Leaky Matters: Organizing Water Infrastructure in Nairobi

Leaky Matters: Organizing Water Infrastructure in Nairobi DISSERTATION of the University of St. Gallen, School of Management, Economics, Law, Social Sciences and International Affairs to obtain the title of Doctor of Philosophy in Organizational Studies and Cultural Theory submitted by Tim Lehmann from Germany Approved on the application of Prof. Dr. Chris Steyaert and Tanja Schneider, PhD Dissertation no. 4674 Difo-Druck GmbH, Bamberg 2017 The University of St. Gallen, School of Management, Economics, Law, Social Sciences and International A airs hereby consents to the printing of the present dissertation, without hereby expressing any opinion on the views herein expressed. St. Gallen, May 22, 2017 The President: Prof. Dr. Thomas Bieger Things are alive because they leak Things can persist and exist only because they leak. The bodies of organisms and other things leak continually; indeed, their lives depend on it. Thanks to leakage, the world becomes a kind of distributed mind. (Tim Ingold, Toward an Ecology of Materials, 2012) Decentring truth What genre could I choose to bring about this fusion of two so clearly separated universes, that of culture and that of technology, as well as the fusion of three entirely distinct literary genres – the novel, the bureaucratic dossier, and sociological commentary? (Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 1992) Meinen Eltern gewidmet Dedicated to my parents Acknowledgements Humans matter, too! I have been very fortunate to get academic mentoring from my doctoral supervisors, Tanja Schneider and Chris Steyaert. Chris inflicted his repertoire of continuous doubt on me and encouraged me to seek for the imaginative and poetic qualities in my writing. Tanja, who was brave enough to join my project towards the end, helped me to harness this doubt and imagination with her own style of reflexive confidence. This thesis would not have come to a close without her. I am also very thankful for the inspiring and reflexive discussions with my academic colleagues and friends at the University of St. Gallen’s Research Institute for Organizational Psychology. Especially, my thanks to Patrizia Hoyer, Christina Luethy, Christoph Michels, Björn Müller, Bernhard Resch and Florian Schulz for reading and guiding me through my clunky drafts. Similarly, this doctoral thesis would not have been possible without the human participants of my study. In the ordinary ethnographic convention, I am required to preserve their anonymity. This is fortunate since it would have taken me a very long time to list them all. Nonetheless, my sincere gratitude to the team at the Non-revenue Water Unit of Nairobi’s water utility and my academic friends Robert Mudida and George Njenga at Strathmore Business School. Collegial thanks to my accomplices in journalism, Sunmin Kim and Patrick Reevell, whose perspective on the empirical world raised in me the journalistic desire to meticulously manufacture a story that might be right. Thanks for the near-infinite support and patience I received from a motley crew of old and new family and friends: Imagine that you are a European contemporary dance artist, you have never been to an African country before, and listening for hours, days and weeks to my meaning making of the leaky and often times dirty worlds of Nairobi’s water infrastructure. A very special thanks to Björn who taught me that the muddiness of life is not only a place of bearing, but of being. Thanks! Particular thanks to Katja Günther, who, as a coach, helped me navigate through my own anxieties of the ever more complex entanglement of this academic project and myself as an already socially entangled human being. Last but not least, my sincere thanks to Alexander Barkawi and the team at the oikos Foundation for Economy and Ecology for the financial support and academic freedom throughout my oikos PhD fellowship. I am also grateful for financial support from University of St. Gallen’s Research Institute for Organizational Psychology. All of these human entanglements mattered in helping me produce the present political and poetic ethnography of the incommensurable worlds that organize water infrastructure in the African city of Nairobi. Zurich, July 2017 Tim Lehmann Table of contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Imagine you work at Nairobi’s water utility to reduce water leakage ............... 3 1.2 Infrastructure organizing.................................................................................... 5 2 Theory..................................................................................................................... 8 2.1 Emergent systems .............................................................................................. 9 2.2 Technoscientific practice ................................................................................. 11 2.3 Re-inventive knowing ...................................................................................... 14 2.4 Summary and analytical research questions .................................................... 18 3 Methodology......................................................................................................... 20 3.1 Accounting for technoscientific worlding ....................................................... 20 3.2 Collecting empirical material........................................................................... 22 3.2.1 Field episode 1 ........................................................................................ 24 3.2.2 Field episode 2 ........................................................................................ 30 3.2.3 Politics of access ..................................................................................... 39 3.3 Data analysis and writing accounts .................................................................. 41 3.3.1 Thick description(s) ................................................................................ 43 3.3.2 Performative process analysis ................................................................. 45 3.4 Summary .......................................................................................................... 48 4 Empirical Results ................................................................................................ 49 4.1 Governing fluidity: enacting Nairobi’s hydraulic system................................ 49 4.1.1 Fluid hydraulics....................................................................................... 51 4.1.1.1 Imagine the governance of Nairobi’s water hydraulics ............. 51 4.1.1.2 Fluid state of hydraulics ............................................................. 55 4.1.2 Measuring leaks: pacifying water hydraulics.......................................... 59 4.1.3 Pacified hydraulics produce new realities ............................................... 64 4.1.3.1 Re-imagine the governance of Nairobi’s water hydraulics ........ 64 4.2 Managing invisibility: enacting Nairobi’s metering system ............................ 67 4.2.1 Invisible meters ....................................................................................... 67 4.2.1.1 Imagine the management of Nairobi’s water meters ................. 67 4.2.1.2 Invisible state of meters ............................................................. 71 4.2.2 Tracking leakage: making water meters visible ...................................... 74 4.2.4 Visible meters produce new realities ...................................................... 79 4.2.4.1 Re-imagine the management of Nairobi’s water meters ............ 79 4.3 Operating messiness: enacting Nairobi’s piping system ................................. 82 4.3.1 Messy pipes ............................................................................................. 83 4.3.1.1 Imagine the operation of Nairobi’s water pipes ......................... 84 4.3.1.2 Messy state of pipes ................................................................... 87 4.3.1.3 Excursion into housing .............................................................. 89 4.3.2 Demarcating leakage: formalizing water pipes ....................................... 91 4.3.3 Formalized pipes produce new realities .................................................. 96 4.3.3.1 Re-imagine the operation of Nairobi’s water pipes ................... 96 4.4 Summary ........................................................................................................ 100 5 Discussion ........................................................................................................... 102 5.1 Registering the organizing of emergent systems ........................................... 102 5.1.1 Historical materiality of infrastructure organizing................................ 103 5.1.2 Topographical materiality of infrastructure organizing ........................ 104 5.2 Enacting the stabilizing of technoscientific coordination .............................. 107 5.2.1 Engineering and economics .................................................................. 107 5.2.2 Technology and society ........................................................................ 109 5.2.3 Space and politics.................................................................................. 111 5.3 Demonstrating the inventive capacities of stabilized worlds......................... 114 5.3.1 Numbering ............................................................................................ 116 5.3.2 Visualization ......................................................................................... 118 5.3.3 Bureaucracy .......................................................................................... 120 5.4 Summary ........................................................................................................ 122 6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 124 6.1 Research framework ...................................................................................... 125 6.2 Contributions to research on infrastructure assembling ................................ 128 6.3 Contributions to organizational research ....................................................... 131 6.4 Selling hope for the business of infrastructure .............................................. 132 References ................................................................................................................. 135 List of tables and figures Table 1: Overview of Collected Field Material. .......................................................... 24 Table 2: List of Interviews with Nairobi's Water Specialists. ...................................... 25 Table 3: List of Sampled Water Specialists and Organizations ................................... 27 Table 4: Overview of Interviews with Nairobi’s Water Utility Staff. ......................... 30 Table 5: Details of Nairobi Water Utility Interviewees/Study Participants................. 32 Table 6: Field Details of Multi-sited Ethnography of Nairobi’s Water utility. ........... 33 Table 7: Praxiographic Framework of Performative Process Analysis. ...................... 47 Figure 1: Making the Flow of Technology and People Stop in Kibera, Nairobi. (Photo “Women are heroes (28mm)” by JR.)........................................................................... iii Figure 2: Tenement District Road in Plot 10. (Intersection of Cathereine Ndereba Road and Plot 10 Alongside Mukuru kwa Njenga.) (Photo by the author.) ............................ 1 Figure 3: Impressions from Embedded Ethnographic Interview Study of Nairobi’s Water Specialists. (Photos by the author.) .................................................................... 28 Figure 4: Impressions from Multi-sited Ethnography of Nairobi’s Water Utility. (Photos by the author.) .................................................................................................. 34 Figure 5: Workshop Presentation Slide. Corporate Finances for Kenya’s Utility Managers. (Presentation by the AFD at Kenya’s Annual Water Conference 2015.) ... 51 Figure 6: Public Stakeholder Meeting of City Engineers Presenting Nairobi’s Water Supply Strategy 2035 in 2012. (Panelists included World Bank consultant, AFD director and Kenya’s prime minister.) (Photo by the author.).................................................... 53 Figure 7: City Reservoir and Distribution Management. (Text messaging about water flow and levels between reservoir, headquarters, and regions.) (Photo by the author.)57 Figure 8: Standardized Water Accounting Tool Used by Nairobi Water Utility. (Screenshot by the author.) ........................................................................................... 60 Figure 9: Pilot District Metered Area (DMA) Non-revenue Water Calculations. (Final presentation of Seureca engineering consultants.) (Slide by Seureca/Veolia.) ............ 63 Figure 10: Data Analysis of Non-revenue Pilot Area Plot 10. (Component of an organizational memo.) (Source: Non-revenue Water Unit.) ......................................... 66 Figure 11: Unjustified Complaint in Dandora Estate – Meter in the System Matches with Meter on the Ground. (Regional performance report. Photo: Nairobi water utility.) ....................................................................................................................................... 70 Figure 12: Water Meter Testing Bench at Nairobi Water Utility Headquarters. (Photo by the author.) ............................................................................................................... 72 Figure 13: Meter Performance Analysis for Nairobi Water Utility. (Slide by Seureca/Veolia). ............................................................................................................ 74 Figure 14: Dashboard of Meter Reading Architecture. (Pilot demo: Field inspector interface of mobile application.) (Source: Wonderkid Consultants.) ........................... 77 Figure 15: Dashboard of Meter Reading Architecture. (Pilot demo. Left: map of GPS tagged meter locations. Right: red marked reading anomalies.) (Source: Wonderkid Consultants.) ................................................................................................................. 79 Figure 16: Piping in Plot 10. (Photo: Non-revenue Water Unit.) ................................ 83 Figure 17: Water Push-cart Refill in Plot 10. (Photo by the author.) .......................... 85 Figure 18: Map of Nairobi‘s Pipe Network. (Nairobi’s four hydraulic corridors, the utility’s six administrative regions, and the network of main pipes and roads. Wall map in operation and maintenance engineer’s office.) (Photo by the author.) ..................... 87 Figure 19: GIS Aerial Map of Plot 10. (Source: Non-revenue Water Unit). ............... 92 Figure 20: District Chief Meeting in Plot 10. (Photo by the author.) .......................... 95 Figure 21: Water Canister Storage and Staircase, Plot 10 Building. (Photos: Baraka Mwau.) .......................................................................................................................... 97 Figure 22: Digging Out Spaghetti Pipes in Plot 10. (Photos: Non-revenue Water Unit.) ....................................................................................................................................... 98 Figure 23: An Everyday Scene in the Tenement District Plot 10. (Photo by the author.) ....................................................................................................................................... 99 Abstract Focusing on the efforts of Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage in the city’s expansion of water infrastructure, this study offers an organizational assemblage perspective on infrastructure. Drawing on the concept of assemblage and its uptake in science and technology studies and cultural anthropology, infrastructure is the material form of emergent systems through which the flow of nature, goods, ideas, people and finance is organized over space and time. Nairobi’s water infrastructure brings together a diverse set of features, including pipes, meters, GPS technologies, smartphones, engineering reports, Excel spreadsheets, landlords, plumbers, African chiefs, thieves, foreign experts, politicians, accountants, engineers, the everyday lives and ethnicities of the people of Nairobi, climate conditions, hydraulics, urban topographies and the fluids sludge and water. Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year ethnographic case study that included eight months of onsite fieldwork in Nairobi, I describe the engagement of Nairobi’s water utility in three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Through a creative non-fictional writing process, including ficto-critical storytelling, inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in science and technology studies, I empirically and politically account for how a technoscientific intervention enacts the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure. My practical ontology framework helps me to understand how the organizing of infrastructure enacts the recursive dynamic of ontological multiplicity and stabilizing, a key concern in assemblage thinking and actor-network-theory. This dynamic is not only experimental, but entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I also give the uptake of the concept of assemblage thinking in the turn to infrastructure in social theory empirical depth. This study suggests an empirical and conceptual way forward for organizational research to deploy infrastructure thinking. Zusammenfassung Diese Arbeit untersucht den Versuch des Wasserwerks von Nairobi den Wasserschwund der expandierenden städtischen Wasserinfrastruktur zu reduzieren. Sie leistet damit einen empirischen Beitrag zur organisationalen Assemblage (Gefüge/Gemmengelage) Sichtweise in der sozialtheoretischen Infrastrukturforschung. Meine Studie bezieht sich auf das in den Wissenschafts- und Technikstudien und der Kulturanthropologie entwickelte Verständnis von Infrastruktur als Assemblage. In diesem Sinne verstehe ich Infrastruktur als die materielle Form emergenter Systeme durch die der Fluss von Natur, Gütern, Ideen, Menschen und Finanzen durch Raum und Zeit organisiert wird. In dieser Lesart fügt Nairobis Wasserinfrastruktur eine Vielfalt von Bestandteilen zusammen, wie Pipes, Zählgeräte, GPS Technologien, Mobiltelefone, Ingenieursberichte, Excel Tabellen, Grundstücksbesitzer, Installateure, afrikanische Oberhäupter, Ganoven, ausländische Experten, Politiker, Buchhalter, Ingenieure, das Alltagsleben und die Ethnien der städtischen Bevölkerung, klimatische Umweltbedingungen, Hydraulik, städtische Topographie und die Flüssigkeiten Schlamm und Wasser. Meine acht Monate Feldarbeit beinhaltende vierjährige ethnographische Fallstudie fasse ich in einer dichten und performativen Beschreibung von drei praxiografischen Studien zusammen. In diesen drei Studien beschreibe ich die Auseinandersetzung des Wasserwerks von Nairobi mit drei technowissenschaftlichen Praktiken des Managements von Wasserschwund: der Messung, Verfolgung und Abgrenzung des Flusses und Verlustes von Wasser. Als Forscher trage ich empirisch und politisch Rechnung dafür, wie eine technowissenschaftliche Intervention die Befriedung, Sichtbarkeit und Formalisierung der Infrastruktur inszeniert. Dafür wende ich in der Aufbereitung und Analyse meines Feldmaterials einen kreativ, sachlichen Schreibprozess an, einschließlich fiktional-kritischer Erzählformen, inspiriert von einer postkolonialen und feministischen Auffassung in den Wissenschafts- und Technikstudien. Meine Praxis-ontologische Rahmung hilft mir zu verstehen, wie das Organisieren von Infrastruktur eine rekursive Dynamik von Vielfalt und Stabilisieren inszeniert, ein Kernanliegen in der Assemblage Denkrichtung und der Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Diese ontologische Dynamik ist nicht nur experimenteller Natur, sondern verwoben mit Praktiken des Organisierens: der Steuerung von Fluidität, dem Managen von Unsichtbarkeit und dem Betreiben von Unordnung. Die Arbeit leistet mit ihrer empirischen Vertiefung des Konzeptes der Assemblage einen Beitrag in der theoretischen Neuausrichtung der Sozialtheorie hin zur Infrastruktur Denkweise. Die Studie zeigt den Versuch auf, wie die Organisationsforschung diese Denkrichtung empirisch und konzeptionell anwenden kann. Preface: Tuning into the worlds of infrastructure “‘You can see why they called it the Lunatic Express,’ says John the stationmaster, sipping on his second cup of tea. ‘If they came all the way from Europe to build this railway through the bush, they must have been mad!’ Opened in 1901, the Lunatic Express earned its nickname carrying a cast of swaggering aristocrats, scoundrels, and hunters with suicidal daring – a generation for whom rail was a ticket to a land of infinite adventure” (O. Smith, 2012). I am about to leave Mombasa to Nairobi with the legendary colonial service that was once known as the Uganda Railway. The train sports a fading Kenya Railways logo. A lion walks along a railway line that connects the Indian Ocean to a white-lined blue flag – now one element of the flag of the Nairobi City County under Kenya’s new constitutional legislation. In 1899, a single railway track connected Nairobi to Mombasa. Locals brought their cattle to a stream called Cold Water (Uaso Nairoi); the area was known as Place of Cold Waters (Enkarre Nairobi). The lions of the Tsavo National Park attacked the Indian construction workers and British engineers who planned most of the early infrastructure systems that now shape postcolonial Kenya. The lions became a symbol; they were the best-known threat to this geopolitical project by the British administration. The railway administration, which was formed before any local administration, introduced the modern urban water system to cater for the need of water for its steam engines and construction workers. Only six years later, in 1905, did the colonial administration move its headquarters from Mombasa to Nairobi. Today, the train’s colonial flair still serves as a more or less convenient tourist attraction. The dining carriage for first-class passengers is spacious. I place my paperwork on the table, which is covered in white linen. Among my documents is Nairobi’s master plan study for the expansion of water infrastructure to meet the city’s future water demand. This multimillion (U.S.) dollar project is part of Kenya’s visionary plan to become a midincome country by 2030. It reminds me of the government’s planned upgrade of the railway. The train connects the 470 kilometers between Mombasa’s harbor and Nairobi in a 15-hour ride. Since independence, the railway project has been plagued by inefficient management, which neglected maintenance. The private concession to a South African i consortium in 2006 had not improved the system, which was already in disrepair. This railway expansion project is East Africa’s largest post-independence investment project.1 What was once a project characteristic of the British colonial administration will be run by the Chinese banks and Chinese engineering firms. The multibillion dollar deal is plagued by kickbacks, allegations of corruption and protests by local communities. Also, two Chinese companies are in a legal dispute with each other over the construction deal – “a situation that is out of character for the usually cooperative Chinese entities,” according to the Wall Street Journal (Bariyo, 2014). Nairobi’s water supply expansion is a logical result of these modernist plans, which will increase the thirst for water in an already water-scarce region. The Chinese railway investments will stipulate even further the flow of goods and people to and through Nairobi in the competition against other cities to become East Africa’s economic center. Nairobi’s water supply investments, on the other hand, still depend on European countries and the US-backed World Bank. Although particularly the French have staked their claims to support the water supply expansion with dams and pipelines to the city, the socalled troika of donors pointed out to Nairobi’s politicians and engineers that the city’s urban water system was in a state of serious disrepair. Even the country’s prime minister had to remind the city’s water technocrats that they must learn to maintain the city’s water infrastructure. In the late morning, the diesel locomotive arrives in Nairobi by crawling through Mukuru kwa Njenga. Mukuru is one of Nairobi’s largest slums and a part of Nairobi that made the city famous for one of Africa’s contemporary urban migration phenomena. From my compartment, I can see the metal and plastic roofs of single-story dwellings. This view reminds me of an art project in Kibera, supposedly Africa’s largest slum, through which the railway track continues beyond Nairobi’s business district. In 2009, the roofs of Kibera were used in the international art project Women are heroes. “2000 square meters of rooftops are covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera,” the artist wrote (JR, 2009). 1 It envisions opening access to the new gas and oil discoveries in East Africa. ii Figure 1: Making the Flow of Technology and People Stop in Kibera, Nairobi. (Photo “Women are heroes (28mm)” by JR.) A year of organizing went into this artistic intervention which, by performing the still image of the African slum and of African women, captures and contains only some of the realities in the African city. The women’s eyes on the train wagons matched the bottom halves of their faces, which had been pasted on the corrugated sheets that led down from the railway to the rooftops. I become aware of Nairobi’s rough urban climate while leaning out of the window and watching the spectacle of thousands of people who live and work along the track. Nairobi’s rains and its polluted climate of dense human occupation likely washed away the artist’s political statement of large close-up photographs of the laughing faces of women. But something concrete is visible in the background of Mukuru’s fragile slumdwellings: the emergent multistory tenement buildings that embody the slum-dwellings’ informal status, but also the places where slum dwellers and new migrants from rural Kenya live within the safety of concrete buildings. At the time, I didn’t know that this dynamic between Mukuru and the emerging neighboring tenement district, Pipeline Estate (Plot 10), would be the place that would teach me the most about Nairobi’s water iii leaks and the stupendous efforts to coordinate the multiple worlds that organize and are organized by the city’s water infrastructure. iv 1 Introduction Figure 2: Tenement District Road in Plot 10. (Intersection of Cathereine Ndereba Road and Plot 10 Alongside Mukuru kwa Njenga.) (Photo by the author.) Through field visits to the Pipeline Estate (popularly known as Plot 10) with the city’s water utility unit for leakage reduction, I began to learn about the incommensurable worlds2 in which the organizing of the lively matter3 of infrastructure makes water flow and leak. I took this photo in April 2014 at Cathereine Ndereba Road, close to the intersection of two large bypasses, Airport North Road and Outer Ring Road. This small 2 According to Gad et al. (2015, pp. 70-71), the ontological turn in science and technology studies and anthropology “can be seen to imply a radical relativism, insofar as it relies on the idea that worlds are singular and incommensurable . . . to maintain the possibility of ‘speaking across multiple differences, without ignoring them or ontologizing them as culture’(Hastrup, 2012).” 3 According to Barad, the turn towards posthumanist performativity in studies of culture gives “matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming” (Barad, 2003, p. 803; 2007; Ingold, 2012). 1 road borders the tenement buildings of Plot 10 and the huts of one of Nairobi’s largest slums, Mukuru kwa Njenga. At first sight, it already unravels the infrastructure’s dirty liveliness that make this place one of little value to the city’s water utility PR officer. Nonetheless, the woman and children in their middle class clothes cannot hide the fact that the infrastructure seems to be falling apart or has never been built. The open drainage expands beyond the photo’s frame. It comprises a cesspool that contains storm water, garbage, and sewage from which a water connection, a so-called spaghetti pipe, can be seen to emerge. The large grey concrete structure on the left in front of the tenement plot is one of the few publicly financed sewer tanks for this densely populated area. In the fluid-drenched road we can see a push-cart loaded with water canisters that serves the six-story buildings. Even so, I was lucky to get this photograph: I took it on the move, somewhat randomly, while passing in a car. Yet, it was not senselessness, but the technoscientific4 practice of water leakage and loss management, that brought my body exactly to this place. Over time and creative analysis, the realities beneath and beyond the gravel, mud, cesspools, tenement buildings, pipes, and water canisters would be revealed to me. The photo shows much of the dirty and lively materialism of infrastructure, as described by Casper Jensen in his example of Phnom Phen’s sewage infrastructure (Jensen, 2016); it forms the central access point for my study on the organizing of infrastructure by drawing on the recent uptake and turn to infrastructure in science and technology studies (STS) and cultural anthropology (Anand, Appel, & Gupta, 2017; Harvey, Jensen, & Morita, 2017b; Howe et al., 2015; Jensen & Morita, 2016; Mitchell, 2014). According to this perspective, the sociomaterial emergence of infrastructure matters coproduces and often exceeds the human capacities to make sense of it, but – clearly – it has animated the participants of my study to act on it as well as myself – the analyst – to creatively write about our shared imagination in and of the designed worlds of organizing water infrastructure in the postcolonial space of an African city (Suchman, 2011; Verran, 1998). 4 The term technoscience is “a means to indicate the contemporary convergence and assemblage of scientific practice and technology development, and to avoid sterile classificatory debates. As Bruno Latour [1987, p. 175] remarks: ‘the name of the game will be to leave the boundaries open and to close them only when the people we follow close them’ (Anderson, 2002, p. 653). 2 1.1 Imagine you work at Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage You’re on a field visit in Nairobi’s eastern estate Plot 10. The people who live here are from a different ethnic community; you would rarely meet them in your private live, nor find them among your colleagues. Your boss, the “engineer”, wants your team to formalize a plan to sort out the water flow in this place: How much water flows into the district, how much water leaks, how much water is billed, and how much would it cost the utility to fix the leaks and collect the money for this water flow? He is already putting pressure on you to deliver results so as to deliver the plan to the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and the County Governor. The French are interested in financing your plan’s implementation via a grant to the utility’s owner, the county governor. You also know that if the plan finds backing, the French Development Agency would contract a foreign engineering firm to implement it, most likely with your help. Thankfully, the French had already contracted a French engineering consultancy that helped you to set up a special unit with your colleagues from each section of the utility across the city. Some of the regional bosses were annoyed at losing their best staff, but the motivated team will help you to go to Plot 10 and find out how you can deliver and implement the plan. You have been chosen because the company bosses know that your 30 years of experience had taught you how to talk to crooks, politicians, and muzungus (Western foreigners)5. You and your colleagues first talk to the regional office, whose coordinators have turned their backs on this place out of sheer frustration. They couldn’t tell you who was responsible for building the pipes and for installing the meters. One staff member confesses that she is stressed out by the regional bosses because she is unable to get any readings from the meters. She says that her field staff were beaten by local plumbers, who operate in a criminal cartel to steal the water. The engineering department shrugs when you ask them for GIS mapping of the pipes that a local engineering firm constructed some years ago with World Bank funding. The transmission engineer says that the flow meters that were supposed to measure the water flow into Plot 10 no longer work. He is also unsure where the main pipes deliver water into this district from. What 5 Literally translated, muzungu means someone who roams around aimlessly; aimless wanderer. In Kenya, the term is used to refer to Western foreigners. 