Scraps, Neighbors, and Committees: Material Things,Place-Making, and the State in an Astana Apartment BlockMATEUSZ LASZCZKOWSKIUniversity of Warsaw

AbstractDrawing on fieldwork in 200809, this article focuses on a courtyard (dvor) in aSoviet-era apartment block in Astana, Kazakhstan. I explore the mundane materialmaintenance of the courtyard, in particular the use of scraps, as a way to reflect on therelationships between material agency, the formation of locality, and the state. His-torically, the courtyard was an urban form through which the Soviet state sought todefine its citizenry. In the post-Soviet period the dvor persists as a space in whichcitizens subjectivities and relationships to the state are formed. However, infrastruc-tures fall into disrepair and are haphazardly patched up by residents. I argue that scrapsplay important roles in the emergence of localities, both enabling and constrainingresidents agency. They engender a sense of disconnect between the local communityand the state. Simultaneously, scrappiness also means that locality is unstable andephemeral. Scraps, in general, are an underappreciated element of urbanization; yetthey are significant actants in the making and unmaking of social and politicalconfigurations. [Kazakhstan, place, courtyard, materiality, infrastructure]

Introduction

One July afternoon, several people gathered outside the apart-ment block at 5 Oktyabrskaya Street1 in Astana, to debatesomething agitatedly. A man in his sixties was holding acrumpled notebook with pages full of columns of handwritten numbers.A small group of women surrounded him and peeped at the notes. Irecognized my landlady Aleksandra Stepanovna, the owner of two apart-ments in the building, and the elderly women who had lived in the blockfor many years and who chatted on a bench in the courtyard nearly everyday. As I listened to the debate, I soon realized the notes they werediscussing were accounts for the purchase of valves and pipes to repair theblocks plumbing. The man had bought the valves using funds pooledfrom residents contributions, but somehow it was unclear how manyvalves were needed, how many had been bought, how many had beenreplaced, how much money was spent, and how much was left. The manfetched two valves from the basement. The group examined themclosely, but they were unable to figure out if those were two of the oldbroken valves, or of the new. Aleksandra Stepanovna and the mandescended to the basement together, only to see, in the light of theflashlight I held for them, that old and new valves and pipes lay heapedhopelessly together amid waste and small construction debris.

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City & Society, Vol. 27, Issue 2, pp. 136159, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. 2015 by the AmericanAnthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/ciso.12057.

Who were these people to one another? Why were they dealing withthose valves and accounts? What were their relations to the blocksmaterial infrastructure? Was there a housing department somewherethat should be involved? I lived at 5 Oktyabrskaya for nine monthsin 200809, and in this article I draw on that experience to reflect onthe relationships between residents and the bits and pieces of infrastruc-ture in the apartment block and courtyard. I study how residents every-day practices of material maintenance and the agency of mundanematerial things shaped the forms and meanings of locality and definedthe relationships between local subjects and the state, in a context ofwide-ranging, multi-faceted social, political, economic, and legal-administrative transformations. Since the onset of large-scale construc-tion works in a newly-designed part of the city following the selection ofAstana for Kazakhstans new capital in 1997, Astana has attracted con-siderable attention from international scholars (e.g., Bissenova 2014;Buchli 2007; Koch 2010; Laszczkowski 2011a, 2011b; Wolfel 2002). Incontrast to the bulk of that work, the present article focuses not on thespectacular recent developments, but on a mundane Soviet-era residen-tial block. This focus allows me to highlight the entanglements of city-planning power with other kinds of human and non-human agencyco-involved in place-making.2

I consider place-making as a dynamic, mutually constitutive relationbetween human subjects (individuals and groups) and their materialenvironment (Low and Lawrence-Ziga 2003). Such relations alwaysoccur in connection to other places and are influenced by outside actors.In a post-Soviet context, the urban neighborhood courtyard, dvor, is acompelling site to study place-making (see Richardson 2008:119128).Basic social relations are tied, performed, and reproduced in the dvor. Itis a site of socializing and of childrens socialization under the watchfuleye of the retired elders. People meet, greet, talk, and sometimes trade inthe dvor. Important matters concerning the neighborhood are discussedin this spacesuch as the interaction just described. In common usage,the noun dvor also refers to a group of people brought together by shareduse of the courtyard. One can say, for instance, that the whole dvorcelebrated a holiday together (otmechali vsem dvorom). In ArjunAppadurais terms (1996:178179), the dvor is a focal site for generatinglocality as a phenomenological quality which expresses itself in certainkinds of agency, sociality, and reproducibility, and the construction ofneighborhood as a situated community in which locality is realized. Bythe same token, however, the dvor is the site of ongoing politics whichperpetually produces and challenges community and locality (Creed2006; Raffles 1999). For Soviet urbanists the dvor was the basic city-planning unit through which to mold the norms and forms of sociality(French 1995:6263), while Caroline Humphrey (2005) argues that thematerial infrastructures of the dvor both transmitted and diffracted ideo-logical intent. In the post-Soviet period, I contend, the dvor continues tobe a site where local subjects are formed and relations with the state areengendered.

For Soviet

urbanists the dvor

was the basic

city-planning unit

through which to

mold the norms

and forms of

sociality

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I argue that scraps and leftovers such as the above-mentioned reus-able and non-reusable valves enabled and constrained residents relation-ships to one another, the courtyard, and the state. Stephen Collier(2010) has shown how material infrastructures (heating pipes, in par-ticular) had literally assembled Soviet cities by plugging together popu-lations, apartment blocks, factories, and nation-wide networksandhow more recently the intransigence of those systems constrainedreforms of post-Soviet urban governance. I build on these observations toargue that at 5 Oktyabrskaya heterogeneous material elements createdplace. However, as shall become clear, the heterogeneity and partialincompatibility of those material things and connections meant that theplace was a creatively improvised but unstable assemblage. Moreover, theconstitutive relations linking the local place to other places and projects,including the state, were as inconsistent, ambiguous, and unstableinshort, scrappy (Smith 1988)as its material make-up. Thus I highlightboth the aggregative and disaggregative possibilities of scraps.

