Creole Infrastructure: States, Neoliberalism and Everyday Practices in Secondary African Cities

Scholarship on infrastructure is central to contemporary urban geography, especially socio-technical perspectives examining infrastructural networks as key mediators of the modern urban condition
(Graham & Marvin 2001; Amin 2004; Swyngedouw 2004). Recently, such debates have been re-energised by research conducted in southern cities, which has challenged prevailing theorisations of the links between networked infrastructures and contemporary urbanism based on the experiences of a limited number of cities (McFarlane 2008; Robinson 2016; Lawhon et al 2017). This fellowship's primary research aim is to contribute to this research field by adding to scholarly and policy understandings of urban infrastructure, particularly in the global south.
The study of water infrastructure - and how political economic circumstances alongside a variety of policies, actors and practices shape these infrastructures - is crucial in expanding equitable access to water. While most urban dwellers in Africa live in cities with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, and population growth is expected to be concentrated in these towns (UN 2014), research on urban infrastructure is mostly centred on large cities. Small cities are sparsely mentioned as examples of those places left out by neoliberalisation (Bakker 2013). Yet, there are few studies exploring actually existing infrastructure in smaller cities. This project addresses this gap by investigating water supply in a small African city: Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau. It shows how distance to centres of political economic power, weak institutions, and acute shortages of resources shape possibilities for water governance in small cities (De Boeck et al 2009; Jaglin et al 2011; Förster et al 2018). As well as researching water supply in hardly-studied cities, this project makes a distinctive contribution to academic debates by bringing into closer focus the specific assemblages of global policies, local socio-political processes and situated practices shaping urban infrastructure in an African city. Current theoretical approaches which tend to over-emphasise neoliberalisation processes cannot capture the complexity of African cities (Parnell et al 2012; Lawhon et al 2014). This is especially the case in contexts where the state or capitalist relations are not the key agents shaping urbanization. This study develops the notion of Creole Infrastructure to examine the multiple forces and practices converging in the situated production of urban infrastructure. It builds on conceptualisations of 'variegated neoliberalisms' (Brenner et al 2010) and ideas around assemblages and the everyday to make sense of urban multiplicities (Simone 2011). The term creole is used to depict the reciprocal intermixing of an array of motivations as an ongoing and creative, but also selective, process shaping urbanization. Research on policy mobility discusses how policy models mutate when moving between and landing in different contexts (McCann & Ward 2014). Yet, there are few studies scrutinising how circulating policies translate into actual infrastructural practices (Monstadt & Schramm 2017) or studying the circulation of best practices between African cities. This project analyses how laws and policy models are enacted in infrastructural practices through the actions of state and non-state actors, and theorises emerging vernacular governance models. It also examines the travels of models between two small cities in Guinea-Bissau and assesses whether these short-distance exchanges can work to improve access to safe and affordable networked water for urban-dwellers.
While this fellowship focuses primarily on consolidating my PhD research, it also expands my doctoral research by developing a grant proposal for future research that will seek to extend my PhD focus on empirical and theoretical understandings of infrastructure from the viewpoint of smaller cities by considering the cases of Beira and Nampula, Mozambique.