Beyond the networked city: situated practices of citizenship and grassroots agency in water infrastructure provision in the Chamazi settlement,Dar es Salaam

I. Introduction

In rapidly transforming cities of the global South, low-income populations reside “beyond the networks”, in terms of service provision. Previous studies have established the inadequacies of state provision of water and sanitation infrastructure in meeting the internationally agreed targets for access to these basic services.⁽¹⁾ This deficit in service provision can be explained, at least in part, by the continued reliance on planning standards and concepts borrowed from the North rather than those informed by local needs and realities.⁽²⁾ Rapid urbanization amid scarce resources has also outpaced the capacity of city planning authorities to provide basic socioeconomic infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the ever-increasing population.⁽³⁾ As a result, a significant proportion of the urban population, often the poor, occupy both physical and institutional spaces outside the reach of the formal system of infrastructure supply and utility networks. In the face of neglect by the state and conventional market mechanisms, marginalized communities are increasingly mobilizing as active citizens, and devising new strategies, technologies, institutional frameworks and servicing models intended to satisfy their basic needs.⁽⁴⁾

Citizenship debates raise fundamental questions concerning the state–citizens relationship, particularly the role and obligation of the state vis-à-vis citizens in the provision of public infrastructure and services. The water and sanitation sector has over recent decades triggered a (re)configuration of modern citizenship ideals, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Privatization of water and sanitation services during the 1990s across cities of the South shifted governments’ role in the water sector to private and market machineries.⁽⁵⁾ Implemented under the rubric of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), this divestiture was instigated by international organizations (e.g. the World Bank) in light of states’ incapacity to invest and manage water supply systems.⁽⁶⁾ The move was aimed, ostensibly, at improving efficiency and expanding coverage of water services to poor areas, in line with the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets.

Critics, however, situate the move by international agencies, in pushing developing countries to adopt privatization policies, within a set of “neoliberal reforms”.⁽⁷⁾ The neoliberal framework was based on private sector cost recovery principles, simply expressed as “no fee, no service”.⁽⁸⁾ This approach to provision of water services strips the universality aspect from substantive (liberal) citizenship, causing limited access and inequalities in accessing socioeconomic rights among different classes of the population. Further, privatization has contributed towards producing “networks and archipelagos”,⁽⁹⁾ leaving unserved large parts of cities occupied by the urban poor. Neither the state nor the private market has yielded the desired network extension to low-income and peri-urban settlements, usually considered less profitable than central areas or middle-income residential neighbourhoods.⁽¹⁰⁾ In the wake of this spatial exclusion, poor residents of peri-urban informal settlements have long been served by private water vendors who levy higher costs per unit volume of water delivered than public water supply systems that cater for the middle- and upper-income population.⁽¹¹⁾

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the water landscape is characterized by complex overlapping supply systems. The municipal networks operated by the Dar es Salaam Water and Sanitation Authority (DAWASA), a public utility company responsible for water and sewerage services, cover approximately 50 per cent of the city’s population.⁽¹²⁾ As is the norm, it is the wealthier and central areas of the city that enjoy piped water connections from the public utility, with poorer areas left to struggle with a number of alternative means of accessing water services.⁽¹³⁾

Recognizing the limits of the public and private delivery mechanisms to cater for their needs, individual households and neighbourhoods that lie beyond the network are increasingly mobilizing their resources in order to access water services, through either shallow wells or boreholes.⁽¹⁴⁾ Kyessi notes the rise of self-help and local governance frameworks in filling the gaps in infrastructure left by centralized public institutions in Dar es Salaam.⁽¹⁵⁾ Over the past decade or so, community-based organizations (CBOs) formed by and for households residing in specific geographically bounded areas of the city have become primary vehicles for popular participation and community partnership in water service delivery.⁽¹⁶⁾ These CBOs play a critical role in providing services that were formerly the domain of the state and/or the private sector. Institutional reforms and partnerships in water service delivery are thus supported by the belief that community-based service provision brings beneficiaries into the delivery process, promotes equity, and is responsive to needs of poor communities.⁽¹⁷⁾