3 you get is an exported file from the accounting office about the registered customer accounts. On the spreadsheet, there are 1,200 registered accounts; each account is billed for the minimum water volume estimate for a small customer; although small, these amounts are regularly paid by someone. When you call some of the contact numbers for these accounts in the customer database, people briefly say that they are only the caretakers of the house and that they will tell the landlord you called. Calls are never returned. In one instance, you get a text message from a caretaker to say that the landlord no longer has an account with the utility. It further states that the landlord’s premises are no longer connected to the city’s water utility, but to a borehole of a person who also sells water to other premises. As the special project manager, you realize that there is no other way but to go and see what is happening so as to somehow come up with a plan. After weeks of visits and planning, you are able to roughly sketch where the utility’s underground pipes are. You know this from the rescued GIS maps and some community based organizations whose staff volunteered to find out where the pipes are. You’ve heard that the pipes were laid by a local engineering firm, but you’ve also seen that they laid more than your metal pipes. With the help of former colleagues from the utility’s regional office and local plumbers, they dug shallow trenches for one-inch plastic pipes that everyone calls spaghetti pipes. You’ve seen them many times. Your staff have some pictures of them in the office to show the bosses. One day your head of unit pops into in your office at headquarters. This engineer has been your colleague for 30 years. He ascended through all the technical ranks. Before this special unit was set up, his previous position was operations and maintenance engineer; here, he was responsible for the city’s hydraulic system and technical networks of pipes. He has just returned from Dakar in Senegal, where he met with colleagues from the Africa Team of the Non-revenue Water Reduction Task Force of the International Water Association. The Task Force is funded by the U.S. Development Agency. He is preparing his next trip, to China, to inspect new meters that can read water flow remotely from the headquarters. He is stressed about the slow progress in Plot 10. From his Dakar meeting, he can inform your team that Nairobi’s percentage of 4 non-revenue water (42%) – the standardized measurement of physical leakage and economic losses – is still higher than the African utility average (39%)6. You say that there are too many spaghetti pipes laid by people with knowledge of the hydraulics of the main pipes and distribution pipes and who fiercely protect their investments. You hand the boss a report that is in line with the ISO standards for compiling company memos and reports. He takes the report and asks you to disconnect the spaghetti pipes. He leaves. He needs to report progress to the managing director. Your team, sitting on plastic chairs in the tiny barrack of the department, looks baffled, but you smile to improve the atmosphere in the room. The young (Swiss) muzungu researcher asks you to explain the situation. It takes long. You discuss the problems. He asks how you propose to do this. You say, “It’s easy. Let’s just shut down the entire supply for the district in order to see who will apply for a formal connection. In the meantime, we serve the district with our water tankers.”7 He asks you for a memo about this meeting with the boss. You send it per email using the Internet account that still bears the name of the French engineering consultancy that left abruptly when it realized that the special unit’s work will take longer than its contract period. The stubborn researcher still sits next to you. The office is now even more cramped than usual. To generate some laughter, you shout, “We prepared the memo just for you!” 1.2 Infrastructure organizing This organizational episode forms the point of entry to explore the dynamic through which Nairobi’s infrastructure materially and practically co-produces the incommensurable worlds of organizing it and the technoscientific practices involved in order to not get ‘washed away’ by the assemblage’s multiplicity8. I argue that understanding the organizing of infrastructure requires one to continuously wrestle conceptually with the interplay between technoscientific practices and an 6 Note that this study is not about determining the right or wrong amount of non-revenue water. All quotes in these, which I introduce and describe below as ‘ficto-postcolonial’ accounts, refer to my own field material, except where it is particularly mentioned in the footnote. 8 Gilles Deleuze referred to the term assemblage as “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogonous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes, and reigns – different natures” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1978). For Deleuze, assemblage thinking replaces the relation between the predicates one/multiple with that of the notion of multiplicity, or rather distinguishing between types of multiplicities (and for that reason types of singularities that mark shifts and the emergence of novelty) (see also D. Smith & Protevi, 2015). 7 5 infrastructure’s ontological multiplicity, which the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages simultaneously demands. Thus, conceptually, I ask: How do technoscientific practices potentialize the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages such as an urban water infrastructure? Empirically, I explore an assemblage perspective on organizing infrastructure (Jensen & Morita, 2015) and the sociomaterial organizing of techno-organizational phenomena (Czarniawska, 2014[2008]; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) by asking how Nairobi’s water infrastructure materially and practically assembles the city water utility’s enactment a technoscientific intervention9. Drawing on a four-year case study of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and the city’s international and local water specialists, I present a water utility unit’s effort to introduce three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management into the city’s water utility: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. My praxiographic methodology10 is attentive to the ethnomethodological creativity of infrastructure work (Vertesi, 2014) and the ontological multiplicity of infrastructure assembling (Jensen & Morita, 2015). My analysis deploys a reflexive reading of technoscientific coordination to re-combine the many pragmatic (Mol, 2002) and imaginary ways (Verran, 1998) of how the organizing of infrastructure is achieved. Through my praxiographic descriptions of participant storytelling and technoscientific worlds-in-the-making, I empirically and imaginatively account for how the technoscientific coordination of multiplicity enacts the recursive ontological dynamic of organizing infrastructure (cf. Kenney, 2015). This study is structured as follows. First, I bring together scholarship on infrastructure in STS and cultural anthropology to develop the conceptual resources for my empirical study, to explore how Nairobi’s water infrastructure is organized and organizes. Second, I explain the methodological setup of my actor-network-theory inspired and multi-sited ethnography and the postcolonial and feminist understanding in STS of analyzing my 9 In science and technology studies, the technosciences are understood as a form of intervention into the world that is always political (see also K Asdal, Brenna, & Moser, 2007). 10 According to Martha Kenney, “A praxiography is ‘a story about practices’, to use Annemarie Mol’s rather unwieldy signifier for a simple concept (Mol, 2002, p. 31). It is a genre of writing that complements an STS mode of attention to practices and processes in technoscientific worlds. By foregrounding relations, it becomes ‘possible to say that in practices objects are enacted’ (Mol, 2002, p. 33). In this kind of account, objects cease to be abstract, singular, and absolute. They become material, multiple, and mutable. Praxiography is a genre of storytelling that is skilled at expressing worlds relationally . . . ” (2015, p. 11). 6 field material. Third, in the empirical chapter – the core of my study –, I ethnographically describe Nairobi’s water infrastructure as a sociomaterial assemblage and the organizing that goes into the coordination of its multiplicity. Each of the three praxiographic studies describes one technoscientific practice of measuring, tracking and demarcating water flow and leakage, and opens and ends with, which I will introduce and describe as a ficto-postcolonial account (like the one in the Introduction). This synchronic emplotment prepares the comparative discussion of the praxiographies. Fourth, in the discussion, I compare the three praxiographic studies to further explore the recursive ontological dynamic of infrastructure organizing, and how this dynamic alters the realities and co-produces the imagination of those most affected by the technoscientifically designed intervention. Fifth, in the conclusion, I reflect on my study’s contributions to the turn to infrastructure in social theory and organizational research. I conclude with the procedural, political, and theoretical questions whether infrastructure means business for organizational research to set out directions for the study of infrastructure organizing. 7 2 Theory Assemblages that comprise the full clavier of contemporary infrastructures indissolubly weave together the types of machines that can be matched to types of societies (Deleuze, 1992[1990]; Larkin, 2013, p. 339). Understood as materially emergent systems, an infrastructure has grown from a small set of independent technologies in one place into materially assembled, heterogeneous, and disparate networks that have come to organize everyday life and politics over and through space (Barry, 2001; Hughes, 2012[1987]). A growing body of research that links science and technology studies and cultural anthropology on the issue of infrastructure suggests that the ontological multiplicity of infrastructures provides an exemplary case for studying the unpredictable iterability between the limits of technoscientifically designed interventions and the invisible, often subversive, yet potentially inventive responses of a motley crew of human and non-human actors (Jensen, 2015, 2016; Jensen & Morita, 2015, 2016; Larkin, 2013). This Deleuzian-inspired sociomaterial assemblage thinking contributes to the underexamined experimental dimension and ontological politics of organizational assemblages that comprise infrastructural worlds-in-the-making. To better understand how infrastructure is organized, in the rest of this chapter, I propose a practical ontology framework for studying how technoscientific practices coordinate, in pragmatic and imaginary ways, the organizing of infrastructural worlds-in-the-making. I provide a synthesis of literature that brings together the anthropology of STS, the politics of technoscience, and the postcolonial and feminist reading of technoscientifically infused worlds-in-the making. Overall, I present this literature in three conceptual frames as theoretical resources for understanding the organizing of infrastructure as an interplay between emergent systems, technoscientific coordination, and the re-inventive capacities of distributed ontological multiplicity. These three frames, I argue in the final section of this chapter, help me to conceptually frame the development of my research question: How do technoscientific practices potentialize the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages such as an urban water infrastructure? 8 2.1 Emergent systems The assemblage perspective suggests that infrastructures are emergent systems that integrate the multiple realities of their constituent components (Jensen & Morita, 2015). Given that an infrastructure comprises growing and ever-proliferating networks of heterogeneous human and non-human components, any intervention is an ontological and political commitment of which realities are to be included and which to be ignored (Larkin, 2013). The sociomaterial assemblage perspective suggests that infrastructures are not a priori distinct technological, social, or environmental systems (Jensen, 2015). This perspective stands in contrast to the standard techno-organizational view that assumes that discrete and interdependent social and technological systems shape one another through ongoing coordination and interaction (Leonardi, 2013; Leonardi & Barley, 2010; see for a review Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Though not necessarily incompatible with an assemblage view, the techno-organizational perspective says little about the heterogeneous variety of materiality and the liveliness of technological and non-technological elements, such as nature and the human body. The infrastructural realities of emergent systems are materially and practically constructed by a multiplicity of entities as diverse and incommensurable as bureaucratic organization, scientific experts, cultural categories, religious beliefs, pipes, computer protocols, engineering manuals, urban topographies, as well as earth, water, and climate conditions. The infrastructure assemblage perspective also relates to the realm of studies of practical ontologies (Jensen & Morita, 2015, 2016). The undecidability about where the empirical ends and the conceptual begins produces a productive instability in the diverse ways infrastructure realities are enacted (cf. Christopher Gad & Jensen, 2014, p. 339; Larkin, 2013). On the extreme end of this instability between the material and the symbolic worlds of infrastructure is “a steady focus on the concrete arrangements that make up infrastructures or, crucially, do not make them up” (Jensen, 2016, p. 5; Lea & Pholeros, 2010). The infrastructural co-production of ontologies foregrounds how the relational entanglements between active materials and non-human actors, like all types of matter, shape the political concerns and cultural categories of human actors (Jensen & Morita, 2016, p. 7). This corresponds with the presupposition of historians of science and technology studies to suspend symbolic and cultural reasons, encouraging instead that one follows the inverted, and often invisible, trails of materiality and infrastructural 9 activity (Bowker & Star, 1999; Star, 1999). According to Jensen (2016), this re-invoked position suggests an even dirtier materialism than original STS. In the example of water delivery, everything emanates from and depends on whether a water tap is materially connected to a workable system of pipes and hydrological waterscapes. According to this anthropology and STS perspective, infrastructural change occurs as dynamic yet barely perceptible practical ontological reconfigurations (Jensen, 2015; Jensen & Morita, 2015, 2016). Scholars Casper Jensen and Atsuro Morita describe this much-overlooked ontological transformation as the experimental dimension of emergent systems. They argue that this dimension generates practical ontologies, for instance, through negotiations about an infrastructure’s technoscientific design and its interplay with the concrete material configurations of infrastructure. In practice, new standards of infrastructural design must make compromises with existing configurations. The de facto operations and uses of infrastructure routinely diverge from the standardization and qualification work of engineers, economists, and politicians. Practical ontologies of infrastructure are experimentally “generated through the incessant interplay between (intended) design and the varied, unpredictable and often overlooked response of other actors, especially a motley crew of non-humans” (Jensen & Morita, 2015, p. 84). In this view, the shape of cultural categories and political issues are an experimental enactment of the productive instability of an emergent infrastructure. This enactment is productive in the way that the experimental dynamic between the empirical and the conceptual qualifications of infrastructure always produce novel relations beyond the values and control of planning and design. In a seminal anthropological review of infrastructure studies, Brian Larkin defines infrastructure as the material form through which goods, ideas, people, and money are exchanged over and flow through space (Larkin, 2013). Larkin acknowledges that scholars draw on diverse theorizing in STS, theories of technopolitics, as well as biopolitics, enacting infrastructures alternatively as networked machines, organizational techniques, physical embodiment, and social practices. Yet, although Larkin acknowledges that infrastructures have peculiar ontologies, he also states that they have one particular ontology, which he says hinges on the choice of methodology and theory. Contrary to Larkin’s view, a Deleuzian assemblage thinking regards an infrastructure’s analytical and empirical strength as unraveling an assemblage’s 10 potentiality of how multiplicit ontologies – various types of multiplicity – are materially networked together (Jensen, 2016). Nonetheless, consensus is high on the basic challenge of infrastructures: “‘as a way of describing infrastructure as a hole’ this is ‘flatly untenable’ (Larkin, 2013, p. 336). Invisibility, [Larkin] argued, is only the endpoint of a range of possible visibilities that ‘move from unseen to grand spectacles and everything in between’” (Jensen, 2016, p. 4). This agreement on the matter of infrastructure elucidates the shift from the representational to the performative understanding in which any intervention, including observers, participates in the production of infrastructural realities or worlds-in-the-making (cf. Christopher Gad & Jensen, 2010; C. Gad, et al., 2015). However, even though emergent systems produce subtle and barely visible change, the legibility of infrastructural change is a key concern for the study of the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages. If any intervention is part of an assemblage it is meant to retain control over, I present a second frame in which I look at the technoscience as a practice that coordinates the assembled heterogeneity of emergent systems. 