Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines infrastructural citizenship in the context of heterogenous infrastructure configurations. Taking South Africa, where hybrid water and energy technologies are increasingly adopted, research considers how heterogenous infrastructure renegotiates citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks, how is infrastructural citizenship challenged and re-shaped by heterogenous infrastructure configurations? Infrastructural citizenship explores how state-citizen expectations and relationships are mediated and materialised through infrastructure. Analysing heterogenous infrastructure through a citizenship lens is important because access to basic services is typically regarded as a core state responsibility within the citizenship contract. However, despite the stubborn persistence of the modern infrastructural ideal within planning and public health, conflating universal networked public infrastructure with urban modernity, this is widely critiqued as a hegemonic myth that ignores global practice. In contrast, particularly in Africa, “hybrid” (Jaglin 2015) and “heterogeneous” (Lawhon et al 2018) infrastructure configurations are dominant, where infrastructure is “co-produced” (Rateau and Jaglin, 2020) as a “bricolage” (Fredericks 2018; Munro 2020) between actors, technologies and resources that are networked and non-networked, public and private. In this landscape, the state occupies a potentially less dominant and/or less visible, position, with consequences for how infrastructural citizenship is conceived and practised. This is important because citizens’ material secession from, and supplementation of, networked infrastructure frequently represents political dissatisfaction with the state, whilst also renegotiating the citizenship contract. For example, in South Africa citizens are transitioning towards hybrid and off-grid technologies and private suppliers not just to avoid material dependency on unreliable and unaffordable utility services, but also to avoid reliance on a state perceived as corrupt and inefficient. However, this has transformed fiscal co-dependencies between citizens and municipalities in ways that undermine South Africa’s civic commitment to redistribution and redefine infrastructural citizenship.