Scrappy place-making

Place, locality, and community are fragile achievements of complexprocesses that involve a multiplicity of actors. Locality denotes notsimply a phenomenological quality of familiarity, but also a set ofrelations, an ongoing politics (Raffles 1999:324). Likewise, communitymust not be taken as an entity, least of all a stable or homogeneous one(Creed 2006). Rather, it connotes a relation, marked by a fragile sharedsense of belonging derived from quotidian forms of interaction. Justlike place, it needs to be performed, recreated ever anew through inter-actions and material practices. Place-making is always a cultural as wellas a political-economic activity (Tsing 2000:338). The local emergesthrough connections to other, often remote places and through themultiple, contingent, and partly contradictory practices of numerousactors involved in various situated projects (Raffles 1999:327).

These projects include forms of state power. The modern stateoften appears as a prominent force that exerts a powerful impact uponlocalities, molding and sometimes destructing them (e.g., Appadurai1996:189191). However, the state is itself a network of actors locatedin specific interconnected sites, and as such it greatly depends on mate-rial connections (Bennett and Joyce 2010; Harvey 2005). Among thecomplex, open-ended processes that lead to the making and re-making ofplaces, forms of state agency thus coincide, collide, and collude with thepractices of dwellers and the recalcitrance of material things.

As the valves-counting episode above already indicates, and as Ishow in more detail below, the material resources that residents at 5Oktyabrskaya had at their disposal to maintain their block and courtyardwere usually scraps. By scraps I mean items disjointed from their origi-nal networks, incomplete, and heterogeneous, calling for new uses andimpromptu connections. Literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith(1988:148) speaks of scrappiness as the condition of incompleteness,

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heterogeneity, and conflict generating human motivations and actions,that nonetheless yields local orders and provisional stabilities. Theconcept of scrappiness helps highlight disorderly implications of hetero-geneity and hybridity that are normally not brought to the fore by relatedterms used to refer to processes of social formation, such as bricolage,patchwork, or collage, which evoke rather more harmonious associa-tions. Victor Buchli (2000) has adapted this concept to an analysis ofindividual home-makers quotidian work of signification in the Sovietand post-Soviet domestic sphere. I follow his lead and explore the role ofscraps in the formation of locality in the dvor at 5 Oktyabrskaya. It mightbe that scraps clatter especially post-Soviet spacethe collapse of theUSSR having been a breakup in quite a literal, material sense (seeAlexander 2007b, 2009b). But scraps proliferate everywhere wherethings are being used, break down, wear out, expire, are being replaced orrearranged.3 They provoke the improvisation of new orders, provisionalto perpetual, while simultaneously constricting human possibilities bytheir intransigent, well, scrappiness. I argue for greater attention to bepaid to the roles that scraps can play in the politics of place-making. Iextend the concept of scrappiness beyond material scraps themselves. Inmy proposed use, scrappiness refers to the relationships between people,places, and things that constitute social and material assemblages. Itdescribes the fragmentary, ad hoc nature of connections linking localitiesto other places and translocal networks such as municipalities, nations,and states, and their involvement in shifting social and politico-economic configurations, legal, and administrative regimes.

It is commonplace in the anthropological literature on place-makingto note that, as Appadurai, for instance, puts it, locality is ephemeralunless hard and regular work is undertaken to produce and maintainits materiality (1996:180181). Until recently, material things havefeatured in phenomenologically inspired anthropological accounts ofplace-making generally as objects of human action: symbolization, inter-pretation, exchange, material transformation or maintenance (e.g., Low2000). In contrast, I follow Bruno Latours (1993) thinking about mate-rial things as mediators: active elements capable of altering the courseand effects of the agency of others, and even to provoke humans toundertake particular actions. As mediators, I argue, mundane materialitems have the capacity to shape and inflect the place-constitutive rela-tions between local subjects as well as the external relationships thatconnect a place to other sites and wider networks.

Simultaneously, I agree with Leo Coleman (2014) who has recentlypointed out that Actor-Network Theorys insistence on tracing materialconnections, although important as a way to avoid reifying abstractionssuch as the state or the social, can become limiting if it meansnot taking into account the work of interpretation and ascription ofmeanings to material things by human actors (see Navaro-Yashin 2012:163165). Material things, I contend, exert agency not only throughparticipation in Latourian webs of mediators, but also in other ways,including involvement in affective, hermeneutic, and phenomenological

Scraps provoke the

improvisation of

new orders,

provisional to

perpetual, while

simultaneously

constricting

human possibilities

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interactions through which human subjectivities, identities, and thesense of belonging are formed. Therefore, analyzing the roles of scrapsand other material items in place-making requires to have it both ways:to observe how material chains of action are linked and unlinked, andalso how those connections and disconnections lead to the rise or erasureof human meanings.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in social science forthe interactions between human actors and material infrastructures (e.g.,Collier 2010; Harrison, Pile, and Thrift 2004; Larkin 2013). While muchof this literature has focused on cases of spectacular malfunction(Bennett 2005; Graham 2009), other works are concerned with the moremundane dynamics of disrepair and maintenance (Edensor 2011;Graham and Thrift 2007), and various forms of bricolage through whichshards of broken-up systems are put together to form new mechanismsreproducing social life. Anthropologists emphasize the agency of mar-ginal actors, unconnected from centralized networks, in creatively con-juring up functioning infrastructures (Buchli 2000). For instance,Abdoumaliq Simone (2003, 2004) celebrates the capacity of Africanurban residents to draw on their social resources to make up for theunreliability or outright absence of vital infrastructures and formal pro-cesses of organization. He highlights how residents put urban systemstogether from below and thus manage the deterioration and precari-ousness of their cities.4 On the other hand, scholars stress the oppressiveand destructive effects of infrastructures (Rodgers and ONeill 2012).Julie Y. Chu (2014) analyzes how disrepair and the slow decay of infra-structures in residential areas in urban China collude with governmentofficials and commercial developers strategies of forced eviction of resi-dents and demolition of their homes to make room for profitable newconstruction and land speculation (see also Anand 2012; Schwenkel2013). Disrepairthe condition of things slowly but steadily fallingapartdistributes the destructive agency of the state across time andamong hosts of material actants, making it possible to avoid spectacularconfrontations between state agents and protesting residents.

