A ten-minute fold of everydayness: municipal rubbish management as a critical field of informal social infrastructure
Topics:
Keywords: rubbish management, folding field, informality, Taipei
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
SHAO-YU HUANG, National Taipei University of Technology
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Abstract
Infrastructure, in recent, has been claimed to be a complex surround, yet its performance is more recognisable than its indefinite form in the everyday experience. Drawing from an ethnographical approach (Star 1999), infrastructure is transparent to use and, in some ways, is embedded inside of other structures and social arrangements. This nature not only echoes what Eric Klinenberg (2018) accounts for as social infrastructure but layouts a solid framework to enrich its contents, especially in different social contexts. With a particular reference to East-Asian cities such as Taipei, where the condition of everyday socio-spatial practices is intensively complex and hybrid, the paper argues that the formation of social infrastructure is a folding process of dialectic relations between physical performance and informal networks.
Accordingly, the paper explores municipal rubbish management in Taipei city as a ten-minute outdoor mundane work that manifests a contesting field where multiple actors simultaneously serve as hard and social infrastructure. This temporal socio-spatial practice yet becomes a physical, social place that crucially supports foreign maids' everyday life in the neighbourhood. It is not a fixed or traditional form of social infrastructure service, yet dynamic and informal. The fieldwork is demonstrated in two districts representing Taipei's old and new city centres. Moreover, the paper asserts that there also requires alternative methods to approach such provisional and territorial infrastructural practice. In doing so, a series of spatial mapping, notation, and interviews, is proposed as an enabling multi-scalar method to visualise this folding process of alternative social infrastructures.
A ten-minute fold of everydayness: municipal rubbish management as a critical field of informal social infrastructure
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Paper Abstract