Bonding: How an absent tram connects urban actors in Rio de Janeiro, t.b. published (portuguese) in: Revista Ciência & Tecnologia Social, Universidade de Brasilia (UnB)

Laura Kemmer | Bonding: How an absent tram connects urban actors in Rio de Janeiro |

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Bonding: How an absent tram connects urban actors in Rio de Janeiro

1. Absent in Presence: A story of bonds and bondes In 2011, the local tram of Santa Teresa neighborhood, Rio de Janeiro lost track. Its breaks failed on its way downhill, shortly before it reached the famous Lapa Aqueduct and thus the central districts of the city. Until recently, the last surviving “bonde” (port. tram) of Rio de Janeiro remained suspended, resuming work only in August 2015. What is the significance of such a four-years absence? It seems tempting to speculate on the changing daily life routines in the street, the accelerating pace of walking and driving, or the impact of practices such as going through a bus-turnstile versus riding a bonde-footboard. Curiously, the alleged absence of the bonde coexists with a strange presence of all kinds of material and immaterial reminders. Tram parts are re-used as restaurant doors, trails and overhead cables mark old routes and routines, tshirts and graffiti depict the joy of footboard-riding and samba songs remind how Santa Teresa’s artists and intellectuals, favela inhabitants and tourists mixed harmonically inside the wagons. Altogether, one could assume that the bonde of Santa Teresa presents a perfect case in time for Susan Leigh Stars famous hypothesis. The tram infrastructure has become “visible upon breakdown” (Leigh Star 1999:382), as its relevance for the neighborhood, its manifold meanings and uses seem to have become even more perceptible in the aftermath of the accident. In this sense, rather than becoming “visible”, the Bonde is present in and to multiple senses: from the visual to the emotional, and from the material to the imaginary. The value of Stars seminal observation for this case lies in its sensitivity for the invisible forces behind infrastructures. It points to their connective potential, binding together a set of heterogeneous actors, from human inhabitants to a non-human transport vehicle, from materialized railway memories to immaterial desires for free access to the city. Following such first research intuition, this paper asks which connections absent transport infrastructures reveal. In a second endeavor, the relation between absence and presence is further complicated by the empirical case study presented here. Adding to the observation that the infrastructure of the bonde was still “there” in a manifold ways during the years of suspension, this years’ comeback reveals that the allegedly new presence of the tram co-exists with the “absence” of the old bonde on a more virtual plane – comprising memories of daily routines mixed with imaginations of how a future transport for the neighborhood should be.

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Following up with recent debates on the secret life of infrastructures (Amin 2014; Gandy 2010; Simone 2015), this paper proposes analytical tools to grasp the invisible forces behind them. In other words, the multiple times, rhythms, spaces, movements and imaginations (Lancione and Calafete-Faria 2016) that connect – and dis-connect – a vast set of urban actors. The next section therefore introduces two approaches that offer theoretical conceptualizations of the connective potential of infrastructures. Drawing from Actor-Network Theory, the study of “urban assemblages” (Farías and Bender 2010; Graham and McFarlane 2015) has provided important insights for an understanding of infrastructures as composed of social standards, regulations, historical legacies, power laden categorizations, urban aesthetics – and a multiplicity of other enabling and restricting factors. In a second step, these studies are brought into dialogue with approaches that focus on the multiple temporalities, and the coexistence of absence and presence in infrastructures. Instead of conceptualizing the “ruins” of transport infrastructure as stable and fixed in time, such approaches propose a close examination of the complex process of re-using and even “ruining” (Gordillo 2014; Stoler 2008). In a third section, these approaches are translated into methodologies using insights from urban anthropology. To this end, the section goes into detail with the empirical case study, presenting preliminary results from ongoing field research during the last five months, between August and December 2015.

2. Bonding I: The assembling potential of infrastructures … and their scrapping (sucateamento) Infrastructures present an insightful starting point for studies interested in “foregrounding the urban backstage” (Amin 2014:139), as they present, by definition, a sort of underlying structure composed of transportation, communication, sewage, water or electric systems that hold together what we call “city”. More recently, both imaginations of cityness as well as urban everyday life are understood increasingly as outcome of human and non-human interactions. In this sense, a number of authors conceptualize urban infrastructures as socio-technical assemblages. Far from assuming an a-social or technologically deterministic perspective, the new writings analyze the assembling capacity of infrastructures by asking how they relate human and non-human actors (Gandy 2010; Graham and McFarlane 2015:920; Höhne 2012; Simone 2015). What is interesting about the assemblage approach is that it allows for analyzing the involved actors not on separated scales, but as “chains of translation” (Latour 1996:85) articulating the global, national, or regional within the local (Färber 2014a:98; McFarlane 2010:732–34). For the here-presented study, this means following the connections between i.e. moving piles of cobblestones along the main street

