Paper short abstract:

My paper will discuss the disrupted process of planning, deferring and realising a new tramway in Lviv (Ukraine). I will examine this tram as an urban socio-materiality brought into being by overlapping policies - some of them translocally mobile, others with the aim at regulating urban mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Tramway number 8 was projected originally by Soviet planning authorities in the 1980s as the major connection between the city centre and Sykhiv, the biggest socialist housing district intended to become a home for 120.000 people. The end of state socialism disrupted investments in public infrastructures and brought about the privatisation of the already built apartment blocks. The projected tramway became one of the many unfulfilled promises of an arrested future.

Journeys to the old city remained troublesome until the idea of the tram was reactivated about 25 years later and finally realised as a conjunction of different policies: i) an urban development scheme that aims at relocating Lviv as an European tourism and IT centre; ii) the subsidies strategies of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development granting credits to "build a new post-Cold War era in Central and Eastern Europe"; and iii) the International Climate Initiative of the German government that finances projects to mitigate green house gas emissions in developing or transforming countries.

In my paper I will trace these policies to their institutional settings of origin as well as to the urban socio-materiality they co-create. I will examine the political rationalities behind them and combine this analysis with observations about the everyday (connective, interactive, frictional) policies enabled by this new socio-materiality. I will discuss conceptually/methodologically how right the conjunction of different policies might open or close conditions of possibilities for infrastructure projects connecting hereby the project of an Anthropology of Policy with infrastructure studies.