In this guest post, former USF International Fellow Dr Lazarus Jambadu describes the results of his research “Repairing the city? Water infrastructure maintenance, politics, and urban inequality in Accra and Dar es Salaam”, for which he spent eight months working at Ardhi University’s Institute of Human Settlement Studies under the mentorship of Prof Wilbard Kombe.
When we think about urban water infrastructure, our attention often goes to what is most visible: pipes laid beneath streets, treatment plants, reservoirs, pumping stations, and the households connected to a network. New infrastructure is particularly easy to celebrate. It signals progress, modernity, and the expanding capacity of cities to provide essential services to growing populations.
But what happens after the ribbon is cut? What happens when a pipe leaks, a valve fails, a pump stops working, or a household connection breaks? Who responds? How quickly? And, perhaps most importantly, whose problem gets fixed first, and whose can remain unresolved? These questions became central to my research on water infrastructure maintenance and repair in Accra and Dar es Salaam. They also became a way of thinking differently about how cities work. During my USF Fellowship, I had the opportunity to reflect more deeply on these questions. The Fellowship provided the intellectual space to revisit something that had initially appeared rather mundane to me: maintenance and repair. I came to realise that there is, in fact, very little that is mundane about the work of keeping a city functioning.
The everyday labour of maintenance and repair of water infrastructure
Spending much time observing the everyday maintenance and repair practices of engineers and repair workers changed the way I understood infrastructure itself. A water network is not a finished object but rather something that is continuously being made and remade through the labour of maintenance and repair. During my research on water infrastructure, I encountered maintenance and repair workers dealing with a seemingly endless stream of leaks, broken connections, malfunctioning equipment, and other infrastructural problems. In some locations, workers were responding to multiple faults every day. The numbers themselves are revealing, but what stayed with me was the rhythm of this work. Repair was never a single event but a continuous process of responding to failure every day. Workers fix one leak, only for another to appear somewhere else; they restore one connection, only for another household to report a problem; they repair a section of the network, only to return later because the same infrastructure has failed again. This made me think differently about the idea of an “urban water system”. Perhaps what we call a “system” is actually a constantly moving assemblage of materials, people, institutions, skills, and improvisations held together through maintenance and repair work. Thus, the city works because someone is constantly working to make it work.
The piped networks in Accra and Dar es Salaam were installed several decades ago, but their ability to deliver water today depends on the utility workers who inspect them, repair them, replace parts, respond to complaints, and improvise when resources or equipment are unavailable. It also depends on residents who report leaks and broken connections and the interventions of private plumbers when public systems cannot respond quickly enough. It equally depends on households’ capacity to store water when they anticipate interruptions. In other words, water access is produced not only through infrastructure construction but also through the everyday labour of keeping infrastructure “alive”. Sadly, this critical labour is often invisible or even marginalised in organisational management and policies.
One of the questions that increasingly concerned me was not simply how infrastructure is repaired, but whose infrastructure is repaired first. In both cities, what I noticed is that there are always more problems than available resources. Maintenance teams have limited personnel, equipment, vehicles, budgets, and time. This means that decisions have to be made about what receives attention and what waits. Those decisions can appear technical, but they have social consequences, and this is where maintenance and repair become political. A leaking pipe in one neighbourhood may be repaired quickly, while a broken connection elsewhere may remain unresolved. A household with the ability to repeatedly contact the utility may be more successful in getting attention than one without such connections. A community with greater political visibility may find it easier to make its infrastructural problems heard. This made me realise that maintenance is also a way of distributing urban resources. These insights will be reflected upon in the two articles I wrote during my USF Fellowship.
Conclusion and key lessons learned
Perhaps one of the most important lessons I take from this research is the need to pay greater attention to the people who maintain urban infrastructure. The engineers, plumbers, technicians, and other maintenance workers possess forms of knowledge that rarely appear in planning documents or infrastructure maps. For example, they know where pipes repeatedly fail; they know which neighbourhoods experience pressure problems; they know which materials work and which do not; they know the practical limitations of the systems they are expected to maintain; they also know the everyday frustrations of residents. Yet their knowledge does not always translate into decision-making power. If infrastructure is to work, the repair workers must be at the centre of urban infrastructure planning and policy.
Secondly, working across Accra and Dar es Salaam has convinced me that we need to rethink what we mean by urban infrastructure. Is infrastructure a “thing” or the processes that keep the “thing” working? Of what use is infrastructure if it is not made functional? It is my view that infrastructure is not simply what is built but what is continually sustained, and maintenance is not simply what happens when infrastructure breaks but rather part of the processes through which the city and its infrastructure are continuously re/produced. This perspective seeks to shift our attention from spectacular infrastructure projects to the less visible practices of maintenance and repair that keep cities functioning every day. It asks us to look at the technician repairing a pipe, the plumber restoring a connection, the resident storing water, the utility worker responding to a complaint, and the household searching for an alternative source. These ordinary practices reveal extraordinary things about the city. They reveal who has resources and who does not. They reveal whose problems become visible and whose remain hidden. They reveal who has the authority to make decisions and who must adapt to them. And they reveal how deeply questions of water access are connected to questions of power.