Hacking the pipes: Hydro-political currents in a Nairobi housing estate

Abstract

Nairobi’s water supply reflects broader dynamics of urban resource distribution, politics and power relations. Continuous disinvestment into the city’s large technological system of water supply has contributed to extreme water shortages in some parts of the city, while residents in other parts have enjoyed unrestricted access to the resource largely since the colonial period. Also, recent water sector reforms that focus less on technological networks and artefacts than on water governance have not alleviated the highly uneven distribution of water in the city. This is the context for our investigation of variegated technopolitics of water pressure management by different actors in one specific settlement: Nyayo Highrise estate. This middle-class housing estate has suffered extreme water shortages in the past decade. We start our investigation from a perspective of technology as a space of possibility – infrastructural networks and artefacts as well as related mobile technologies are not stable or fixed results of past planning decisions, but they are affected by, and at the same time shape, the ways in which people exert social and political pressure (or not). We analyse the manifold ways in which urban actors try to access, negotiate and change the city’s water flows, be it through manipulating the network of water pipes, through the provision of decentralized technologies, or through activism and public protest. We argue that this is an important intervention into current debates on African urbanisms, because it demonstrates how technology and infrastructure are spaces of possibility that may work towards emancipation and repression at the same time. © The Author(s) 2019.