Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates social and economic landscapes produced by modern piped connections that fail to deliver expected services. We discuss the variegated mechanisms (political, social, and material) by which water courses across the estate's physical and human geography.

Paper long abstract:

Where much writing on urban water supply in the Global South considers service deficiency explained by the lack of infrastructure, this paper investigates social and economic landscapes produced by modern piped connections that fail to deliver expected services. Analysing water provision to a Nairobi housing estate, we elaborate the manifold grid-hacking strategies and consequent outcomes as residents, water activists, and aspiring politicians attempt to divert and increase water flows into the estate.

Vendors ferrying barrels of water from the informal settlement to the modern housing blocks reveal a counterintuitive pattern of distribution: informal settlements that are better serviced than fee-paying flats. But if this enterpreneurialism clarifies the estate-wide consequence of a malfunctioning infrastructure, water bowsers, storage tanks and whirring pumps (expensive and spatially limited options) lay bare an intense socioeconomic stratification within the estate, and the fragmented strategies by which this vital resource is accessed.

Using Nikhil Anand's formulation of 'pressure management', we discuss the variegated mechanisms by which water courses across the estate's physical and human geography. We extend the metaphor to describe the associational forms that appear sporadically to amplify resident grievances against the water company. Opposed to these, we enumerate the decades long ebb and flow of counter-strategies - public meetings, supplementary boreholes - employed by elected representatives, the county executive and the water service company to dissipate popular demands, to placate angry residents and to assure them of efforts to end the estate's prolonged drought.