MINIM REPORT N.IV |DECEMBER 2020|

Municipal
logistics

Popularinfrastructures andSouthern urbanisms
during the pandemic
Leandro Minuchin | Julieta Maino | María Julia Bizzarri
Luciana Bertolaccini | María Victoria Gomez | Camila Panero

Minim is a municipalist observatory that amplifies the voice of municipalism by sharing practical and theoretical knowledge with the support of a community of activists, scholars, journalists, and public officials.
Dr. Leandro Minuchin is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Global Urbanism (U. of Manchester). He has done research on the politics of construction in South America. Is currently
editing a book on prefigurative urbanisms, focusing on radical architectural collectives in Latin
America. He leads material politics, a research practice on popular infrastructures in the global
south and is currently teaching a module on Municipal logistics at the Manchester School ofArchitecture.
Julieta Maino is a political scientist (Universidad Nacional de Rosario - UNR), an advanced
PhD student (UNGS) and a Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Political Science (UNR). She
is currently leading a research project on feminist organizations in local neighbourhoods in
Rosario.
Maria Julia Bizzarri is a political scientist (UNR) and Ma in Urban Studies (Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento). She focuses on feminist urbanism and urban financialization.
Luciana Bertolaccini is a political scientist (UNR) and PhD candidate funded by CONICET(Argentinian national research agency). She works on urban protest and feminist urbanism.
María Victoria Gomez Hernandez is a student of Political Science (UNR) and focuses on feminist urbanism and social policies.
Camila Panero is a student of Political Science (UNR). She works on feminist urbanism andthe right to the city.
© 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 license

Photo credits: La Poderosa
Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

Table of contents:
Introduction										

1Commoning platforms: Municipal logistics				6

From ‘Free Market’ to ‘Fair Market’					8Counter-logistics of food circulationand people’s production infrastructures					
10		Pueblo a Pueblo									 12Public food company								 14Infrastructure of knowledge							 16Counter- and feminist logistics						 19Popular organizations and infrastructures of care			21

Other municipalisms: Constructing counter-logistics		

23

1

MUNICIPAL LOGISTICS:

POPULAR INFRASTRUCTURES AND
SOUTHERN URBANISMS DURING
THE PANDEMIC 1
Introduction

The spread of Sars-Covid-2 prompted the Argentinean government to issue a decree enforcing
strict mandatory social confinement. On 20 March, the normal circulation of goods and people
was interrupted. Commercial and manufacturing outlets that were deemed non-essential wereclosed. Street-vending, the recovering and recycling of discarded materials, and the multiple
and precarious modalities of making ends meet, were all suspended. The cancellation of movement, halted minor forms of exchange and changas2, stifling the circulation of money, so vitalfor those living in one of the more than 4,400 slums in the country.3 In an attempt to diminish
the impact caused by the shutdown of circuits of provision and trade, the cabinet implemented
a series of programs, providing financial assistance to families and businesses: subsidies offered
to poor households were multiplied and wages of furloughed workers were partly paid by thestate. Yet despite these efforts, by April, the number of people requiring food assistance had
jumped from 9 to 11 million. In July, sources from the Ministry of Social Development estimated that the figure could have jumped to 13 million: close to 30 percent of the total population.
The pandemic rapidly dislocated procurement networks, disrupting contracts and financial
commitments, shrinking an already battered and indebted economy. Those economic sectors
associated with food production, distribution, finance, and on-line services strengthened theiralready dominant positions. For the vast majority, however, the pandemic meant further debt,
uncertainty and an increased reliance on local networks of solidarity.
1

We would like to thank the members of the social organizations and public institutions for sharing theirexperiences and views throughout the research project. Their politics beautifully illustrates the potentialities of a
new municipalist agenda.
2

In Argentina changas refer to casual labour, often associated with the building and repairs sector.

3

In 2016, a law brought about the mapping and recognition of informal settlements in Argentina. The

visualizations and geographical distribution of slums can be accessed at the “National Register for Popular Neighbourhoods”.

2

The alteration to the distribution and circulation of people and things, brutally exposed how dependant urban life has become on stable provision and services networks. Routines and patternsof sociability have become increasingly mediated by ever-expanding infrastructural set-ups, disfiguring the city as a bounded place of interactions. The territorial scale of the urban has morphed into unrecognizable spatial morphologies. Urban processes begin in distant hinterlands.
They expand as roads, ports, and airports accelerate the flow of people and things. Conduits,pipes, and codes, connect specialized zones with factories and workshops. At each stage, satellites and spreadsheets weave the urban scale as an intricate topological terrain, that is superimposed over political boundaries and administrations. Through transformations and movement,
minerals, grains and data are turned into commodities and their distribution generates otherforms of valorization. Insurance, derivatives and securities, support a process of financial accumulation that is then offloaded in the form of urban regeneration, infrastructural projects, andlarge real-estate investments. The urban in its contemporary iteration is no longer associatedwith densities, forms, or patterns of sociability. Instead, it has turned into a set of infrastructuralprocesses that initiate or cancel circulations. The civic imaginations that associated city life withfleeting encounters; where political parties and democratic confrontations organized the margins and reach of social and economic rights, are replaced by territorialities where urban identities are forged around residents’ ability to become enmeshed with distribution chains, exchange
platforms or solidarity networks.
As covid cases slowly began to spread; as the patterns and rhythms of normalcy started to fade,the urban level manifested itself as pure lack. Territories were engulfed by a generalized sense ofabstinence produced by the sudden reconfiguration of the mediating and circulatory arrangements that sustain consumer patterns and reproduce life. With the pandemic, the urban condition grew into the dystopian vision that Mumford or Lefebvre had anticipated more than 50
years ago: a concatenation of endless infrastructural processes ceaselessly transforming the faceof the earth, eroding the city as a place of experimentation and proximity, replacing it with interconnected territorial enclaves arranged to synchronize forms of capital accumulation.

