In Brazil’s post-neoliberal government of upward mobility and public policies, infrastructures are the symbiosis of experimental forms of government, political action, and practices of consumption. This article draws from a four-year-long multiscalar ethnography of Minha Casa Minha Vida, the country’s largest public housing program. It uncovers the temporalities of infrastructural hope unleashed as people wait for—and engage with—their first homeownership. Specifically, I focus on struggles over the design and implementation of surveillance and security technologies by residents of one such condominium, charting how aspirations for “the good life” crystallize in emerging—yet ephemeral—collectives of consumer-citizens. My contention is that desires for infrastructure elucidate the ubiquity and ever-elusiveness of middle-class affects in Latin American social mobility. The tangled worlds of desire and materials illuminate the workings of a middle-class sensorial: the topography of images and affects through which class mobility is experienced and located in time and space. Trailing the movement, saturation and porosity of housing materialities and their embroilment with emergent forms of sociality decode the ambiguous economic and political subjectivities flourishing in the aftermath of fraught urban interventions.

中文翻译：

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巴西公共住房的多孔基础设施和向上流动的政治

在巴西的后自由主义上层政府和公共政策中，基础设施是政府的试验形式，政治行动和消费习惯的共生体。本文摘自该国最大的公共住房计划Minha Casa Minha Vida的一项为期四年的多尺度人种志。它揭示了人们等待并参与首次购房时释放出的基础设施希望的暂时性。具体来说，我重点关注一个这样的公寓的居民在监视和安全技术的设计和实施方面的斗争，并绘制出对“美好生活”的诉求如何在新兴的，但短暂的，消费公民的集体中具体化的图表。我的观点是，对基础设施的渴望阐明了拉丁美洲社会流动中中产阶级影响的普遍性和难以捉摸的意义。欲望和物质的错综复杂的世界照亮了中产阶级感官的工作原理：图像的形貌，并影响着阶级的流动性，并通过它们经历了时空。追踪住房重要性的移动，饱和和多孔性以及它们以新兴的社会性形式被卷入的故事，解码了充满烦恼的城市干预之后蓬勃发展的模棱两可的经济和政治主观性。