Water tanks, jerry cans, power banks
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Date
2025
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Artefacts and practices of storage as part of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations in Nairobi
Abstract
This dissertation examines how everyday artefacts of storage – such as water tanks, jerry cans, and power banks – shape Nairobi's infrastructure space. Far from being mere household items, these objects and the practices around them are central to how urban residents navigate fragmented, heterogeneous, and often unreliable infrastructure configurations that reflect colonial legacies and post-independence mutations. Within this context, storage becomes a crucial yet ambiguous tool: enabling autonomy and resilience while also reinforcing infrastructural fragmentation and injustice. Focusing on domestic storage of water and electricity, the study explores how households adapt to and simultaneously reproduce place-specific infrastructural conditions through individual storage arrangements that connect to both networked and non-networked modes of supply. Through 40 enriched household interviews, 36 expert interviews, go-alongs, urban explorations, and other informal and observational methods, the research investigates and discusses how domestic storage mediates relationships between residents, infrastructures, nature(s), and the city. Anchored in critical urban studies, STS-inspired infrastructure research, urban political ecology, and planning theory, the study introduces conceptual tools such as the 'storage city', the 'batteryscape', and 'storage as a multi-scalar analytic' to analyze storage across scales, resources, and applications. It argues for understanding storage as both a symptom of and enabler to infrastructural uncertainty. Ultimately, the dissertation proposes 'storage as a propositional space' – a field of action and possibility for urban planning and governance. It calls for recognizing domestic and communal storage as integral to infrastructure policy and planning, and for further research into minor and domestic forms of storage as a key element of urban life.
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Keywords
Urban studies, Infrastruktur, Wasser, Elektrizität, Nairobi
Subjects based on RSWK
Stadtforschung, Infrastruktur, Wasserversorgung, Elektrizitätsversorgung, Nairobi