Abstract
The participatory turn of Dakar’s waste collection infrastructure in the 1990s and 2000s was internationally acclaimed as best practice of “participatory” urban governance in Africa (p. 98). For geographer Rosalind Fredericks, however, the transfer of Dakar’s waste work onto unpaid, poorly equipped, “community-based” labor bears testimony to the unmaking of the city’s networked trash infrastructure and the devolution, instead, of infrastructure on an increasingly informal and flexible labor force. This triad of community, labor, and infrastructure and the role of neoliberal reform in reshaping it are at the core of this book.
After highlighting the many faces of neoliberal reforms of the Senegalese state and their implications for the politics of urban work and infrastructure (Chapter 1), the book examines two formulas of participatory waste collection to describe their contribution to the processes of “flexibilizing the … labor force” (p. 13) and “governing-through-disposability” (p. 32). Set in the backdrop of violent riots and social unrest, the 1990 Set/Setal youth movement (described in Chapter 2) “offered a constructive response to the general population’s disillusionment with the country’s economic and political state of affairs through cleaning activities” (p. 43). Although initially a grassroots initiative, the movement was channeled into a new garbage collection infrastructure by the municipal administration, which harnessed youth’s enthusiasm and sense of responsibility through informal, poorly paid, and unprotected labor. Chapter 3 moves to another form of participatory waste management, run by an non-governmental organization in one of Dakar’s peripheral neighborhoods in 2003.This program of low-tech, horse-cart drawn garbage collection relied on the voluntary work of the neighborhood’s women to link the neighborhood’s waste to the rest of the city’s collection network. These two cases both exemplify the enrollment of the free, or poorly paid, labor of young men and women through a rhetoric of community, responsibility, and cleanliness. Chapter 4 finally highlights the trash workers’ collective struggle to oppose the flexibilization of the labor force and the respective role of the vital materiality of trash and of Muslim piety in demonstrating opposition to the municipality’s infrastructural policies.
Rosalind Fredericks’ book is an important intervention at the crossroads of (urban) political ecology, discard studies, and labor studies. It contributes to a growing body of research into the triad of urban neoliberalism, the precarization of public work, and the rhetoric of “community” (Krinsky & Simonet, 2017; Perkins, 2009; Rosol, 2012). Its key originality lies in its insistence on the role of labor, and laboring bodies, in holding urban infrastructures together. Fredericks engages with Simone’s notion of “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) to undo common imaginaries of infrastructures as hard, networked, “things,” seeing them instead as embodied-material performances.The diachronic perspective adopted powerfully illustrates the vicissitudes of urban neoliberalism and its embeddedness in geopolitical struggles and performances of state power. The attention given to bodies, materiality, and the potency of waste as political matter, finally, brings the urban political economic questions raised by the book in dialogue with feminist and new materialist approaches in a fruitful way.
I was surprised not to read more about methods and positionality. There remain for instance unresolved questions about the capacity of ethnography to illuminate past events, and an unresolved tension between claims for situatedness, and for a broad validity of the book’s conclusions “in cities anywhere” (pp. 5, 154). What is to be gained by stating that conclusions are valid “anywhere”? Is it really the case, and why does it matter? Given the book’s insistence on producing theory “from the South,” I was expecting more explicit engagement with debates between, for instance, partisans of “situated” urban political ecology (Lawhon et al., 2014) and theorists of “planetary urbanization” (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2015).
Notwithstanding, the book provides a fascinating, and somewhat heterodox, combination of “materialisms old and new” (p. 4), and a forceful provocation to take seriously the challenges that urbanization in the Global South pose to understandings of the links between infrastructure, labor, and urban life.
