Urban fractures: mobility, risk and the accidenté in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

Changing practices of motorized mobility in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have given rise to what residents call the ‘accidenté’: a victim of a traffic accident, often involving the city’s increasingly ubiquitous motorcycles. This article explores the significance of the accidenté in Kikwit’s social universe and considers how everyday urban mobilities are imbued with a sense of bodily exposure, risk and the threat of broken bones, so much so that ‘fracture’ has come to be seen as an urban condition. This entanglement of perceptions of mobility, risk, fracture and urbanity represents both a particular spatialization of risk in relation to city life and a critique of how corporeal vulnerability is tied into other vulnerabilities in the daily lives of urbanites. By analysing how one can become an accidenté and what trajectories of care transpire after the moment of injury, this article reveals how this new patient subjectivity necessitates a confrontation with potentially enduring motility limitations and risky navigations of the city long after the accident.