Hacking the pipes: Hydro-political currents in a Nairobi housing estate

Abstract

Nairobi's water supply reflects broader dynamics of urban resource distribution, politics and power relations. Continuous disinvestment into the city's large technological system of water supply has contributed to extreme water shortages in some parts of the city, while residents in other parts have enjoyed unrestricted access to the resource largely since the colonial period. Also, recent water sector reforms that focus less on technological networks and artefacts than on water governance have not alleviated the highly uneven distribution of water in the city. This is the context for our investigation of variegated technopolitics of water pressure management by different actors in one specific settlement: Nyayo Highrise estate. This middle-class housing estate has suffered extreme water shortages in the past decade. We start our investigation from a perspective of technology as a space of possibility-infrastructural networks and artefacts as well as related mobile technologies are not stable or fixed results of past planning decisions, but they are affected by, and at the same time shape, the ways in which people exert social and political pressure (or not). We analyse the manifold ways in which urban actors try to access, negotiate and change the city's water flows, be it through manipulating the network of water pipes, through the provision of decentralized technologies, or through activism and public protest. We argue that this is an important intervention into current debates on African urbanisms, because it demonstrates how technology and infrastructure are spaces of possibility that may work towards emancipation and repression at the same time.

Infrastructure governance in the post-networked city: State-led, high-tech sanitation in Addis Ababa’s condominium housing

“…‘Heterogenous’ or ‘hybrid’ infrastructure configurations are concepts used to refer to the diverse ways that people access services within and beyond conventional city networks (Cirolia, 2020; Jaglin, 2016; Lawhon et al., 2018). The term ‘configuration’ (often used interchangeably with networks, assemblages, arrangements, dispositifs ) helps to draw attention to the relational, distributed, and complex dynamics involved in shaping infrastructure and service delivery, whether material, social or regulatory (Larkin, 2013; Schramm and Ibrahim, 2019; Silver, 2014).…”

Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South

“…This includes research that is attentive to local histories and everyday practices and processes that do not necessarily fit received concepts in urban studies, and often intersect with, supersede, or modify and situate processes of capitalist urbanization. Studies in this SI on urban electricity (Pilo', 2021), water (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020;Alves, 2019;Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021;Truelove, 2021;Pihljak et al, 2021) and waste (Schindler et al, 2021) bring a situated approach to everyday urban governance, giving attention to local institutions, histories, diverse infrastructural configurations and multi-scalar power relations.…”

“…The everyday, rather than itself being a scale of analysis, has the potential to collapse multiple scales by showing how the global, state and local urban scales of governance become situated and experienced in everyday practice. Schramm and Ibrahim (2021) posit that ethnographic approaches to the everyday are not at odds with structural governance processes, but rather show how they are reflected in the everyday lives, politics, and practices of Nairobians. Rather than focusing on informal settlements of the urban poor, these authors' study a middle-class housing complex called the Nyayo Highrise Estate.…”

“…Often, analytically tracking the politics and poetics (Larkin, 2013) of infrastructures helps reveal infrastructure's situated violences (see Rodgers and O'Neill, 2012;Truelove and O'Reilly, 2020), effects and emancipatory potential that coexist at the same time, and sometimes in the same space. For example, Schramm and Ibrahim (2021), Kundu and Chatterjee (2020) and Pilo' (2021) all reveal the complex power relations and politics that emerge from neighborhood struggles over water and electricity networks respectively. In each study, these authors show how negotiating access in particular urban spaces has diverse and situated effects on differing residents and state and non-state actors, deepening marginality for some, while empowering others with increased access, control, or decision-making power (see also Cornea et al, 2016).…”

“…The papers in the SI do not conform to a single understanding or theorization of the everyday or everyday governance and our intent was not to make a homogenizing conceptual claim. Rather, we make an analytical claim: examining the everyday with regard to urban environments, as both a temporal field of action and a practice, exposes hereto unseen forms for agency and resistance, cooperation and conflict, inclusion, and exclusion (see also Pihljak et al, 2021;Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021;Truelove, 2011). Doing so has potential to open new ways of thinking through politics, practice, modalities of power and unequal lived experiences in contemporary cities.…”