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of Santa Teresa and global imaginations of the integrative function of public transport for the city. Working with assemblage approaches does not only allow for an analysis that takes the interdependency of spatial scales, i.e. local street in Rio and globally circulating urban imaginations, serious, but also accounts for the temporal entanglements that forge or dissolve connections. Which connections emerge if new technical details of the tram are discussed, if old trails are dogged out during construction work, if a tram driver becomes Facebook profile? One of the oldest electric bondes of Latin America bears manifold moments of irritation about the creation, adaption, and use of trams and the connections that emerge around them. Not only on the conceptual level, but also on the meso-theoretical level, infrastructures present a valuable starting point for translating “connections” into researchable processes. Approaches originating in Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) – both within and beyond urban studies (cf. CITY 2011/2-6: Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011; Dovey 2011; McFarlane 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; Swanton 2011) – have been criticized for uncritically or apolitically assembling a heterogeneous set of actors. In turn, the critical potential of such approaches lies exactly in their theoretical and empirical description of the very connections. While the theoretical framework of ANT provides the vocabulary for describing the actors under study, it is not separable from critical empirical research (Färber 2014b:136). The value of an assemblage approach for critical urban studies must thus be assessed on its capacity to trace the connections between the analyzed actors (Lippuner 2014:122). Through the methodological toolkit provided from the fields of geography and sociology for analyzing infrastructures, connections – and also disconnections – can be traced across spatial and temporal scales. Critical geographers have well elaborated on the relations between material infrastructures and everyday life (Graham and McFarlane 2015; Guy et al. 2010). They provide important insights i.e. on the social effects of the breakdown of the tram and how in turn the tram has itself also shaped social relations. As “infrastructure is [always] sunk into and inside other structures, social arrangements and technologies” (Leigh Star 1999:379), the relation traminhabitants and the techno-material-symbolic assemblages around them are a central issue for the here-presented work. In this sense, a comprehensive set of studies in the field elaborates on the power geometries of infrastructure and their effects for access to resources, as well as broader mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Adding to geographers’ focus on the materiality of infrastructure, sociological analyses have been more concerned with the related subjective experiences. The kinds of connections worked out from such a perspective relate to social integration or differentiation, as well as the relation between social life and urban imaginaries (Angelo and Hentschel 2015:311). For the study of transport infrastructures, such perspective

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opens up ways to research the generation of “new and powerful modes of collective and individual subjectivity” (Höhne 2015:313). In this sense, “subject formation” (Prestel 2015:321) through infrastructure happens on the individual level of the passenger, but might also result in new modes of distinction for a whole social group or class. Based on the patterns of spatial inequality identified by geographers, sociological studies of infrastructure thus account for how the strategies for “crowd control” inscribed into i.e. public transport systems are interrelated with individual and collective practices and perceptions, as well as imaginaries of progress (Höhne 2015:317). Research on the formation of social bonds and new connections through infrastructure does not only allow for cutting across spatial layers – i.e. by pointing to “parallels in technological development and social formation” (Prestel 2015:323) in European and Non-European cities – but also helps to account for the multiple temporalities embedded in streets, or trams, or their remainders. Urban researchers have recently rediscovered Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004), for a new way of “temporal thinking” based on the assumption that “places possess no essence but are ceaselessly (re)constituted out of their connections” (Edensor 2011: 190, in: Cresswell and Merriman 2011). Again, an insightful body of work has developed around the figure of the passenger or commuter (Bissell 2010, 2015; Edensor 2010b; Laurier, Lorimer, and Brown 2008; Lehtovuori and Koskela 2013; Smith and Hetherington 2013). According to this strand of research, it is the very transport infrastructures – connecting moving human bodies, cars, trains, or streets – that embody rhythms of daily routine, but also lifetime circles or even millennial temporal scales (Lefebvre 2004). What is interesting here, is that rhythmanalysis does not depart from an understanding of repetition as restrictive or repressive, but rather as successive moments of routine and the immanent, together with surprise and emergence (Seigworth and Gardiner 2004:240). As many have pointed out in reference to Leigh Star’s seminal work, infrastructure is characterized by constant transformations, always changing between presence and breakdown, between invisibility and visibility (De Boeck 2015:4; Larkin 2013:336; Leigh Star 1999:382; Simone 2015:376).

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Figure 1: Bonde afterlife

Source: Own pictures, 08/16/2015 (left: old and new railways on the street; right: tourists holding original tram handle attached to new bonde mural, picture taken at local construction site)

The present research contributes to a set of studies which assume that the rhythms of failing infrastructure generate a constant need to forge connections in order to build infrastructural alternatives (De Boeck 2015:10). What is more, not only the emergence of connections around the tram are analyzed here, but also the “material and social afterlife” (Stoler 2008:194) of such transport infrastructure. Rather than understanding the numerous tram-remnants – ranging from rails and cables, to an old tram handle recycled as part of a wall mural (see figure 1 above) – as seemingly static objects, they are conceptualized as processes of “ruination” (Navaro-Yashin 2009:5; Stoler 2008:195). While an understanding of discarded and reused tram-parts as “ruins” seems to lie at hand, this study gets beyond interpreting them from an “European gaze” (Stoler 2008:198) or falling into a “middle-class fetishism” (Gordillo, in: Elden 2014:7) of their allegedly abstract pastness. Instead, the generation of memories around the tram and its “ruins” – in the sense of “historical patrimony” (Pires 2013:13; Ribeiro 2007:71) – are understood as contradictory process. As argued above, the emergence of connections around transport infrastructure are analyzed not as power-neutral process. A focus on the tensions between meanings such as “ruins” vs. “rubble” (Gordillo 2014:9) helps to account for the distribution of power and agency around the tram-remnants as “living parts of the present” (Gordillo, in: Elden 2014:9). Again, such an analysis rejects a sole focus on how humans fetishize, re-use, or simply live with tram parts. Be it as “ruins” or as “rubble”, the tram-remainders exert power, as they continue binding people to them (ibid.: 4). But how to account for the connections that are created by absence? The following section tries to develop a methodological frame for analyzing

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not only how people and objects are tied together through material infrastructures, but also through “virtual ontologies” (Farías 2010:226) of the city, or, as I would argue, the promises of such infrastructures.