My argument in this article builds on but also differs from thesecontrasting views on the politics of infrastructural abjection (Ferguson1999:236238), disrepair, and fixing, by emphasizing the constructivepotential of scraps and at the same time the centrifugal tendenciesinherent to them. I highlight how scraps, through their potential to formnew connections, occasioned forms of collective maintenance workshared by a group of residents at 5 Oktyabrskaya that filled the voidcreated by the crisis of formal urban governance in the post-Sovietperiod. That mundane material work led to the formation of place and asituated community of neighbors. Yet, simultaneously the scrappiness ofthose material items and of the social relations that they enabled andmediated, implied a potential for instability and disaggregation of local-ity. Infrastructures are frequently assumed to play central roles in gener-ating state effects (Harvey 2005; Mitchell 1999) and supportingnational identities. To draw an example from my own work, I show

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elsewhere that in Astana government-orchestrated construction-workson a large scale give substance to the reconstruction of the state as asocial, imagined, and material realitya process I call state-buildingthrough building work (Laszczkowski 2014:152). But, drawing onGiorgio Agambens (2011) work, Coleman (2014) argues that the rela-tion between material connections and meaning is aporeticthereis no deterministic correspondence between material structures and col-lective sentiment or identity. Thus, as I demonstrate below, the relation-ships between the local community that emerged at 5 Oktyabrskayaand the state were ambivalent and at times openly antagonistic.

Urbanism in the USSR and after

The history of 5 Oktyabrskaya is tied with the late-Soviet and post-Soviet history of urbanism as a form of place-making state power.Following Rabinow (1989), by urbanism I mean a form of powerdeploying knowledge and bureaucratic techniques to define the normsand forms of the social environment in citiesthe management ofpeople and things to produce and maintain places in specific forms. ToSoviet planners, the city was the engine of social progress (Alexanderand Buchli 2007:1). Soviet urbanism undertook the formation of a newkind of person (Crowley and Reid 2002:15), a new economy, society,politicsin short, a new culture (Kotkin 1995:34). Every detail ofurban infrastructurefrom a piece of pipe to a family dwelling to acluster of apartment blockswas to partake in assembling the Sovietsocial (Collier 2010:85). From the late 1950s, Soviet authorities empha-sized the extensive construction of standardized four- and five-story (andlater higher) apartment blocks (French 1995:6996), which still domi-nate the landscape in many cities today. The residential cluster, includ-ing apartments, courtyards, shops, and service points, was conceived of asa whole, designed to induce more collective forms of everyday behavior.Tselinograd (as Astana used to be known in Soviet times) was redesignedin 1963, with a new general plan that followed the then-ruling modernistprinciples established in the 1920s and 1930s by the architect NikolaiMilyutin (Alpyspaeva 2008:94; French 1995:3549). The plan entailedthe construction of a new street grid, lined with apartment blocks,including the area where the building at 5 Oktyabrskaya was later built.

In the post-Soviet period, former Tselinograd followed a uniquetrajectory of change. After Kazakhstans independence, the city was firstrenamed Aqmola (1992), and, as mentioned, in 1997 the countryscapital was relocated here from much larger Almaty. The following yearAqmola was renamed again: AstanaCapital in Kazakh.5 Since then,half a million people in search for better lives (Laszczkowski 2011a)moved to the city from all over Kazakhstan, by far outnumbering Soviet-era inhabitants.6 Monumental architecture has been used in Astana totransform the formerly provincial, mid-size industrial town into a futur-istic national capital. A new general plan was commissioned from theworld-renowned Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa (Bissenova 2014).

Every detail of

urban

infrastructure

from a piece of

pipe to a family

dwelling to a

cluster of

apartment

blockswas to

partake in

assembling the

Soviet social

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To manifest a vision of Kazakhstans future as an independent, techno-logically advanced state integrated into global markets, an expansivenew district was added beyond Soviet-era city-limits. This space wasfilled with an eclectic array of grandiose government buildings, officeskyscrapers, housing estates for the elites and public employees, andfanciful commercial venues. The Soviet-era city-center was alsorenewed, even if renewal did not reach far off the main thoroughfares.The development of the new capital became the pivot of Kazakhstansstate- and nation-building ideologies (Anacker 2004; Koch 2010;Laszczkowski 2014; Schatz 2004; Wolfel 2002).

However, as Buchli (2007) points out, the creation of the new capitalevoked profound public questions as to the forms and values of social life.One set of such questions, in particular, concerned the relationshipsbetween government, city-planning, and the population. The telos ofurbanism changed compared to the Soviet era. Up until the later 2000s,emphasis in Astana was placed on the construction of new seats of powerand spectacular venues built to impress domestic and transnational audi-ences. Residential development was treated as secondary, and while newhousing complexes were built, officials paid little attention to thearrangement of courtyards. Even in the new estates residents commonlycomplained about this shortcoming which caused a haunting feel ofemptiness. As a top city-planning official repeatedly assured me, theSoviet-era aspiration to mold selves and society through hands-on man-agement of neighborhoods was explicitly abandoned. This may be inter-preted as the adoption of neoteric liberal views by local planners(cf. Chikanaev 2008) or as a case of postmodern privileging of surfaceappearance at the expense of substance (cf. Jameson 1991), but alsoasan effect of the post-Soviet crisis of power and knowledge that leftplanners hesitant to tamper with urban milieus.

