Aid on Spreadsheets

Urban infrastructure challenges of the South: Waste and sanitation research in Ugandan cities to develop theory and methods for heterogenous infrastru

Cities in Africa are growing at unprecedented rates, and face an historically unique set of multiscalar constraints including poverty and resource scarcity. This project will focus on urban waste and sanitation in two Ugandan cities as these significantly impact the health of residents, and particularly the health of women and youth and have been widely documented to impact other development indicators, including school attendance, economic development, and gender equity. We will emphasize the politics of these services, including the contestation and negotiation that are part of the everyday use of residents. Our starting point is that residents use a diversity of sociotechnical options to obtain services, such as using flush toilets at school, paying to use a privately owned pit latrine, and making use of a distant open space. Building on African urbanist literature which urges us to start with cities in the South rather than established Northern theories and norms, we challenge the notion of the “infrastructure ideal” that suggests that the goal of service provision ought to be uniform, single-network services throughout the city. Instead, we focus our work on understanding the existing range of options and the processes undertaken to negotiate, contest, and improve what we call a “sociotechnical configuration” that helps to differentiate from a uniform and static systems view. Methodologically, we combine a study of everyday practices (using ethnographic methods) with studies of socio-technical configurations (using historical-interpretative and structural-quantitative methods) and our work will contribute theoretically to a number of fields, including infrastructure studies, urban political ecology, and global South urbanism. We seek to iteratively develop a conceptual framework to explain how infrastructure services are navigated, distributed and fought over, as well as how interventions can enable more just and sustainable services. We also believe that our work will have practical implications. We believe that shifting the focus from seeking large-scale, uniform solutions, towards implementing an array of services, can help urban ecosystems and human health. Our knowledge project seeks to foreground that heterogeneous sociotechnical configurations already provide residents with more options when services are interrupted. Rather than to ensure that nothing ever goes wrong, we suggest that resilience is increased by this multiplicity and should be built upon towards universal rights and provision. Through numerous outputs, including local workshops, community video, and regional learning platforms, we seek to inform development agencies and other stakeholders on how investments can be channeled more effectively.

Project ID

SE-0-29-2015-03543-285-43082

Activity status

2 - Implementation

Aid type

D02 - Other technical assistance

% to Uganda

100.00

Organisations

Funding

Sweden

Implementing

Kungliga Tekniska högskolan

Extending

None

CRS code	%
Research/scientific institutions (43082)	100.0