3. Bonding II: How to trace connections in-between infrastructure? Infrastructures, it has been argued above, leave traces in form of intensities (Bissell 2015), movements (Cass, Shove, and Urry 2005; Cresswell and Merriman 2011), or habitual rhythms (Edensor 2010a), they can be at the same time present and absent, stable and fragile (Rao, Simone, and De Boeck 2009), while they connect people, materials, or ideas over space and across time. At the same time, infrastructures also offer the grounds for connections that go beyond their technical function: “They emerge out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy” (Larkin 2013:329). It is exactly their potential to connect not only human and nonhuman actors, but also imaginaries and promises. In concordance with a broad set of studies, such promises often recur to imaginaries of modernity, development, and civilization (Edwards 2003; Graham and Marvin 2001; Larkin 2008; see Hetherington and Campbell 2014 for the case of Latin America). While it seems interesting to study the genealogy of infrastructure (and to question its linearity) as originating in relation to railways during French colonialism1, then being used as military jargon by NATO during post-World War II rebuilding, and lastly becoming a common term for UN development agencies (Rankin 2009), the here-proposed analysis does not only focus on its commonplace promises, but also on their irritation. The analytical problem at hand is the question how to get hold of such infrastructural connections if they are per definition dynamic, “in-between” the actors but never stable or fixed to a certain place, object, or person. For the present case study, the connections that tram infrastructure generates within an assemblage of human and non-human actors are approached by focusing, on the one hand, on intense moments such as tram memorial ceremonies, public protests, or construction works and other situations that point to the unstable character of infrastructure – and its promises. On the other hand, this study is interested in the routines and habits that the actors develop to maintain im/material connections (see figure 2).

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According to Rankin 2009, infrastructure was coined in French high colonialism to denote underlying

structures of railways, such as railbed, dams etc., as opposed to overhead structures such as station, rails etc.

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Figure 2: “[tramway] footboard is immaterial, cultural, affective patrimony of the people of Santa Teresa”

Source: Own picture, 08/16/2015

What has become clear, by now, is that the here-sketched theoretical framework leaves many (implicit) tensions unsolved. How to account infrastructural “connections” between a heterogeneous set of actors if the character of these connections oscillates between the continuous and the emergent, between daily routines and virtual ontologies, between promises and disruptions? Such alleged dichotomies are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Instead, they might take place simultaneously and thus point to the multiple temporalities that overlap in infrastructure: Memories, objects, and habits from the past might overlap with day-to-day routines or their disruption. What is more, while past and present meet, imaginations of the future are born. They emerge out of a present situation that is charged with the “absence” of something that is associated with the past, thus projecting a desire for its come-back – or its alteration - into the future. The following section aims at further specifying the methodological approaches chosen to tackle some of the theoretical questions and problems identified so far. Following a first research intuition, developed during an explorative approach to the field in autumn 2014, this study choses to “follow the conflict” (Marcus 1995:105) around re-installation of a local tram (port. “bonde”) in Santa Teresa neighborhood, Rio de Janeiro. Instead of opting for a detailed case introduction at this point, the specifics of the neighborhood, and its tram will be explained in the course of the following chapters. A first set of informal interviews and unsystematic observations indicated that the various connections that emerged in Santa Teresa did always involve the bonde as an actor, that was not to be situated on the level of “infrastructure” or “object” in a passive and a-social understanding. The bonde appeared as

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potentially active, social mediator and thus actor the “makes other actors act” (Latour 2005:107). It does not simply exist as “fact”, as means of transportation that enables physical mobility alongside the street, but as disputed “concern” (ibid. 114). Despite the physical absence of the original bonde since an accident in 2011, it is present everywhere along the street and, interestingly, together with the street. As a speaker on occasion of the fourth’ anniversary of the accident says: “the tram was […] the prolongation of the sidewalks in this street, it means permanent togetherness” (fieldnotes from 08/31/15). Interestingly, even after its come-back in form of a newly built tram that copies the original design, the bonde that is tested for a short street section since August 2015 does not simply conceal the multiple material and virtual reminders of its predecessor. Instead, at this moment in time the presence of a functioning transport infrastructure between center and hilltop coexists with the overall sensed absence of the bonde of Santa Teresa – be it in form of old railway tracks and piles of cobblestones, as tshirt print and samba song, or as graffiti, online manifesto and facebook page. The tram certainly provides a starting point for following a complex assemblage of actors, both human and nonhuman, and the formation of connections between them. The next two sections discuss a series of observations that have been made during the past five months of ongoing field research in Rio de Janeiro – between August and December 2015. On a first account, the emergence of dis-/connections between inhabitants and tram-infrastructure will be analyzed on the basis of participatory observations during an event that illustrates very well how moments of intensity related to the tram, or its imaginary and material reminders are created. Such intensities, it will be shown, spontaneously create strong bonds between the inhabitants of Santa Teresa and the bonde-infrastructure. Secondly, the consolidation of such connections is related to the moments of routine, the habitual movements in the streets and their disruptions. In order to trace the daily reproduction of bonds with the tram infrastructure, the experience of going and driving-along with the interview partners is shared here. By contrasting what has been called “ruins” with the alleged “rubble”, or, more abstractly, the simultaneity of tram absence and presence, it will be pointed out that the connections between the analyzed actors are far from being neutral, but reveal complex power constellations and negotiations of agency.