2.2 Technoscientific practice Technoscientific interventions provide one way, and a very popular one, to configure and to coordinate existing infrastructures, technological systems, and so on. One example is the recent rise of ‘tech economists’ and their data analytical methods to capture and contain the vastly distributed worlds in which the global platform economy networks together existing configurations of labor, space, materials, and consumers, such as Uber and Airbnb (The Economist, 2015). These technoscientifically designed interventions are not only becoming ever more sophisticated for commercially funded software platforms, but also for publicly funded physical networks such as water supply infrastructure; even more so in the future, as commercial and public infrastructure will increasingly overlay in many if not all cases by designs that connect existing infrastructures to digital networks . Deleuzian-inspired thinking reminds techno-organizational research that assemblages are enacted via a wide range of technoscientific practices of coordination (Law, 2005; Mol, 2002). For instance, the protocols of profit and loss accounting in global finance 11 have enabled the coordination of a stable, highly destructive, reality, even though the technoscientific protocols of accounting had produced remarkably incommensurable worlds within investment banks and ratings agencies (D. MacKenzie & Spears, 2014). This technoscientific intervention of accounting not only enacted multiple organizational worlds, they also stabilized a provisional and multiplicit character of a single version of reality over the heterogeneous assemblage they were meant to coordinate (Erturk, Froud, Johal, Leaver, & Williams, 2013; Law & Ruppert, 2013). According to the performativity turn in STS, technoscientific practices give operations their particular rationalizing shape and to act for political purposes (M Callon, Millo, & Muniesa, 2007; Erturk, et al., 2013; Law & Ruppert, 2013). There is little disagreement with and a wealth of detailed studies about the performativity of the technoscience, particularly of the economic science as a sociomaterial practice (D. A. MacKenzie, Muniesa, & Siu, 2007). The meaning of what is to be a particular configuration is not the starting point, but it is done, it is the outcome of a process of designs that originate in the technosciences, such as economics and engineering (M. Callon, 1998a) From a process perspective, the technosciences purposefully make qualifications by intensifying differences between practices to be made transparent, their boundaries policed and eventually reduced (Barry, 2006; Law & Ruppert, 2013). As a result of this process, the new upspring of difference potentially leads to new connections and new forms coming into being (Barry, 2006). For instance, Singleton and Law’s (2013) study about the UK government’s technoscientifically designed practices to trace livestock in beef cattle farming have enacted realities that displaced and colonized others, while the achievement of local universalities were fluidly evading capture and enacting alternative realities. This process perspective conceives of technoscientific practices and devices as not only purposefully designed and disciplining forms of coordination and stabilization, they are also more fragile than one might expect, such as what is written on their package or in their protocols. In practice, technoscientific interventions are potentially fragile ad hoc patchworks that aim to tack together provisional realities instead of approximating a logic of perfect design and protocols of control (Galloway, 2004; Law & Ruppert, 2013). The fragility of the technosciences spurs agency into certain yet unpredictable directions by connecting and disconnecting the multiple realities they enact (Barry, 2006). Thus, the technosciences become a material conduit 12 for the contamination of neatly distinct, bounded spheres, like that of technological systems, state bureaucracies, and the market (Barry, 2002). The technosciences pacify11 and make differences visible. They pacify realities by intensifying differences. On the other hand, they produce a space of new differences and possibilities of subsequent actualization. Thus, they stabilize realities and produce overflows – realities evading capture – that agitate (Michel Callon, 1998b). They produce the tension of subordinating realities, in which either the unknown difference is singled out through the colonizing of intolerant realities or the unknown difference that serves vested interests is made transparent and visible (Singleton & Law, 2013). Thus, the technoscientific coordination of infrastructure conditions and is conditioned by an “[infrastructural] space within which differences between technical practices, procedures and forms have been reduced” (Barry, 2006, p. 239). According to Andrew Barry’s (Barry, 2001, 2006) conceptualization of the technosciences as technological zones, this space cannot be marked on a mapped out infrastructure, but is rather found in the entanglements and flows of knowledge between government bureaucracies, activists, consultants, and the local population (Barry, 2013). Yet, according to Barry (2006), any intervention makes potential explicit by unravelling local forms and politics of organizing. Technoscientific enactments, partly unconsciously, unravel and challenge the categories and knowledge through which a concrete sociomaterial assemblage is conceived. To sum up this second frame, instead of neutrally observed, the multiplicit assembling of an infrastructure is coordinated – pacified and made visible – in the material worlds of expressive practices and devices, which produces a space of ontological possibilities and their subsequent actualization (cf. C. Gad, et al., 2015; Jensen, 2004). Accordingly, infrastructural realities are enacted in a wide range of technoscientific practices through the human-enabled use of coordination devices and practices (D. J. Haraway, 1985; Law, 2005; Mol, 2002; Strathern, 2005[1991]). These interpretative and expressive 11 Michel Callon used the notion of pacification to denote the transformation of things into objects with fixed qualities that enables agents to act. The objects that scientists approach do not express stable qualities, they produce conflicting data about themselves, and thereby the objects participate in scientific controversies. According to Caliskan and Callon, “For a scientific fact to emerge, scientists must successfully pacify natural objects, reducing them from wild unknowns to things with fixed qualities” (Caliskan & Callon, 2010, pp. 5-6). 13 practices and devices act as mediators that enact infrastructure assembling as (displayable) events with an unforeseeable character rather than stable structures, in a positivist sense, simply “out there” (Jensen, 2016; Larkin, 2013, p. 330) For my assemblage view on infrastructure, this means that technoscientifically designed interventions must conceive of the practices and devices through which an infrastructure system is enacted as episodic events. An infrastructural event produces a range of always partial and provisional, not yet fully actualized, (dis)connected parts. I suggest that the study of infrastructure organizing must focus on the episodic entanglements of the emergence of two heterogeneous systems: The system of the technoscientifically designed intervention, such as water leakage and loss management, that pacifies, makes visible, and produces spaces of possibility and actualization and the emergent system of the configuration of pipes and water, in the example of water delivery. 2.3 Re-inventive knowing The episodic events in which we – practitioners and scholars – as collaborative participants of our studies enact the technoscientific potentiality of emergent systems problematize the knowing of infrastructural worlds-in-the-making. How we can and should address knowing and acting, or even human agency, if realities are distributed and practically assembled beyond our own ontologies, has been a major issue in the postcolonial and feminist understanding of STS. Yet the challenge remains that not only people have agency. Agency does not only rely on the capacities of people but on the actions of an array of things, technical objects from pipes and monitoring devices, which unconsciously operate and co-produce human knowing and acting (Barry, 2001, p. 175; Thrift, 2004). Things, such as the components of an infrastructure, become political materials with vast experimental consequences whose liveliness unfold “a sub-politics, which silently changes worlds while people deliberate and argue about different matters” (Jensen, 2015, p. 4). The unruly properties of materials unfold and mutate in environments in which they are difficult to control and used wildly, much beyond the intentions and abstractions of engineers and designers (Barry, 2013; de Laet & Mol, 2000). 14 A theory of infrastructural transformation and agency necessarily incorporates the materiality of knowing and seeing. This means not only seeing the abstract features of connections embedded within the circulation of the technosciences (Barry, 2006), but also the materially embodied connections that only become visible in particular situations by experimenting with not yet foreseeable objects (Morita, 2013; Strathern, 2005[1991]). What is at stake politically is how an emergent system produces and is produced by the structural features and the messy local performances that emerge from the technoscientific enactments of various versions of reality and the knowledge these enactments create (Anderson, 2002; Barry, 2013; D. Haraway, 1988). Enmeshing theory and practice, the technosciences powerfully generate local universalities that are both intolerant and permissive of local practices (Latour, 1993; Singleton & Law, 2013). The experimental assembling of infrastructure as emergent systems is, and must remain, epistemically dirty, both to study participants and the analyst. The visibility of the unknown requires one to experiment with materially embodied seeing and knowing. A vision is always embedded in an assemblage of technical devices, artefacts, and sensory receptors that constitute a mechanic act of knowing what to see (D. Haraway, 1988; Morita, 2013, p. 7). Materially conditioned forms of knowing must not only shape an outward orientation to the relations that a technical device already has with its surroundings. It also embodies an inward connection that may resist and re-configure human agents’ capacities to see and know differently, to be inventive. Yet, embodied inward connections are only visible in particular moments (of contact), or events, when they collide with another set of connections through comparative perspectives (Morita, 2013, p. 7; Strathern, 2005[1991]). Helen Verran’s notion of postcolonial moments of technoscientifically infused worldsin-the-making remind us to side with the epistemically less powerful, often decentered and embodied, aspects of assemblages. To account for the culturally distinct knowledge systems of sometimes radically incommensurable micro-worlds, Verran deploys a feminist and postcolonial conceptualization that foregrounds the potentiality of events during which shared ontic imagining holds up difference as long as possible (Anderson, 2002; Kenney, 2015). Verran’s relational empiricism explores the potentiality of technoscientific inventiveness, for instance, calculative micro-worlds in which 15 competing ways of numbering are not explained away, but attended to as important differences (Kenney, 2015; Verran, 2001, 2002). These postcolonial moments of relational, embodied knowing are alert to the interactional constitution of social collectives, identities, processes, and practices across space (Go, 2013, p. 25; Latour, 2005). They methodologically produce, and conceptually account for, the epistemic flourishing of worlds-in-the-making in order to remain accountable to the epistemic and ontological commitments of the worlds inside technoscientific practice (Kristin Asdal & Moser, 2012; Morita, 2013). In feminist STS scholar Martha Kenney’s reading of Verran’s unique approach, “When [the technosciences] have largely defined what knowledge practices are considered legitimate, creating conditions for epistemic flourishing requires ongoing attention to what enables and forecloses the recognition of differences and the ability to stay with differences as they emerge in practice” (Kenney, 2015, p. 755). The postcolonial condition of technoscientific worlds accounts for the antagonisms of the disparate systems of knowing between the universal and the local; without such consideration, the knowing of alternative, new, inventive objects is unlikely to emerge, yet it is always present as a subpolitics of ontic imagination (Kenney, 2015; Verran, 2002). “It is in the everyday messing around with mucky, obdurate stuff, and in the conversations and other texts – official and unofficial – that imaginaries are enacted and enact. The imaginaries imminent in practices interpellate those objects/subjects that/who are implicated in and by the practices, helping to constitute them as objects/subjects” (Verran, 1998, p. 252). In this reflexive view, technoscientific devices and practices act as experimental frontiers between incommensurable worlds of different epistemic and ontological commitments (Jane I. Guyer et al., 2010; Verran, 2010). Practices such as enumerating for audit or marketing can be enacted in multiple ways as sources of “provincializing universal reasons, the description of alternative modernities, and the recognition of hybridities” (Anderson, 2002, p. 643). Technoscientific practices “become sites for fabricating and linking local and global identities, as well as sites for disrupting and challenging distinctions between global and local” (Anderson, 2002, p. 644). There are multiple ways to experiment with these distinctions and to not only exploit the contradictions of Western rationality (Anderson, 2002, p. 649). 16 Shared imaginations are part of the complex technical assemblages in which all knowing and knowledge-making is local (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987[1980]; Verran, 1998). According to Verran, “The story about sameness should also expand collective imagination” (Verran, 2002, p. 731). And there are ways of “doing good work” within and between the messiness and ineradicable heterogeneity of different knowledge practices and traditions, which does not need to imply purification and conversion. But, by upholding difference as long as possible, at least for a moment, one may become capable of seeing and knowing alternatives within the overlap of differences (Verran, 2002). To sum up the third frame, it is not particularly radical to argue that knowing and acting in technologically networked words are materially enacted. For instance, it seems to be common sense that the smartphone has become a key material anchor that captures and makes the worlds through which people enact their realities. Yet, the emergent systems of infrastructural worlds and technoscientific coordination produce worlds, even the smallest micro-worlds, that do not operate any longer under any single knowledge system or worldview. Postcolonial STS’s (and its feminist sister’s) theoretical rigging12 with contexts in which disparate knowledge traditions “abut and abrade” helps to open up a clunky characterization of reality, in which the reality-enacting authority of technoscientific modernity is kept in balance for the sake of producing shared imaginations to increase possibilities of cooperation (and thereby to decrease possibilities of protest) (Verran, 2002, p. 730). Even though there is a normative touch to the notion of cooperation (and protest), the creation of cooperative symmetry serves as conceptual and methodological rig to participate in the production of inventiveness that goes beyond the stickiness of path-dependency in which powerful worldviews and technologies constrain the imagination of new becomings, new worlds of being. 