Short Abstract

The many waters that flow through Africa's cities entangle geographies, actors, and ways of knowing. This panel invites multidisciplinary, collaborative work that relates these hydro-multiplicities productively: how waters transform, link scales, bind actors, and are lived, governed, and researched.

Long Abstract

Stormwater from hillsides floods settlements downstream. Boreholes for apartment towers draw down aquifers shared with larger geographies. Tankers and kiosks resell water from distant dams to residents the grid never reached. Across African cities, rain, rivers, wetlands, groundwater, piped, harvested, stored, and wastewater tie neighbourhoods, catchments, and actors together. What is channelled or withheld in one place resurfaces elsewhere. Yet hydro-social geographies are never simply relational, let alone flat. Colonial planning legacies, rationing regimes, cost recovery, and contested land tenure have long fragmented relations between waters, scales, and actors. Our knowledge of these waterscapes is equally partial. Hydrological models, engineering plans, development imaginaries, ethnographies, and everyday experiences each refract these waters differently, offering glimpses that rarely speak to one another.

This panel invites multi-disciplinary, mixed-methods contributions that relate such hydro-fragments without forcing them into a coherent whole, drawing especially on urban political ecology, the anthropology of infrastructure, and urban studies and planning. How do waters, whether flowing, stored, stagnant, or absent, transform into one another? How do urban waters link households to catchments, dams, and aquifers, and to national reforms, donor agendas, and international capital? How do utilities, planners, politicians, vendors, residents, and non-human actors co-produce, contest, and depend on one another along water's flows? And, as the 'urban extremes' of a changing planet intensify, how are urban waters being planned, designed, and governed, or should be? We welcome empirical, conceptual, and methodological papers, including co-produced and arts-based work on the limits and possibilities of researching urban waterscapes together.

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