Case D
A balcony and a sensibility of care
I was introduced to Alicia Smedberg’s work through a presentation she gave at Aalto University’s NorDes2019 conference. There, she presented a small, full-bodied account involving a balcony and a person named Mrs. E. Here, I heavily rely on Smedberg’s own writing for her to speak for her own work. All of the quoted text belong to her article, Affective Infrastucturing (2019). The experience is situated in Malmö, Sweden in a project, as Smedberg describes it, exploring “methods for citizen engagement within city planning. … The shift [in the municipality’s work is] intended to tackle systemic inequalities, and to begin to build a future Malmö democratically.”
“… While it was clear that the citizens participating were welcome, present, and contributing to the project there was still an imbalance of power.” In this case, the practitioners are the civil servant, as the person in conversation and listening to Mrs. E’s experience, and Alicia Smedberg, as the researcher reflexively writing about what happens and what is needed in this context.
“Mrs. E. worked with the project for the best part of six months, and partook in two [citizen dialogues]. The civil servants in the project told me … while there she would seize every opportunity to talk about her balcony. … She, they speculated, simply did not understand the purpose of the project. … Mrs. E. did continue working with them, but she also refused to let the balcony go.”
It wasn’t until a few weeks later … that the story behind Mrs E.’s balcony began to emerge in a one-to-one conversation with a civil servant. This time, there was space in the work for open-ended conversations and there was an interpreter present to enable the two discussants to speak freely to each other. … In this particular constellation with Mrs E., the interpreter, and a civil servant with the fortunate skill of being an excellent listener, it was found that Mrs. E, had recently had a break-in in her ground floor apartment, and would feel safer with an enclosed balcony as this would offer her the possibility to lock it. She told the civil servant about the conditions on the street on which she lived, and the tensions she experienced there. She explained that she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if there was a burglar in the house, because her family — including her husband and children — were all living abroad. … She hoped that a glass balcony would at least make the situation bearable.”
“Care is understood in this paper as an on-going shared work or practice, where the notion of “good” care is an innately collective effort (Mol, 2008; Mol et al., 2010*). … The phrase sensibility of care … seeks to [emphasize] the temporal aspect [where]…caring practices which were ‘good’ yesterday may not be ‘good’ tomorrow (but may work again next year). …Failure is not a feature of materials themselves but an experience that … allows us to understand how material relations might be participating in the production of political modes of engagement (Knox, 2017., p.376).”
The care that is needed hinges on the relations surrounding the physical material that is the balcony, and would offer her ‘the possibility to lock it’ — security — relieve ‘tensions,’ and ‘make the situation bearable.’ “Hannah Knox’s definition of an Affective Infrastructure [is] where affect is embedded in the socio-material infrastructure (Knox, 2017). … Tracing the way materials become political (Knox, 2017., p. 367) can become a way of marrying material politics and the so-called “language ideologies” [of] pacifying inherently political connections — and replacing the vocabulary of activation with a vocabulary of analysis (Martin, 2014; Bessire and Bond, 2014).”
Alicia is able to recognize the care that is needed in projects like these hinges on the relations surrounding physical materials. In this case, that is the balcony that would offer a person the possibility to lock it, relieve tensions, and make the situation bearable. In parallel to the civil servant who listened carefully to Mrs. E, Alicia applies a sensibility of care in that she understands care practices as temporal and whose appropriateness constantly changes. Otherwise, an analysis of this situation might be left as designating Mrs. E as disruptive and overlook the civil servant who took the time to listen, one-to-one.
Read more about Alicia Smedberg here.
References
Smedberg, Alicia. “Affective Infrastucturing.” No 8 (2019): NORDES 2019: WHO CARES?
Read more from this publication
Case A | A handbag and the making of a boundary
Case B | A deck of cards and a vocabulary for social choices
Case C | A collection of home things and the gauging of limits
Case D | A balcony and a way of caring
Case E | A city playground and the connection of family and everyday life
Case F | A hacienda as an “instrument” to notice and wonder