Platform capitalism. Delivery workers on strike in Buenos Aires.
Photo: Politica Obrera, link3

The sudden interruption of flows prompted, in Argentina, a public debate regarding the processes and spaces enrolled in the production and distribution of things. Logistics became politicaland the domain of politics was reconfigured into a set of critical logistical decisions: how arethings moved? Who controls the platforms that organize virtual spaces of exchange? Are thereways of intervening supply chains? Discussions that until the pandemic could have seemed minor or peripheral; decisions that had been confined to the arcane spheres of business management, corporate boardrooms, and private security firms, were now held across a variety of publicarenas: from normative adaptations in parliaments to tactical demands posed by social movements. As closures and disruptions forced a rapid transition to on-line territories, logistics andopposition to the widespread commodification of platforms and distribution channels emerged
as defining ingredients of a radical agenda, that located municipal politics as an area of dissent
and possibility. The endurance of logistical arrangements and the stability of the infrastructural
networks that support them were rapidly scripted as strategic arenas from where to plan andadminister both the production of urban space and the protection of public health. From theprocurement of medical supplies and the construction of modular and temporary hospitals, tothe distribution of food boxes, the movement of essential workers, and the arrangement of delivery solutions. Behind the noise of party-political differences, the struggle over the politics oflogistics served to distil the true nature of the conflict. On one side were those actors benefittingfrom the reproduction and expansion of extractive logistical infrastructures. On the other, thosecalling for the municipalization of logistics and the commoning of platforms and supply chains.

La Poderosa working on a national campaign. “Pass on solidarity”.
Photo: La Poderosa

Despite prompting the mobilization of national and international resources and forcing the implementation of state-led protocols, for the newly elected administration, the spread of COVID-19 was ultimately configured as an urban problem. Not because the policing and design ofhealth policies were devolved – entirely – to local governments, but because the focus of politics
shifted to the invention and governance of procurement solutions. The urban emerged as thelevel where decisions regarding the functioning and integration of infrastructural arrangements
to sustain life were tested and implemented.

4This essay traces the emergence of counter forms of logistics in Rosario, Argentina. It registers
the material and virtual adaptations made by social movements, neighbourhood organizations,and public agencies to configure different forms of producing and distributing goods, services,and knowledge in the city. These counter-logistics contest the prominence of privatized andcommoditized provision networks and prefigure modes of constructing more just alternative
urban worlds. The article argues that the politicization of logistics offers a means of extending
and problematizing the remit and purpose of municipalism. In a context where privatized distribution infrastructures mediate the expressions of urban life, the paper advocates the articulationof common and people’s forms of logistics as a strategic dimension of a municipal politics.
The essay reviews the emergence of four different types of popular logistics in Rosario. The firstsection addresses the building of municipal platforms for the commercialization of goods andservices. By looking at two different initiatives, one implemented by the local government andthe other proposed by an urban alliance of parties, the section depicts how virtual exchange
platforms have become territories of dissent. The case of Mercado Justo (Fair Market), presented
as a radical alternative to the expansion of Amazon-like firms locally, rewires the urban economy around principles of proximity, makes visible the work of cooperatives and calls for the municipalization of logistical services. The second section addresses the logistics behind food production and distribution. Focusing on the work done by Pueblo a Pueblo and the proposal put
forward by Ciudad Futura and Frente Patria Grande to create a public food company, the section
examines how cooperative platforms between small farmers, segmentation hubs and non-commoditized forms of distribution provide an alternative to prevailing restrictive and concentrated
patterns of food access. The section connects the municipalist agenda with the commoning ofproduction and distribution of essential goods. The third section examines the role technicalknowledge plays in the configuration of people’s logistics. It describes the initiatives deployedby the National University of Rosario (UNR) during the pandemic. The section illustrates how
academic units reconfigured research from a support input used to inform decision-making
processes, to a critical component in the materialization of autonomous solutions. This institutional transition towards engaged and practical research, transformed the University into an
infrastructure of knowledge, where open and public research underpins the production anddistribution of essential materials like ventilators. The section illustrates how counter-forms oflogistics rely on horizontal forms of knowledge and data production. Lastly, we examined how
the pandemic prompted the consolidation of alternative care infrastructures: from supporting
the elderly, to attending cases of domestic violence, and helping families with assistance whenisolating or dealing with close Covid cases. Relying on the work done by feminist collectives indeprived areas, the section illustrates how prevailing forms of logistics reinforce patterns of inequality, condemning the female body to unrecognized and obscured forms of labour. The work
carried out by members of La Poderosa and Terreno Saludable, describes how feminist logistics
is prefiguring other forms of conceiving and constructing productive territories. The essay con5

cludes by highlighting how these popular logistics, born out of practised and shared historiesof political struggles, confront the engrained injustices of extractive forms of urbanization. It
frames and projects the call for the municipalization of logistics as a political struggle that cuts
across territorial levels and geographical areas.
The paper is based on interventions developed and implemented during the pandemic in Rosario. It registers the views and voices of the actors that were directly involved in giving shape toother forms of organizing infrastructural and logistical arrangements in the city.4 It is supported
by a review of media reports and policy documents. We traced and registered interactions insocial media platforms and asked activists to share visual material of their infrastructural spaces
and logistical arrangements.

Commoning platforms: Municipal logistics
A month after lockdown, with bars and shops closed; with open fairs and markets cancelled,
the local government of Rosario develop an on-line service that would allow small enterprises
to promote and advertise their goods and services: vidrieras en red (showcases on-line)5. The
platform was divided up into three different pages: one was set up for outlets

Feminist logistics. La Poderosa administering soup kitchens (comedores). The white sign reminds everyone that misogyny is “men’s hatred towards women”. Photo: La Poderosa

4

The team conducted over 12 different virtual interviews with key participants and transcribed andtranslated the recordings
5

Vidrieras refers to the old arcades. It projects onto the virtual realm, the physical experience of win-

dow-shopping. To visit Vidrieras en red.

