Promissory things: how affective bonds stretch along a tramline

This article draws from the case of the oldest electric tramway of South America, in Rio de Janeiro, in order to study the spatial extent of affective bonds. The current struggle for re-installation of the tram network, I argue, presents a moment in which residents’ desires for mobility and access to the city become distributed across various material elements of the transport infrastructure. I conceptualize these elements as ‘promissory things’, that is, things that come to make their own promises, exceeding human utterances. By this, I propose to locate affect in between speech act and materiality. Through contrasting my findings on the attraction of residents to specific instances of urban matter with a collective repulsion to ‘asphalt’ that surfaced after the tram-comeback, I develop a model for the spatialization of affect that interweaves notions of proximity and distance.