The collapse of the USSR had shaken up most areas of social life(Humphrey 2002). The situation was described, specifically with regardto urban Kazakhstan, as chaos (Nazpary 2002). A central element ofchange was the privatization of apartments and utility networks. Far froma simple transfer of ownership, this was a complex process of trying outand negotiating basic rights, roles, norms, and relations (Alexander2009a; Struyk 2011). Households were suddenly burdened with theresponsibility for building-maintenance, while heat, light, gas, and waterwere commoditized, breaking up previously taken-for-granted materialbackground ties between residents and the state.

Importantly, uncertainty was felt equally acutely inside municipalbureaucracies (Alexander 2007a, 2007b; Humphrey 2007). City-buildingin the sense of that totalizing, teleological form of governance establishedin the Soviet era (gradostroitelstvo), was over (Collier 2010:124). Soviet-era city executive committees in Kazakhstan were transformed into cityhalls, akimaty (sing. akimat). Their members pondered what their newroles vis--vis citizens and infrastructures might be while social norms andvalues were in turmoil. One thing in particular that became unknown waswho was now responsible for shared spaces within residential units, such as

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basements, hallways, staircases, and courtyards. Initially, maintenance wasthe responsibility of municipal housing departments (domoupravleniya).Those were large organizations (only two covered all of Aqmola) andlargely ineffective. In the late 1990s the so-called Apartment OwnersCommittees (Komitety Sobstvennikov KvartirKSK) were established. AKSK normally groups the owners of all apartments in a cluster of severalneighboring apartment blocks. The members elect a chairperson fromtheir ranks. The committee pools monthly fees from members, managesmaintenance and repair-work, and employs an accountant and, fundsallowing, a plumber, cleaning personnel, and other technicians.

In sum, the breakup of material and administrative chains of con-nection left both urban administrators and residents groping for ways todeal with the heterogeneous mass of suddenly redefined material ele-ments: buildings, pipes, wires, and so forth. This opened the way forscrappy ad hoc local infrastructural solutions to proliferate.

The apartment block and its residents

In spite of the above-mentioned spectacular architectural develop-ments in recent years, the bulk of Astanas built environment is stillpredominantly composed of Soviet-built neighborhoods of apartmentblocks from the 1960s1980s. In terms of style and architectural form,the building at 5 Oktyabrskaya, dating from the 1970s, is a typicalexample of that architecture (see Figure 1). The building is a box ofgray brick, with five stories, four entrances, and seventy apartments. Themonotonous faade with square windows is broken by double verticalrows of balconies between each pair of staircases. Residents haveglassed-up most of the balconies for protection from wind and frost.Oktyabrskaya Street is located in the north-central residential part of the

Figure 1. 5 Oktyabrskaya Street. Photo by author.

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city, half-way between the Soviet-era city-center and an industrial zone(see Figure 2). Positioned inside a quadrangle of north-south and east-west roads, the block stands away from the street (see Figure 3). In frontof the building, there is the courtyard (dvor) with some trees, a fewbenches to sit and have rest, a childrens playground, a laundry-dryingarea, and a tiny grocery store with a steep, bright-red roof. Across thedvor stands a twin building that was constructed at the same time as 5Oktyabrskaya. The dvor is overshadowed by a higher, nine-story apart-ment block built at a later time at the dvors southern side.

Despite the typicality of their outward form, the building at 5Oktyabrskaya and the twin block opposite were less typical in terms oftheir specific social history. They had been built as so-called co-operative houses (kooperativnye doma). In the late-Soviet period urbanhousing was generally state property. Apartments were distributed eitherby municipal authorities or state-owned major enterprises (Morton1980). Factory-organized housing was especially prevalent in those citieswhere the municipal economy hinged on a few city-forming enterprises(gradoobrazuyushchee predpriyatiya; Collier 2010:102).7 Some employers,however, did not have the capacity to build, distribute, and managehousing. Those citizens working, for example, in the potrebsoyuz (stateadministration of the supply of consumer goods), airlines, healthcare, oreducation, could enter a co-operative (kooperativ) for the building ofapartments. Such apartment blocks were constructed and maintained forresident-members contributions, which meant that their occupants wereaccustomed to relative independence and responsibility. The building at5 Oktyabrskaya was an example of this type of housing. That fact waslater to have implications for locality in the post-Soviet period. Namely,

Figure 2. AstanaOrientation map.

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in a departure from the usual pattern, both 5 Oktyabrskaya and the twinblock across the dvor had their own separate KSKs. Long-standing resi-dents explained to me that this was a legacy of the buildings co-operativepast.

The changes associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union hadtheir resonances for social life in residential neighborhoods and indi-vidual apartment blocks. The privatization of housing and the redrawingof state boundaries triggered mass residential mobility (Struyk2011:208210). Large numbers of Russians and other non-Kazakhsmoved out from Kazakhstan. After Tselinograd became Astana and tens,soon hundreds of thousands of migrants from across Kazakhstan startedmoving in, Soviet-era residents continued to depart, selling or rentingtheir property to newcomers. During the 1990s and 2000s, up to three-quarters of long-standing inhabitants left 5 Oktyabrskaya and werereplaced by various kinds of newcomers. As a result, the community ofresidents was itself, in a sense, scrappy: composed of individuals withheterogeneous backgrounds, brought into the block by various socio-economic dynamics and legal regimes at various times, and only partlyintegrated, with divergent interests and contrasting relationships to theplace.

Some of the newcomers, having come to settle permanently, soonwere no longer perceived as strangers. By the time of my arrival they hadlived in the block for a good several years, in some cases for over a decade.Together with the remaining old-time residents they formed a relativelybounded group connected by everyday forms of neighborly sociality. The

Figure 3. 5 Oktyabrskaya Street and its immediate vicinity.