6

that displayed information about their products and details about services, a second used the digital infrastructure to process purchases and commercial operations, and lastly, a third page was
exclusively curated for those involved in the suspended green fairs, offering organic products,
backed by the municipality’s social economy programs. The initiative, although it was limited
in its scope and reproduced outdated developmentalist distinctions between formal enterprises
and initiatives derived from social and people’s economies, did serve to identify imbalances andinequalities forced by the sudden virtualization of commercial exchange. The pandemic rapidly shifted demand to on-line platforms, like big supermarket chains or transnational virtual
warehouse sites like Mercado Libre (Free Market) – an on-line service that began as a regional
competitor to eBay and expanded to offer groceries, financial services, and wireless forms of
payment, damaging local shops and enterprises that had no on-line presence. In addition, delivery platforms, like Rappi or Glovo, suffocated supply by adding 30 or even 40 percent to theexchange cost. In this regard, Rosario’s secretary of economic development and employment
highlighted how delivery apps for goods and food were mistakenly presenting themselves “aspartners of local shops and producers”, generating and capturing value by providing the digital
infrastructure to establish commercial relations and the logistical support – rather than employment – to carry out the operation. With this initiative, the municipality posited logistics as acentral political sphere of contestation. The survivability of the commercial and productive fabric of the city rested on the possibility of developing other means of guaranteeing the circulationof goods. The commodification of logistics, not only had accentuated patterns of exclusion anddifferentiation: it was accelerating physical and territorial transformations, enforcing a deeper
disconnection between the sites of production and the places of consumption.
“Explosive growth”, that is how the CEO of Rappi characterized the expansion of the delivery
platform during the pandemic. The app, even though it presents itself as a delivery

Ciudad Futura and FSP’s digital infrastructure for exchange. Against Amazon’s model. No commissions,democratizing algorithms, strengthening local economies.

7

service, is more than that: it fulfils urban logistical necessities, fusing the operations of sortingand distribution with credit offers. The apps generate a separate terrain of functions, where they
govern the costs and rights of visibility. For small commercial outlets, which previously reliedon flyers and word of mouth to promote their shops, it meant adding the cost of page notoriety
and algorithmic privileges for exposure to already inflated rental costs. Throughout lockdown,
the work carried out by the army of precariously employed cyclists was deemed essential: but
their remuneration, insurance and protection seemed optional. What was regarded as essential was the sustainment of the distributing practices, the allocation of orders, the workings ofthe algorithms. Platform capitalism erodes the territorial frictions and impediments associatedwith the rigidities and regulations that are associated with work practices and the operationsof commercial and industrial enterprises. The app economy is based on forms of accumulationthat although unfold through space-time relations, are entirely deterritorialized. Exchanges andassociations are replaced by points and nodes on live maps. Platforms turn this flattened, anonymized and standardized networks of connections, into operable terrains. It is this potential
operability; the client base, the hits received, the ratings given, what is turned into objective
measures to acquire financial investment. This form of digital valorization rests on the capacity to legitimise, through reviews, hits and exposure, the aggregated objectivity of a seemingly
endless virtual territoriality of opportunities and profit. During the pandemic, Mercado Libre, aclear Amazon competitor in Argentina and South America, became more valuable on the stock
exchange than Argentina’s main oil company, YPF.

From ‘Free Market’ to ‘Fair Market’
In May, two months after lockdown, the initiative put forward by the municipality was superseded by a project presented by the urban political party Ciudad Futura (Future City) and theSocial and People’s Front (FSP). Building on previous policies they had developed during pasteconomic crises to strengthen neighbourhood economies and include cooperatives in the supply chain, the two parties passed through the local legislature the framework to create “a digital
infrastructure for exchange”. The project, Mercado Justo (Fair Market), sought to strengthen
local producers, privileging neighbourhood outlets, highlighting the values of “proximity, solidarity and community”. The initiative envisaged not only the commercialization of goods, butalso services, allowing the platform to function also as a job-centre hub. In contrast to the original municipal proposition, the creation of the digital infrastructure projected an economy that
integrated local producers, shop-keepers, farmers, cooperatives and actors of the social economy, as part of the same network. Large enterprises were excluded. No commissions were stipulated. The project incorporated innovative financial alternatives, allowing for the possibility ofvouchers or credits to be used for future purchases. In addition, and as a direct alternative to theextortionate rates charged and accumulated by competitors, the project incorporated the local
municipal bank as a central actor, envisioning a radical expansion of public financial assistance8

to economic players that had previously been side-lined or overcharged by lenders. The communication campaign developed to promote the initiative used the visual language of Mercado
Libre6, its colours, and the oval shape of its logo. It positioned the project as a direct alternative:
a counter model for exchange and logistics. Not simply as a competitor, but as a different modelof wealth accumulation.
When discussing the political vision that underpinned the proposal for Mercado Justo, one of
the activists involved in the writing of the Rosario ordinance, stated: “[w]e wanted to dispute theterritory occupied by Mercado Libre and other platforms”. Here territory retains thePeople’s logistics circuit. Other ways of thinking about
production, distribution and consumption (Mercado Justo)

Play on logos. “Google - control. Amazon – big abuse”(@Alfredo Moreno, ‘Capitalismo de plataformas. Mercado libreo justo.’ July, 2020)
6

Mercado Libre, heralded as a regional digital success story, is a perfect example of how consumer pat-terns are becoming increasingly enmeshed with logistical and financial enterprises. Mercado Libre is, ultimately, alogistics company that cuts across the physical and virtual realm.

9theoretical and practical references that accompanied the movements’ struggles since their
inception. For the members of Ciudad Futura, the territory is where the central disputes oflate-capitalism are staged. Where logics of extraction operate through processes of displacement
and expulsion; where tactics of accumulation by dispossession obtain material and physicalform. It is also from where resistance grows, where counter visions of other economies are prefigured. The same way a decade ago, when the political grouping was still named GIROS, theypushed for an ordinance preventing new building of gated communities in Rosario, illustrating
how speculative real estate developments were accelerating fragmented and unequal forms ofurbanization, the Mercado Justo initiative revives the notion of territory and extends it to thevirtual realm7. The public platform challenges the commodification of logistics and uses it toarticulate spaces of cooperation, where connection, association and distribution are not meansof extracting and transferring value but form part of a politics of urban inclusion. The platform
is presented as a strategic municipal infrastructure that rewires the local economy: exposing
the exploitive and extractive commercial and logistical costs engrained in the configuration ofexisting supply chains for basic and essential goods and services, and showing the possibility ofarticulating a set of counter-logistical arrangements that disrupt hegemonic positions to articulate an urban economic commons.