This paper situates the role of active citizenship and grassroots agency in instigating changes in urban governance and transforming urban planning and infrastructure development processes at the local level. Using the case of the Chamazi water and sanitation initiative, the paper examines the role of community participation in redefining citizenship through provision of water and sanitation infrastructure in the peri-urban areas of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Employing active community participation, the Chamazi project features unconventional models of water and sewerage infrastructure provision in terms of design, technology, and innovative financing options, all tailor-made to meet the practical needs of the local community, which resides beyond the reach of the municipal water mains. Employing a multidisciplinary interpretive approach, the aim of the paper is to interrogate the efficacy of bottom-linked project design and to situate the Chamazi model within the broader debates on citizenship and low-income water and sanitation infrastructure policies in Tanzania and the wider global South.

Empirical material is drawn from fieldwork carried out in March 2013 and March 2015. A focus group discussion with project beneficiaries consisting of women’s savings group members was held in Chamazi in March 2013. This was followed by in-depth interviews with 17 evicted households who resettled in Chamazi. In addition, semi-structured interviews with four officials of DAWASA and the Temeke Municipal Council were conducted during the March 2015 fieldwork. Further structured interviews were carried out with two project officials from the Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI), an NGO involved in the community resettling project in Chamazi. Field observation and review of project documents constituted complementary data for analysis.

This paper is divided into five sections. After this introduction, Section II reviews theoretical concepts of citizenship to help in grounding the Chamazi case. The main argument advanced herein is that the meaning and practice of citizenship are being redefined around nuances in the daily struggle for urban services by the low-income communities living in the interstices of neglect by the state and/or market. Section III presents the background of the Chamazi water and sewerage project and the steps undertaken by the community in implementing it. The case is analysed in depth in Section IV in relation to the main aspects of citizenship identified in Section II. Finally, Section V concludes by highlighting the role of local communities in instigating social changes in urban governance for improvement of service delivery, particularly for the low-income population residing beyond municipal networks.

II. Situating Active Citizenship Debates and Participation at the Local Level

New forms and practices of citizenship have proliferated in recent years, undermining the hegemony of the traditional notion of citizenship as linked to the nation-state.⁽¹⁸⁾ Citizenship has shifted from the mere right to vote in elections to embracing wider political, socioeconomic, cultural and spatial practices.⁽¹⁹⁾ Purcell outlines two critical aspects that characterize contemporary changes in citizenship.⁽²⁰⁾ First, citizenship is being rescaled from the hegemony of the nation-state by the creation of communities at multiple scales. This rescaling is manifested by erosion of the nation-state’s role, with localities and supranational organizations increasingly becoming the primary sites of citizenship regulation.⁽²¹⁾ Secondly, citizenship is being reterritorialized, raising open questions about the sovereignty and political loyalty of the nation-state’s territory. Here, citizenship is being reoriented away from the nation as the predominant political community.⁽²²⁾

The reconceptualization of citizenship away from the state to people –the citizens– has given rise to new definitions of citizenship as “participatory”, “inclusive”, “invented” citizenship;⁽²³⁾ and “citizenship from below”, commonly known as “insurgent citizenship”.⁽²⁴⁾ This paper positions citizenship as a form of agency comprising a range of agents and activities, from individual actions by ordinary citizens to collective, organized and purposeful interventions aimed at directly meeting the needs of social groups.⁽²⁵⁾ This notion of citizenship as agency is mostly associated with urban poor communities that confront entrenched national regimes of citizen inequalities through organized social movements and grassroots agency, while demanding a new formulation of citizenship and struggling for a dignified daily life in the city.⁽²⁶⁾ The emphasis here is as much on the process of attaining this form of citizenship as it is on the end outcome.