12 Feminist STS scholar Martha Kenney (2015, p. 21) describes Verran’s postcolonial and Harraway’s feminist theorizing of technosientific worlds as ‘rigging’ instead of ‘framework’: “Although they have similar meanings, ‘framework’ has become a sleeping metaphor in scholarly writing. Along with the nautical meaning of ‘rigging’, I want to add a second association, inspired by the television show MythBusters; on MythBusters, the hosts build elaborate and clever technological rigs to test modern myths. Each rig is a provisional construction, set up for a specific myth, and dismantled after they finish the episode. Sometimes bits of old rigs are reused or repurposed for new rigs.” 17 2.4 Summary and analytical research questions In this chapter, by elaborating on the ontological iterability of infrastructure assembling and technoscientific practices, I sought to contribute conceptually and to provide the theoretical resources to an organizational study of infrastructure by following Casper Jensen and Atsuro Morita (Jensen & Morita, 2015, 2016), according to whom infrastructures offer rich and dirty materials for the analysis of practical ontologies and the politics of emergent systems. In assemblage thinking in STS and cultural anthropology, infrastructures are the material forms of emergent systems through which the flow of natures, goods, ideas, people, and finance is organized over space (cf. Larkin, 2013). I have argued that infrastructures have grown from a small set of independent technologies in one place into a materially assembled heterogeneous and disparate form that has come to organize everyday life and politics over and through space (Barry, 2001; Hughes, 2012[1987]). In a Deleuzian understanding, physical infrastructure ensembles indissolubly link the control and value of the types of machines that can be matched to types of societies (Deleuze, 1992[1990]). A growing body of research that brings together cultural anthropology and STS on the issue of infrastructure suggests that the ontological multiplicity of infrastructures has a key role in the unpredictable interplay between infrastructural work and the invisible responses of human and nonhuman actors (Jensen, 2015, 2016; Jensen & Morita, 2015, 2016; Larkin, 2013). This ahumanist-inspired research reminds us that infrastructural worlds are enacted in a wide range of technoscientific practices (Law, 2005; Mol, 2002). Technoscientific practices perform and counter-perform the realities of infrastructure assembling and enact the unstable, provisional, and multiple nature of a single version of reality over the heterogeneous assemblages they are meant to control (Barry, 2006). To better understand how technoscientific practices coordinate and stabilize infrastructure assembling, I propose to study them as practices that enable the flow of associations across infrastructural worlds. To capture how the technosciences enact the material composition and the ontological multiplicity of infrastructure, I formulate a set of questions to guide my practice and process analysis. These analytical questions help me to explore the overall research question: 18 How do technoscientific practices potentialize the organizing of infrastructure? • How do an infrastructure’s emergent material systems co-create the multiplicit worlds of organizing it? • How do technoscientific practices coordinate the stabilization of this infrastructural multiplicity? • How, in these stabilized moments, do technoscientific practices potentialize the imaginative capacities that re-invent infrastructural ontologies? 19 3 Methodology In this chapter, I present an overview of my postcolonial STS-inspired ethnographic praxiography. I document how my empirical findings are based on the manufacturing of various sources of field material between 2011 and 2014 and how these were reflexively interpreted in my effort to conceptualize the ontological dynamic of the organizing of infrastructure. The narrative interpretation is grounded in writing a thick performative description of various technoscientific vignettes and ficto-postcolonial stories. Each of the studies of the three practices – praxiographic studies – starts and ends with a ficto-postcolonial account (Kenney, 2015; Michels & Steyaert, 2017; Stewart, 2014) (like the one in the Introduction) to unmake the infrastructural worlds of the technoscientific praxiographic studies. In the following chapters, I will present my empirical results as one descriptive account and will comparatively discuss these three praxiographies that are well connected to my field material of Nairobi’s technoscientific worlds and are accountable to the postcolonial sensitivity of this material. This chapter is organized as follows. First, in this methodology section, I present the deployed STS methodology. In section 2, I outline two field episodes that helped me to produce a large ‘field archive’. I track my ethnographic moves and the politics of field access between Nairobi’s’ ‘orchestra of water specialists’ and the organizational apparatus of the city’s water utility. In section 3, I present my analytical procedures and praxiographic framework. The thick description and my analytical research question(s) informed the subsequent performative staging of three separate praxiographic building blocks, which I will present in the next chapter. 3.1 Accounting for technoscientific worlding One of the fundamental messages in science and technology studies is that knowledge, technology, and society are entangled and cannot be split into separate systems. For instance, one fails to understand markets if one does not trace how the epistemic communities of economists, both in the lab and in the field, construct devices, and create and run sociotechnical capacities, like firms, which themselves – as non-human actors – have capacities to act. To understand the social, or more nuanced worldly things, it is 20 not only social categories and technological artefacts that mediate social relations, but assemblages of human and non-human relations that constitute the locally contingent and heterogeneous social (Latour, 2005). John Law’s metaphor of heterogeneous engineering conflated the principle of paying attention to the seamless web of borders between the social and material drawn by social groups, systems, or actor networks (Bijker, 2012; Law, 2012[1987]). In particular, STS scholars drawing on actor-networktheory have intensified the material turn towards an ontological and performative stance on the politics of enacting research (Latour, 2005; Law & Mol, 2001; Mol, 2002). States of affairs are always in the making or in the becoming and need to be constantly enacted by both the actors and their devices. Benefiting from the political project of feminism, in particular via Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, STS has come to an understanding that matters such as the market economy or gendered bodies are performatively constituted by the very materials and expressions said to be their results and that foundational divisions such as capitalist/non-capitalist or male/female are not foundational but sources of politics and power, and are also constantly prone to be reinvented (Butler, 1993, 2010; D. Haraway, 1996, 2008; Law & Singleton, 2013). This turn to the normative aspects of STS raised the issue of accounting for the procedural politics of who participates in the representation (of the enacted worlds). From a practical ontological claim of which actors, activities, and devices are best represented by researchers, STS made the epistemological problem of human researchers representing the world to its own object of accounting for the epistemological fragile and very political devising of social science methods (Law, 2005; Law & Urry, 2004). The empirical study of an infrastructure’s ontological dynamic invokes methodological attention to the partial connectedness of multiple worlds during ontological moments of contact and the unmaking of technoscientific worldings (C. Gad, et al., 2015). Considering the feminist understanding of ‘methodological’ guidelines to study technoscientific practices in postcolonial worlds (Kenney, 2015; Verran, 2001), I suggest an analytical approach in which the research and the analyst participate in the collective making of the technosciences and the ontological dynamic of infrastructure. I understand the organizing of infrastructure as a process of sociomaterial assembling. This organizing dynamic, as accounted for in the ficto-postcolonial story in the introduction chapter, was accompanied by and reflexively produced a technoscientific enactment of Nairobi’s water infrastructure. My notion of a ficto-postcolonial story 21 draws on Kathleen Stewart’s notion of ficto-critical storytelling13 as theorizing experiences, as well as Kenney’s reflexive reading of Verran’s technoscientific storytelling in postcolonial contexts, which is particularly sensitive to upholding and accounting for ontological differences as long as is possible. By way of producing this form of accountability for “how ‘we’ [as participant analysts] must think in order to conceive the world the way they do [our human informants]” (Henare, Holbraad, & Wastell, 2007, p. 15), I draw on a sense of postcolonial accountability as reflexivity, which is about re-making the organizing of infrastructure through storytelling/theorizing as a relational and representational practice to account for the imaginary and affective qualities of technoscientific worlds (Kenney, 2015; Stewart, 2014). 3.2 Collecting empirical material The intersection of multisite ethnography and actor-network-theory as anthropological method (Morita, 2013) for producing case studies (Law, 2009) inspired my ethnographic methodology. Between 2011 and 2014, during three on-site episodes in 2011 (pilot), 2012 (episode 1), and 2014 (episode 2) totaling eight months of fieldwork, I conducted 76 ethnographically embedded interviews (74 recorded and transcribed, totaling 60 hours) with Nairobi’s water specialists (31) and utility staff (45) including numerous conversations in the field, and four months of participant observation with Nairobi’s water utility along the production and distribution of water across the city. During these four years, I produced more than 100 ethnographic images and collected, read, and coded through several thousand pages of industry reports, policy papers, engineering reports, and organizational memos and archives. I also co-authored and published a 12.000-word case report with a local business school professor, which I used to trigger some reflective responses from the study participants (Lehmann & Mudida, 2015). I stored the transcribed interviews, field notes, images, and text documents in the software NVivo. This database helped me to structure my field material in an iterative procedure. 13 Following cultural geography’s momentum for mobilizing fictional vignettes/ethnofictions (Rabbiosi & Vanolo, 2016), Christoph Michels and Chris Steyaert provide the first empirical study that deliberately draws on and develops ficto-critical accounts in organizational studies (Michels & Steyaert, 2017). 22 Because I became interested in how the technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management enacted the organizing of Nairobi’s water infrastructure, I collected multiple forms of qualitative data about the fairly dispersed organizational and expert stakeholder sites entangled with the emergence of this technoscientific practice. To understand the unique features of my case, I also collected data about the focal urban waterscape, Nairobi, and the sector as a whole – Kenya’s water sector. In total, I spent eight months of fieldwork between Nairobi’s water utility headquarters’ specialized Non-revenue Water Unit, the utility’s six regional offices, a tenement estate in Eastern Nairobi, and Kenya’s national and international ‘orchestra of water specialists’ that all became more or less consciously entangled with the practice of water leakage and loss management over the course of my study, including myself. In total, excluding my pilot study, the sources from field episodes 1 and 2 included ethnographic observations and interviews, open-ended and semi-structured expert stakeholder interviews, ethnographic pictures, organizational memos, meeting minutes, e-mails, presentations, organizational policy documents and strategic plans, studies of engineers, regulatory filings and reports, sector publications, websites, online discussion forums, international and local online and newspaper articles, and many others. Overview of collected field material* Ethnographic observations Water specialists Example material • Observation of interview sites • Participation in stakeholder workshop • Comparing atmospheres of office space and activity • Described dynamic between experts during workshop • Observation of expert feedback about written case study Water utility • Observation of interview sites • Observation of office activities • Participant observation of dynamic between coworkers • Observant participation in office Example material • Participating in drawing sketches and calculating numbers as sense making of work problems • Observing managers drafting and editing strategy papers with staff • Joint production of organizational memos of visited sites 23 Interviews Ethnographic pictures Archival documents • Open ended and semistructured interviews • Problem centered around events and issues • NGO staff interview about interfaces with water utility • Interview with donor about financing water utility project • Semistructured and problem centered interviews • Desk office interviews • Interview to the double • Pictures of offices, office materials and workshops • Capturing spatial and office atmospheres and detail • Pictures of offices, compounds, field visits and customer clinics • Water legislation, reports, white papers, etc. • Letter of circle of donors to the ministry, master plan studies, etc. • Engineering reports, strategy documents, organizational memos, accounting sheets, infrastructure maps • NA • Online blogs, • Local researcher’s Twitter, online blog about newspaper life in tenement articles, etc. district *See the following tables for a more extensive overview of field material. Other sources • Interview with security manager about water theft • Interview with account about water audit at his laptop • Interview with technical service staff in region about daily work activities • Capturing the detail of spatial conditions of utility compounds • Capturing the atmosphere and details of district visits • Project documentation about nonrevenue water strategy • Water audit baseline study • NA Table 1: Overview of Collected Field Material. 3.2.1 Field episode 1 After a pilot field episode that brought me to Kenya in 2011 for four weeks, in August and September 2012, I conducted open-ended interviews with Nairobi’s water specialists, including entrepreneurs, regulators, NGO activists, journalists, bankers, technical development aides, engineering consultants, social science researchers, professors, among many others. During the interviews, I generally asked about topics 24 such as their organizations’ and their personal involvement in Nairobi’s water infrastructure; what they conceived of as the main challenges of Nairobi’s water utility company, and how they worked with the utility, if this was the case. From my involvement, I was invited by a bilateral donor representative to observe a one-day stakeholder workshop where engineering experts and government representatives discussed the results of Nairobi’s water master plan study with stakeholders. Throughout my field episode 1, I used the snowball sampling technique. I asked stakeholders to identify other stakeholders and publications that mattered to our conversations. Details of interviews with Nairobi’s water specialists* Background of interviewees Category of Number of interviewees interviews Engineering Commercial/ administration Origin Foreign Kenyan Consulting 3 2 1 2 1 Donor 8 0 8 8 0 Government 7 4 3 0 7 Media 2 0 2 0 2 NGO 6 0 6 1 5 Research 5 1 4 3 2 Total 31 7 24 15 16 *includes interviews from field episode 1 and 2 Table 2: List of Interviews with Nairobi's Water Specialists. 