Counter-logistics of food circulation and people’s production
infrastructures
As contagion spread and government agencies faced decades of accumulated infrastructurallimitations or neglect; as the configuration of emergency logistical arrangements to distribute
food and essential items to deprived communities stumbled with the lack of technical, humanand financial resources, South America saw a surge of improvised solutions from below. In Argentina, the new administration implemented a food assistance program to tackle the swollen poverty figures left by the previous government: it mobilized the army to support logisticaltasks. But even with the distribution of a food card that allowed poor residents to purchase fooditems, the concentration and commodification of food distributing networks and infrastructures, weakened the effectiveness of the planned efforts. Cases of overpricing became widespread. In the city of Buenos Aires, for example, the local government outsourced the logisticaloperations of assembling and distributing boxes to working-class areas. Studies by the research
institute associated to the People’s Unity party claim that the government paid three different
providers an extra 30 percent in direct contracts.8
7

For an analysis of GIROS’ prefigurative tactics, see Minuchin L. (2016) The politics of construction:

towards a theory of material articulations, Environment and Planning D, vol. 34, 5: 895-913.
8

The Institute for Research and Public Policies (IPYPP) published the document with the title The com-modification of hunger.

10In this context, where governments at every level were struggling to secure, through the market,
suitable contracts for food distribution, urban social movements, neighbourhood organizations
and solidarity networks offered territorial experience and organizing capacity to channel government policies, but also to develop supplementary and alternative interventions. Networks ofsoup kitchens, barter markets, and improvised care and assistance volunteer squads improviseda landscape of infrastructural support. Organized collectives, some – like La Garganta Poderosa(The Powerful Throat) – spread like an articulated federation of movements across the country’s
working-class districts, consolidated themselves as crucial political intermediaries. The pandemic fostered a plurality of organized people’s responses that sought to challenge and fill thevoid left by a politics of food production and distribution that favoured exporting agriculturalcommodities, the cartelization of food producers, and the prominence of a limited number oflarge supermarket chains.
In a context where food supply chains punish small producers by separating them from distribution hubs and commercial outlets, different collectives sought to prefigure a counter-logistics
of food distribution, bringing together small producers and cooperatives and connecting them
directly to distribution networks. The food crisis served to expose the multiple stages of financial speculation that underpin the formation of supply chains: future commodity and currency
prices create a separate domain of accumulation and have a direct impact on food availability.
In an attempt to position food as a public and common good, two different initiatives in Rosario
sought to reconfigure the logistics of food.

Boxes ready for distribution Pueblo a Pueblo.
Photo: Pueblo a Pueblo

11

Pueblo a Pueblo
Mobilized by the pillaged geographies left after the 2001 crisis, militants that had been active inthe unemployed collectives, created the movement of excluded workers (MTE). The MTE wasborn with the mission of improving the living and working conditions of those excluded fromthe formal sector, developing production alternatives, offering workshops and health assistance.
The organization is split into strands that represent the different expressions of what they referto as the ‘people’s economy’: those working in small construction projects, in recycling, textiles,
farming and street vending. The MTE sought to give voice, presence and organization to morethan 30 percent of Argentina’s active labour force.
Pueblo a Pueblo (People to People), was started up, within the MTE, as a commercial initiative
for small farmers. It was first launched nationally in 2014. The Rosario branch began operatingin 2016. As an organization it connects cooperatives, family-farmer associations, small producers and indigenous communities, with the objective of enhancing the quality and reach ofenvironmentally aware forms of agricultural production. The aim was to establish what Gastón
St Jean, the coordinator of Pueblo a Pueblo in Rosario, refers to as “a short chain”: creating direct
relations between producers and consumers and protecting the rights and living condition of
the former. At first, the network consisted of a few families. It now connects 150 family producers from rural areas around Rosario. The initiative allows the organization to prefigure logisticaland productive networks that contrast with the extractive principles that govern the expansive
fields of the world’s most important soya production hub. The group is organized around four
different assemblies where activists and farmers discuss issues such as internal organization,
gender dynamics, seed procurement and costs.
Pueblo a Pueblo functions as a networked cooperative, where family farmers rotate to provide
the fresh vegetables that will make up the commercialized boxes. The coordinator explains thelogistics as follows: “[e]ach box contains seven seasonal vegetables, the farmers organize themselves in groups of seven, and each of them provides one item for the box assembly. Every week
or every 15 days, one group is in charge of preparing the boxes”. The products are then distributed through a group of volunteers based in Rosario. Details about the boxes circulate throughsocial media networks from Tuesday to Thursday: orders are collected by using google online
forms. Before the pandemic, distribution was organized on Saturdays, in four points across thecity. Through this logistical set-up, cooperative rural forms of production became enmeshedwith ethical consumer practices. The organization prefigured ways of materializing the reproduction of rural livelihoods by reconfiguring their relation with processes of urban consumption. Pueblo a Pueblo breaks with the idea that there is only one possible way of sustaining themetabolic requirements of urban life: there are alternatives to the established expulsionary andextractive agricultural practices. The organization highlights the importance of knowing where12food comes from, how it was produced, and by whom: it seeks to project an association between
sustainable forms of agriculture and land use that has been eroded through expansive forms of
monocultures and higher levels of land concentration. Through this proposed reduced network,
producers receive 85 percent of the retail price: 10 percent is then left as a communal fund forall producers, and 5 per cent is used for running and logistical costs.
The pandemic tested the scalability of the network and the resilience of their logistical arrangements – as they could no longer have customers come to the pick-up points. Mandatory confinement meant they had to develop a home-delivery system. Demand spiked. They jumped
from commercializing 150 boxes every 15 days to distributing 1500 every week. They enlisted
volunteers and made arrangements with transportation services that were left without work
during lockdown. Pueblo a Pueblo was now reaching peripheral and poor neighbourhoods inthe city, establishing an infrastructure for cooperative and horizontal forms of food production
and distribution.

