Prefigurative urbanization: Politics through infrastructural repertoires in Guayaquil

Abstract

The notion of prefiguration resurfaced in urban geography and social movement literature to describe the practices of social movements seeking to experience, in the present and through direct action, post-capitalist lifeworlds. The paper argues that the tactics that underpin prefigurative practices — the focus on immediate transformations and the recuperation of the agency to act without the mediation of representative structures –not only typify a form of collective action, but serve to describe a distinct mode of producing urban space. The article introduces the notion of prefigurative urbanization to depict a territorial process where a plurality of self-managed infrastructural manifestations, replaces the role played by sovereign institutions and planning technologies in organizing spatio-temporal relations. The term captures how infrastructural scripts are used as repertoires to anticipate and project new regimes of subjectification, transform patterns of accumulation and prefigure modalities of spatial inclusion and exclusion. The article is structured in two parts. The first expands the notion of prefiguration form a type of collective action, associated with radical, anti-capitalist urban movements, to a logic of urbanization. It argues that prefiguration is practiced through the articulation of contrasting infrastructural repertoires that define both how territories are produced and urban politics is practiced. The second part draws on ethnographic material collected through an action research project conducted in Guayaquil (Ecuador) and examines how prefigurative urbanization unfolds through the infrastructural practices carried out by local improvement committees, NGOs, and private developers. The conclusions highlight how prefigurative urbanizations stage the conflict over the production, access and governance of urban and popular infrastructures as the ground for urban politics.

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