3.1

Emergencies: Connections generated through intensities

In order to further explore the contrast between the extraordinary and routine, between intensities of specific moments in time and daily habitual practices, participant observation has become a central method during fieldwork. Immersion into ethnographic research in this sense

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means observing how others collectively produce and react (Robert M. Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011:2) to both, situations in daily urbanity (construction sites, bus rides, “bonde” pieces) and expressions of city ontologies (tram revitalization, transport policy, integration). The methodological choice of participatory observations speaks directly to the main research question presented here, interested in the emergence of (infrastructural) connections. First of all, such approach accounts for the temporary and dynamic character of such connections, their constant changes and contradictions because “the fieldworker’s closeness to others’ daily lives and activities heightens sensitivity to social life as process” (ibid.: 4). Through participation, the researcher establishes bonds with human and non-human actors in the field, thus experiencing how connections are stabilized and destabilized. A second advantage of participant observation is that it accounts for the virtual level of infrastructure, that is, the intensification of connections as they become associated with specific imaginaries or promises. While such virtual connections might not be localizable within, but amongst individual bodies (of both people and objects), the researcher is still able to document how she experiences their transmission – her emotional and bodily reactions – through a moment-by-moment “thick description” (Geertz 1973). To give an example, the following quote is taken from participant observation of a ceremonial march in memory of the accident in 2011 that followed the provisional test track of the bonde from the city center to the first functioning station on Santa Teresa hilltop. The fieldnotes have been taken during the crossing of the ancient aqueduct that today (again)2 serves as railway-bridge: “We are all slowing down now, the narrow bridge forces us to walk in lines of maximum three persons. Everybody is looking down, to the railways and stones between them. We stumble over the lateral rods between the railway tracks. It is very hot. The crossing seems like an eternity. All my muscles are tensed now, adrenaline pumping through my body as I look down to the street. People are looking around, making eye contact, sighing, fanning themselves with paper flyers, trying to accelerate or overpass and giving up again. I do not want to make conversation, feeling somewhat lethargic.” (fieldnote, Arcos da Lapa, 30.08.2015, 11:50). Interesting here is the observation of the interrelation between the slowing down of the protest march and the changes in the participants’ disposition. While the desired speed is disrupted and the formerly dispersed group constellation is channeled into a long line of bodies forced to walk at same pace, the involuntary facial (raised eyebrows) and oral (sights) expressions can be interpreted as symptoms of “intensive transformations that signal not only how bodies on the move adapt to, become attuned to, and transform their milieu, but how these milieus shape those bodies and bring them into being” (Bissell 2015:130–31). Altogether, intensity can be felt through 2

Since August 2015, the bonde is carrying our regular free test journeys, from “estação Nelson” (formerly

“carioca”) “curvelo” station.

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the tensed muscles, sweating, accelerated heartbeat etc. These intensified connections that reduce distance between actors involve neurotransmitters such as adrenaline, material infrastructures such as the bridge, or the tramway rails, and so on, finally aligning these heterogeneous actors into specific formations. In order to describe the socio-technical assemblages that such material infrastructural and virtual connections might forge, spatial descriptions of these constellations can be added (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011:4). To this end, the narrative elements and own experiences of place documented in the fieldnotes have been documented in a series of sketches (cf. figure 3 below), understood here as another tool for enhancing the readability of the complex spaces under analysis (Tamayo and Wildner 2004).

Figure 3: Movements and constellations during bonde-commemoration

Source: Fieldnotes from 30/08/2015 10:15-10:30h, Carioca Station, Lapa, Rio de Janeiro.

