to such license, all rights are reserved.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadiaa charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Henke, Christopher, 1969- author. | Sims, B. (Benjamin), author.

Title: Repairing infrastructures : the maintenance of materiality and power / Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2020. | Series: Infrastructures series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020002135 | ISBN 9780262539708 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Public worksUnited States. | Infrastructure (Economics)United States.

Classification: LCC HD3885 .H44 2020 | DDC 363.6068dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002135

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Carolyn and Kathy

d_r0

We thank the many colleagues and friends who supported this project and helped us see it into print.

We first met during our graduate studies in the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. This book reflects the influence of both San Diego itself, through case studies in chapters 2 and 3, and the intellectual community at UCSD, which shaped our thinking about repair in important ways. Special thanks are due to Chandra Mukerji, an important mentor to both of us. This book owes a crucial intellectual debt to her work on infrastructures and material culture, and has been shaped in many other ways by methods and perspectives she introduced us to. Thank you, Chandra, for your continued support and inspiration over the years. We are also indebted to many other colleagues from UCSD, including Patrick Carroll, Mark Jones, Martha Lampland, Charlie Thorpe, Josh Dunsby, Jennifer Jordan, Steven Shapin, and other colleagues and mentors we first met as graduate students, including Trevor Pinch, Tom Gieryn, Mike Lynch, and Harry Collins.

We are fortunate to be part of a growing community of scholars working on repair, and we have benefited from the insights and friendly critiques of many colleagues, especially participants in the International Comparative Urban Retrofit workshop in 2012, the Repair Work Ethnographies workshops in 2014 and 2015, and the workshop on Maintenance, Repair and Beyond held in 2015. We are grateful to have been included in these conversations as well as the resulting publications: Retrofitting Cities: Priorities, Governance and Experimentation (Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin, editors; Routledge, 2016); Repair Work Ethnographies: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality (Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet, and Philippe Sormani, editors; Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and an issue on repair in the online journal Continent (Lara Houston, Daniela K. Rosner, Steven J. Jackson, and Jamie Allen, editors; issue 6.1, 2017). The editors and peer reviewers for each of these projects provided helpful feedback that has shaped our thoughts for this book.

Colleagues who heard presentations on portions of this project at UCSDs Science Studies Program, Cornell Universitys Department of Science and Technology Studies, and conference sessions for the Society for Social Studies of Science and the American Sociological Association also provided valuable feedback.

This work would not have been possible without the patience and trust of the people we interviewed, observed, and just chatted with in the course of developing the case studies in this book. These included the maintenance technicians described in chapter 2, the Caltrans and UCSD engineers and other specialists we discuss in chapter 3, and the nuclear weapons scientists and engineers featured in chapter 4. Chapter 3 would not exist without the amazing, largely uncompensated work of the activists and muralists who created Chicano Park in San Diegos Barrio Logan and have maintained it as an artistic landmark and community resource for over forty years. We owe particular thanks to Salvador Torres, who shared many insights on the history of the park and murals with us, and Mario Torero, who graciously allowed us to use an image of his mural