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K. Trogal:
"Confronting unjust urban infrastructures: repairing water connections as acts of care.";
Talk: Pirate Care. Centre for Postdigital Cultures 2nd Annual Conference., Coventry University, United Kingdom; 2019-06-19 - 2019-06-20.

This paper reflects on two stories of repair from the 21st century, to consider how repair practices might begin to rectify some of the injustices built-into, and maintained by, physical urban infrastructures. When thinking about infrastructures and the socio-spatial (in)justices they establish or entrench, repair as a mode of action does not appear to offer much in the way of solutions, especially where repair would maintain that infrastructure in its original form. Yet when it becomes an act of pirate-care (Graziano, 2018), repair can be seen as both an articulation of rights as well as the formulation of collective, organized responses for social justice.
The first story, presents some of the actions of Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), an umbrella activist organization established in 2000, Johannesburg SA, who with Coalition Against Water Privatisation (CAWP, formed 2003) coordinated a series of acts of civil disobedience in repose to the installation of pre-paid water meters. The meters left significant numbers of households without adequate water for their survival, the APF and CAWP undertook the (then illegal) removal of the meters from disconnected households and freely reconnected them to the water supply. The second act of repair concerns the mass action of 300 union plumbers who in 2016 travelled to Flint, MA, USA to voluntarily install free water filters for residents. The water crisis that has engulfed the city since changing the water supply in 2014, has left residents with water that contains unsafe levels of lead contamination causing a litany of health problems and (by 2016) 10 deaths. Faced with no state action, plumbers from across the US volunteered to install the donated filters, to re-establish residents' connection to safe water.
The two examples, while taking place in very different contexts and conditions, constitute acts of care. In the first case against the violence and damage caused by the enclosure of water, enabled by infrastructure and associated technologies, and in the second a means to counter the 'slow violence' (Nixon, 2011) and institutionalised negligence (Harney and Moten, 2013) concerning the maintenance of infrastructure. What is also significant, in the first case is that their acts of care are not isolated, but part of wider coordinated actions and networks, and in the second was the result of coordinated union action. The concept of pirate-care, offered by the call, in these cases therefore also offers a way to rethink debates around the 'right to the city' (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008) , seen not only as a collective and mutual shaping of the city, but one that also operates with an ethics of care (Tronto, 1993; Gilligan, 1982) as agency with and on behalf of others.