Counter-logistics and municipalism: Popular infrastructures during the pandemic in Rosario

Abstract

Logistics, as the language and practice that organises the distribution of matter and value, not only scripts the infrastructural expansion of late capitalist urbanisations, it also informs the tactics of survivability and resistance that address the spatial and social disparities generated by the latter. Behind the arrangement of makeshift infrastructural set-ups for commercial exchange, food distribution and community support, there is a form of popular logistics, interventions put in place to articulate the circulation of resources, weave nodes of solidarity and navigate the bureaucratic and territorial distances that exist across institutional scales. The paper frames the integration of these forms of counter-logistical expressions as an emerging form of municipalism. Focussing on municipal responses to the pandemic, the essay describes the emergence of counter forms of logistics in Rosario, Argentina. It registers the material and virtual adaptations that social movements, neighbourhood organisations and public agencies put in place to configure different forms of producing and distributing goods and services in the city. In a context where privatised infrastructures of distribution mediate the expressions of urban life, the paper positions the articulation of common and popular forms of logistics as a strategic dimension of municipal politics.