RETHINKING THE NETWORKED CITY: THE (CO-)PRODUCTION OF HETEROGENEOUS WATER SUPPLY INFRASTRUCTURE IN NAIROBI, KENYA

Water supply is an integral infrastructure that sustains urban life. It is for this reason that urban planning authorities and state actors have for long pursued the provision of water services through a standardized infrastructure system that conforms to ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ ideals. As such, the ‘networked city’, a Western technological ideology of the Nineteenth Century has remained the blueprint for planning and development of water infrastructure across the Globe. The ‘modern’ planning model presupposes a centralized governed and uniform urban configuration for the provision of networked infrastructures for the supply of urban services such as water, sewer, electricity and telecommunication. However, the networked city ideology presents limited perspectives in the production of variegated socio-technical arrangements for water supply in many contemporary cities. This is particularly the case across rapidly transforming post-colonial cities of the Global South. The pronounced visibility of water trucks, hand cart pullers, long queues at water vending kiosks, exposed water pipes and the ubiquitous 20-litre jerry cans dotting the urban street depict, rather vividly, the everyday unequal struggles to improvise reliable water supply across different cities of the Global South. The reliance on interactions of numerous modes of water supply to sustain urban life is a clear indication of multiple modernities that defy simplistic Western universalization around the ‘modern’ ideal of centralized and networked infrastructure systems. This PhD study employs a socio-technical approach in analyzing the existing water supply modalities in contemporary cities of the Global South. Through an interpretative case study of Nairobi, Kenya, the study illuminates the interrelations between the networked water infrastructure run by the public utility company on the one hand, and the multiple non-networked water infrastructure models such as privatized enclave infrastructures, water vending practices, private boreholes and rain water harvesting on the other across different socio-spatial typologies in Nairobi. The study interweaves situated urban development processes of rapid socio-spatial transformations, development of residential enclaves, informal settlements and peri-urban sprawl with the wider political economy dynamics shaping water infrastructure provision. The recurring themes is that of localized socio-spatial processes that shape and are in turn shaped by circulating conventional planning models enforced by city authorities to produce unequal geographies of water supply across different parts of Nairobi. This is demonstrated through comprehensive empirical accounts drawn from four different neighborhoods namely, Eastleigh (fast transforming residential-cum-commercial inner city district), Runda (a gated residential neighbourhood), Kayole Soweto (a rapidly transforming informal vi settlement) and Ruai (a peri-urban district). Each of the cases presents different socio-economic and political realities on the ground that contradict city authorities’ visions of building an integrated ‘modern’ monolithic infrastructure system. Altogether, the four empirical cases help to ground the need for co-existence, co-production and co-governance of a heterogeneous infrastructure configuration, with the aim of broaching the inadequacies of centralized infrastructure systems across fast transforming 21st century cities. The interrelations and multiplicity of infrastructure interpretations as I suggest for Nairobi, relate closely with contexts characterized by either lack of a centralized service, intermittent supply and/or multiple modalities of water supply as is the situation in many cities of the Global South. The study findings reveal that no one infrastructure model works in isolation without interacting with other configurations in both complementary and conflicting ways. It is also clear that different urban actors ranging from the public utility, real estate players, international actors, residential communities, individual entrepreneurs and households employ diverse typologies of socio-technical arrangements in meeting their daily water needs. As a result, the constant co-existence of the heterogeneous water supply configurations defy simplistic notions of transporting the modern infrastructure ideal in different contexts by way of revealing multiple modernities through variegated water provisioning mechanisms. While this co-existence and co-production have complex implications for infrastructure and urban governance in general, the study urges policy makers, international actors, development partners and state agencies to shift focus to the existing multiple realities confronting them as opposed to burying their heads in borrowed monolithic ideologies that perpetuate urban inequalities. Particularly, the study suggests a deeper interrogation of the interface between the official planning models and their rationalities; and the growing grassroots initiatives in water provision fronted by different actors, agencies, institutions and communities. This interface promises a new perspective of understanding what socio-technical arrangements are suited for equitable provision and distribution of scarce water resources among the different socio-economic groups that compose the urban population