Bâtiments en flux : le travail relationnel des concierges sur les infrastructures d’habitation

Caught up in multiple flows of socio-technical relations, our dwellings are relational infrastructures sewn in multiple ways to the material and human environment. The ethnographic approach to the work of caretakers shows how this sewing takes place, particularly through the repair and maintenance interventions that constantly link and reconfigure housing infrastructures. Against the temptation to reduce the work of caretakers to isolated tasks, the relational approach to residential infrastructures allows us to better understand their essential contribution to the habitability and sustainability of infrastructures. The first section of the paper develops this relational conceptualization by emphasizing the geographical anchorage of infrastructures, which requires to approach them not as standard objects but as always situated spaces. The collection of empirical data is based on an ethnomethodological and video-ethnographic analysis of interactions and socio-technical routines of four types of caretakers in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The second section proposes an immersion in the work of caretakers by showing how they organize their daily work and how their work in turn reconfigures buildings. The third section contains a theoretical discussion on the relational dimension of infrastructures by approaching the residential building not as a static object but as a permanent flow of adjustments and experiments. The fourth section provides an empirical illustration showing how caretakers contribute to ordering these socio-technical flows, by reminding, updating or adjusting the norms of use, thus acting as real mediators between a social order and a technical order. While recalling some of the article’s key concepts (“provincialisation”, “relationality” of infrastructures), the conclusion underlines the (micro-)political character of caretakers, whose work amounts to governing the behaviour of others and ensuring peaceful cohabitation between humans and hon-humans.