Dr Colin McFarlane

Informal settlements and infrastructures of everyday life: materialising urban collectives

While urban infrastructure has become a focus of debates on urban change, there have been relatively few attempts to examine the politics of infrastructure on an everyday basis. Building on my ESRC project on different people's everyday experiences and perceptions of basic urban infrastructure within informal settlements in Mumbai, I will use this fellowship to develop a more general account of the everyday production, improvisation, and contestation of urban infrastructure. The lack of research on infrastructure and collective life within informal settlements is particularly important given their growing importance to both scholarly and policy debate. The proposed research will demand an interdisciplinary approach and will produce two key outputs. First, a paper examining how infrastructure enables, delimits, and disrupts everyday collective life within informal settlements. This paper will carve out a new research area on the materialisation of everyday urban life from the viewpoint of informal settlements. Second, an ESRC grant application that will build on this work by examining how infrastructure produces and inhibits urban life through a comparative perspective. This comparative perspective will enable investigation of important differences of culture, politics, economy and social relations in the ways in which infrastructure relates to collective urban life. It will build on my British Council research scoping trip to Brazil in 2007 by comparing informal settlements in Mumbai with those in Rio. Through the fellowship, I will seek to expand on my specific interests by fostering a new cross-University research network examining the links between infrastructure, everyday life, and resilience.

This work will lead to the following outputs:

1. One position paper entitled 'The materialisation of everyday life: infrastructure, informal settlements, and urban collectives', submitted to Public Culture;

2. An ESRC grant application entitled 'Everyday infrastructure, informality and everyday life: a comparative study of Mumbai and Rio', that seeks to research this new area through a comparative perspective;

3. A new University research network examining infrastructure, resilience and everyday life that cuts across:

(a) the Durham Energy Institute, the Institute of Hazard and Risk Research, and the Department of Geography;

(b) the South Asia and Latin America area research networks in the University

To find out more about Dr McFarlane please visit his home page on the Department of Geography's website: www.dur.ac.uk/geography/