The social and political life of waterways Everyday practices of infrastructure in Accra, Ghana

This PhD project sheds light on the social and political relations embedded in the infrastructure, flows and practices of drainage in Accra, Ghana. It focuses on the everyday geographies of drainage infrastructure, approaching urbanization as a subjective, socio-ecological process using urban ethnography.
Conceptually, the dissertation understands urban infrastructure as a site where socio-ecological inequalities are produced and negotiated. Understanding Accra’s “gutters” not only as drainage channels but as an infrastructure for waste disposal and as resource, it studies how these waterways circulate material through the city.
I employ a qualitative approach of observations and informal unstructured interviews; I follow one primary waterway, the Kordzor, systematically tracing it from its tributaries to its outfall in the sea over the course of twelve months between February 2020 and March 2022. This is supplemented with a second site in a neighbouring basin, the Odaw, as well as stakeholder interviews with (local and national) government officials, representatives of waste management companies.
The chapters address different dimensions from the findings. Chapter 2 discusses how political authority is leveraged through interventions in the waterway. Chapter 3 showcases the micropolitics approach of studying infrastructural imaginaries through the affective and visceral responses to everyday wastewater problems. Using an expansive understanding of infrastructure, Chapter 4 reveals ambiguity within the waterway’s spatial politics. Finally, Chapter 5 shows that despite the widely shared notion that urban residents need to be educated to adopt proper waste disposal methods to prevent flooding, they are often already mobilizing knowledge to protect themselves in small-scale interventions.