Collective Urban Futures Within Decentralized Infrastructures: The Production of Water Quality in Lusaka, Zambia

Abstract

The city of Lusaka, Zambia, experiences recurring cholera outbreaks, but this is often isolated to peri-urban settlements where rapid urbanization and climate change leave residents dealing with groundwater contamination and flash floods. Within the uneven distribution of waterborne disease, the ‘modern infrastructural ideal' of centralized and separate circulations of water and waste, and the urban form that comes with it, has been superseded by the deployment of heterogeneous infrastructures that produce drinking water at multiple scales and locations across the city. These infrastructures are often situated in neighbourhoods and households, such as point-of-use chlorination, community-run boreholes, and on-site sanitation. At the same time, within Lusaka’s decentralized infrastructural configurations, water’s quality changes in its flows within, beyond, and below the urban scale, exposing the challenges of urban water management across varied infrastructural, institutional, and hydrological logics. Based off of ongoing fieldwork in Lusaka, this paper examines how decentralized water and sanitation infrastructures that produce drinking water at the household and neighbourhood scale in turn impact water management strategies at the urban scale in Lusaka, including the ways in which climate adaptation in the city is imagined and enacted. As the case of Lusaka demonstrates, water quality is deeply implicated in the working out of relations between differently situated groups across class, location, and gender. Understanding how water quality is produced in Lusaka thus suggests how different urban environments are negotiated across scales and how collective urban futures under the uncertainty of climate change are imagined by different groups within decentralized infrastructural configurations.