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Paper short abstract

Sand at Mombasa’s urban depots “does not rot”. This paper examines how sand’s durability and trusted presence enable forms of urban everyday life grounded in granular rhythms, maintenance, and repetition rather than permanence or security.

Paper long abstract

Taking sand as a material through which to think from the ground up, this paper examines how geological matter mediates social relations in Mombasa, Kenya. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at urban sand depots, it follows sand after extraction to the sites where it is stored, trusted, and lived with, shifting attention from extraction and circulation alone to moments of accumulation, temporary fixity, and place-making.

Unlike perishable goods, „sand does not rot“, as my interlocutors repeatedly noted. It can be piled, left to wait, and mobilized when demand arises, holding value across uncertain futures. Amid ecological degradation and economic hardship, this material durability generates a form of trust. Through daily acts of placing sand, brokers, loaders, and drivers align their own temporal horizons with those of a material shaped by deep geological time yet embedded in everyday urban livelihoods. Their lives are synchronized with fluctuating construction cycles, seasonal rains, fuel prices, infrastructural projects and political instability.

Rather than treating sand simply as a commodity, this paper approaches it as a sedimentary companion to urban life whose durability makes certain forms of staying possible. Sand’s capacity to be accumulated, paused, and reactivated enables people to inhabit urban space through waiting, maintenance, and repetition rather than permanence. Attending to these granular practices foregrounds how emplacement in Mombasa is not secured through stability or ownership, but is continuously negotiated through trust in material endurance, everyday labor, and alignment with granular rhythms.