The two sketches shown in figure five allow for taking a step back in order to explain the situation. Every year during the end of August, the local neighborhood association of Santa

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Teresa (AMAST), together with varying other persons and social groups commemorate the accident of the bonde on the 27th of August 2011 (see fig. 4 below). During the last four years, the event has been entitled “one year”, “two years” or “three years without bonde”, simultaneously mourning the accidents’ victims and claiming re-installation of the tram. What is interesting about this year’s event is that it happened only one month after the official inauguration of a test-track for newly built bonde model between downtown “carioca” station and “curvelo” square on the hilltop of Santa Teresa. Despite the newly circulating bondes, the event did not change its name, commemorating “four years without bonde”. Once again, presence and absence of the tram infrastructure co-exist. What is more, the virtual connections that have emerged in the alleged absence of the bonde have been reinforced, reproduced, or newly build during the intense situations of the event. In this sense, it is important to note that this august’ ceremony somehow disrupted the routine of commemorating the tram accident. What can be seen on sketch one above (fig. 3), is that after arriving at carioca station, the different actors involved in the event started to meet around a metal plaque. The plaque officially inscribed into the place what the present people celebrated: The renaming of the carioca station after “Nelson”, the tram driver that had died during the accident in 2011. The intensity created by the memorizing of the dead tram driver connected a variety of people here, ranging from members of the local neighborhood association ‘AMAST’, individual inhabitants and small retailers of Santa Teresa, Nelsons’ family, a group of tram drivers, some journalists, to the representative of the federal transport company “CENTRAL”. From the perspective of an assemblage study, the observed connections do not stop at the tram station. Indeed, the various representations of the dead tram driver that have been shown in the course of the event – in form of a drawing handed over to the drivers family, or as banner celebrating “driver Nelson, simple hero of the people” (fig. 4), held by participants in front of the new tram model – find their repercussion in the various Nelson-portraits that circulate in the neighborhood, be it in the shop window of a present retailer, be it as profile picture of the AMAST facebook page. Those circulating bonde-artifacts do not only constantly reinforce the connections of the neighborhood’s inhabitants and visitors with the tram, but also insert commercial meanings (a souvenir shop) or political actors (a neighborhood association) into the tram-assemblage. Altogether, the sketches are used here as tool for visualizing data and to open up new perspectives – in the sense of heuristic instrument to synthesize and interpret complex empirical information. They not only serve to describe the actor constellations during the “four years without bonde” event, but also become a tool for analyzing them and bringing them into relation with circulating imaginaries and promises of how the tram-infrastructure “should be”.

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Figure 4: “Motorneiro Nelson, herói simples do povo”, Group picture taken after the renaming of the former “carioca” station

Source: Own picture from 30/08/2015, persons unrecognizable on purpose.

A second observation that can be made on the basis of the above-depicted sketches is the emergence or re-production of connections through intensities created by the movement and order of bodies and things in space. The proximity of certain actors, all wearing black shirts with a crying bonde, to the commemorative plaque on sketch one is contrasted by a surrounding of more colorfully-vested people, others wearing working overalls with small bonde symbol and formal clothes with “CENTRAL” logo. On the second sketch, the people wearing the black shirts have been identified as members of the neighborhood association, while they group around a microphone, assuming the role of moderators. Both microphone and bonde print on the shirts become powerful actors that transfer agency to the AMAST. What is more, the teardrop on the bonde-symbol creates an emotional intensity of loss, while the microphone raises and thus intensifies the voice of the speaker. The order and movements that evolve around these artifacts show how the connections between the present actors do have different qualities. Being close to the plaque, holding the microphone, or wearing the shirt do not show power-neutral attachments, but at the same time distance or even dis-connect those actors from others. Accordingly, the two sketches show how the movement of people and objects reflect such process of connecting, and dis-connecting. While the tram drivers’ family, identified here by their “colorful” clothing - wearing neither bonde-shirt nor working clothes – is standing at a distance from both the other people and the plaque, they are drawn inside the new tram by the CENTRAL-representative on the second picture, only to be drawn out again shortly afterwards and drawn to the microphone by the AMAST speaker.

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The movements and constellations described here do not only point to the spontaneous emergence of connections, between the favela-inhabitants identified as the drivers’ family, the middle-class members of the AMAST and the state representatives of CENTRAL, but also show that such connections are at the same time not power-neutral. Their analysis might provide important insight about the distribution of agency within a specific constellation of actors: The distancing, or loosening up of connection with the driver’s family together with the spontaneously built connections in moments of proximity and intensity shows how those actors that make the family move – the bonde-shirt, the AMAST, the CENTRAL-representative, the microphone – all gain in terms of agency. In the following two sections, the further stabilization of such spontaneously emerging connections, but also their disruptions, will be further examined.

3.2

Routines and ruptures of bonde-assemblages

The fieldwork did not only apply classical methods for place-based ethnography, such as participatory observations. In addition, an in-depth analysis and description through walking, listening, smelling, asking, touching has been found indispensable to account for the multiple spatial and temporal layers of the tram-infrastructure, its material elements (bonde) and their connections (bondings) (cd. Wildner and Röhm 2009:2). Nevertheless, such procedure is always either documented by the researcher as individual sensual experiences – in her fieldnotes – or expressed through language – during the ethnographic interviews (Kusenbach 2008:352). In order to account for the virtual, embodied, reflexive dimensions of the connections and disconnections generated by infrastructure, a mixture of joint walking and interview - so-called “go-alongs” (Kusenbach 2008) – has been added to the fieldwork plan. “Going along”, in the sense of accompanying people on their daily stroll through the street offers a methodological answer to the above-identified theoretical problem that infrastructure is never simply stable, and daily life is not necessarily restricted by routine. This choice of method helps to account for the dynamics and transformations of street and tram infrastructures – as socio-technical assemblages – as well as for the emergence of connections out of seemingly individualizing and repressive temporal rhythms and bodily habits. While following the two informants that have been selected for analysis here – street vendor “Ana” and tramway driver “João”3 – during their walks or drives through the street and across the railways, the researcher has been asking, observing and listening to find out about the “complex network of social connections, the relations, constellations and hierarchies” (ibid.:354) that evolve around street and tram. The two people to go – and to ride-along with – have been 3

All names have been changed in order to protect the informants’ anonymity.