Citizen participation provides spaces for assertion of citizenship. These spaces are however often undermined by historic state and market power relations pegged to the liberal ideal of citizenship.⁽²⁷⁾ The hegemony of the state and market has reinforced marginalization of the poor, who are more often excluded by the state bureaucracy, besides succumbing to the vagaries of market mechanisms.⁽²⁸⁾ It is no wonder that a significant portion of the urban citizenship literature focuses on the struggles of excluded groups that seek their rights in more direct ways that resonate with their everyday life experiences at local level.⁽²⁹⁾ In 1969, Arnstein formulated a “ladder of participation”, which distinguishes various power slots in the participation process.⁽³⁰⁾ According to Arnstein’s ladder, citizens occupy spaces often at the bottom rungs, with the state retaining control and dictating terms of engagement in participatory decision-making processes, in what Cornwall⁽³¹⁾ and Miraftab⁽³²⁾ term “invited” spaces of citizenship. More often, participation in “invited” spaces is through tokenism,⁽³³⁾ with grassroots participation only carried out to lend the process some legitimacy.⁽³⁴⁾ State-defined spaces thus restrict direct citizen participation and control, meaning that major decisions end up being implemented top-down.⁽³⁵⁾

Beyond the restrictive state-defined spaces, citizens are increasingly creating their own opportunities and terms of engagement that reconfigure the state-defined spaces of participation.⁽³⁶⁾ Miraftab refers to these citizen-defined spaces as “invented” spaces of participation.⁽³⁷⁾ She defines them as spaces “occupied by the grassroots and claimed by their collective action, but directly confronting the authorities and the status quo”. Invented citizenship is active, engaged and grounded in civil society,⁽³⁸⁾ in contrast to traditional citizenship that assumes that the state is “the only legitimate source of citizenship rights, meanings and practices”.⁽³⁹⁾ Invented spaces serve to resist dominant power relations with the hope of bringing about larger and more fundamental societal transformation.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Through these new spaces of engagement, communities mobilize themselves by forming associations that traverse different institutional boundaries to push for their interests and to achieve legitimacy from the state. Such spaces constitute critical platforms for promoting active citizenship. Mitlin uses the concept of co-production to make evident how grassroots organizations and federations strengthen their political position and power, and cause transformation in the process of addressing their immediate developmental needs.⁽⁴¹⁾ This corresponds to potentials that underlie “invented” citizenship.

In (de)constructing citizenship, Miraftab warns of a binary construction of “invited” and “invented” citizenship that does not actually reflect the grassroots’ daily practices.⁽⁴²⁾ Grassroots groups may simultaneously take advantage of both of these spaces as long as doing so helps them in advancing their interests. A binary construct, she argues, runs the risk of classifying “invented” spaces within the informal arena while recognizing “invited” spaces as the “proper or authentic” space for civil participation. It is therefore important to recognize the range of spaces within which social groups exert their social and political struggles in pursuit of active citizenship.

The utility of “invented” spaces is that they “open arenas once closed off to citizen voice or public scrutiny [and help] widen political space for citizens to play more of a part in shaping some of the decisions that affect their lives”.⁽⁴³⁾ In the event, citizens become “makers and shapers” of decisions, upending their previous role as “users and choosers”⁽⁴⁴⁾ in externally instigated projects. Mansbridge highlights a dimension of “invented” spaces as “laboratories of self-interest”, which enable historically marginalized groups to build positions, construct politics of engagement, and gain greater legitimacy to voice demands within participatory spheres.⁽⁴⁵⁾ These created spaces give previously excluded groups time and opportunity not only to determine their political preferences, but also provide an arena to make their demands and concerns legible to the state.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Consequently, invented citizenship recasts governance and opens up new spaces for significant participation of actors and communities who have in the past been excluded from policy processes and decision-making that directly affect them.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Here, effective channels of communication and negotiation between the state and citizens enhance democracy, create new forms of citizenship, and improve effectiveness and equity in public policy outcomes.⁽⁴⁸⁾

