Getting a feel for infrastructure: Embodied calculation and the sensorial management of water in Mexico City

Alejandro De Coss-Corzo

Research output: Contribution to specialist publicationArticle

Abstract

This essay argues that senses are developed relationally with infrastructures through various forms of embodied calculation, and that these skills are necessary for the performance of infrastructural labour and the maintenance of infrastructural form and flow. I demonstrate this claim by showing how workers at SACMEX – the Mexico City water utility – operate hydraulic systems and infrastructures through embodied calculations that engage simultaneously with situated forms of hearing, feeling, and smelling. Relying on fieldwork observations and my own experience in performing infrastructural work, I show how these embodied calculations require that workers learn how to sense infrastructural forms and flows through collective, iterative, and adaptive practices and processes. This suggests that the senses are not only necessary for infrastructural work, form, and flow, but that these practices and relations shape the senses, understood not only as perception but also as technique.
Original languageEnglish
No.006
Specialist publicationRoadsides
Publication statusPublished - 10 Nov 2021

Keywords

  • Embodied calculation
  • Infrastructure
  • Labour
  • Sensing
  • Water (Q250)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Social Sciences

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