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members of that group knew each other and their family members byname, and addressed the elderly with the familial tyot or ded (auntieand granddad, respectively) added to their first names. They greetedeach other heartily and often chatted in the dvor, where their childrenand grandchildren played together. The women exchanged home-madepickles and vegetables from their suburban garden patches, and the menhelped each other repair their cars. At the time of my fieldwork, membersof that group of neighbors generally aged between their early fortiesand mid-seventies. They were all Russian or in any case Slav.8 The eldesthad migrated from various places in European Russia, Siberia, Ukraine,and Belarus during Khrushchevs Virgin Land (Tselina) campaign, fromthe mid-1950s to mid-1960s (Pohl 1999).9 The middle-aged hadbeen born in Tselinograd or in other towns in north-central Kazakhstan.They had various educational and professional backgrounds. Forinstance, the group included a retired construction-machinery operator,a truck driver, an accountant, a tailor, an elderly taxi-driver, a retiredfood-supply worker, a Soviet-era consumer-trade clerk, and a retiredshop-manager.

Members of this group drew a clear boundary separating them from adifferent kind of newcomers to the block: short-term tenants, usuallyKazakh wage-migrants from provincial towns and villages, to whom atleast one-third of all flats at 5 Oktybrskaya were rented. These migrantstended to live in overcrowded conditions, sometimes several of themsharing a single bedroom. The more established neighbors accused themof unruly behavior such as littering and damaging the stairwells andvarious items in the courtyard. The migrant tenants generally did notpartake in dvor socializing with other neighbors or in collective initia-tives for the maintenance of the block and the courtyard. For thesereasons they were seen as not really belonging to the local community.

Fixing the dvor

Formally speaking, the dvor was municipal property and its mainte-nance thus a responsibility of the city hall (akimat). However,as mentioned, following the post-Soviet crisis of knowing(Alexander and Buchli 2007:3), throughout the 1990s and much of the2000s municipal authorities lacked capacity or willingness to engageconsistently in the maintenance of residential units. At 5 Oktyabrskaya,the municipality occasionally provided major elements of dvor infra-structure. At some point in the early 2000s, the akimat had the internalroadway surrounding the dvor paved and new curbs installed. Onanother occasion, a besedka (single-piece table with benches under aplywood roof) and some ladders and slides for children to play wereplaced in the courtyard. However, akimat involvement with the dvorwas inconsistent: for instance, an old fence was once removed, presum-ably to be replaced with a new one, yet that new fence never materi-alized. Everyday maintenance of the dvor was left in the residentshands.

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Aleksandra Stepanovna played a leading role in organizing residentsto weave through the available things (to paraphrase Latour, 2005:68)in order to maintain the dvor. She and her husband, both north-Kazakhstani Russians who had lived in Tselinograd for all their adultlives, had moved to 5 Oktyabrskaya with their then-schoolboy son in1998. They bought an apartment from a former resident moving out.Their second son was born there. Soon, the couple purchased anotherflat in the same building, which they rented to long-term tenants (suchas me) for a substantial share in their household income. AleksandraStepanovna was not employed by the KSK and held no official functionrelated to the maintenance of the block (she was a seamstress and herhusband, having tried many vocations before, repaired ATMs for abank). Nonetheless, she was often seen busy cleaning or repairing variousitems in the staircases, the courtyard, or tending the greenery around thebuilding. Aleksandra Stepanovna valued a sense of neighborly commu-nity and was wholeheartedly dedicated to the good of the block (notleast, of course, because she owned two flats there, though other ownerswere not so committed). By the time of my fieldwork she had become theresidents informal leader in matters of the maintenance of the courtyardand the shared infrastructure of the building. At times, she had evenbeen able to de facto appoint and dismiss KSK chairs.

Aleksandra Stepanovna personally painted the fence surroundingthe laundry-drying area, using paint she purchased for KSK money. Thefence remained unpainted on the side of the other building, as with mostitems for which the other KSK was responsible. Having left-over redpaint, Aleksandra Stepanovna renovated a concrete camel in the chil-drens playground. The railing around the playground was made of oldpipes that had been stored in the basement, their purpose long forgotten,probably leftovers from some previous maintenance job. AleksandraStepanovna had arranged for the owner of the small grocery shop in thedvor to have the pipes soldered and put up around the playground. Thusthe shop-owner, a Kazakh woman who had recently migrated to Astana,settled her bills for having connected the shop to the blocks water supplyand sewerage.10 Next, the small grass-patches at each of the buildingsfour entrances had different fences still. Those had once stood in front ofthe neighboring nine-story block. Then the owner of a newly-openedboutique in the nine-story had them replaced with fancier fences, simplydumping the old pieces behind the building. Using the Soviet-eraPioneer Day as a pretext, Aleksandra Stepanovna mobilized a group ofmale residents of 5 Oktyabrskaya to put up the fences. This was not aprofessional job, however, so she had to constantly remind people notto sit on the wobbly fences. For sitting, there were benches by eachentrance. Originally, there had been four identical concrete-and-woodbenches. At some point, two of those were replaced by the akimat withmore decorative, park-style items. Aleksandra Stepanovna could notrecall where exactly those had come from or why they were only two; shesuspected the other two had simply been stolen before they were eveninstalled. Finally, one of the most long-standing residents, a truck-driver,

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once brought an elegant heavy wrought-iron bench, which he had appro-priated in circumstances likewise shrouded in the mists of favor-economyand forgetting. However, the bench soon disappeared from outside theblock, only to be found in the courtyard of a nearby school. AleksandraStepanovna commented with a self-assured tone entirely disregardingthe benchs unclear provenance: Technically, its ours. We could go andbring it back anytime.

