Popular infrastructural politics: Connecting grassroots knowledge and practice on marketplace governance

市场在许多城市社区的日常生活中发挥着至关重要的作用。它们是城市居民获得食物和其他基本主食的供应系统的一部分，在世界各地的许多城市，它们也是建立社会关系和归属感的重要公共空间。无论是封闭的还是开放的，市场日益成为低收入和被边缘化的城市居民的基本基础设施，他们依靠负担得起的价格维持生计。这种对人们生存的贡献在很大程度上取决于市场交易者社区充满活力的经济、社会、文化和政治生活，他们为保持这些商业基础设施运行所做的努力是永久性的。这一奖学金的目的是传播和巩固我关于交易商为保持市场活力所做的永久努力的研究成果。通过这样做，该奖学金将有助于更好地了解基层组织对基础设施和城市建设的长期贡献。该奖学金还旨在鼓励学者、市场利益相关者和从业者之间就他们在基础设施治理方面的经验进行国际对话。通过这种方式，该奖学金将促进关于基础设施提供、维护和改造方面的挑战的知识交流。围绕这两个目标，该奖学金将有助于从草根的角度展望基础设施治理中当前趋势的替代方案，承认并重视市场交易员等关键工作者的工作和政治经验。为此，该奖学金建立在我的博士研究基础上，该研究探索了墨西哥城的交易员社区及其公开市场网络，该网络由7万多名交易员和329家商业设施组成。这些参与者和空间发展了我所构想的流行的基础设施政治，以对抗政治忽视和基础设施的废弃和恶化。大众基础设施政治不是将草根政治视为离散、脆弱或短暂的，而是寻求捕捉长期存在的草根政治传统的存在，这些传统围绕生存权、基础设施和城市的权利。我的田野调查显示，市场交易员能够围绕公共市场打造这些长期存在的政治传统，使大众基础设施政治成为捍卫边缘人群基本服务的关键实践。此外，通过流行的基础设施政治，墨西哥城的市场交易商不仅制定了在地方范围内塑造市场治理的战略，而且在过去70年里制定了城市和国家层面的基础设施供应和法律和政策制定。这一奖学金的拟议活动将通过出版物、国际在线研讨会、一个项目的网站、播客系列和新的研究，进一步促进这些概念和经验的贡献。这些传播和参与活动将寻求通过参与基础设施治理的理论和实践，最大限度地发挥我的研究成果的影响。他们还将寻求通过提高人们对被边缘化的城市行为者在基础设施提供、维护和改造以及一般城市建设方面的贡献的认识来向公众提供信息。这项关于民众政治和基础设施治理的研究在政府和公众广泛承认关键工作者和基本服务的重要性和价值的背景下具有现实意义。因此，根据这一奖学金提出的活动和产出不仅对那些与市场直接相关的人具有重要意义，而且对任何参与或对确保城市基础设施安全和运行的长期基层斗争感兴趣的人都具有重要意义。

Marketplaces play a vital role in the everyday life of many urban communities. They are part of the supply systems that make food and other basic staples accessible to urban residents, and in many cities around the world, they also represent significant public spaces where social connections and forms of belonging are built. Either covered or open, marketplaces have increasingly become essential infrastructures for low-income and marginalised urban residents, who rely on their affordable prices for subsistence. This contribution to people's subsistence largely depends on the vibrant economic, social, cultural, and political life of market trader communities, whose efforts to keep these commercial infrastructures working are permanent.The aim of this fellowship is to disseminate and consolidate my research findings concerning the traders' permanent efforts to keep the marketplaces alive. In doing so, the fellowship will help to better understand the long-standing contribution of grassroots organisations to infrastructure and city-making. The fellowship also aims to encourage an international conversation between academics, marketplaces' stakeholders, and practitioners about their experiences in infrastructure governance. In this way, the fellowship will facilitate knowledge exchange concerning the challenges embedded in infrastructure provision, maintenance, and transformation. Focused on these two aims, the fellowship will contribute to envision alternatives to current trends in infrastructure governance from a grassroots perspective which recognises and values the work and political experience of key workers such as market traders.For this, the fellowship builds upon my PhD research, which explored Mexico City's trader community and its public markets' network, which comprises more than 70,000 traders and 329 commercial facilities. These actors and spaces have developed what I have conceptualised as popular infrastructural politics to fight against political neglect and infrastructure abandonment and deterioration. Rather than seeing grassroots politics as discrete, fragile, or ephemeral, popular infrastructural politics seeks to capture the existence of long-standing grassroots political traditions that revolve around the rights to subsistence, infrastructure, and the city.My fieldwork revealed that market traders have been able to forge these long-standing political traditions around public markets, making popular infrastructural politics a crucial practice to defending an essential service for the marginalised. Furthermore, through popular infrastructural politics, Mexico City market traders have not only developed strategies to shape marketplaces governance at a local scale but infrastructure provision and law and policymaking at the city and national levels for the past 70 years.The proposed activities for this fellowship will take these conceptual and empirical contributions further through publications, an international online workshop, a project's website, a podcast series, and new research. These dissemination and engagement activities will seek to maximise the impact of my research findings by engaging with both theory and practice on infrastructure governance. They will also seek to inform public opinion by raising awareness of the contributions of marginalised urban actors to infrastructure provision, maintenance, and transformation and city-making in general.This research on popular politics and infrastructure governance is relevant in a context in which governments and the public have widely acknowledged the importance and value of key workers and essential services. Therefore, the activities and outputs proposed under this fellowship will not only be significant to those directly related to marketplaces, but to anyone involved or interested in the long-term grassroots struggles to keep safe and running essential urban infrastructure.