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chosen because they offer quite contrasting experiences to the narratives that have already been collected about the bonde, and its connective function. In this sense, reading the daily conversations in the street with Anas voice, or the driving along the test track with João and his changing passengers, opens up different perspectives than imaginaries of the tram as “historic patrimony” and its fetishized ruins. In contrast to popular associations of transport infrastructures with moments of transit, or passages, embodied by the individual, anonymous passenger (bonde), or passer-by (street), I follow an interest for the streets pessoalidade (Frehse 2015:118). The case of street vendors seems quite interesting in this aspect because they give “personality” to the main street of Santa Teresa as they are known amongst both inhabitants and tourists, on the street and on facebook. They contradict the anonymity that passing-by is assumed to create by forging connections between people and other actors in (social) space. Interestingly, they seem to be positioned somehow inbetween a dialectic of transition and immobile non-passants (ibid.: 119), unwarily walking up and down the street but at the same time stabilizing connections – up to the point that Ana is known as “not having left the neighborhood since she arrived 15 years ago” (Facebook quote). The shirts and some of the literary observations she sells with her book in the street are about the tram-infrastructure. Her connection with the bonde is obvious, Ana says: We always used the bonde. Even more when I started making bonde-shirts. I took photographs of it, and ended up producing yet another bonde-shirt: bonde in color, black and white, with and without passengers, riding the footboard. We were friends, I knew all the drivers well. (translated transcript of go-along on 27/10/2015) The assemblage of street vendor, tram, pictures and t-shirts is not only described neutrally here, but qualified by the mentioning of “friendship” with the drivers, pointing to an affective relation with the bonde and its related actors. On the one hand, Ana is just another inhabitant of Santa Teresa who remembers the bonde as daily means of transport. On the other hand, her connection to the bonde has stabilized even more with yet another routine – the one of “making pictures”, of documenting the tram in form of artwork and selling it as t-shirt print. Accompanying Ana during her daily street strolls means following an exact schedule: At 7:00 in the morning the street vendor sits down in her favorite café, orders a portion of pão de quiejo and might after a while try to sell a shirt or a book directly at the place. Around 8:00 a.m., Ana gets back to her room, where she works on her paintings and writings. Lunchtime and dinner are the best selling times, as the main street of Santa Teresa – one of the most touristic neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro after Copa Cabana and Ipanema – get crowded with visitors from Brazil and all over the world. Over the years, and through the repeated act of selling the bonde-shirts, Ana has developed strong ties with the tram, or her imagination of it that she

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expresses in her paintings. In this sense, it makes a difference whether she depicts the footboard or not. While walking along the street together, the artist points to one of the current construction sites that have popped off repeatedly in the neighborhood ever since the tram reinstallation started two years ago (fig. 5 below), with the promised but never achieved goal of being completed in time for the football world cup that Rio witnessed in 2014.

Figure 5: Street Obstacles

Source: Picture taken at construction site on the main street of Santa Teresa by author on 14/12/2015

“The governors”, Ana explains “think they’d have to change everything, from rail tracks to overhead cables” (ibid.). While breaking up the asphalt presents a sudden rupture for Ana’s walking routine, as she has to make her way around the construction sites, the now bare-laying tram infrastructure reminds her of other forgotten parts: “Today, people aren’t allowed riding the footboard anymore. I do not agree that it is dangerous. The bonde was perfect as it was, a means of transport that exists for over 100 years without changes can only be a good one. I would really like that the bonde had a footboard again” (ibid.). What is interesting about Ana’s observation here, is that it connects a positive memory of a technical detail of the old tram with a current situation at a construction site in the street and – most importantly – a desire for a future tram that would allow for footboard-riding again. For the street vendor, even the presence of a new bonde that seemingly follows the exact same design of