As outlined above, urban residential areas, especially in formerSoviet settings, are often considered focal sites of statist intervention,through which governments seek to organize and control social life.11

However, these details show how at 5 Oktyabrskaya place was consti-tuted through the contingent intersection of multiple agenciessomefrom within the neighborhood, some from other placeswhile the influ-ence of formal urban governance was limited and intermittent. Theemerging place was a scrappy assemblage in a double sense. First, it wasmaterially made up of what were mostly scraps: old pieces of pipe, leftoverpaint, discarded fences, and other things jerry-rigged, re-used, recycled,re-appropriated, orin some casessnatched from some other place.Those heterogeneous items came together through the generally unco-ordinated actions of diverse actors, each pursuing their own situatedprojects. Aleksandra Stepanovnas coordination was only partial andcontingent on available items and coincidental opportunities. Benches,fences, and other things appeared and disappeared depending on theoften obscure personal deals and exchanges of favors linking residents,administrators, entrepreneurs, and outsiders.

The other sense of scrappiness here refers to the emergence ofplace as a contingent spatiotemporal entanglement of processes such asprivatization, commercialization of urban space, reform of urban gover-nance, or migration, none of which principally aimed at place-making.This is not a case of large-scale phenomena impinging on the local,but rather of translocal flows of action crosscutting locally, bringing inpeople and things. Consider, for instance, the pipes used to make therailing around the playground. They must have been brought to 5Oktyabrskaya by the akimat or some other municipal organization. Butthen they were just left in the basement because that organization,probably itself undergoing reform, either had no use for them or nocapacity to retrieve them. Finally Aleksandra Stepanovna found new usefor the pipes. The partly undetermined mandate of the KSK, and thepolitical decisions that had created the KSKs in the first place, allowedher to gain unofficial but effective control of courtyard maintenance.Then the actual job of soldering the pipes was carried out thanks to theshopkeeper who would not have been there if not for the political-economic projects, devised in remote places, which had allowed theestablishment of private shops in neighborhood courtyards and triggeredmigration to the new capitalplus, of course, the entrepreneursunknown personal motivations. The local place emerged as a continu-ally improvised, scrappy assemblage out of such convergences of actionswidely distributed in space and time.

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Furthermore, the ongoing material work of putting and holding thatmotley assortment of different things together simultaneously amountedto the production of locality as a structure of feeling (Appadurai1996:181) and the formation of local subjectsthe making of peoplewho think of themselves (at least sometimes) as belonging in and to aplace (Raffles 1999:334). On an individual level, the formation of localsubjecthood is perhaps most clearly seen in Aleksandra Stepanovnascase. Through the material work she performed in the dvor, AleksandraStepanovna from an outsider became a local leader. Moreover, sincematerial elements are subject to interpretation and held to representhuman relations and collectives, in minor rituals of maintenance . . .material connections are linked to collective identity (Coleman2014:470). Thus, at 5 Oktyabrskaya, a sense of collective localsubjecthood crystallized around particular items: the we in whose nameAleksandra Stepanovna, for instance, claimed the ownership of the fancybench. This does not need to imply that community was forged as afixed entity. Rather, community was actuated in specific moments and inrelation to particular matters of concern (Latour 2005).

Assemblages of specific things make places different, or make differ-ent places, giving rise to divergent identifications. The scraps made 5Oktyabrskaya a place which residents found entirely different and sepa-rate from those areas elsewhere in the city where the government wascreating its new capital (compare Figure 1 with Figure 4). This wasexpressed poignantly in the following comment by one dweller in thebuilding across the dvor, a Kazakh working-class man in his mid-fifties:This here is the old city, and Nazarbaev [Kazakhstans president] isbuilding a new city there. . . . We are lost, abandoned people. We hereare Tselinograd people, and over there are Astana people. Although thesense of despair was far less pronounced among those residents who, likeAleksandra Stepanovna, actively took care of their block, these words

Figure 4. Residential block in the new part of Astana. Photo by author.

Putting and

holding that

motley assortment

of different things

together

simultaneously

amounted to the

production of

locality as a

structure of

feeling

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indicate how the different material make-up of places produced juxta-posed identities (Tselinograd people versus Astana people). Thatfurther implied a particular relation of this neighborhood and localsubjects to the state: a relation of abandonment, not belongingtogether, a latent opposition that resulted from the scrappy constitutionof the local milieu.

The KSK takeover

The previous section has shown how scraps helped constitute placeand imbued it with particular characteristics. At this point,however, let us return to the opening scenethe discussion aboutvalves and expenses. That scene and later developments reveal tensionsamong neighbors, their only provisional ability to manage the materialinfrastructure of the block and the dvor, and the susceptibility of place toconjunctures of outside practices. In other words, they shed light on theconstraining and disaggregative dimension of scrappiness, which, as shallbe revealed shortly, eventually led to the unmaking of locality.

The man with the crumpled notebook, Mikhail Petrovich, was thechair of the KSK at 5 Oktyabrskaya. In the Soviet period, he used to workat the municipal electricity department and had been among the originalkooperativ members. More recently, however, he had moved out from theblock. He still owned an apartment there, in which his daughter lived.On this account, the residents trusted himthey had known him forlong and apartment ownership was an incentive to care for the block. Onthe other hand, Mikhail Petrovich himself did not live there any longer,and rumor had it, he owned property somewhere in Russia. Like manybut far from all Kazakhstani Russians, he had obtained Russian citizen-ship, which meant he could emigrate with relative ease. Therefore, theneighbors saw him as not quite in the same boat as the others. Theypondered how strongly committed he actually remained to their commongood. The day after the valve inspection I asked Aleksandra Stepanovnaif the point of the discussion had been money. She replied:

We were not quite counting money. We had given Mikhail Petrovichsome money before, he had bought some stuff, and we wanted to counthow much had been spent . . . But you see, I was counting, and I dontknow these things, then someone else was counting . . . We tried to doit all at once, but . . . its very hard to count all this stuff, you need toknow these things, and thenIve never done audit, Ive never con-trolled anyone . . . And the documents, they always have to be signedby someone [other than the chair, on behalf of the KSK], but he[Mikhail Petrovich] comes when no one is around to sign the papers, oras it often happens, the grandmas [babushki, elderly women] will signthem [without inspecting] . . . He often makes the documents aftersome time, like its only now that we see the bill for the stuff he boughtin May [two months before], so then its very hard to figure out whatgoes with what, if you didnt follow . . . Some claim hes a thief, weshould get rid of himbut no one wants to do the job . . .

