The Urban Metabolism of Waterborne Diseases: Variegated Citizenship, (Waste)Water Flows, and Climatic Variability in Maputo, Mozambique

Keywords: Climatic variability, faecal contamination, variegated citizenship, WaSH inequalities, waterborne diseases.
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

In this paper we draw on an interdisciplinary study on drinking water quality in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, to examine the nature, scale, and politics of waterborne diseases. We show how water contamination and related diseases are discursively framed as household risks, thereby concealing the politics of uneven exposure to contaminated water and placing the burden of being healthy on individuals. In contrast, we propose that uneven geographies of waterborne diseases are best understood as the product of Maputo’s urban metabolism, in which attempts of being sanitary and healthy are caught up in relations of power, class, and variegated citizenship. Waterborne diseases are the result of complex and fragmented circulations and intersections of (waste)waters, generated by uneven urban development, heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, and everyday practices to cope with basic service deficits, in conjunction with increasing climatic variability. The latrine—from which ultimately contamination and diseases spread—is an outcome of these processes, rather than the site to be blamed. This paper also advances an interdisciplinary framework for analyzing urban metabolism and deepening its explanatory potential. It serves as a demonstration of how interdisciplinary approaches might be taken forward to generate new readings of more than human metabolic processes at distinct temporal and spatial scales.