Public Food Companies in Argentina. @Ciudad Futura/Frente Patria Grande, “Plantas localesde fraccionamiento”, p. 4, 2020.

Public food company
The shortening of the supply chains, particularly in relation to the production and distribution offood, is a shared political ambition among urban social movements interested in strengthening
forms of people’s economy. As inflation rates started to reduce the purchasing power of deprived
communities, Giros – before they formed an urban political party (Ciudad Futura) – articulated13

in 2014 what they referred to as “an anti-inflation mission”. Connecting producers with consumers, the movement organized through a membership system, the monthly distribution of boxes.
Groups of friends and families will come together to purchase in volume, allowing them to save
up to 40 percent of what they would have paid for similar products at a big supermarket chain.
But the inflation and food crises were further compounded during the Macri administration.
Escalating prices, higher unemployment figures and a greater concentration of distributors andcommercial outlets, forced the newly elected administration to declare – at the end of 2019 – afood emergency in Argentina. The economic downturn triggered by the pandemic, placed foodprocurement as a critical political concern. Memories of riots and lootings demanded a set ofradical responses to sustain and protect urban life.
In this context, members of Ciudad Futura and Patria Grande, proposed to dislocate establishedforms of food distribution, by problematizing its configuration as a commodity, and introducing
other actors in the productive process. Food is valorized as it circulates: fractioning, sorting,packaging, marketing. This movement disfigures its original use value and dissociates it fromthe territories and labour that produce it. The movements proposed treating food as a public
good and articulating a counter logistics that was not driven by accumulation through distribution. Instead, they envisioned a model that consolidates networks of cooperation, transforming
how land is produced and value generated. The initiative works on multiple scales. On one level,
the organizations have presented in parliament a bill seeking to create a network of Public Food
Companies: these horizontally run enterprises, will distribute processing factories as

Activist preparing boxes for distribution at Misión Inflación. Photo: Ciudad Futura

14

points of connection between cooperative rural plots and deprived urban communities (see figure 8). As a means of prefiguring what that national network could look like, the movement has
already started working on the first Public Food Company in Rosario. Intended as a social enterprise, the company will not be administered by the municipality or the Provincial government.
Instead, projecting the ideas of autonomy that underpinned much of the territorial experiencesof social movements in South America, the activists involved in the project, speak of gestión social (management by society). Precisely this is a form of governance structure that allows social
movements, cooperatives and actors directly involved in the production of goods and services
to be directly involved in the administration of public enterprises. Ciudad Futura has set up the‘University of Doing’ to train and support activists in the development, co-production, and administration of public enterprises.
The Public Food Company, according to one of the activists in charge of its design and development, will “allow social organizations to run the factory, opening up job opportunities throughthe funds generated by fractioning, packaging and distributing food”.

Draft layouts for the Public Food Company factory. Fractioning oils and dry products. Ciudad Futura

Presently, the municipality and the provincial state pay a high price to obtain suitable products.
Only a handful of companies qualify as providers, further enhancing monopolistic positions.
The Public Food Company will not only shorten the supply chain but redistribute the benefits tolocal producers, sustaining smaller enterprises, rescuing them from punitive rental structures.
The counter-logistics proposed by the Public Food Company establishes, through cooperative
associations, the territorial footprint of the urban scale: it (re)produces territory, and introduces15new forms of governing an expanded commons. “We are always seeking ways of problematizing
what we understand as public, a terrain where the state motorizes and finds allies in administering the commons…”, states the document that socializes the initiative.
Salinas, one of the persons in charge of designing the company, details how they envision theprocess of production and distribution: “the factory will have two forms of outputs. One is basedon pallets or large bags of 25kg. These will be distributed to identified soup kitchens and institutions. A second form revolves around nutritional boxes. With these we will not only reach stateagencies but also unions, pensioners and cooperatives”. In terms of scale, they expect to be able
to produce 25,000 nutritional boxes a month: roughly the figure for the families expected to fallunder the poverty threshold.
The making of a more egalitarian urban terrain requires infrastructures and logistical arrangements that extend beyond the remit and reach of local governments. Initiatives like the Public
Food Company introduce an ordering and producing of territories that connects actors andpractices that stretch across and beyond the cities’ administrative boundaries. They delineate amunicipalist agenda, where the democratic control of logistic and infrastructure arrangements
is practiced through linked platforms that extend and multiply the principles of gestión social.

Infrastructure of knowledge
The articulation of supply chains; the monitoring and tracking of movement; the timings ofproductive processes and the allocation of slots, services and people, relies on the applicationof technical knowledge. Software, patents, and expertise are an integral part of the process ofvalorisation that is generated through logistics. The analysis and gathering of data, the hiring of
consulting firms and the use of modelling, are all essential for the calibration and adjustmentsof logistical chains. There is a logistics of knowledge circulation and consumption: it connects
research centres and analysts with decision makers. It circulates through reports, newsletter
subscriptions and market analyses. Knowledge is commoditized to turn the urban scale into a
speculative terrain, where projections for future physical transformations are configured as extended platforms for growth and accumulation. Simulations, smart-city laboratories and visual
renderings of regeneration projects: the construction of probable futures mediates the present
impacting on land prices, master plans and housing policies, advancing – in turn - the development of novel financial instruments and regulatory frameworks. Data – its production throughaggregation and its analysis – is presented as an integral component of commoditized urban
logistical networks: it turns flow and time into manageable units. In a context where the simulation of future scenarios underpins the decision-making process of extractive, productive andreal-estate practices, governance over the sourcing and use of data becomes a central terrain ofcontestation.
16

