ABSTRACT
This article examines the so-called “infrastructural turnaround” in urban studies of the past two decades from the theories and timelines of the urbanization of Brazilian cities. Our objective is to bring to international debate on the ethnography of infrastructures a comprehensive view of theoretical discussions developed in Brazil over the past fifty years. The first section examines the first ethnographies of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the late 1960s, including the intellectual relations among scholars and the attention given to house construction and the provision of urban services. The next section presents the figure of community agents of social housing policies and infrastructure upgrade programs. We conclude by reading the work of community agents in the light of AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of “people as infrastructure”. Community agents render legible the techno-politics and the labor and technical logic, thereby blurring the boundaries between the State, the market and urban social movements..
KEYWORDS:
Urbanization; Infrastructures; Favelas; Urban peripheries; Ethnography