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Many said Aleksandra Stepanovna should replace Mikhail Petrovich,but she was reluctant. While she had long been practically in charge ofthe block, she did not want to shoulder the responsibility that came witha formal appointment. Moreover, she felt awkward with regard toMikhail Petrovich, as she had been the one to put him up for chairmana few years back.

Soon, Mikhail Petrovich decided to retire as chairman. Nobodyseemed ready to replace him, and some residents began to suggest that athorough report on the KSKs finances should be demanded of him beforehe was gone. Meanwhile, the KSK chair from the neighboring nine-storybuilding, a young and energetic Kazakh man, began to be seen around theblock, along with an akimat representative who aggressively demandedthat any meetings among the residents be registered with the municipal-ity and conducted in his presence. Soon, the residents at 5 Oktyabrskayafound themselves under pressure from the akimat to give up runningtheir own KSK and to accede to a common KSK with the twin buildingacross the dvor and the nine-story. Aleksandra Stepanovna and otherlong-standing inhabitants were upset by what they interpreted as anattempt at suppressing the blocks autonomy. They were particularlyoffended by the chairmans plan to clear the basement at 5 Oktyabrskaya,where the residents stored pickles and all sorts of things, to convert itinto commercial space. The neighbors believed that the akimat preferredto group KSKs so as to have fewer of them do deal with and to more easilyelicit funds from the residents. They questioned the legitimacy of theakimats actions.

The merger was effected through a hastily arranged meeting a fewweeks later. A small group of apartment-owners, in the presence of theakimat representative and the chairman from the nine-story, voted infavor of abolishing the separate KSK at 5 Oktyabrskaya. The vote washeld on very short notice, and only twelve voters were present, five ofwhom voted against the motion. As one of the upset residents pointedout, that was against KSK rules, which required a thirty-percent quorum.Nonetheless, Mikhail Petrovich soon tacitly passed the relevant docu-ments to his counterpart from the nine-storyan act that other residentssaw as treason, but had no power to oppose.

This story highlights the fragility of locality resulting from thescrappiness of internal and external relations constituting place. Thefuzziness of the KSK as an administrative form, which had enabledAleksandra Stepanovna to successfully coordinate maintenance work,finally proved a liability. Residents lacked the knowledge and resources toguarantee proper care of the block infrastructure and communal budget.Even the pooling of funds was not a straightforward affair while someapartment-owners and tenants refused to pay their share. Second, thescrappiness and recalcitrance of the material things that went into themaintenance of the dvor meant the assemblage they made was hard tograsp and managea point powerfully visualized by the confusing heapof old and new valves and pipes in the basement. Additionally, theinternal tensions of the neighbors community and its contingency on

The scrappiness

and recalcitrance

of the material

things that went

into the

maintenance of

the dvor meant the

assemblage they

made was hard to

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far-reaching external connections are further exposed if we consider therole of Mikhail Petrovich. His commitment to 5 Oktyabrskaya was appar-ently less than complete, and so was other residents trust in him as theirchairman. As mentioned, this had to do with the Kazakhstani Russiansinconsistent positioning with regard to the two statesKazakhstan andRussia, which suggests the breadth of the translocal networks of relationson which locality may depend. Finally, the politics of place-makinginvolves competing claims by different actors about their position rela-tive to the place in question and their entitlement to control it (Tsing2000). At 5 Oktyabrskaya, the group of long-standing residents had beenoutnumbered by newcomers, whose presence was the result of dynamicsincluding the commodification of apartments, Kazakhstans capital relo-cation, and migrationthe same processes that had contributed to theformation of locality. The old-time residents questioned those newcom-ers local belonging and right to decide, just as they questioned thelegitimacy of the akimats attempt to strengthen its grip over of theneighborhood. They saw the akimat representative and the KSK chair-man from the nine-story as outsiders and usurpers of authority over localaffairs. However, when it came to deciding the fate of 5 OktyabrskayasKSK, the long-term residents were outvoted.

In the months that followed, little improvement was noted in themaintenance of the building or the courtyard. The only ostensible dif-ference was that the new KSK fired the sweeper at 5 Oktyabrskaya, animpoverished female resident with a drinking problem, which resulted inthe courtyard hardly being swept at all. Nevertheless, the KSK takeoverhad significance for the residents insofar as they now had even lesscontrol over their block and dvor than before. From their point of view,that meant an unmaking of locality (cf. Raffles 1999:346). The physicalstructure of the block remained unchanged, yet the particular configu-ration of micropolitical relationships and sense of belonging cameundone.

