‘The Water We Need’: Household Water Mapping as Ecofeminist Education and Research for the Water Commons

Basic services are a critical nexus point for the realisation of sustainable cities. In South Africa, the failure to realise adequate and equitable basic services cements apartheid and colonial power relations, reproducing violent inequalities and relations of unsustainability. Water inequality has a disproportionate impact on women, who are often responsible for the labour involving water use. Thus, approaches to urban water management that centre life-making and the common good become critical. In this article, we present and discuss a research process for mapping household water use. This process was co-designed and implemented by water organisers in Cape Town and its surroundings. The organisers come together through the African Water Commons Collective, a women-led collective that supports self-organisation around water struggles in urban communities. We argue that water mapping as a process enables people to share and analyse their lived realities, and reimagine urban water management. Such an approach to research and learning reveals the complexity of the urban, raises political questions about water use and distribution and begins to imagine alternatives to existing systems of water distribution.