Urban informality and the state: Repairing Cairo’s waters through Gehood Zateya

Abstract

Equitable and just access to urban water presents challenges for global policymakers. In Egypt, providing and maintaining access to water has always been associated with the state. Recently, however, in cities such as Cairo, water shortages have led to the inclusion of multiple actors in the complicated processes of water access and repair. This paper argues that the state’s hegemonic control over water governance is contested by increasingly blurred binaries of formal and informal everyday practices. I show how water governance in Cairo operates through a plurality of informal practices – gehood zateya (individual and community efforts) – which cross boundaries of class, legality and space. By drawing on theories of hybrid infrastructures and urban informality, water access and repair in Cairo emerge as relational processes shaped by socio-technical practices of state and non-state actors. This paper explores two case studies demonstrating the politicization of repair in a marginalized informal area and elite/middle-class gated communities. These cases illustrate how residents living in informal areas maintain relations with the state through community water systems and ‘cultures of repair’, while elite residents engage in ‘private governance’ schemes and rely on networks of privilege. This article offers insights into changing state-society relations during transitions to water privatization and the shaping of Cairo’s uneven urban waterscape.

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…In her analysis of maintenance practices in the case of irrigation infrastructures in Egypt, Barnes (2014, 2017) frames the maintenance of water infrastructures as a work of ‘profound social, economic, and political significance’ (2017: 147) which not only maintains infrastructural functioning but also reproduces state and community power and relations. Thinking with instances of infrastructural inadequacy, informality, and splintering, Wahby (2021) shows how repair work is also undertaken by residents and communities, reconfiguring relations between them and the state in contexts of privatisation and water governance transition. Equally, in studying police sweeps of homeless encampments, Gordon and Byron (2021) highlight how seemingly innocuous acts of urban maintenance are productive forms of power and exclusion in the governance of homelessness in North American cities.…”

MAD water: Integrating modular, adaptive, and decentralized approaches for water security in the climate change era

“…The water literature is rife with examples of systems that are neither centralized nor networked, but still meet water needs of local communities in important ways. Examples are documented in literatures including, but not limited to, water and informality (Kooy, 2014; Schwartz et al, 2015; Truelove, 2019), community‐based water management (Adams et al, 2020; Cox et al, 2010; Mansuri & Rao, 2004), small‐scale water vendors (Kariuki & Schwartz, 2005; Solo, 1999; Whittington et al, 1991), small drinking water systems (Klasic et al, 2022; McFarlane & Harris, 2018), hybrid water systems and regimes (Storey, 2021; Wahby, 2021; Yates & Harris, 2018), decentralized water provision (Arora et al, 2015), green infrastructures for water and wastewater management (Green et al, 2021; Sharma & Malaviya, 2021), and packaged water (Gleick, 2010; Morinville, 2017; Pacheco‐Vega, 2019; Stoler, 2012, 2017; Wilk, 2006). Our work builds on this literature by proposing a framework that can bring these contributions into closer, more integrated (and convergent) conversation.…”

The enabling environment for citywide water service provision: Insights from six successful cities

“…Until 2004 in Egypt, local water and sewer authorities were responsible for delivering services, providing high levels of coverage in Cairo but depending heavily on donor funding [60,61,[100][101][102][103]. In that year, the national government restructured the sector to establish a national holding company that managed all water and wastewater assets in the country, with all local authorities converted into subsidiary companies that still provided services.…”

“…This restructuring also created an independent national regulator (Egyptian Water and Wastewater Regulatory Agency, EWRA) to oversee the companies' performance, determine standard service levels, and establish performance indicators . [63,104]-a reform that international donors had been encouraging as early as the 1980s [100][101][102]. EWRA's monitoring of financial indicators and new tariffs approved by Egypt's Cabinet of Ministers have improved the sector's economic performance, with all subsidiary companies in the Greater Cairo Region recovering more than 100% of operating costs in 2018 [63,79].…”