Presentation short abstract

I draw on the notion of accretion to build on the concept of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations. I examine accretions of waste management in Dakar, Senegal. Accretion defies modernist infrastructure concepts by exposing how multiple agents and configurations manifest and co-exist over time.

Presentation long abstract

Existing scholarly work unpacks infrastructure in the global South as networks of socio-material relations of people and matter. The notion of configurations has been used to challenge the uniformity of modernist infrastructure. I anchor my understanding of configurations in the concept of Heterogenous Infrastructure Configurations (HIC), which grasps how socio-material elements complement and relate to each other by continuously rearranging across space.

Anand proposes the notion of accretion to extend understandings of urban infrastructure. He suggests that infrastructure exceeds modernist design as it manifests across multiple overlapping temporalities. I deploy accretion from an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective to further interrogate how urban infrastructures exceed modernity.

This article examines accretions upheld by formal waste collectors, female street sweeping groups and environmental youth groups in Yarakh, a coastal neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal. By studying these actors, I advance theoretical debates on accretions and configurations in two ways. First, I suggest that accretion can foreground the multiplicity of agents and co-existing configurations of infrastructure upheld across overlapping temporalities. Second, accretion potentially offers an avenue out of sector-bound thinking about configurations.

With a focus on temporal and sectoral non-boundedness, accretion informs a vision that is less linear than modernist concepts of infrastructure. By extending the scope of recognised infrastructural agents, accretion inspires a more just, inclusive perspective on configurations.