Socioplastics 11854 The City Is Built Again Every Morning
An urban project is usually described through its design, materials, cost and completion date. Its public life depends on work that starts after completion and returns without a final endpoint. MaintenanceReturn identifies the recurring attention through which buildings, public spaces, archives and ecological systems remain usable. It treats maintenance as an arrangement of intervals, responsibilities and resources that shapes what a place can continue to offer. A square opens with finished paving, young trees and photographs of its inauguration. Five summers later, the trees may provide shade or have failed through irregular watering; lights may work or remain broken; seating may have been repaired or removed. These conditions depend on schedules, staff, budgets and authority to act. An opening photograph records an appearance, while a maintenance log records the labour and decisions that sustain use. Neither account alone describes the square’s whole life. Shannon Mattern’s writing on maintenance and care questions the prestige given to innovation over the work that keeps systems operating. Stephen Graham examines how infrastructural disruption is experienced unevenly. Steven J. Jackson approaches repair as a standpoint from which to understand technological worlds. Read together, their work directs attention to who notices a failure, who can repair it and who bears the consequences of delay. A broken lift, blocked drain or failed irrigation system has different effects depending on the alternatives available to its users. An architectural assessment could therefore document maintenance intervals alongside spatial form: inspection dates, repairs, closures, staffing and recurring complaints. It would ask whether tasks occur when needed and which uses are interrupted when they do not. MaintenanceReturn makes temporal obligations part of architectural evidence. A project’s public value depends not only on what is inaugurated but on the repeated work, resources and decisions through which it remains accessible over time.
REFERENCES
Graham, S. (ed.) (2010) Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. New York: Routledge.
Jackson, S.J. (2014) “Rethinking Repair”, in Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K.A. (eds.) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 221–239. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0011
Mattern, S. (2018) “Maintenance and Care”, Places Journal, November. https://doi.org/10.22269/181120
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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