How Hopes Build the Civic Infrastructure of New Residential Areas

Abstract

Urban infrastructures are central to urban life and urban politics. The crisis of big political agendas with their abstract goals and uncertain time horizons resulted in the emergence of politics centered around urban infrastructures. Infrastructures become the field for negotiation and confrontation between different agents, especially in new residential areas that experience a deficit of public transportation and social services. The paper focuses on the residents of these districts, who stand up for their infrastructural hopes and thereby contest the monopoly of the authorities and developers to produce and manage large-scale urban infrastructures. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted by the authors across 2019 and 2020 in a new residential area of the Moscow Region. The data include semi-structured interviews, offline and online observations. To defend their hopes and challenge the privileged position of local authorities and developers, citizens create a dynamic, eventful, emotionally saturated environment that (re)produces the idea of infrastructure (and its characteristics) as a must. This environment is formed by residents, who simultaneously act on multiple arenas such as courts, mass media, public meetings, etc. Cooperating, residents frame the situation, i. e., develop and share a coherent vision of events articulated through digital citizen media. In doing so, they reveal the logic of infrastructures and the responsibilities of involved agents. This knowledge empowers residents to pursue their interests in various public arenas and pressure authorities and developers to follow the contract and keep their promises. While doing so, locals produce shared knowledge about the district and its problems. It is hard to assess to what degree citizen actions influence the development of material infrastructures; however, it can be concluded they do successfully create a civic infrastructure.