Infrastructural tinkering and the everyday governance of water in Pumwani, Nairobi

In Southern cities, residents carry out continuous acts of tinkering through which they negotiate access to water despite the characteristic unreliability of the formal system. While Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown how governance emerges through situated socio-material practices, they have paid less attention to the recurring dynamics through which these practices reproduce or reorganise urban order. Drawing on Varela and colleagues enactive account of coupling and co-dependent arising, this paper conceptualises infrastructural tinkering as an iterative mode of governance through which embodied dispositions are continually reproduced or reorganised in response to failure. The argument is developed through qualitative interviews conducted at nine water points in the neighbourhood of Pumwani, in Nairobi. The analysis identifies six patterns that reveal distinct modes of orienting action in recursive socio-material engagements. While most patterns reproduce conditions of urban capture by reinforcing historically inherited relations, autonomous forms of tinkering demonstrate how recurrent engagement may also reorganise governance through situated negotiation. The paper argues that tradition and transformation are not opposing pairs but emerge from the same dynamics that produce constraints. In doing so, it contributes towards a relational account of governance that explains how urban order is continually reproduced andreorganised through everyday infrastructural practice.