Paper short abstract:

How do informal settlers manage for cooking, lighting and heat? Interviews engaged with temporalities of displacement, post-conflict transition, and climate change-affected conditions in make-do, urban margins, and how to claim infrastructural services in precarious urban landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper concerns making claims to belong in urban places as voiced in interviews with mostly women members of several informal settlements in the Kathmandu Valley between 2018-2019. The interview materials were gathered as part of a project to understand everyday energy practices by informal settlers (who are increasingly of interest given global policies of Sustainable Energy for All). How did they manage for cooking, lighting and heat? The project's research team recorded accounts of difficulties of gas supply experienced during the India blockade (2015/16) and of struggles to get electric grid connection without documents of property title, or to access other services that are normal to contemporary urban expectations. People tell of their involvement in temporalities of urban displacement, civil war, post-conflict transition, and climate change-affected conditions experienced in make-do, urban margins. Through research networks mobilised by the team of local investigators, a pair of consultative meetings helped to open out spaces for deliberative participation, and point to the value of dialogue in the formulation of citizenship and recognition of claims to infrastructural services in precarious urban landscapes. The paper's argument engages with disputed accounts of The Anthropocene by considering new urban/rural socialities of living as vital territories for understanding how people stake claims in places of geo-social marginality.