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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: E32-06. To panel E32.

Title of paper:

Author:

Lalli Metsola (University of Helsinki).

Long abstract paper:
This paper discusses the role of what I call 'social infrastructuring' in the daily life of residents of the fringes of Namibia's capital city, Windhoek. By this, I refer to the ways in which various forms of social connectedness contribute to provision and how such forms in turn link with official material and administrative infrastructures.

Conventionally, the concept of social infrastructures has referred to the administrative and technical solutions that provide welfare and social connectedness. A contrasting and more recent conceptualization has focused on how sociality and human activity themselves serve as infrastructure, often in contexts where official infrastructure in the material and technical sense might be lacking.

Instead of treating material or technological infrastructures as 'things' that either work or don't and social ones as relationships and networks that enable lives in infrastructurally lacking urban environments, I am referring to social infrastructuring as the process where the two constantly flow into each other - the interconnectedness of particular forms of sociality and different kinds of technical infrastructures. This convergence is the focus of this paper - the ways in which existing infrastructural forms with their constraining tendencies, deficits and opportunities contribute to socialities and how the latter in turn produce ways of using, modifying and innovating material infrastructures.

The situation in Windhoek is particularly well-suited for this task, as it faces the infrastructural challenges familiar from literature on African urbanities, yet is not makeshift, unpredictable and ungovernable to the extent stressed by some of this literature. Structuration and fragmentation, construction and deterioration, order and disorder, the durable and the provisional constantly mingle in this context.

One important implication of this is the centrality of coproduced infrastructures where official and unofficial efforts meet in numerous ways, for example in relation to water, electricity, access to land, construction or security. Another is that the connections between technical, administrative and social infrastructures have political and governmental implications. Social infrastructuring concerns not just the conditions of meeting daily needs but also the construction of society and the political community. It concerns what could be called the morality of infrastructure, or infrastructure as an arena of claims, negotiations and struggles over decency, citizenship, and authority.

The paper is based on fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2019.

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