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the old one does not end with a specific feeling of absence. With the suspension of the tram, the joy of footboard-riding and more generally, the “alegria”, the happiness of the inhabitants of Santa Teresa has been lost (ibid.). The power of such virtual connection between inhabitants and tram through emotions such as “love” and “joy” might be something that the state authorities underestimated. While a project coordinator of the transport secretariat of Rio de Janeiro also uses the qualifier “alegria” when he describes what the new tram will bring to the neighborhood, he fails to see that the feeling of loss and the associated memories cannot be erased from the public space, its materialities and people. Though both interviewees are connected by a word that appears repeatedly throughout the fieldwork, they apply very different meanings to it. Ana applies the term to make clear that the tram-absence did not affect business in the street, but was more important for the inhabitants of the neighborhood and their positive relation to the neighborhood. In contrast, for the state representative, the “alegria” will be amongst those working in the tourism sector as much as the very inhabitants of Santa Teresa, because from the 40.000 passengers that have used the new tram in its first month, most where national and international visitors (own interview, 19/11/2015). The drive-alongs that have been carried out with João, one of the nine drivers that had been working with the old bonde already and who recently resumed their work with the new model, confirms this impression. While there are always a few inhabitants of Santa Teresa, usually sitting in the first row just behind the driver, the majority of the new bonde users are tourists. Driving down the steep street that connects the current final tram stop at uphill “curvelo” square with the “carioca” station in the city center, João does not stop at a single station along the way. After an angry old lady has complained with him because he could not stop for her to jump on the vehicle, he explains: For now, the tram functions only on a very short track, and with limited operating hours between 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. The old bonde was used by the inhabitants to get to work, or to school in the morning. It was the only means of transport here with exact and reliable schedules. During the afternoons they used it to meet their friends inside the tram, because they took it at the exact same time, or even made friends with new inhabitants or tourists. Some even celebrated their birthdays inside the tram, sharing their cake with us drivers. Actually, our working philosophy was “alegria”, and Santa Teresa became like my backyard (drive-along 26/10/2015). The drive-alongs with João allow for capturing the mobile experience of place in the street that is associated with the tram-infrastructure. The above-quoted idea of “collective transport” vehicles as hybrid spaces between the streets anonymous passing-by and public meeting-place character can be put under closer scrutiny here. Once again, the repetitive rhythms of a timely transport vehicle consolidate the bonds amongst inhabitants, with others and with the materiality of the bonde itself. In this case, the drivers are added to the list actors that assemble around the tram-

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infrastructure, João uses the term “alegria” to explain how he also became connected to the neighborhood. From this perspective, the important position of the drivers within this assemblage becomes very obvious. They function as a sort of gatekeepers not only during the concrete situation of bonde-riding, where they currently let those inhabitants they know pass the long line of visitors waiting down curvelo station. Knowledge is indeed the central theme here. The fact that João knows so many passengers is due to the inevitable fact that he was re-employed for the new bonde. Inevitable, again because of knowledge. While the tram passes the place where the accident in 2011 happened, João states: Some say that Nelson [the driver] went to fast. But this is not true. He was a very responsible person. Actually, he would have never driven another tram than that one he used the day of the tragedy. Why? Because it was himself who repaired the vehicle. We all did that. We were not only drivers, but also became mechanists, we found out how to maintain the trams and we were the ones who sent for missing pieces, sometimes even bought them from our own money, as we did not receive support from the government. (ibid.) Knowing how to maintain and repair a tram, besides riding it, became a very limited resource not only in Rio de Janeiro, but all over the world as there were fewer and fewer trams of similar design. Again on a virtual level, the connections that were established through knowledge became very strong. Today, the tram drivers gain agency vis-á-vis the state authorities, as they have to be re-employed being the only people who still know how to handle the bonde. From another angle, going back in time, the connection between drivers and tram could rather be described as dependency, because being so specialized also implied difficulties to find a new job, once the system has broken down. On a different occasion, the president of the local neighborhood association AMAST adds a hypothesis to the question of how maintenance and the connections built by knowledge were not only reinforced, but also “ruined” on purpose (interview 30/10/2015). What has been concealed, he argues, is the story of the so-called “Frankensteins” (ibid.) – a new tram model that the transport company tried to implement shortly before the accident. These new trams had encountered technical problems and actually been declared as “not able to operate” by a group of engineers who had been “flown in on purpose from Portugal” because the tram of Lisbon is very similar to the Santa Teresa model. Instead of maintaining the old bonde, the authorities left it to a process of purposeful “ruining” (sucateamento), with the accident being a welcome excuse for abandoning a whole system and thus concealing the disinvestment in a malfunctioning new model. Altogether, knowledge can be recognized here as powerful not only for establishing and consolidating connections, but also for breaking them or leaving them to dissolve. While the connections between tram drivers might seem weak as long as they remain limited to these two actors, they grow stronger as soon as they are shared by a broader set of actors, involving the middle-class members of the local

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neighborhood association, who count with a vast archive that comprises technical documents about the bonde dating back to the 19th century, as much as the drivers, who oftentimes live in the favelas at the hillsides of Santa Teresa. Bonding, here, becomes a powerful process that might even deconstruct class or race-differences while the involved actors get assembled anew building new alliances. What has been shown here, more generally, is that the method of go-alongs has the advantage that it does not depart from an artificial separation between public and private (space), or the location of individual anonymity within the former and intimate relations within the latter (cf. Kusenbach 2008:354). Rather, it allows for reconstructing the distributed dynamic of daily habits, the virtual connections between people and materiality in the streetspace – and their sudden disruptions. In this sense, the transcendental aspects of the street or tram experience can be captured, because an informant might be able to point to certain place, object, person etc. that reminds her of a past event, or about future aspirations. Go-alongs allow for capturing the virtual levels (promises), or spatial (city) and temporal (past/future) scales that are embedded in daily experience – thus speaking to the theoretical concern worked out above, about the reality of both daily urbanity and city ontology.

