Presentation short abstract

Storage infrastructures – from jerry cans to grid-scale batteries – shape contemporary urban realities and imaginaries. Exploring water and electricity in Nairobi and beyond, I show how storage reveals multi-scalar relations, infrastructural injustices, and propositional futures beyond the modern.

Presentation long abstract

The ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ has long promised an uninterrupted, universal supply of resources and services. Yet, the limitations of this ideal – whether infrastructural, ecological, or conceptual – have also been well documented. At the same time, our urban worlds have entered a phase in which the certainties and patterns of urban metabolism are reshaped by climate change, technological disruption, and more. Established ways of regulating flows – including their overflows and shortages – through infrastructures are being confronted with new realities, in which, for example, the storage of resources is gaining renewed importance. In their minor and major articulations – as jerry cans or groundwater storage, as power banks or grid-scale batteries – storage infrastructures play an invisibly central role in contemporary infrastructural realities and imaginaries, but they remain peripheral to critical debates about urban metabolisms. Drawing on my PhD research on domestic storage, this contribution explores and contrasts the urban political ecologies of water and electricity supply in Nairobi (Kenya) through the lens of storage, highlighting multi-scalar relations, infrastructural injustices and the ‘tool power’ of storage arrangements. Broadening the scope, I also take a glimpse into planning documents and policies from selected countries/cities in Africa, Asia, and Europe (including Nairobi) to demonstrate how storage (water/energy) has been incorporated into the planning, design and governance of urban worlds, or not. Ultimately, I present storage as a crucial propositional space for urban-infrastructural futures beyond a ‘modern’ ideal, as we re-envision ideals, plans, and projects for more sustainable and just cities.