21st N-AERUS Conference

At the 21st N-AERUS Conference in Kassel, Germany and Khulna, Bangladesh Christian Rosen is presenting first findings from his fieldwork in Peru earlier this year. You can find the abstract below. 
Registration to the conference is free on www.n-aerus.net.

The struggle for infrastructure in Arequipa’s “pueblos jovenes”

Water and mobility are two of the most important infrastructures for the development of the pueblos jovenes, young settlements outside the city centre of the Peruvian Secondary City Arequipa. Local actors demand that the state connects them to the existing water network, and they also want a functioning, safe and affordable public transport system. In extensive ethnographic fieldwork over
several months, the residents’ efforts and plans of public and private providers were analysed. In addition, the provisional solutions that are used to help themselves in the pueblos jovenes were examined. These are often strongly
characterised by hybrid arrangements that combine elements of informal
practices with rudimentary services provided by the state in the neighbourhoods. The work on the ground has shown: These processes of co-production are complicated by complex constellations of actors. In the pueblos, two groups of actors are of particular importance in the discourse: the inhabitants, who mostly live in the poorly supplied areas due to a lack of economic resources, and investors, who own numerous plots of land and for whom a better supply with infrastructure means an increase in the value of their plots and thus higher sales revenues. This case study further shows that this constellation is unfavourable for local politics: Since many of the plots remain undeveloped due to land speculation, the costs for the installation of a networkbased infrastructure increase. At the same time, many actors in politics are themselves land speculators an thus directly part of the unstoppable expansion of the settlement areas.