Confronting the consolidation of extractive urban dynamics requires recovering and producing
public forms of knowledge. Practices of research that are put at the service of a counter-logistics
aimed at serving an expanded commons. As soon as the lockdown was announced, the National University of Rosario (UNR), positioned itself as a central actor in local efforts at tacklingthe health and social emergencies. ‘National Universities’ in Argentina have a long-standing
tradition of engaging with the complexities of the territories in which they operate. Extension
and social-responsibility programs have historically fostered alliances between academic institutions and local government agencies. But in most instances, the role played by Universities has
been limited to offering technical support, testing capabilities, or specific consultancy work. The
University of Rosario’s Vice-Chancellor won his campaign9 in 2019 on a platform that sought totransform the institution’s relation with its territory, mobilizing a feminist lens to review interventions and power relations.
The pandemic brought urgency to the university’s administration. According to the vice-chancellor, “the health crisis accelerated the timings, and forced us to rework priorities”. As soon as
the emergency was declared, the vice-chancellor informed local and provincial authorities that
all the institution’s buildings, resources and expertise was available to be used by public agencies.
The University managed to move academic activities on-line rapidly, building on

PPE equipment and hand sanitizers made by the National
University of Rosario

early changes they had made to the IT infrastructure as soon as they had taken office. This virtual presence, which allowed debates and interactions to continue, underpinned the transforma9

Vice-chancellors in National Universities in Argentina are elected by students, graduates, and academic

and non-academic staff.

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tions regarding the university’s external relations. The university was to move from a position ofproviding technical assistance and support, to become directly involved in the materialization ofsolutions. The secretary in charge of reworking the university’s presence in its territory, speaksof critical engagement: reconnecting with the spirit of “Paulo Freire and Fals Borda”. Action-research was no longer going to be restricted to specific projects but will shape the institution’s
perspective on how to position the production of public knowledge during the pandemic.
Research had to be put at the service of developing rapid practical and material solutions. The
pandemic forced the University to transition from working as an institution to an infrastructureof knowledge: performing mediating functions to transform research into public resources, inserting itself within logistical networks directly involved in strengthening social capabilities. To
alter the workings of the University, the vice-chancellor did away with the bureaucratic obstacles
to institutional reform. Instead he introduced “executive units”. Each one of them with the capacity to mobilize resources, establish protocols, and develop the network of actors needed forthe intervention.
One of the units focused on tackling the food emergency. Nutritional experts from the university began working with engineers to develop a factory for the assembly of properly balanced
food boxes. The plan is for the university to directly collaborate with small producers to expand
the involvement of public institutions in the logistics of food distribution. The same team istransforming the existing university restaurants as sorting and distributing hubs. The University
has transformed its public profile: it acts alongside municipal and provincial agencies in theplanning of distribution routes. Yet it does all this whilst still retaining its autonomy, mobilizing
its own financial resources, allocating personnel, and setting strategic objectives. The governance of public logistics enlists the work of a plurality of agencies and actors that go beyond theorganizational footprint of local bureaucracies.
As a response to the health and sanitary crises, another executive unit started working immediately in producing sanitizing gel and specialized personal-protection equipment (PPE). The
unit prepared a lab, relied on biochemists and engineers to establish a network of distribution
across Rosario and southern Santa Fe. This counter-logistical arrangement established corridorsof production and circulation that were not governed by market logics. The networks spread as
nodes of solidarity, consolidating the University – in the public gaze – at the heart of a municipal commons, where relations, distributions, and territories are not arranged according to the
procurement necessities of mercantile experiments. Perhaps the most important contribution
during the pandemic was that made by a third executive unit: the development of ventilators.
In association with a technical company, the university managed to engineer, assemble, anddistribute ventilators throughout Santa Fe. The infrastructure of knowledge here not only serves
to support the efforts of multiplying the availability of ICUs; it also reinforces the possibility of18

imagining autonomy, not as detached or isolated territorial experiences, but as the consolidation of expansive publics that are capable of generating resources and creating value throughrationalities of collaboration and production that are not those of businesses and private ventures. The university is prefiguring practical forms of autonomy, redefining the margins of whata municipalist agenda can do, experimenting with the materializations of a form of commonsthat extends the remit of public spheres well beyond the institutional machinery of government.
It also prefigures a form of municipalism that is not restricted or reduced to technical and social
support. It reconfigures the public and municipal areas as productive and generative spaces, that
dispute the monopoly held by commercial rationalities over notions like efficiency and productivity.
The projects developed by the University of Rosario are expanding the municipalist agenda.
They highlight the importance of public knowledge in the configuration of counter logistics.
Forms of knowledge that emerge from practical experimentations, that multiply and are disseminated through direct interventions. They underpin the construction of logistical systems thatare not driven by the need to guarantee the survivability and expansion of capital flows, but by
the drive to sustain life and the circulations that give consistency to a common territory.

Counter- and feminist logistics
Logistics emerged as a distinct area of knowledge linked to support for expansive military campaigns10. From the 16th century, reason and science were mobilized in an effort to sustain the
lives of armies covering increasing distances: establishing procurement networks, administeringresources, and planning for eventualities. Very rapidly the techniques that organized circulation
were appropriated by imperial expeditions. The circuits of extraction demanded more sophisticated labour and capital flows: calibration of funds, transport, and enslaved labour. For theSouthern Viceroyalties of the Spanish crown, the security and profitability of trade networks
relied on a logistical operation that guaranteed, at the same time, the flow of silver and theforced labour of indigenous populations. Logistics always entailed a differentiated protectionof life. Logistics never were (or are) neutral: sustaining trade and extractive networks required
privileging the safety and reproducibility of commercial ventures and capital flows, establishingroles, hierarchies, and regimes of exploitation.11 Logistics did not attend to the potentiality and10

For discussions on the origins of logistics see Cupini and Fraporti (2018) ‘Logistics Genealogies: a dia-logue with Stefano Harney’, Social Text 136, vol. 36; Mezzadra and Neilson (2019) Politics of operations: excavating contemporary capitalism; and A. Tosacano (2011) ‘Logistics and opposition’, Mute, vol. 3, n. 3.
11Arboleda, M. (2020) in Planetary mine: territories of extraction under late capitalism provides a sharp

analysis of the relation between extractive practices and contemporary logistical arrangements, looking at themining industry in Chile.