Secor observes that the “everyday life-spaces of the city—its neighbourhoods, parks, streets, and buildings—are the medium through which citizenship struggles take place…”⁽⁴⁹⁾ Citizenship can therefore be seen at the scale of everyday life within “lived spaces”,⁽⁵⁰⁾ where local inhabitants constitute key decision makers. This empowers inhabitants to participate in decision-making and space production, as envisioned in “the right to the city”.⁽⁵¹⁾ “The everyday life-spaces” serve as primary sites, where belonging is (re)negotiated and rights are pursued,⁽⁵²⁾ demonstrating the integral practices and meaning of citizenship.⁽⁵³⁾ “The right to the city”, therefore, reorients and reconceptualizes citizenship towards citizen control, in contrast to the liberal understandings of citizenship, where citizen participation is predominantly a state affair.⁽⁵⁴⁾ These new forms of citizenship can open greater political, economic, and social-cultural opportunities not inherent in nation-state citizenship. Miraftab and Wills appraise the potential of these (in)formal innovative spaces, created from below for practising citizenship, as they are often inclusive, responsive and relevant to immediate needs and demands of the poor.⁽⁵⁵⁾

On the other hand, while these created spaces are viewed as empowering and democracy enhancing, such spaces reveal underlying challenges of power relations.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Swyngedouw, for instance, notes that such initiatives can both empower and disempower different actors in the process.⁽⁵⁷⁾ A differential power structure among stakeholders may undermine the democratic credibility of the process, particularly where communities do not hold the same power as other stakeholders. Purcell cautions us on the dangers of the “local trap”, in which the local scale is often assumed to be more democratic than other scales.⁽⁵⁸⁾ In such spheres, the dominant structures, norms and values, and other factors may shift, determining the outcome of local democracy.⁽⁵⁹⁾ With this need for caution in mind, it is crucial to examine processes within their contexts in questioning the empowerment outcome.⁽⁶⁰⁾

However, to forestall such power imbalances, Booher and Innes suggest the concept of “network power”.⁽⁶¹⁾ According to them, network power is an alternative form of power that linked agents in a collaborative process share in ways advantageous to all involved, individually and collectively. Network power emerges as diverse participants in a network focus on a common task and develop shared meanings and common heuristics that guide their action. Network power can have the potential to bridge differential power structures, thereby enhancing democracy and social justice in participatory decision-making.

The Chamazi case, to which I will turn presently, reveals the import of the invented participatory sphere and grassroots agency, validating its transformative potential in the realization of active citizenship and critical urban services.

III. The Chamazi Community Water Infrastructure Initiative

The Chamazi water infrastructure project was initiated in 2009 by evicted households from the Kurasini informal settlement. In 2006, about 36,000 inhabitants of the Kurasini informal settlement were issued with a state eviction notice.⁽⁶²⁾ The eviction was to pave way for the Dar es Salaam port expansion project. Following the notice, evictees mapped their settlement and enumerated their structures.⁽⁶³⁾ Critical data collected during the mapping and enumeration exercise included the number of evictees, ownership structure, community facilities, household income and expenditure. Using this information, evictees presented their concerns to the state for consideration, noting that 70 per cent of them were tenants⁽⁶⁴⁾ and would by law therefore not receive state compensation.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Despite the residents’ petition, only structure owners were compensated by the state, while tenants were left to fend for themselves.⁽⁶⁶⁾ It was in response to this situation that evictees mobilized themselves around small daily savings to help them in seeking alternative accommodation. Among the tenant evictees, about 300 households, the majority of whom were women, joined hands to form a slum-dweller federation. It was this group of evictees that later resettled in Chamazi.

Following the evictions conducted in October 2007, members of the group temporarily relocated to the nearby informal settlements but continued with their mobilization activities initiated earlier in Kurasini. In a span of three years, the group had saved adequate funds to enable them to purchase a 30-acre piece of land in Chamazi, approximately 20 kilometres from Kurasini. Being at the periphery of the municipality, this new site lay beyond the municipal water and sewer service networks. Notwithstanding this, the community registered its newly acquired land under one block title with the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements. The block title as a form of collective landholding model meant that every community member had an equal stake in the ownership of the newly purchased land in Chamazi.