25 Detailed list of sampled water specialists and expert organizations Category Organization • Business IT transformation for water utilities Farley Consultants - Water Loss Management • Water loss management consulting Gauff Engineering • Water engineering consulting French Development Agency (AFD) • Water infrastructure investments and financing policies German International Cooperation (GIZ) • • • • Water sector reforms in Africa Water utility regulation Water utility association management Water sector legislation in Kenya World Bank • • Water sector reform and financing Business transformation in water utilities UN Habitat • Urban water research Water Services Regulatory Board • • • • Athi Water Services Board • • Water services regulation Water consumer participation Institutional law and water law Local water consumer participation (citizens) Water infrastructure planning Water tariff and accounting Ministry of Water Services • Water service policy implementation Nation Media Group • Business editor, utility coverage Standard Media Group • Feature journalist, water sector Consumer Association of Kenya • Water consumer spokesperson Maji na Uanfinisi • • • • • Social and water programs Climate change Environmental communication Managing water projects in informal settlement Environmental communication Water Bank • Water sector entrepreneur Grundfos Lifelink • Water kiosk business modells University of Nairobi • Water sector reforms University of Cape Town • Urban studies Wonderkid Consulting Donor Government Media Expertise NGO Pamoja Trust Research 26 Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique University of Stockholm Independent researcher • Social science • Water engineering and infrastructure, water donor consulting Urban geography and water, water donor consulting • Table 3: List of Sampled Water Specialists and Organizations 27 Figure 3: Impressions from Embedded Ethnographic Interview Study of Nairobi’s Water Specialists. (Photos by the author.) From top left to bottom right: digitalized media archive at Nation Media Group library, sketch of residential areas and water prices from interviewed journalist, waiting for interview in the boardroom of the water service regulator, networking at a local business school, participants waiting for the prime minister at a water stakeholder workshop, ride through jammed traffic to an interview site on a ‘boda boda’ motorbike taxi. 28 I complemented this embedded ethnographic interview study of expert stakeholders in the field episode 2 with a focus on the practice of water leakage and loss management (see more below). While conducting expert stakeholder interviews, I wrote minutiae field notes of the settings; who referred me to this site and the interview partners; how I could establish contact with the interview partners; where the interviews took place; how I perceived the interview settings and interviewees; and, where possible, I took images to capture the sites’ atmospheres. The sites varied from entrepreneurial technology co-working hubs, money-dripping state corporations, cerebral regulatory boardrooms, buzzing university campuses, pounding industrial manufacturing sites, crowded newsrooms, chaotic NGO command posts, disciplined technical development agencies, slick engineering consultancies, Western-designed donor agencies, opulent compounds of ex-patriot-populated United Nations agencies, and the bureaucratic labyrinths of state ministries, to name a few. In addition to my detailed note-taking, I received permission from all but one interview partner to audio-record the interviews, which I had professionally transcribed. The interview partner who did not want to be tape-recorded was my first contact at the city’s water utility. While I was unable to get access to the water utility company during field episode 1, the engineer felt quite uncomfortable giving an interview. The external attention on her department required her to respond to requests from numerous foreign research consultants for interviews. He appeared increasingly relaxed during the interview, and expressed his anger about the opportunistic attention on his role in the utility and the scant support she received. Nonetheless, he broke company policy. If I wanted to conduct official interviews, I needed permission form the CEO and the PR manager. However, during this field episode, I could not get hold of the utility. Until then, I had only had a loose affiliation with a local business school, which I had to formalize in order to get access to the utility. This embedded interview study of expert stakeholders and the stakeholder workshop played a key role in my focus on the practice of water leakage and loss management. By then, non-revenue water had vaguely surfaced among experts and in some news articles as a concrete concept under another technical term unaccounted-for water. While most expert stakeholders conflated the two terms, some engineers made subtle 29 technical distinctions between them. Nonetheless, as I show in the empirical part, the practice flourished under the term non-revenue water. 3.2.2 Field episode 2 During my second episode in the field, from January until July 2014, I collected the core of my field material – an ethnography of the city water utility’s specialized Nonrevenue Water Unit. After I had teamed up with a local professor as a research associate at a local business school, we negotiated my access to the utility with the utility’s managing director. Throughout the negotiations, it was clear that the MD had one concern he wanted us, as business school researchers, to investigate: how the company tackled the management of water loss through its recently established Non-revenue Water Unit. Overview of interviews with Nairobi’s water utility staff* Background of interviewee Category of Number of Engineering/ interviewees interviews Technical Headquarters 18 Regional Position Commercial Management Other 6 12 9 9 20 7 13 3 17 Production 7 7 0 2 5 Total 45 20 25 14 31 *all Kenyan Table 4: Overview of Interviews with Nairobi’s Water Utility Staff. 30 Details of Nairobi water utility interviewees/study participants Category Company position Workplace Management Directors Managers Managing director Headquarters compound Technical director Headquarters compound Commercial director Headquarters compound Finance director Headquarters compound Regional director, northeast Northeast office Regional director, south Southern office Regional director, east Eastern office Regional director, west Western office Thika dam & Ngehtu treatment plant Upcountry, north (Ngehtu/Thika) Sasumua damn & water treatment plant Upcountry, north (Sasumua) Operations & maintenance Headquarters compound Engineering Headquarters compound Non-revenue water Headquarters compound Customer care Central business office Meter reading Headquarters compound Informal settlement Northeastern industrial compound Security Headquarters compound Utility practices* Technical service Customer care Finance & revenue collection Officer, east Eastern office Coordinator, south Southern office Coordinator, west Western office Coordinator, north Northern office Officer, central Central office Coordinator, north Northern office Coordinator, south Southern office Coordinator, west Western office Officer, central Central office Coordinator, headquarters Headquarters compound Coordinator, east Eastern office 31 Meter reading & billing Coordinator, south Southern office Officer, central Central office Officer, north Northern office Officer, west Western office Coordinator, northeast Northeastern office Coordinator, west Western office Officer, east Eastern office Water production Water treatment plant & reservoirs WTP coordinator, Kabete Inner city reservoir (Kabete) Dam, coordinator, Dakeine Upcountry, Northeast (Dakeine) WTP, operations, supervisor, Sasumua Upcountry, North (Sasumua) WTP, operations, supervisor, Ngehtu Upcountry, Northeast (Ngethu) WTP, quality, coordinator, Sasumua Upcountry, North (Sasumua) WTP, quality, coordinator, Ngehtu Upcountry, Northeast (Ngehtu) Special unit Customer care, coordinator Headquarters compound Finance, officer Headquarters compound Non-revenue Meter reading, officer Water Unit Technical, officer Headquarters compound Technical, coordinator Headquarters compound Headquarters compound, field *Names of practices given by the utility Table 5: Details of Nairobi Water Utility Interviewees/Study Participants. 32 Field details of multi-sited ethnography of Nairobi’s water utility Days in the field Types of data Examples of activity Headquarters Meetings with management, administration 9 and departments • Recorded interviews with management • Field notes about conversations and meetings • Conversation with personal assistant about coordination of my field access • Waiting several hours on an office chair for interviewing a director • Observing client who wants to complain to MD Regional offices Northern 1 Northeastern 2 Eastern 2 Southern 1 Western 1 • Pictures of office space and compounds • Recorded interviews • Field notes about office and compound atmosphere and space • Sitting in a boardroom to interview regional staff • Receiving a guided tour of the office compound • Chatting with customer in customer counter area about water bill Production sites Site visits and interviews at water treatment 4 plants, dams, • Recorded interviews • Field notes about production site activities • Pictures of sites and reservoirs • Water tasting of treated water in the laboratory • Guided tour through treatment process • Reservoir manager describing text message information system Non-revenue Water Unit at headquarters 53 in the field (Plot 10 tenement 5 district) Total • Recorded desk interviews • Field notes of work conversations, staff meetings, activities in the office • Field notes of site activities and conversations between staff and people in the field • Photographs and recordings of meeting with district people • Chatting about private matters during morning tea breaks • Drawing sketches about pipeline locations • Observing conversation of staff about photographed illegal pipe connection • Chatting with driver about work traffic jam • Conversation with security staff and people from the district • Participating in customer clinic/district meeting 78 Table 6: Field Details of Multi-sited Ethnography of Nairobi’s Water utility. 33 Figure 4: Impressions from Multi-sited Ethnography of Nairobi’s Water Utility. (Photos by the author.) From top left to bottom right: company motorbikes at a regional utility office, white board of daily performance targets at a regional utility office, distribution pipes at an inner-city water treatment plant and reservoir, meeting in district chief office with utility staff and local spokespersons, customer sign at regional utility office, customer information poster in regional utility customer center (Photos by author). 34 During four months of organizational fieldwork, I shadowed the Non-revenue Water Unit in action as a participant observer (Czarniawska, 2007, 2014). My affiliation with the Non-revenue Water Unit allowed me to shadow in social and material space in which the non-revenue water produced its structural effects. This served two ethnographic purposes consistent with STS and actor-network-theory (Czarniawska, 2004; Latour, 2005). First, I tracked the unit’s efforts to align the utility’s dispersed calculations (of volumetric and commercial water losses), to implement and scale up utility-wide pilot projects, and to gain control over specific technical and commercial utility operations. Second, I tracked the intellectual and physical technologies and organizational sites that made up the unit’s actors’ capacities in relation to the nonrevenue water. The departmental team (and office space) literally re-assembled the utility’s main organizational functions and practices comprising a managing engineer; technical engineers in charge of the physical assets such as the performance and allocation of meters and pipes; customer service staff in charge of customer relations; meter reading, customer billing, and finance staff in charge of accounting; and an administrative assistant. During my stay in the unit’s office site at the utility’s headquarters, I compiled audiorecorded desk interviews, field conversations and field notes. I informally spoke and listened to the unit’s staff articulation of their everyday work lives. Further, I became particularly involved in the unit’s ongoing pilot project in an eastern district of Nairobi (Pipeline Estate/Plot 10). These interactions regularly turned me, from a disinterested participant observer, into an observing participant who intervened into the staff’s calculations and drawings of particular concerns (cf. Moeran, 2009). This was due to the team’s or a team member’s struggle to articulate a problem, and his or her problem to present a solution to the department’s manager, the MD, or myself. By participating in the articulation of minor problems, I revealed some of the staff’s key concerns, which I later used to write myself and my relationship with the study participants into the fictopostcolonial accounts. The staff did not only produce these concerns for me as a Western outsider, but in relation to the burdensome tasks that the non-revenue water imposed on them in the context of the staff’s physical work environments and the management’s performance objectives. 35 A multi-sited interview study supplemented my organizational ethnography at the unit level. I interviewed and visited multiple sites at the utility’s headquarters; main dams, water production plants, and city water reservoirs; and the six regional and water distribution and customer centers. The sampling of my interview partners and organizational sites was shaped and facilitated by the Non-Revenue Water Unit, the staff in charge of the local site, and my emergent diplomatic skills to independently navigate contacts in the utility. In addition to making detailed field notes and images, I received permission from all but one regional director to audio-record interviews. In these semi-structured interview settings, I integrated the strategy of the interview to the double (Czarniawska, 2011; Nicolini, 2009). I invited my interview partners to articulate their everyday work and practices. I asked for a description of yesterday’s or today’s tasks and let staff compare them with a description of how a normal day would have varied from the former.14 The interviews lasted between 30 and 120 minutes. The site visits lasted one day on average. At the utility company headquarters, I conducted interviews with the utility’s directors and managers of the technical and business processes, ranging from network system operations, asset management and mapping, customer relations, meter reading, and revenue collection, to the coordination of internal and external security staff. The interviews started with a detailed description of the job and the current challenges of the company unit in question and ended with a discussion about the non-revenue water and the department’s interfaces with the Non-Revenue Water Unit. At the dams, production plants, and city reservoirs, I spent each up to a day to interview site engineers and visited the sites with company staff. These formal interviews and informal conversations during the visits started with a site’s specific role for the company’s water network, their performance objectives, and their interfaces with other units at headquarters and, upwards and downwards, the network’s water flow. They also ended with discussions about the non-revenue water and the site’s interfaces with the NonRevenue Water Unit. 14 This strategy proofed more or less effective depending on the interviewees’ reflective capacities. Reflective capacities about work varied a lot as I interviewed people with different educational backgrounds ranging from civil engineering to clerks or meter readers without formal training. 36 At the six regional offices, which acted as technical distribution and customer service centers15, I spent up to one day on interviews and visits of office sites in order to get a comparative understanding of the variability of practices across the distinct sites of the infrastructural network. I conducted separate interviews with coordinators, supervisors, officers, and the region’s director. To conclude, the sampling of the multi-sited organizational ethnography revealed and enacted some of the utility’s politics and my engagement as a fieldworker (Ghorashi & Wels, 2009). On the one hand, the Non-revenue Water Unit’s structural position concerning the sphere of the MD, and my affiliation with a reputable local business school enabled and constrained my moves across the organization’s various structural and political spheres. On the other hand, instead of my initial approach to use complicit arrangements to gain access via an ‘independent’ business consultant, my sampling became more engaged, so as to motivate people in the organization to talk to me. For instance, the Non-revenue Water Unit initially told me that my interviews with directors and managers should take less than 10 minutes. The story went that, only recently, an influential regional director had quit after 10 minutes of an interview with a foreign engineering team of non-revenue water consultants. It turned out that becoming more involved in and committed to the organization made complicit arrangements unnecessary. Directors and managers openly talked to me for more than two hours, or invited me to stay for longer in their spheres of influence and to meet their staff. The reason seemed to be that I successfully remained unaffiliated to any of the foreign donor agencies, which made me less of a ‘political subject’. Also, my increasing fluency about the utility allowed me to cross-reference between the various organizational sites as well as the city’s water specialists. My fieldwork with the utility intensified a second, recursive round of expert stakeholder interviews and archival research. While reviewing the previously collected data, I 15 The flow and pressure of water at the respective sites across the urban water network produced quite different matters of concern than the ones in the headquarters. The comparative regional interviews rarely proofed to be redundant, but rather revealed the multiplicity of water as articulated in practice. It became clear to me that water was a multiple beyond structural positions and practices. For example, the non-revenue water intensified the meter reading and billing practice to enact water as an economic good, water that is not metered cannot be billed. However, what water is for whom depended not only upon the practice and the structural level in the organization, but the specific hydraulics of the network. By when how much water with what pressure was available produced quite different realities. 