Vital infrastructures

Sustaining lives in urban environments depends on infrastructures – buildings, water pipes, sewers, energy distribution, or roads, among others. Their availability is particularly acute in Africa due to rapid urbanization, entrenched inequalities and persistent resource constraints. At the site of my ongoing research, Namibia’s capital Windhoek, the legacy of colonial segregation coupled with low incomes and lack of affordable housing have led to the mushrooming of ‘informal’ settlements with insufficient formal infrastructures. In these conditions, the necessity to satisfy basic needs, as well as aspirations of improvement, lead the residents to rely on improvisational skills, co-presence, and social relationships to innovate do-it-yourself (DIY) solutions as well as to appropriate, bypass and complement formal infrastructures. These arrangements are ‘vital infrastructures’ in two senses: both as facilitating and regenerating lives in the city, and as relying on the energies of the residents for their operation (which blurs the categories of provider and user). I argue that such vital infrastructures are a major force in the making of cities and urban lives, in Africa and beyond. While their immediate purpose is to solve practical problems, the social, transactional and political patterns that they entail lead to profoundly relational, co-constructed infrastructures and everyday governance.