Conceptualizing Hybridity through delivery configurations seen from building and dwelling perspectives

Keywords: Hybridity, Informality, Infrastructure delivery, comparability
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 27

Abstract

This paper discusses a concept for analyzing hybrid forms of infrastructure production through their delivery configurations, observed from the building and dwelling perspectives.
While the transferability of North-Western ideals of infrastructure delivery and use is now often questioned, infrastructures at the same time still represent an important reflection of social orders and power relations today and produce new social contexts themselves.
To better understand these relationships, Olivier de Sardan developed the concept of delivery configurations, which understands infrastructures as the actors and institutions, the equipment and resources, and the different forms of co-production, from direct to indirect collaboration and temporary or permanent arrangements. He also suggests analyzing the function of infrastructures as substitutes, competitors, or complements to existing structures.
This paper argues that urban development processes are permeated by formal and informal structures. It reveasl the simultaneity, the often permanent juxtaposition and coexistence of formal and informal processes or the "gray spaces" in cities of the Global South, and examine their relationship to social inequality. We address questions about the diversity of local infrastructural manifestations, their preconditions and their consequences for the inhabitants. In this paper we discuss a research concept that:
1. Focuses on local realities through in-depth qualitative research methods and an internationally comparative design
2. Compares both the building and dwelling perspective on a small-scale level (neighbourhoods)
3. Describes the delivery configurations of selected infrastructures (in our case water and mobility)
4. Analyses the different configurations of hybridity between formal and informal modes of production of infrastructures