Tides of Concrete: Sensing Infrastructural Times in a Former Socialist Model City

Ringel, Felix

Abstract

This is an episodic sensorial biography (Desjarlais 2003) of a city made of concrete. It recounts how urban modernist infrastructures, shaped by their main construction material, created a new historical-sensorial experience. It tracks an infrastructural intimacy, whose cracks, tremors and concussions mark epochal changes in what – for want of a more precise term – others have coined “infrastructural times:” the similarly intricate relations between specific infrastructures and the times in which they exist (Barry 2015; Anand et al. 2018; Appel 2018; Joniak-Lüthi 2019). The maritime metaphors deployed below are not intended to naturalize these dramatic changes. Rather, they introduce a different temporal context to this infrastructure’s precarious materiality in order to disturb our own sense of time.

Citation

Ringel, F. (2021). Tides of Concrete: Sensing Infrastructural Times in a Former Socialist Model City. Roadsides, 006, 72-80. https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202100610

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 2021
• Deposit Date: Dec 7, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 7, 2021
• Journal: Roadsides
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 006
• Pages: 72-80
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202100610