Infrastructural citizenship: The everyday citizenships of adapting and/or destroying public infrastructure in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

This paper develops infrastructural citizenship as an analytical framework that bridges geography's sub‐disciplinary silos. While urban geography promotes infrastructure as a core lens for understanding the city, recognising that political struggles are mediated through infrastructure, discourses of citizenship are rarely employed. Similarly, while political and development geography promote citizenship as vital in understanding socio‐political life, often framed by citizen‐led action to secure basic rights and services, critical debates on urban infrastructure are typically overlooked. Consequently, despite the growth in studies recognising the politicised nature of urban infrastructure and the centrality of citizenship to urban life, the multiple ways that citizenship and infrastructure relate in diverse urban settings has received limited critical attention. This paper demonstrates how urban dwellers' relationship to public infrastructure in the domestic spaces of the home and settlement, and the temporal scale of the everyday, offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. In South Africa, despite 25 years of significant post‐apartheid public investment in housing and services, frustration at poor service delivery and beneficiary (mis)use of public infrastructure remains dominant. While citizens adapt and consume public infrastructure in ways deemed “illegal” and “uncivil” by the state, citizens view these actions as a legitimate form of “citizenship‐in‐action” in the context of rapid urbanisation and poverty, and are frustrated by perceptions of state neglect. Using the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship, the paper reveals how this state–society disjuncture represents a citizenship mismatch that is embodied in infrastructure, rather than a material product of state disinterest or citizen destruction per se.

Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Approaches: Anthropological Contributions and Future Directions for Engineering

“…The valuation of water is often tangled with infrastructural considerations; social scientists have addressed intricacies of when, how, and why water is used (Gleick, 2003 ), commodified (or not) (Bakker, 2007; Teodoro, 2018 ), and how this toggles with the costs and realities of infrastructural decision making (Von Schnitzler, 2013 ; Beresford, 2020 ). In South Africa, citizenship (one's position vis-a-vis the State) is created through a person's relationship with water and sanitation infrastructures, inter alia (Lemanski, 2019 ). These approaches provide a useful conceptual bridge into sanitation, as infrastructural regimes (e.g., flush toilets) often require the use of water for sanitation.…”

COVID-19 responses: infrastructure inequality and privileged capacity to transform everyday life in South Africa

“… 30. Lemanski, C (2020), “Infrastructural citizenship: the everyday citizenship of adapting and/or destroying public housing in Cape Town, South Africa”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Vol 45, No 3, pages 589–605. …”

Retrofitting, repurposing and re-placing

“…Silver (2014) discusses 'material improvising' in Accra, as a more permanent way to extend networked systems. Lemanski (2019) deploys the concept of 'infrastructural citizenship' to foreground the relationship between political identity and infrastructural practices in Cape Town. These pieces show how, as Howe et al (2016: 553) point out, "infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual".…”

“…While some scholars are critical of the ways in which structural inequities are reproduced through practices of retrofit and extension, there is important work which examines how urban socio-spatial relations are reimagined through replacing, that is, through the re-inscription of a building's history and identity (Lehrer, 2006). Another growing body of work considers how such processes are infused with care, solidarity, and resistanceprogressive and even radical social and political practices (Lemanski, 2019;Silver, 2014). Mattern (2018) defines care as everything that we do to continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible.…”

“…These acts are aimed at improvement and ascentmaking the space better than what they left. At the same time, they are reflective of gestures that show a refusal to be 'kept in place' or 'pushed out of place' (Lemanski, 2019;Silver, 2014). Instead through beautifully decorating the entrances to their homes, celebrating acts of natural beauty (such as the view of Table Mountain), and creating shops in their homes, residents are challenging their market-led displacement through acts of replacement.…”