GroundTower illustrates infrastructure’s ideal proximity to the everyday.Traditional infrastructural systems are either remote and therefore absent in the city (hydroelectric dams, reservoirs and landfills) or they exist as basic and single-purpose networks (roads, aqueducts networks and electric grids). Unlike these systems, GroundTower overtly places infrastructure within people’s daily life so it can be appropriated and tended by the community.
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action and promises – infrastructure and citizenship
constant negotiation between individual desires and the promises that, as a community, its individuals have tacitly made to each other. As barrios operate outside any official rules or regulatory entities, promises become more poignant while at the same time more fragile — they are the unstable base upon which a barrio functions. Barrios redefine citizenship as a direct involvement in the production of the city. They have eroded citizenship’s exclusionary limits (traditionally attached to property) and have delineated a new definition based on their informal urban practices. These practices are mediated by the constant exchange of promises, though these are wilfully broken, easily forgotten, and wrongly replaced.
For Arendt, action is also the experience of freedom. But freedom cannot be fully realised without the existence of promises. Reality reflects both the uncertainty that comes from the freedom of action and the potential certainty of promises. In the barrios, institutionally unregulated and constructed through improvisation, the built environment itself emerges out of the reification of promises. Promises originate from two facts: our own unreliability as free individuals and the impossibility to foretell the consequences of our actions in a community of equals. These promises can be of abstention or deed, but it is in this latter category where the potential for action truly resides. Barrios are built out of a
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