Urban waterscapes and the pandemic – changing water practices, technologies and infrastructures in Nairobi
Final Report Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic brought to the fore the importance of water access as an essential service protecting human health. Yet, the prevention of human-to-human transmission of the novel virus can be impacted by uneven geographies of water access. Focusing on Nairobi, Kenya’s capital with historically uneven and highly contested geographies of water, the 12-months “Urban Waterscapes and The Pandemic” project mobilized the concept of waterscapes to understand how Nairobi’s water supply, technologies, governance, and practices have changed during the pandemic. Accordingly, the project team of TU Dortmund and the University of Nairobi targeted two waterchallenged areas in Nairobi – the informal settlement of Kibera and the dense, central neighborhood of Eastleigh – to a) understand Nairobi’s pandemic waterscape, b) explore potentially changed water practices in Kibera and Eastleigh, and c) compare placespecific changes to challenge the dichotomies through which urban infrastructure provision and access are often seen. Overall, with more than 50 qualitative interviews, more than 900 quantitative questionnaires, one open data set, three conference contributions, two peer-reviewed publications (one under review, one being drafted), and a forthcoming policy brief, the project met and even exceeded its anticipated goals. More so, the academic merit is displayed in its key findings and newly identified research gaps. Nairobi’s waterscapes did indeed experience disruptions and changes, such as an unprecedented supply of free water to informal settlement, a state-led surge in boreholes, and further increases of erratic supply patterns within the piped water network. However, those changes cannot be attributed to the pandemic alone but were the result of coincidental overlap with distinct, albeit temporary changes in Nairobi’s overall urban governance structure. Further, these disruptions and changes played out in very place-specific and fine-grained ways that hint at a further urban-infrastructural fragmentation within the neighborhood level. The findings of the project lead to specific recommendations and propositions for urban water policy and practice as well to the identification of a research gap regarding the temporalities of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations (in urban Africa), which the project team is now using for a follow-up research proposal.
Publications
-
Governing Pandemic Waterscapes: Covid-19 and Nairobi Metropolitan Services as Co-Catalysts of Waterscape Changes. MDPI AG.
Schramm, Sophie; Kasper, Moritz; Mwenje, Emmanuel; Bohlen, Simon & Wamuchiru, Elizabeth
-
Household Survey in Nairobi (Kibera & Eastleigh) for the "Urban Waterscapes and the Pandemic" research project
Kasper M.; Schramm S.; Mwenje E. & Wamuchiru E.
