Mapping operation and maintenance: an everyday urbanism analysis of inequalities within piped water supply in Lilongwe, Malawi

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the production of inequalities within the centralized water supply network of Lilongwe. We use a process-based analysis to understand how urban infrastructure is made to work and explain the disparity in levels of service by tracing the everyday practices of those who operate the infrastructure. This extends existing analyses of everyday practices in relation to urban water inequalities in African cities by focusing on formal operators, rather than water users, and looking within the networked system, rather than outside it. Our findings show that these practices work to exacerbate existing water stress in poor areas of the city. We conclude with a reflection on how understanding these practices as the product of the perceptions, rationalizations, and interpretations of utility staff who seek to manage the city's (limited) water as best they can offers insight into what is required for a more progressive urban water politics.

Water Brokers: Exploring Urban Water Governance through the Practices of Tanker Water Supply in Accra

“…In recent years, urban (water) scholars, but also geographers and anthropologists, have engaged with the study of everyday practices in order to document the different and unequal ways through which basic services are provided and accessed [26,28,[37][38][39][40]. Practice-oriented approaches have been particularly useful for gaining fine-grained understandings of how the distribution of water actually happens in face of policy requirements and ideal models [27,30,[41][42][43][44]. Documenting the practices of planning, maintaining, repairing, and accessing water and water related infrastructure has illuminated how "consumers, providers, engineers, plumbers, politicians, policy-makers, and government authorities interact through a dynamic set of social and material relations to access, provide, and control water supply" [45] (p. 32).…”

“…These actions are, at the same time, repetitive and dynamic, maintaining existing patterns and expressions of a continuous rearrangement of relations. Importantly, practices are not to be understood in isolation, but situated in specific contexts [27] and local histories [50] enacted by situated actors [25]. Following Cleaver [51], we understand agency as complex, "relational, and constituted by routine practices as well as purposive actions" (p. 223).…”

Socio‐environmental confounders of safe water interventions

“…In Lilongwe, Malawi, exclusion began with the city's Water Board employees. They decided where to direct water flow using their own personal views of who was entitled to the best water service, using social status and political priorities to make these decisions of who deserved water (Alda‐Vidal, Kooy, & Rusca, 2018). Urban piped water service has long been rationed in Accra, Ghana, as well, with communities benefiting from or excluded by a complex mix of geography and income effects (Stoler, 2013).…”

Rethinking water insecurity, inequality and infrastructure through an embodied urban political ecology

“…Drawing from these insights, embodied approaches to water in/security recognize that analyses that are only attentive to regional, national or even urban scales can give an appearance of water access and availability that fails to hold up when the bodily scale is taken into account-consequently excluding important dimensions of insecurity and inequality (Truelove, 2011). For example, while cities such as Delhi, Lilongwe, and Amman may appear to provision sufficient and/or secure aggregate water flows at the scale of the city, zooming in to the scale of the body reveals how differing urban, regional, and local processes unequally channel water to city-dwellers, with particular residents receiving sub-standard and insufficient potable water and encountering detrimental consequences associated with procuring water despite per capita averages (Alda-Vidal, Kooy, & Rusca, 2018;Truelove, 2018;Mustafa & Talozi, 2018). Thus, attention to embodied forms of water in/security reveals that an exclusive focus on national, regional, or urban scales of water security can mask important dimensions of insecurity and inequality experienced by city-dwellers in everyday life.…”