37 realized that the non-revenue water brought together many of the water specialists’ concerns in more or less explicit ways. For instance, the water services regulator, in its 2012 published sector report, changed the name of one and only one of the nine performance indicators for the country’s water utility companies, from unaccountedfor water to non-revenue water. As a result, the sampling of referrals to people, organizations and publications became iteratively more intense. In comparison to the previous field trip, my access to the utility and the tapering of the non-revenue water intensified access to new and previously met expert stakeholders. My ability to create networks to powerful actors – the affiliated business school and the water utility company (for more, see below) – directed the sampling towards the more secretive networks of state bureaucracy and development finance (and, thereby, away from many others). The recursive insights of my fieldwork at the utility and among expert stakeholders enhanced my ability to see and understand better what was occurring in the worlds of my study participants. In a context where corruption is supposedly ‘everywhere’, as an experienced water specialist told me, it became quintessential to situationally assess and steer “the believability of the talk-based information harvested over the course of [my] study, an evaluation dependent upon the fieldworker’s interest, skill, and good fortune in uncovering lies, areas of ignorance, and the various taken-for-granted features of the studied organization” (Van Maanen, 1979, p. 548). This is not to say that I was hunting for “facts and lies”; establishing facts situationally helped me to get to the actors’ diverse concerns and their more or less conscious ignorance of other concerns (cf. Anand, 2011). For instance, the various enactments of the realities of a non-revenue water consultant contract between the utility, a state corporation, a foreign engineering consultancy, and a donor agency shaped my view on how the various data sources produced the incommensurable yet partially connected worlds that the infrastructure co-produced across the various sites and actors. Yet, while I was in the field, these detective efforts to establish facts also created inconsistencies that my participants could ignore or mobilize for political statements; this often made me feel insecure about the trustworthiness of my participants and the solidity of my data. For partly this reason, I published a case study, which I circulated among my participants to add a sense of validity to my field material. I will now further discuss this case study. 38 3.2.3 Politics of access Since the beginning of my fieldwork, I have realized that Nairobi’s particular international, national, and local water specialists produced problems of access without me being explicitly affiliated. If I wanted to work (i.e. observe, participate, and interview) with the city’s water organization and bureaucratic local and international bodies, I required access at their executive levels. A professor of geography at a local university told me that, as a Western foreigner, people would suspect me of working for and siding with one of the donor agencies that dominate the politics and flow of capital in the water sector. For instance, the Nairobi-based Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRAS) has been a common destination for foreign researchers in Kenya. However, the Agence Française de Développement, France’s bilateral development finance agency, was known to be Kenya’s largest bilateral donor in water infrastructure. On the other hand, the University of Nairobi’s geography department, which unfortunately was loosely connected to IFRAS, was the country’s most entangled research department in the water sector. Nonetheless, the geography department was very involved in the politics of the sector, which I wanted to avoid becoming directly implicated with for as long as possible. The department’s faculty members held not only senior positions in the water sector before joining academia, but still hold influential positions in the relatively small circles of legislative decision-makers (e.g. Khroda, 2008; Rampa, 2011). Thus, even though there have been obvious reasons to partner with the department, I wanted to be able to control and minimize my immediate effects in practice. I chose to become explicitly affiliated with a prestigious local business school16, which had an exceptional although elite reputation in the country. My affiliation with the business school, which had done little research in the water sector, instead of generating suspicion or enacting hidden agendas, created surprise and curiosity because of the business school’s economic identity (cf. Oakes, Townley, & Cooper, 1998). 16 There was quite some work involved in building a formal relationship with the business school. At start, I used my affiliation with a prestigious European business school, which had formal ties with the Kenyan school. However, my current university affiliation, an internationally unknown school in Switzerland, was not much convincing. Therefore, I helped my Swiss university to negotiate a special partnership contract with the Kenyan school. In the end, it needed my Swiss university’s vice president to visit Nairobi to sign a contract, which helped me gain the school’s leadership support my research project. 39 After my last episode in the field, I dissolved my ‘disinterested’ position, partly owing to my personal commitment to the business school and the utility, to publish a practitioner case study (Lehmann & Mudida, 2015). Fortunately, this study was not commissioned by any party, and my co-author, a professor at the local business school, and I remained independent in the writing process and published the study with the Case Centre, a case clearing house. The study turned out to provoke some rare reflexive insights from actors in the field. During my stays in the field, I became aware of the absence of people “who were able to distance themselves from the public positions of the organizations for whom they worked and to address the complexity of the situation as they experienced it, as well as the limitations of their own understanding and knowledge” (cf. Barry, 2013, p. 27). One of the actors in the field, and also a study participant, a UK-based engineer, was popular for his advocacy and consulting work of spreading the practice of water leakage and loss management from Europe to Africa, ingenuously told me: “If you want to hide something from Africans, you have to put it in writing.” Yet, the joint writing, commenting, and publication with the professor provoked much pragmatic feedback and considerable reflexive insights, at several levels. During the period of collecting comments on a draft version, we offered the incentive to participate in a local study in a context dominated by commissioned foreign studies. The comments revealed pragmatic corrections of minor structural and technical details about the institutions charged with the governance and management of Nairobi’s water infrastructure, the evolution of sector legislation, as well as its links with the implementation of Kenya’s new constitution. On the other hand, one intense written interaction led to an emotional response by an executive about the tensions between the asset manager and the water utility. Further, the circulation and teaching of the published case in the business school’s senior public management program harnessed broad agreement with the case’s detailed descriptions of actors and events. Eventually, a major development finance executive invited my co-author and me to organize an executive training program. According to the foreign professional, Kenya’s water professionals did not have the skills needed to finance and manage the (non-)revenue potential of the country’s water utilities. Nonetheless, before I would further dissolve my disinterested position, I paused and did not follow this invitation. I did not want to become too entangled in practice through the economic potential of non-revenue water. 40 The collection of my data (what I call my field archive) bears witness that field data are not innocently and naturally occurring data, but that are manufactured (Czarniawska, 2014, pp. 26-27; Latour, 2005). The generation of my field material had its own politics and economy, in which I became entangled, witnessed by being – seductively – offered indirect financial and symbolic returns to lecture executives. However, according to Michel Callon (2002), in a situation in which there is no clear-cut debate any more, choosing which side to work with is not a moral or political choice. Instead, it is an ethical choice about the co-production procedures between economic actors and social scientists. According to Callon, sociology and anthropology can bring a “recognition of the experimental character of [a social field] and the need to debate the consequences of experimentation. It is a collective learning process” (Barry & Slater, 2002, p. 299). The emerging analytical protocols remained open to this collective and experimental approach to learning and discovery. Thus, eventually, the case study served three emerging causes. It allowed me to trigger, quite experimentally, some reflexivity in a highly political field, intensified my access to the field, and contributed to the study’s validity. Even though “veracity was not the point”, it helped me to sense that my assembled stories from the field were right (Mol, 2002, p. 151). 3.3 Data analysis and writing accounts My analytical procedure is best described as a transition from incremental discovery to analytic abduction (Czarniawska, 2014; Peirce, 1955[1940]). I developed a creative and analytical strategy of adaptive and collective discovery in which I reassembled the data (the field archive) into a detailed and recursive narrative (Latour, 2005; Verran, 2001). In the logic of incremental discovery, the detailed description of events offered conclusions that I tested during the next observation. These explanations moved from the field archive to the analytical writing desk and back, recursively, refining the emerging theory (Czarniawska, 2014, p. 24; Strathern, 2004). Throughout the analysis, I adapted my narrative methods to better participate in the postcolonial “contexts-inthe-making” (cf. Kristin Asdal & Moser, 2012; Kenney, 2015, p. 750). My narrative methods comprised the writing and emplotment of a thick description (Geertz, 1973). To me, this thick description has emerged through a narrative emplotment of the vast materials produced through ethnographic fieldwork 41 (Czarniawska, 2014). It was also a method to analytically experience the field material via various writing techniques from non-creative to creative non-fiction (Latour, 2005). The thick description served as the bedrock for the analytical assembling of vignettes. This assembling of vignettes followed the sensibilities of actor-network-theory, understood as “a set of empirical interferences in the world, a worldly practice that cherishes the slow processes of knowing rather than immediately seeking results or closure” (Law & Singleton, 2013, p. 485). To me, vignettes were (re-)combinatorial assemblages of worlds-in-the-making (Boje, 2001; e.g. Gehman, Trevino, & Garud, 2013). To address my large body of field material, I used an exploratory writing procedure to understand how the various human and non-human actors came together in Nairobi’s emerging water infrastructure. In my creative and analytical writing accounts, I deployed actor-network-theory’s relational and flat ontology to cope with the relational and symmetrical organizing of human and non-human actors (Latour, 2005). In the first writing procedure, I produced a thick description of my case by following the water specialists’ accounts and the infrastructural work around the trajectory of water through Nairobi’s infrastructure from dam sites and water treatment to district and household distribution. In a second step, I re-structured the material according to three empirical bundles of practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. In this praxiographic approach (Czarniawska, 2014; Kenney, 2015; Mol, 2002), I arranged my material in the logic of incremental discovery according to how the technoscientific practices enacted the emergent assembling of the city water’s flow trajectory through the infrastructure apparatus from dam to household. The three emerging praxiographic studies upheld a symmetrical stance between the technoscientific intervention and the infrastructural assemblage. In a third (final) step, I re-arranged my material in an abductive process to explain how these praxiographic studies performed the ontological dynamic of the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages. The emerging synchronic emplotment of the three praxiographies was iteratively developed between the empirically grounded practice studies and my analytical research questions. 42 3.3.1 Thick description(s) While in the field, I stored, thematically coded, and dispatched the field material in the software NVivo. In keeping with the actor-network-theory methodology, once the mess of the field archive spilled over from NVivo onto my desk, I produced a detailed textual account (Latour, 2005, p. 123). Through the writing, I explored connections between the field material without taking a short-cut ride on any pre-given theoretical construct. At some point, I realized that the description of thick detail was not sufficient to overcome the problems of time and place in contemporary organizing (Law, 1993). According to Bruno Latour, thick descriptions demand to experiment with various styles of writing (Latour, 2005, p. 136). To textually connect, narrate the spatially and temporally dispersed movements, actions, expressions, situations, objects, and people, I drew on a combination of textual styles of non-creative feature writing (cf. Newman, 2015) and creative screenwriting17. My cinematic description of situations and sites ended when talk became so intense that its narrative visualization seemed too complex to envision the expressions and movement of situated action. As a journalist would, my non-creative feature writing started when people seemed to speak and interact with each other even though they were at different places in different times. These writing techniques helped me to depict specific events that occurred within the investigation of my case study by using the techniques of ‘enhanced’ and ‘semifictionalized’ ethnographic writing (Humphreys & Watson, 2009). My ethnographic writing style combined descriptive scene-setting, involving myself as a character, and included emotional responses by subjects; it drew attention to the perspectives and stories of subjects (and objects). I often restructured events occurring within one or more ethnographic situations into single narratives. The truth claim inherent in these accounts does not necessarily depict what more or less happened, but how a novelist or a screenwriter might have reported it in order to imagine an enhanced understanding of practice (Humphreys & Watson, 2009, p. 43). The benefits of this approach were both pragmatic and analytical. First, these writing styles made me sensitive to the problems of the centering of space and the chronology 17 The ‘enhanced reality’ style of BBC’s television series „Peaky Blinders“ informed my deployed mode of screenwriting, see also http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/peaky-blinders. 43 of time in economic organization (Czarniawska, 2004). I assembled all types of data sources, particularly my ethnographic pictures, to create descriptive textual accounts in order to overcome the limits of space and time of observable activities. Activities of economic organizing appear as spatially centered, but they are often not. “Although calculation centers still do exist, the activity of calculation has been dispersed in economic organization” (Czarniawska, 2004, p. 778). On the other hand, chronological time is an important foundation for organizing activities, but “nothing ever happens right where and when the researcher is observing. All important events happen at some other time, in some other place” (Czarniawska, 2004, p. 776; Law, 1993). Second, I explicitly deployed fictitious and aesthetic accounts to not only preserve the subjects’ anonymity, but to offer a different mode of attention to technoscientific worldmaking via descriptive story-crafting. My descriptive accounts deploy Helen Verran’s meaning-making tool of clunky minimalism to tell technoscientific stories differently (Kenney, 2015; Verran, 2001). As an aesthetic form, clunky minimalism is accountable to how the research (and my wording) participates in shaping and struggling with the collective and ambiguous qualities of re-assembling Nairobi’s water infrastructure. This aesthetic linguistic form of analysis resists the naturalization of an abstract, singular, and absolute description of this postcolonial STS project – a foreigner’s representation of Nairobi’s water infrastructure. In other words, I am aesthetically committed to foregrounding the ontological leakiness, or seamfulness, of the work of coordination and stabilization across the incommensurable worlds involved to making water flow. Version 1 of the thick description was 80 pages long. I deployed a highly descriptive emplotment in which my textual accounts followed the water’s pathways and trajectory through the infrastructure following Appadurai’s idea in his book The Social Life of Things (Appadurai, 1988). I assembled my field material, comprising Nairobi’s landscape of international and local water specialists, along Nairobi’s water production and urban distribution networks. Because my initial focus was on following the orchestra of expert stakeholders in relation to the infrastructural apparatus from production to consumption, I emplotted the thick description without foregrounding any technoscientific intervention. In particular, I separated my field material from the practice of water leakage and loss management, which emerged as a central empirical and analytical device only over the course of my case study. In this first version of my 44 thick description, I retrospectively mitigated the emergent bias towards this technoscientific practice. While in the field, I always remained open by not exclusively centering on these practices, but keeping eyes and interview questions either open or articulating my particular concerns as late as possible in fieldwork. This strategy had two consequences. First, it contributed to the empirical relevance of this particular technoscientific intervention. It could assure me that there wasn’t any other intervention occurring or emerging at the same time. Second, during this analytical writing process it allowed me to capture the material assembling of the emerging infrastructural systems, which is often unnoticed in practice (cf. Jensen, 2016). In version 2 of the thick description, I imported the technoscientific intervention and practices into the descriptions. Version 2 of the thick description comprised 160 pages of written text. I dispatched the first version and added material from the field archive that chronicled the evolution and performance of three practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating losses. The emerging plot connected the coordination of the non-revenue water; the labor involved of producing, distributing, and selling water throughout Nairobi; and the framing activities of water specialists and managers. 