The infrastructural passions of urban mutuality

Abstract

The article suggests an “infrastructural” approach to mutuality in the city. What organises mutuality is less a matter of the common urban horizon or the grown community than of “enabling conditions” (Calhoun) we would call infrastructures: their makeup shapes how urbanites live together, share, partake, cooperate or make deals. Concretely, the article looks at three infrastructural experiments in Durban, South Africa, in recent years, all intervening into a crisis of urban insecurity: first, the Priority Zone in downtown Durban with its passion for clean urban surfaces and with its imaginary of being itself an infrastructural creature; second, the commercial and traffic hub of Warwick Junction with its slow infrastructure of building trust, ownership and responsibility; and, third, the less place-bound instant infrastructures organizing the sharing of safety-relevant information between responsible urbanites on their way through the city. I argue that an infrastructural inquiry into mutuality of the urban necessitates a curiosity for those infrastructures that seem chaotic, lagging, in crisis, or messy and it needs to grasp the city at large.