Article ID: CBB802260917

Maintenance epistemology and public order: Removing graffiti in Paris (April 2021)

unapi

Taking part in the growing concern for repair and maintenance in STS, this article investigates epistemic dimensions of maintenance. Drawing on an ethnographic study of graffiti removal in Paris, it highlights the different objects of knowledge involved in this specific setting of urban maintenance and documents their relationships. It shows that, inspired by the ‘broken windows’ thesis, the anti-graffiti program that emerged in Paris at the turn of 2000 articulates three objects of knowledge – public order, graffiti and the city – whose intertwined definitions root a restorative maintenance epistemology. Such epistemology unfolds in an assemblage of policy documents, regulatory texts, contracts, technical specifications and procedures, information infrastructures and categories, removal techniques, tools and situated gestures, which take place in municipality’s offices, contractors’ workshops and during each intervention in the streets. The Paris graffiti removal program instantiates a preservationist approach which focuses on recurrent visual signs of disruption occurring on the façades and rests on both a distributed attention and a particular pace for interventions. It involves three main operations: measuring surfaces, identifying public expressions and composing with materials. None of these operations are neutral. Aimed at preserving a specific order, they also participate in the daily transformation of urban reality. The heterogeneous knowledge at play in maintenance practices intricately takes part in the becoming of the things whose stability it strives to ensure.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB802260917/

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Authors & Contributors
Jacob, Marie-Andrée
Mandy de Wilde
Appel, Hannah
Juan Francisco Salazar
Adam Fish
Crooks, Roderic N.
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Maintenance and repair
Infrastructure
Ethnography
Cities and towns
Participation
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
Places
Havana, Cuba
Puget Sound
Cambodia
Indian Ocean
East Asia
Madagascar
Institutions
Committee on Publication Ethics
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