Pascale Hofmann

The peri-urban water poor: citizens or consumers?

Using the results of a comparative three-year research project in five metropolitan areas, this article reviews a range of practices in accessing water and sanitation by peri-urban poor residents and producers. It starts from the observation that neither centralized supply policies nor the market through, for example, large-scale profit-making enterprises are able to meet their needs. Although they are consumers insofar as they have no option but to pay market prices for water (and often for sanitation), the peri-urban poor are, in practice, sometimes regarded as citizens with basic entitlements such as the right to water. This article outlines a conceptual distinction between “policy-driven” and “needs-driven” practices in the access to peri-urban water and sanitation services. The case studies show that this access is mainly needs-driven and informal rather than the result of formal policies. The key to structural improvements in water and sanitation lies in the recognition of these practices and their articulation to the formal system under new governance regimes.

Water trajectories through non-networked infrastructure: insights from peri-urban Dar es Salaam, Cochabamba and Kolkata

For many urbanites, infrastructural uncertainty refers to ‘predictable shocks’ rather than constituting a quotidian experience. By contrast, for the peri-urban poor, the sources of uncertainty underpinning water and sanitation services are endless: uncertainty about cost, about being evicted and indeed about ever becoming connected to networked systems. Drawing on a number of case studies, we argue that across the urban global south, the future is not one of networked systems but rather one of ‘infrastructural archipelagos’ that need to be thoroughly understood in order to bridge the growing gap between everyday and large infrastructural planning practices.

Institutional Discourses on Urban Water Poverty, Considering the Example of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Reconciling Justice and Resilience?

While some argue that the process of urbanization in the Global South is characterised by intense social and political struggles around water, most current conceptualisations on urban water poverty are based on a politically produced ideology that water shortages are due to technical and natural constraints. This chapter explores the diverse range of institutional discourses on urban water poverty that have emerged with particular reference to the context of Dar es Salaam. The author highlights the implications for environmental justice and resilience and investigates the scope for their reconciliation. Discourses that uphold social and environmental injustices display limited connotations for resilience while those that problematize existing inequalities and dependencies aiming for just processes and outcomes have the potential to contribute towards resilience in a more encompassing way.

Falling through the net: access to water and sanitation by the peri-urban water poor

There is still a considerable gap that needs to be filled in order to meet the water and sanitation target of the Millennium Development Goals. Current efforts are driven by the particular way in which the problem has been conceptualised, and this has implications for a large part of the population that lacks access to water supply and sanitation services (WSS), but is continually overlooked. This article takes a closer look at official attempts to improve WSS in order to understand their underlying assumptions and subsequent implications for the provision of services. This is contrasted with evidence from research in Cairo, Caracas, Chennai, Dar es Salaam and Mexico City, which sheds light on the continued struggles of the peri-urban water poor in gaining access to services. Peri-urban communities in these cities have developed a number of needs-driven practices in order to compensate for the inefficiency of the formal WSS system, but remain largely invisible and unsupported due to their political status. The article argues for recognition and active involvement of the peri-urban water poor to have a realistic chance to address the global water and sanitation challenges.

Multi-layered Trajectories of Water and Sanitation Poverty in Dar es Salaam

Many cities in the global south keep on expanding without adequate infrastructure leaving a large number of people to experience varying degrees of water and sanitation poverty. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has been subject to numerous interventions aimed at improving service provision across the city with mixed and overall limited results. Most of them are driven by popular definitions of urban water and sanitation poverty that portray the problem in a simplified way. It is often assumed that once people gain access to some form of improved access to basic services, this access is sustained over time. Instead, the urban poor experience differing journeys as they ‘travel’ in and out of water poverty but their trajectories are insufficiently understood. This chapter applies a relational approach to unfold a select number of trajectories from people living in a low-income community in Dar es Salaam. The stories illustrate how and why certain households and individuals are able to move out of urban water and sanitation poverty while others are not and thus offers insights into the dynamic interplay between individual and collective agency. This highlights different and changing degrees of urban water and sanitation poverty in a settlement and reveals the power dynamics that condition inequalities and shape people’s trajectories over time. These narratives offer a nuanced and multi-layered understanding that challenges fixed universal approaches.

Relational Trajectories of Urban Water Poverty in Lima and Dar es Salaam

Women’s trajectories in and out of urban water poverty are located at varying intersections of class, citizenship, age, ethnicity and other social categories and identities. Previous work by feminist researchers has demonstrated how women’s experiences and their possibilities in life differ depending on these intersections. This chapter examines how three women and one man in two informal settlements in Lima (Peru) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) experience water poverty in their daily lives and seek water justice. Drawing on primary research, the chapter adopts a portraiture approach to weave an intricate outline of how these four people navigate fuzzy water entitlements in these two cities. The discussion shows how gender cannot be understood in isolation. As a practice it intersects with issues of urban life to create gendered trajectories that explain why and how some women can escape water poverty and activate their right to water while others cannot. In doing so, we adopt a dialectical perspective to explore how an intersectional approach can go beyond enduring individualist and reductionist assumptions linked to Western liberal underpinnings embedded in water interventions. The discussion posits the need to include a robust conception of the social world in which change depends on shifting power relations, and individual agency is shaped by power or social forces as well as individual will.