Suturing a failing district heating system: repair as epistemic practice on a London housing estate under ‘regeneration’ and demolition

As increasing numbers of council housing estates in London undergo long-term, state-led regeneration via demolition, residents find themselves living in deteriorating infrastructural conditions for protracted periods of time, often spanning decades. Local authorities’ strategies of managed decline escalate into active ‘degeneration’ when regeneration and demolition start. This article focuses on the Aylesbury estate in South London, where a failing district heating system puts its residents in a chronic situation of uncertainty regarding the delivery of heating and hot water. It analyses residents’ efforts to understand this basic infrastructure of everyday life to demand its repair from the local authority. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the research finds that residents detect, diagnose and socialise breakdowns in the heating and hot water systems, and leverage repair, through bodily sensations, encounters with materials, neighbourly networks, and interactions with call centre personnel, technicians, local administrators and councillors. I argue that this resident-led repair is best understood as an epistemic practice based on the suturing of knowledge fragments. Rather than being the cause of infrastructural failure, as they are often depicted, council estate residents contain disrepair through the suturing of embodied, technical, social and institutional forms of knowledge.