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Paper short abstract

Tapping into the City Through Illegal Water Connections

Paper long abstract

This paper unpacks the art of illegal water connection in KwaDukuza and eThekwini municipalities on South Africa East coast as a layered underground practice. Both covert in its legal status and its material form, residents routinely dig down to expose buried state water infrastructure in order to splice in their own plastic piping and guide water into informal household networks. While these interventions are framed by officials as theft, they also reflect a more complex politics shaped by chronic supply gaps, uneven service delivery, and long histories of infrastructural marginalization.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2026, the paper traces how people learn to read the landscape through its hidden infrastructures: the sound of moving water under a concrete verge, the vibration of pressure changes, the mapping of older pipelines whose records no longer exist. These techniques reveal a kind of expertise in the anatomy of the city that emerges outside of formal engineering.

I argue that Illegal connections stake improvised claims to reliability in a system that is chronically intermittent. They reshape buried network into spaces of resistance, conflict, and survival, allowing households to quietly negotiate their own terms of access. At the same time, these practices entangle residents with more-than-human forces: shifting soil, aging pipes, fluctuating pressure, and the unstable flow of water itself. By foregrounding illegal connections as underground acts the paper shows how the subsoil becomes a contested arena in which residents remake the city’s infrastructures—and their own place within them.