ConclusionThe material world is hardly fixed, inscribed or explicitly signifying;nor is it inherently ambiguous, polyvalent and open. . . . The mate-rial world is . . . whatever an individual agent or group requires it tobe, or . . . enables it to become in order to cope with contingencies andrealise individual or group interests, writes Victor Buchli, and he adds:By applying a little bit of paint, inserting a strategically placed thinpartition, or . . . rearranging the furniture of a room, one can assert andsubvert entirely different and contradictory cosmologies of social being(2000:187). Buchli makes an important pitch against overly determinis-tic theories of the relationship between spatial planning and sociallife (e.g., Hillier and Hanson 1984), and in favor of a research sensibilitythat addresses the roles of individuals and embraces the multivocalityand open-endedness of social action. A similar theoretical orientationhas also driven my analysis of place-making in the courtyard at 5

They now had

even less control

over their block

and dvor than

before. From

their point of

view, that meant

an unmaking of

locality

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Oktyabrskaya. However, the results of this analysis suggest that theaffirmation of the individual ability to manage the undecidability(Buchli 2000:5) of the material world, as expressed in these quotes, mightjust need to be qualified. I have observed how place emerged out of atangle of human and non-human, local and outside agencies. It was adynamic and fragile construct which needed to be constantly maintainedand reproduced. The practices of its reproduction included quotidianinteractions among neighbors and more formal activities such as electingKSK chairs, holding votes, and managing accounts. Equally importantfor place-making was the material maintenance of the apartment blockand courtyard. At a time when the attention of planners in Astana wasfocused on spectacular developments in a new part of the city while theinvolvement of the formal place-making institutions of the state withSoviet-built residential neighborhoods was limited and inconsistent, het-erogeneous scraps enabled residents to creatively reproduce place andperform community. However, scraps also constrained and resisted theresidents agency. The scrappiness of local arrangements, in the doublesense of material make-up and of the entanglement of the place and localsubjects in multiple translocal social, economic, and political relations,simultaneously meant that locality was an unstable assemblage. Eventu-ally, long-standing residents were deprived of their autonomy in manag-ing the place.

Much has been written about the relationships between the state,ordinary residents, and material infrastructures of urban residential areas.Infrastructure has been seen to diffract the ideological meanings it wasdesigned to convey (Humphrey 2005); resist neoliberal reform of utilityprovision (Collier 2010); help oppress particular classes of residents,denying their social and political entitlements (Anand 2012); or slowlyfall apart, contributing to the creative destruction of places and com-munities (Chu 2014). The case of the apartment block and courtyard inAstana highlights aporetic entanglements of state power with the agencyof residents and heterogeneous material actants. Mediated by the bits andpieces of infrastructures, state agency was far from determining the shapeof locality. Various elements of state-provided infrastructure were cre-atively appropriated by residents and formed parts of emerging localassemblages. This, however, is not a call to celebrate the creative powersof infrastructural bricolage. As I have argued, scraps encapsulate withinthem the potential both for crafting new connections and for conflict,collision, and instability. They materialized multiple place-making con-nections and influences which variously colluded and collided with theagency of urban administrators. Sometimes, they generated oppositionbetween the local place and the state. Plausibly, the historical condi-tions in post-Soviet cities were particularly conducive for scraps to pro-liferate and take center stage. However, rather than being a special caseunto itself, the scrappiness of post-Soviet urban place-making points tothe more general capacity of material things to stabilize and destabilizeplaces within networks of social and material connections, and some-times to defy human efforts to produce and maintain order.

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NotesAcknowledgments. This research was made possible by SocAnthMarieCurie Early Stage Training networkMEST-CT-2005-020702. I wishto thank Jutta Turner for drawing the maps used in this article, andCatherine Alexander, Alima Bissenova, James Carrier, SvetlanaJacquesson, Soledad Jimnez-Tovar, Natalie Koch, Joe Long, AndrThiemann, two anonymous reviewers for City & Society, and editorSuzanne Scheld for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manu-script. I also wish to thank the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthro-pology, Halle, and its director Gnther Schlee for providing me withan institutional home during the research project from which thisarticle is drawn.

1Fictional address. A real Oktyabrskaya Street once existed in todaysAstana, but it was located in another part of the city. Likewise, the namesof all persons appearing in this article have been changed.

2This article is drawn from a larger research project on the relation-ships between the transformations of the built environment and socialand political change in Astana (Laszczkowski 2012). The data used inthis article was generated through participation in the everyday lifeof the apartment block, residents meetings, minor maintenance jobs,and neighborly socializing in the courtyard, as well as informal extendedinterviews with residents.

3See, for instance, the recently growing anthropological literature onruins and ruination (Edensor 2005; Gordillo 2014; Stoler 2013).

4Simone extends the meaning of the term infrastructure to includethe ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects,persons, spaces, and practices (2004:407408); he speaks in that sense ofpeople as infrastructure.

5The city was originally established in the 19th century as a Tsaristoutpost called Akmolinsk (Dubitskiy 1990).

6While according to official statistics the population increasedfrom around 275 thousand in 1997 to 650 thousand in 2010 (RegionyKazakhstana 2011:71), almost 70 thousand old-time inhabitants leftAstana between 1997 and 2003 alone (Tatibekov 2005:27). Moreover,the number of newcomers might be underestimated, as for variousreasons many migrants go unregistered (see Zabirova 2002).

7In Tselinograd this role was played by the agricultural machineryproducer, Tselinselmash (Alpyspaeva 2008:4560) and several otherfactories.

8Russian influence in Kazakhstan dates back to tsarist colonizationsince the 18th century. Under Soviet rule, Russian and other Slav pres-ence dramatically increased. The Slavs settled mainly in the north-central and north-eastern parts of Kazakhstan where they formedregional majorities (see Kaiser and Chinn 1995).

9The Virgin Lands campaign had been a large-scale agriculturaldevelopment scheme intended to turn the steppes of north-central

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Kazakhstan into a grain producing region. It entailed the relocation of upto two million settlers into the area (Pohl 1999:2)

10The shop itself was an ambiguous addition to the dvor. Theresidents had initially opposed the idea of having it built, based onSoviet-era principles of social and spatial organization: in AleksandraStepanovnas words, We were used since the Soviet times to the follow-ing rule: whats there is there, and nothing extra is needed. Somesuspected the shopkeeper had obtained the necessary permits by bribingsomeone at the akimat.

11For non-Soviet settings, see e.g., Holston 1989; McDonogh 1999;Rutheiser 1999.

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