‘Infrastructural Challenges in Smaller African Cities...’ is an innovative research project into water and digital infrastructures in smaller cities in sub-Saharan Africa. It examines the growing adoption of digital technologies in water infrastructure, an emerging phenomenon across urban Africa that remains under-investigated. It focuses on the dynamic and vibrant context of smaller cities in sub-Saharan Africa, which are experiencing accelerated urban growth but continue to be neglected in urban and infrastructure academic research. Examining water and digital infrastructures in two smaller Mozambique establishes new, in-depth understandings of the infrastructural challenges, models and solutions emerging in smaller cities. In this way, this research contributes to broader theorisations of infrastructure and African cities by bringing into these debates the experiences of a diversity of cities. This project also sheds light on the emerging social, political and material implications of the growing adoption of digital water technologies, and on the modes of urbanity specific to smaller cities. Findings are relevant to policy debates and Sustainable Development Goals 6 and 11. The research adopts an innovative mix of qualitative methods, including mobile methods and ‘water biographies’. Novel user engagement and dissemination strategies facilitate the engagement of different academic and non-academic audiences. Supervision by an expert with networks across the Francophone and Anglophone academic worlds (Professor Sylvy Jaglin at LATTS), the opportunity to connect with scholars in the Lusophone world maximise this project’s ambition to strengthen links and shape conversations on urban research across literatures and scholarly networks.
This project examines (1) the visions of digital water technology circulating and the technologies being effectively adopted in the designing, building, management and use of different types of water infrastructure in small towns in Mozambique; (2) how smart technologies are shaping socio-political relations institutions relating to water provision; and (3) what a comparative analysis can teach us about state-society-NGO relations, the urbanity of small cities and their ongoing infrastructural challenges.
It demonstrates that digital technologies are an important tool shaping visions and practices of water supply and urban development. They are doing so in at least three significant ways: 1) by promoting the entry of new private players - in the form of software and technology developers mainly from Northern countries - into the sector; 2) by generating new funding streams that enable experimentation with new technologies; 3) by creating new mechanisms that improve (or seek to improve) cost recovery and thus attract more private investors and companies.