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freedom of bodies but to their inclusion within regimes of labour and consumption. From its
modern military configuration, logistics was instrumental in the expansion and discovery ofnovel territorial and spatial opporutnities for capital flow and accumulation.
Today, the reproducibility of the urban level provides a new frontier for capital experimentation. Its scale connects, for example, the fertile provinces of Santa Fe and Buenos Aires with thecommercial strategies and dietary requirements of a growing Chinese middle class12. It requires
the arrangement of maritime routes, port infrastructures, and processing plants. The extractive
practices mobilized to reproduce the urban on a planetary scale demand an integration of infrastructural networks that far exceeds not only the planning powers of local administrations but
increasingly the sovereignty of national governments. This is reflected in the projects discussed
within the Latin American Council for Infrastructure and Planning (COSIPLAN), where infrastructural and logistical schemes are projected at a continental scale: communications, roads,
ports and electricity intermingle in a vision of development that still requires national economies that are primary.
A vicious circle of depletion is established. In order to sustain and reproduce this form of urban
scale, public agencies will have to engineer regulatory frameworks for unprecedented levels of
infrastructural investment. The closing of what development banks across the world term theinfrastructural gap, demands turning infrastructural projects into assets, allowing hedge funds
to move in and out of ‘investments’ as if they were stocks or securities. The result is a process ofaccumulation through infrastructural operations, environmental degradation, and erosion of
public control over the distribution, access and valorization of those networks. In other words,
infrastructure spaces develop where populations become secondary variables in logistical systems that privilege speed and efficiency.
The logistics that sustain and reproduce established patterns of urbanization cannot guarantee
sustaining and reproducing social urban life: the required levels of consumption are aggregatedfigures. Decent wages for labour are not part of the equation: bodies who cannot join the established supply chains, who cannot mediate their circulation and sociability through formal infrastructural setups, become disposable13. The imposition of this commodified logistical spaceis instrumental to the calibration of contemporary forms of exploitation. It first frames patternsof inclusion and exclusion around degrees of access and connectivity to basic resources. Then,
12

For a discussion on the urbanization of hinterlands see Brenner and Katsikis (2020). ‘Operational land-

scapes: hinterlands of the Capitalocene’. Architectural Design, 90(1), 22-31.
13

In La potencia feminista (2019), Verónica Gago presents a lucid and timely analysis on the feminist

movement in Argentina and the region and how it serves as a lens to interrogate the relation between bodies,
exploitation and extraction.

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in contexts where formal infrastructures abandon the basic provision of care, it is the female
body that is regularly left with the task of arranging other forms of facilitating distribution andsupport.
Feminist forms of resistance are contesting these pervasive forms of exploitive and patriarchal
forms of urban logistics. Across Latin America, residents that seek dignity and the right to decent
forms of urban life in swelling poor urban areas, have developed through movements and organization – often shaped by a feminist militancy –, indispensable infrastructures of care. From
food provision to assistance in cases of domestic violence; from the running of autonomous
schools to the setting-up of clinics and hubs for psychological assistance; in slum organizations,federated urban movements and neighbourhood collectives; and participating in networked
alternative forms to guarantee forms of procurement and circulation of goods and services. In
Argentina, past crises and legacies of experimental forms of collective action have fostered an
impressive network of social and political organizations actively working and shaping peripheral territories14. Through slow and deep integration with local dwellers they assembled circuitsof counter-logistics: establishing cooperative forms of distribution, inventing modes of support
that are not mediated by market rationalities, that disrupt the normalized and assumed roles ofthe female body. These forms of popular logistics rely on autonomous infrastructures: buildings, workshops, cooking facilities, which mediate and transform goods and services but not forthe purposes of accumulation. These popular infrastructures are articulated through customaryforms of cooperation and by the urgency of having to protect and sustain lives that have beenleft unprotected and disconnected.

Popular organizations and infrastructures of care
For the activists of La Poderosa working in three different settlements in Rosario the pandemicchanged the scale of the problem. It forced a reassignment of volunteers and the invention of
new tactics of care, but it did not alter the finality of the programmatic agenda that justified theirnational presence across Argentina’s slum quarters. They seek a recognition of the labour performed: a disruption of the patriarchal and oppressive rationalities by which established forms
of production and value generation are organised; through the inclusion of people’s modes ofcare as central economic practices.
“We want the women who work in popular territories to be recognized as territorial promoters”,
an activist from La Poderosa declares. “We want the work we do to be recognised not only by the14

For a detailed chronicle of the work done by feminist movements and the reconfigured relation with thestate during the pandemic, see the article by Tali Goldman, T. (2020) Promotorxs comunitarixs: eso que llaman
amor ahora lo paga el Estado, published by the Latin American feminist portal LATFEM.

