‘Precarious power’: Implicit infrastructures and electricity access in Witsand, Cape Town (South Africa)

IF 6.5 1区 经济学 Q1 DEVELOPMENT STUDIES Habitat International Pub Date : 2024-11-15 DOI:10.1016/j.habitatint.2024.103228
Romeo Dipura , Elmond Bandauko , Robert Nutifafa Arku
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Abstract

For the poor residents in Witsand, an informal settlement on the periphery of Cape Town, electricity access is an everyday struggle, where households circumvent Eskom's vouchers and prepaid meters to adapt electricity to their lived realities. In this paper, we argue that in a context where Eskom electricity provision is often exclusionary, residents deploy diverse strategies to challenge this form of infrastructure violence. Drawing on over twenty months of ethnographic work, complemented with participant observations and semi-structured interviews, we demonstrate how resident-made electricity connections prove a critical and implicit part of the electricity infrastructure system. Building from a sociotechnical approach to infrastructure, we use the notion of ‘precarious power’ to explore the mix of agency and precariousness that are entangled in the everyday practices of ordinary people making electricity connections. We highlight that in improvising electricity access, residents in Witsand exercised their agency to circumvent and appropriate Eskom electricity. This paper contributes to an understanding of urban residents' everyday infrastructural experiences through an analytical frame that is neither dismissive of their agency nor celebratory of their struggles.
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不稳定的电力":南非开普敦维桑德的隐性基础设施与电力供应
对于开普敦外围非正规定居点维桑德(Witsand)的贫困居民来说,用电是他们每天都在进行的斗争,在这里,家庭规避 Eskom 的凭证和预付费电表,使电力适应他们的生活现实。在本文中,我们认为,在 Eskom 电力供应往往具有排斥性的背景下,居民们采取了多种策略来挑战这种形式的基础设施暴力。通过二十多个月的人种学研究工作,并辅以参与者观察和半结构化访谈,我们展示了居民自制的电力连接是如何成为电力基础设施系统的一个关键和隐性部分的。从基础设施的社会技术角度出发,我们使用了 "不稳定的权力 "这一概念,来探讨普通人在日常接电实践中纠缠不清的代理和不稳定性。我们强调,在简易接电的过程中,威桑德的居民行使了他们的权力,规避并使用了 Eskom 公司的电力。本文通过既不轻视居民的能动性,也不赞美他们的抗争的分析框架,为理解城市居民的日常基础设施经验做出了贡献。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
10.50
自引率
10.30%
发文量
151
审稿时长
38 days
期刊介绍: Habitat International is dedicated to the study of urban and rural human settlements: their planning, design, production and management. Its main focus is on urbanisation in its broadest sense in the developing world. However, increasingly the interrelationships and linkages between cities and towns in the developing and developed worlds are becoming apparent and solutions to the problems that result are urgently required. The economic, social, technological and political systems of the world are intertwined and changes in one region almost always affect other regions.
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