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City of Repair stems from a suspicion that the foundations of urban life rely not on grand solutions but rather on small, improvised, and persistent actions: a staircase rebuilt by a neighbor, a market that reorganizes traffic, an altar that cares for otherwise neglected items. In these often-unnoticed practices, something fundamental is at stake: the possibility that the city will continue. In this context, the idea of “future” is transformed. Every repair, no matter how small, contains the anticipation of sustaining life under uncertain conditions.
Through fragmented explorations of Mexico City, this book constructs an unstable cartography built on detours and discoveries. It does not seek to explain the city in its entirety (an impossible undertaking) but rather to inhabit that impossibility. From this emerges what Julie-Anne Boudreau names an epistemology of the street—a form of knowledge that orients itself not around metrics of control or distance but from the body's own wanderings and wonder.
Julie-Anne Boudreau is Director of the PATIO lab (Institute of Geography, National Autonomous University of Mexico) and Codirector of the Humanity's Urban Future program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). She is also coauthor (with AbdouMaliq Simone, Ash Amin, Daniel Agbiboa, Filip De Boeck, and Enrica Morlicchio) of Urban Lifelines: The Future Between Foreclosure and Foreshadowing.