4. Conclusion: Consolidation, or “the illusion of the unprecedented” A gente olha para a frente a ver se o bonde está chegando. Não chega. [...] Durante esse tempo continua o nosso castigo, lento, bárbaro, sem uma esperança de trégua. [...] Até aqui, porém, restava sempre uma consolação; a consolação ou a ilusão do inédito. (Assis 2013 [1893]:56) One of the first witnesses of the bondes of Rio de Janeiro has been documented as early as in 1893 by the famous writer Machado de Assis. If it was not for the specification of year, the above-quoted could be read as a current testimony of the last surviving bonde. Just as those waiting at the tram-station in de Assis’ description, the inhabitants of Santa Teresa have been “looking forward” to the come-back of a transport infrastructure ever since its suspension in 2011. This paper has been motivated by an interest for the processes that happened “during that time”, during the four years without tram. More specifically, it departs from a similar contradiction than the one observed by Assis. While the absence of the tram is experienced as a form of punishment “without any hope for relief”, it coexists with the possibility of something that is still there, as the “illusion of the unprecedented” (ibid.). The bonde of Santa Teresa presents a perfect case in time for analyzing the simultaneity of what has been captured here by use of the notions of absence and presence. Even though witnessing a setting where the bonde is only temporality “absent”, de Assis is aware of the fact that the novelty of this specific transport

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infrastructure continues to be “present” on a more imaginative sphere. What the chronicle makes very clear is that it is not a whole system of (transport) infrastructure that has to break down until its users, or the writers and researchers become aware of it. Leigh Star’s famous hypothesis about the “visibility of infrastructure” would thus have to be modified to account for the “daily breakdowns”, the irregularities and instabilities of all sorts of infrastructure. As has been shown through urban anthropological research in this paper is that the everyday dynamics of such infrastructures are always characterized by a simultaneity of presence and absence: The absent tram was outlasted by material reminders such as railway tracks, and since this years’ August the presence of a new “test” model co-exists with imaginaries on the joy of footboard-riding. Consequently, instead of understanding the latter as result of the former – breakdown or absence leading to presence or visibility – this paper argues that it is the interrelations, the in-betweens or the connections that these allegedly dichotomous notions forge that have to be analyzed. Following this choice of direction, the variety of human and nonhuman, material and immaterial actors that assemble around the tram-infrastructure are not described as non-hierarchical constellations. Rather, it is exactly by focusing on their connections that distributions of power and agency can be analyzed. The potential of an assemblage approach for the research interest expressed throughout this paper is that it follows the connections between the involved actors not on separate scales, thus not distinguishing between the inhabitants of a neighborhood or the citywide acting transport secretary. Only in a second step, the quality of these connections is put under closer scrutiny. For the present case, such theoretical perspective has been operationalized by analyzing for example the bonds created by a portrait of the dead tram driver, the crying tram symbol on t-shirts, and a metal plaque commemorating the accident that led to the suspension of a whole transport system. On a first account, such bonde-artifacts seem to connect a heterogeneity of actors, ranging from the local shop owner, to the neighborhood association AMAST, the tram drivers’ family, and the state transport company CENTRAL. After tracing the connections between these actors and thus describing them as assemblage, a second look inevitably points to the dynamics of dis-connecting and dissolving bonds, and their influence on the distribution of agency. All involved actors gain from appropriating bonde-artifacts, be it by exhibiting them in a shop window, uploading them on a Facebook page or by emplacing them into the concrete space of the tram station. Again, the virtual dimension of such connections has been identified as crucial from the analysis. They reveal contrasting imaginations of revitalization or tourism versus social integration and mixing. By asking for the connections that emerge in absence of a tram infrastructure, this paper

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contributes to current debates in urban assemblage studies. Absence, it has been shown by the empirical case study, might be useful as a notion to grasp the forces that build powerful connections between a complex set of actors but are not always directly ascribable to the human or material city. Such imaginations or promises do not only surpass spatial, but also temporal boundaries. A tram-footboard for example, can simultaneously be connected with a history of free public transport as well as with current infrastructural interventions and the desire for a future “collective” transport, accessible for all economic and social classes. In this sense, temporality becomes a central qualifier for understanding the rhythms of emergent, consolidating and disrupted connections within the described assemblages. While he long-term rhythms and routines of selling a bonde-shirt or driving and riding the tram stabilized the bonds between human inhabitants and non-human tram, or the promises it transports, there are also always new connections emerging from the sudden disruption of such habits by a construction site in the street, or during an emotionally intense commemoration. At the same time, the presence of the tram-infrastructure through its material remnants does not only create or consolidate connections and thus the distribution of power and agency amongst certain actors. By asking for the bonde “rubble”, instead of understanding it as unchangeable “ruin”, this paper has pointed to the complex of maintenance, repairing, recycling, or purposeful decay (sucateamento). In this context, knowledge has been proven to be the central qualifier for the building or the disruption of connections between drivers, inhabitants, state authorities and a tram-infrastructure. Ultimately, this paper argues that it is impossible to solve the theoretical tensions between emergence and stabilization of infrastructures, the related human-material relations and virtual imaginaries – or between their presence and absence. What has become clear, nonetheless, is that the connections between those actors, and thus between their tensions as well, bear the possibility of change.

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