In addition, the community sought the technical expertise of the Temeke Municipal Council to have its new plot of land certified for residential development before it could commence housing development. The community also prepared a site layout plan for approval by the municipal council. Besides the 300 houses, the community included a community centre, playground, space for future development of rental housing units, sanitation plant and gardening area within the 30-acre land plot. The local authority obliged, conducted a topographic survey, and certified the land as suitable for human settlement. This had two implications. First, the community had the municipal authority approve its proposed development. Secondly, the local authority would in effect consider the new settlement in its future infrastructure plans.⁽⁶⁷⁾

To aid the local authority in planning and developing its new settlement, the Chamazi community organized field exchange visits to India and Thailand to learn from peer federation practices. Through these visits, members were trained on low-cost water and sanitation infrastructure models, financial management and entrepreneurial skills, and affordable housing options. Using the newly acquired knowledge, the community drilled a solar-powered borehole on-site to supply water to its settlement. The community also constructed an environment-friendly on-site sanitation plant to serve its needs. While community labour was employed in development of the water and sanitation infrastructure, the community also sought professional and technical services from experts. It employed a site foreman, and worked closely with engineers and a hydrologist.

To achieve its objective, the community collaborated with the Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI), a Tanzanian NGO active in the low-income shelter sector. CCI proved a useful bridge between the community and other external agencies. Specifically, through the collaboration, the Chamazi community became affiliated with Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), WaterAid and Homeless International (HI), all of which extended technical and financial support in helping the community achieve its shelter and sanitation needs.

IV. Appraising the Chamazi Water Infrastructure Project

This section discusses the Chamazi case in the context of the main lines of the citizenship debate presented earlier. The following subsections are not mutually exclusive, but rather provide a useful heuristic for structuring the discussion.

V. Conclusions

This paper has highlighted some of the constraints and hardships borne by the urban poor in accessing urban services. The Kurasini evictions, as observed, deprived the urban poor of their socioeconomic and political citizenship rights, pushing them to the margins of society. Whereas the state is supposed to protect the public by ensuring delivery of basic services, especially to poorer segments of the population, this case illustrates the state’s usual failure to defend citizens’ rights. The state did not uphold social equity and justice in infrastructure provision in its partial compensation of the eviction victims. The private market has not been friendly either, as it cherry-picks profitable areas, leaving the low-income population to cope on its own. This spatial infrastructure pattern exacerbates urban inequalities and denies the poor their citizenship rights.

The Chamazi case demonstrates the importance of invented spaces of citizenship, which empower formerly marginalized communities through their active participation in decision-making. The new spaces are valuable for supporting the creation of socially innovative strategies that enhance democracy, social cohesion, and social justice. Through these socially innovative strategies, communities are able to transcend various institutional domains. Specifically, communities bypass the usual bureaucratic channels in dealing with state agencies, thereby challenging and transforming governance at the local level and instigating changes in urban planning and infrastructure provision. The role of community initiatives in devising bottom-linked models of infrastructure governance and provision therefore redefines the meaning and practice of daily urban citizenship.

The case also demonstrates that the struggle of the poor for urban services means access to secure land tenure that allows for long-term investment plans on the part of communities and other service providers. Moreover, provision of water and sanitation services is directly linked with seeking housing and livelihood opportunities. The community prioritized its own land ownership as a step towards securing its future. The complex linkage between land tenure and infrastructure investment has profound implications for public policies concerned with planning and infrastructure provision. Perhaps the infrastructure deficit is not solely a technical problem of extending pipe networks, but a set of socio-political problems, especially those surrounding land ownership.

Finally, while access to water and sanitation services was the end objective of the community, the participatory process that defined the process was equally crucial. The case indicates how lengthy such processes can be, demanding a common voice throughout the process. While it is important for communities to maintain solidarity, it is also important to institutionalize their activities and spaces, enhancing their socio-political access to resources that the prevailing state or market mechanisms cannot provide. Engaging facilitative partners also legitimizes the community’s activities as well as reinforcing and transforming institutional and governance structures. Such bottom-linked community-led approaches, I argue, contribute to long-term socioeconomic transformation and workable solutions to the infrastructure and housing problem within low-income communities in rapidly transforming sub-Saharan African cities.