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state, but also by society as a whole”. That quest for recognition is not staged as a demand to thestate. It is prefigured, practiced through the multiple interventions they deploy in the territories.
Each of these interventions connects volunteers with resources. They rely on rehearsed formsof regulating the circulation of food. They agreed on protocols on how to register the outcome
and the timings of health visits. Each program, or dispositivo – as they refer to the initiatives –,combines and links levels, from the blocks and alleyways that are reached by the initiatives, tothe municipal-health officials that operate local clinics; from the national offices of La Poderosa
that orchestrate donation campaigns (see figure 2), to provincial and national ministries where
supplies and food subsidies are discussed. Autonomy does not mean detachment or isolation
but the power to act and organize. In the case of the militant female bodies, direct involvementmeans anti-patriarchal emancipation. In the case of these activists, counter-logistics is also ameans of evading and disrupting the prevalence of the male gaze and the control it enforces
over resources, organizations and spatialities. The infrastructures of care rely on adaptable andexpandable logistics: WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages; email chains and spreadsheets that
adjust real-time decision making. The platforms that on a global scale operate to extract value
from data aggregation are appropriated by deprived urban collectives to establish ad-hoc cooperation platforms.
The pandemic forced an adaptation of existing infrastructures. The soup kitchens that once
served hot meals, now operate as hubs for the assembly of ready meals that are then delivered,door to door to those families in need. They rely on a steady supply of dry ingredients that they
get from multiple public agencies. Direct subsidies just cover the cost of gas canisters for cooking and heating. Donations complement the food offering with meat, and help support otherlogistical work. The pandemic forced the houses from where they operate to become legal support hubs. In living rooms turned into improvised offices, the female activists work mainly withother females for them to fill-out forms and join new public support programs, ringing gender
helplines and dealing with police abuses.
The infrastructures of care developed by the women of La Poderosa not only contest the established lessening of the value of domestic labour as unproductive work. It also problematizes
the assumptions that associate the productive and valued body, with entrepreneurial attitudes
and predispositions. In this reductive view, the practices that are not engaged with accelerated
patterns of accumulation – although essential for the reproduction of labour relations – are occluded and treated as secondary and voluntary. Their demands are not for an inclusion into the
dynamics of contemporary labour relations. Through their activism, the feminist logistics prefigure other patterns of work and valorization: one where the circulation of bodies and exchangeof support and services is not structured around dominance and exploitation.
As with the food initiatives by Pueblo a Pueblo or the Public Food Company, the infrastruc22

tures of care in working-class areas signal the need to reconfigure the commons. They project a
notion of care that disrupts established associations between gender dynamics and domesticity,and situates the dynamics of home within a much wider set of physical and logistical support.
These interventions view and recognize the work of feminist activists, not as voluntary or part of
temporary emergency support but as a transformative mode of imagining the flow and insertionof networks of solidarity. The feminist counter-logistics developed by La Poderosa amplify thetechniques available for governing increasingly complex urban scales. They illuminate a terrainof municipal politics that breaks the bounds of the regular consensual politics of institutional
arenas and demarcates a clear line of dissent: those who sustain the logistical and infrastructuralarrangements that serve to reproduce inequality and exploitation, and those who envision otherforms of organizing the circulation and distribution of bodies and things.

Other municipalisms: Constructing counter-logistics
The reproduction of the urban scale as we knew it, cannot guarantee sustaining life. The protection and expansion of infrastructural conduits that shape and transform the face of the earth
with the purpose of enlarging dynamics of consumption, has become decoupled from environmental, human, and non-human equilibriums and expressions15. And in this spiral of accumulation and incessant search for new material and spatial frontiers for exploitation, agency has
seemingly been devolved to algorithms and the efficiency of integrated processes. The urban
scale has outstripped the institutional machinery and the regulatory capabilities of democratically elected governments: the unfolding of extractive logistical infrastructures has crippled
the potentiality of politics. In South America, progressive movements that sought, at the turnof the century, to address the scars of inequality, subscribed to visions of development and progress that relied on the state’s support for the reproduction of dependent and degrading formsof accumulation. The revolts and riots that spread across the streets of Quito, Santiago de Chile
and Bogotá before the pandemic, should not only be seen as popular manifestations against
neoliberal programs. The coup d’état that deposed Evo Morales’ government in Bolivia, is notjust a reactionary, racially motivated movement against the consecration of indigenous rights.
These scenes of institutional unrest were also epicentres for large urban crises. Struggles over thecontrol of resources, governance over basic infrastructures, and how they are distributed. The
pandemic accelerated the dynamics of an era of infrastructural conflicts.
The pandemic exposed how the reproduction of the urban is wired to exacerbate forms of inequality and extreme patterns of differentiation: access to infrastructural and logistical arrangements are not evenly distributed. But it also made visible an intricate and expansive network
15

For a reflection on the urban and environmental impacts caused by the pandemic see Buenaventura deSousa Santos (2020), La cruel pedagogía del virus. Clacso.

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of popular organizations that are practicing a different type of logistics. They shorten supply
chains, they democratize technical knowledge, and substitute accumulation with care. These
often improvised, autonomous infrastructures contest discourses of efficiency and profitability,
and appropriate the expansive scales of logistical infrastructures to construct and promote different territories, organized around open and democratic supply chains, that value environmental resources and the sustaining of life.
The examined forms of counter-logistics proliferating in Rosario delimit and frame a territorialconflict that is going to shape the politics of the 21st century. The disputes on how we govern andchange the way we produce, consume, and live require different technologies of power and therecognition and visibility of other lives and bodies. The municipalist agenda in South America
needs to offer alternative ways of governing urban processes. Municipal politics should unchain
itself from the rigid boundaries of local governance and assert the urgency of addressing andengaging with the organizational, environmental and economic interventions needed to reproduce the urban sphere. In a region where the interests behind infrastructural investments andthe provision of basic services are going to condition institutional politics’ room for manoeuvre,
municipalism should serve to contest what is deemed possible and articulate a radical agenda.
Through counter-logistical initiatives it should promote discussion on the reach and purposeof public infrastructures, addressing the conduits and platforms for exchange, distribution andcare as essential services for a life in common.
The sense of emergency introduced by the pandemic will eventually fade. Some of the tacticalalterations made to cope with different degrees of enforced isolation will be reversed. But theconflicts regarding the ownership and organization of supply chains, the logics of valorization
and accumulation that underpin them will endure. The counter-logistics that emerged in Rosario and helped to prefigure other ways of imagining territories of care, will undoubtedly resonate, be replicated, adapted and expanded, as urban collectives across Latin America prepare forstruggles over resources and distribution.
During the last decade there has been a blossoming of critical logistical studies. In the urban
North, the attention has centred around the understanding of the injustices embedded in global
supply chains and the possibilities of disrupting the flows and codes of platform capitalism. The
forms of material and social inequality that underpin the unfolding of southern urbanisms, demand a more regionally attuned conception of logistics. One that registers its association withthe sustaining of poor urban areas and the politics of care.

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