3.3.2 Performative process analysis The thick description’s emerging synchronic emplotment served as the bedrock to provide three symmetric and comparable praxiographic studies to explore depth and variation of the ontological dynamic of the organization of the infrastructural assemblage. In an iterative process, I began to emplot the three praxiographies’ ontological dynamic in a process understanding of my three analytical questions relating to (see chapter Theory): the material assembling of emergent systems, technoscientific coordination, and the inventiveness of technoscientifically infused worlds-in-the-making (cf. Czarniawska, 2014, p. 26; Martin & Turner, 1986). Table 7 presents an overview of my synchronic endeavor, documenting how I interpreted the three praxiographic studies in the results and discussion chapters according to three conceptual frames that grounded the writing of the various performative textual accounts. 45 Thick descriptions Process of analysis 1a. Imagine the ontological multiplicity through which infrastructural worlds are made Results Ficto-postcolonial introduction Show that an infrastructure is made in heterogeneous worlds and that these worlds are co-produced by the participants’ capacities and the analyst’s performance (Kenney, 2015; Stewart, 2014; Verran, 2002) Praxiographic study 1: Measuring Imagining the worlds of specialists of molding the metrological standards to govern infrastructure (Barry, 2006) Governance of Nairobi’s water hydraulics Praxiographic study 2: Tracking Imagining the worlds of managers of track-and-tracing the invisible performance of infrastructure (Thrift, 2004) Management of Nairobi’s water meters Praxiographic study 3: Demarcating Imagining the worlds of operators who bridge the seamful spaces of infrastructure (Vertesi, 2014) Operation of Nairobi’s water pipes 2. Qualify types of multiplicity of an emergent system Historical and topographical descriptions Show that the variability of multiplicity through which infrastructure become emergent systems is historically and topographically distributed (Mitchell, 2002, 2011) Praxiographic study 1: Measuring Describing Nairobi’s hydraulic system by exploring its historical and topographical qualities as a sociohydraulic assemblage (Meehan, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2015) “Fluid qualities of Nairobi’s hydraulic system” Praxiographic study 2: Tracking Describing Nairobi’s metering system by exploring its historical and topographical qualities as a calculative assemblage (Barry, 2002; Michel Callon & Muniesa, 2005) “Invisible qualities of Nairobi’s metering system” Praxiographic study 3: Demarcating Describing Nairobi’s piping system by exploring its historical and topographical qualities as a technospatial system (Barry, 2013; Gandy, 2014) “Messy qualities of Nairobi’s piping system” 3. Track the technoscientific coordination of stabilizing infrastructural multiplicity Technoscientitific practice vignettes Show that technoscientific practices coordinate the stabilization of an emergent system (Michel Callon, 2004; Mol, 2002) 46 Praxiographic study 1: Measuring Tracing the pragmatic ways of pacifying the fluid qualities of water flow (Caliskan & Callon, 2009, 2010) Measuring leakage: pacifying water hydraulics Praxiographic study 2: Tracking Tracing the pragmatic ways of making visible the invisible qualities of water flow (Thrift, 2004) Tracking leakage: making water meters visible Praxiographic study 3: Demarcating Tracing the pragmatic ways of formalizing the messy qualities of water flow (Law & Singleton, 2005) Demarcating leakage: formalizing water pipes 1b. Re-imagine the shared ontologies of infrastructural worlds Ficto-postcolonial coda Show that ontological transformations occur experimentally in the ways they partially and temporarily connect multiple worlds and how the possibilities of these connections are constituted by the reinventive capacities of the technosciences’ and the analyst’s performance (Kenney, 2015; Stewart, 2014; Verran, 2002) Praxiographic study 1: Measuring Re-imagining the shared ontological commitments of numbers that partially connect the worlds of molding specialists and implementing engineers (Anand, 2015; Verran, 2010, 2012, 2013) Re-imagined governance of Nairobi’s water hydraulics Praxiographic study 2: Tracking Re-imagining the shared ontological commitments of visibility that partially connect the worlds of tracking managers and tracked objects and subjects (Verran, 1998, 2002; von Schnitzler, 2008, 2013) Re-imagined management of Nairobi’s water meters Praxiographic study 3: Demarcating Re-imagining the shared ontological commitments of formal bureaucracy that partially connect the worlds of operators and users (Anand, 2011; Verran, 1998, 2002) Re-imagined operation of Nairobi’s water pipes Table 7: Praxiographic Framework of Performative Process Analysis. 47 3.4 Summary In the methodology chapter, I presented an overview of my postcolonial STS approach and empirical endeavor, documenting how my empirical findings are based on various procedures of fieldwork, the manufacturing of a large and lively field archive, and an iterative production of a thick description, and how I interpreted them in my efforts to conceptualize ontological transformations grounded in the writing of various technoscientific vignettes and ficto-postcolonial stories. Each praxiographic study starts and ends with a ficto-postcolonial account (Kenney, 2015; Stewart, 2014) (like the one in the Introduction) to disentangle the infrastructural multiplicity that the technoscientific practice bundles seek to coordinate and stabilize. In the following chapter, I will present my next narrative step as an account of the three praxiographies that is well connected to my empirical material of the technoscientific enactment of Nairobi’s infrastructure worlds and is accountable to the postcolonial sensitivity of this material. I assemble the three analytical steps as a synchronic emplotment into an overall process narrative – emphasizing the dynamic iterability between multiplicity, coordination, and stabilization, and opening up through inventive imagining – how three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management potentialize Nairobi’s water infrastructure assembling. I perform one praxiographic study for each of the three identified practices – measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow – to show how the technosciences do not only stabilize but also potentialize the infrastructure’s design configuration, the de facto behavior of materials and people, and the embodied inventive capacities of infrastructural worlds. As a way to generalize the ontological dynamic of the organizing of infrastructure described in each of the three performative thick descriptions, I will further explore the solidity of my findings in the discussion chapter by comparing the praxiographic findings across the synchronic emplotment. 48 4 Empirical Results Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year case study that includes eight months of on-site fieldwork in Nairobi, I will describe the engagements of Nairobi’s water utility in three water loss management practices: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in theorizing technoscientific worlds and practical ontologies, I deploy a creative non-fictional writing process to empirically and politically account for how these technoscientific practices pattern the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure. I track this technoscientific enactment of the ontological transformations of Nairobi’s water infrastructure through a corpus of ethnographically collected and imaginatively re-assembled material. This chapter is structured as follows. First, in praxiography 1, I show how the interweaving ways of measuring water flow pacify the fluid qualities of the hydraulic water system, and with which effects on the reality production of human participants and the inventive capacities of shared ontic imagination. Second, in praxiography 2, I show how the interweaving ways of tracking water flow render the invisible qualities of the metering system visible, and with which ontological effects on the participants and shared imagination. Third, in praxiography 3, I show how the interweaving ways of demarcating water flow formalize the messy qualities of the piping system, and with which effects on the participants and imagination. In the concluding section, I wrap up my results to prepare the discussion of the three synchronically emplotted praxiographies and to further explore the dynamic ontological iterability between multiplicity, stabilization, and inventiveness of organizational assemblages. 4.1 Governing fluidity: enacting Nairobi’s hydraulic system In praxiography 1, I conceptualize the recursive patterning between fluidity and pacification through the work of measuring physical (real) and economic (apparent) water losses that seeks to govern the fluid qualities of Nairobi’s hydraulic water system. In my descriptions, I show how the practice of flow measurement (leakage flux) is organized by and organizes the pacification of the fluid quality of infrastructure. In this 49 empirical case, the organizing manipulates the distinction between real and economic flow. Instead of integrating these flows, the flow-measuring practice problematizes the social flow (economic losses) that stabilize the particular social qualities of the infrastructure assembling. The pacification of hydraulic fluidity into distinct social and physical flow produces the problem I address in the following praxiography: tracking the invisibilities of the distributed operations of domestic flow metering. The first praxiographic analysis consists of three sections. In section 1, I present an account of the governing of the fluid qualities of Nairobi’s hydraulic water network. I do this in two parts. I open praxiography 1 with a ficto-postcolonial story that draws attention to the efforts of a French finance officer in engaging with the city’s water engineers about the water accounting practices so as to retain control of governing the city’s water hydraulics. I then provide a technoscientific account of the history and technical details of the fluid state of Nairobi’s hydraulic system so as to understand the desire to upgrade Nairobi’s water infrastructure. In section 2, I track the interwoven practices of measuring the flow of a French engineering consultancy and the city’s water engineers in the attempt to pacify the hydraulic system’s fluidity. Third, I close praxiographic study 1 with a ficto-postcolonial story that draws attention to how the water accounting practices shape the reality of a city water engineer in his efforts to engage with the abovementioned French finance officer as well as the analyst. 50 4.1.1 Fluid hydraulics Figure 5: Workshop Presentation Slide. Corporate Finances for Kenya’s Utility Managers. (Presentation by the Agence Française de Développement at Kenya’s Annual Water Conference 2015.) 4.1.1.1 Imagine the governance of Nairobi’s water hydraulics Imagine you have just presented this slide (see Figure 5) at Kenya’s Annual Water Conference. Your presentation, for Kenya’s water engineering executives, was full of comparative performance indicators, chart bars, and financial figures. But you also used poignant cartoons to figuratively express the water wastages behind the financial figures to make your arguments more appealing to your colleagues from Africa. Although your English is not perfectly cosmopolitan, your accent is technically fluent, with a charming 51 French note. You are a Nairobi-based senior executive with the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). You are back in your European-furnished office in an estate in the European part of Nairobi that is famous for its expatriate appeal. From your top-level office, you glance into the treetops of the sacred African fig trees that punctuate the neatly cut lawns. The corporate finance book and one of your published articles about utility financing and policies in Africa are on the table you used to prepare your slides. While you write an email with the presentation file to selected workshop participants, the managing director of Nairobi’s water utility, and the CEO of Kenya’s water services regulator, you are expecting a visit from two researchers from a premier local business school. While you’re skeptical, because you are unaware of the business school’s research into the water sector, you are interested to hear their questions, as newcomers to the water sector. It seems that they have entered into a research agreement with Nairobi’s water utility. They may have interesting insights into the problem you and your colleagues from the World Bank and the German development agency are trying to address. 52 Figure 6: Public Stakeholder Meeting of City Engineers Presenting Nairobi’s Water Supply Strategy 2035 in 2012. (Panelists included World Bank consultant, AFD director and Kenya’s prime minister.) (Photo by the author.) When you arrived from West Africa to Kenya two years ago, your boss, AFD’s director for Kenya, briefed you that the French government, together with the World Bank and the German government, plan to finance the expansion of the city’s water supply until 2035 (EgisBeceomInternational, 2012). However, the multimillion dollar investments would be a drain on the government budget if the city cannot increase the revenues from the sale of this water. The problem is, as your director said, “The distribution network is currently in bad shape. Investment into distribution pipes and meters have not been as high as in treatment plants and dams, but it should not be forgotten, because it is not sustainable to source, treat, and transport the water to Nairobi if the infrastructure leaks much of this precious commodity.” Two years ago, he said exactly the same thing to the city’s water engineers and politicians, including Kenya’s prime minister. 53 Fortunately, your colleagues from the German development agency (GIZ) have supported the commercialization process in the sector since 2002. They have helped set up a now well-functioning service regulator (Rampa, 2011). The regulator obliged the municipal authorities to form water utility companies and introduced a range of competitive performance indicators. But Nairobi’s water utility is by far Kenya’s biggest water utility tanker, and it has resisted the reform process. As an African utility finance expert, it was easy for you to identify where the money should come from that would enable Kenya’s government to finance your government’s grants. When you transferred to Nairobi, you paid a local consultant to prove that even Nairobi’s poor would prefer to pay higher water tariffs if they could receive a reliable connection to the water utility instead of the private services of water tankers, boreholes, and others that have mushroomed across the city (Hailu, Rendtorff-Smith, & Tsukada, 2011). If the regulator and the county governor would approve an increase in Nairobi’s historically low water tariff, this would boost the water utility’s revenues. The utility could reinvest these revenues to finance repairs to and expansion of the city’s water infrastructure. However, the chicken-and-egg problem is that the people of Nairobi don’t want to pay towards the city’s badly managed water utility. From the principles of corporate finance, you know that, of the regulator’s range of performance indicators, the indicator non-revenue water is the best for changing Nairobi’s water utility management. You have taken over leadership of the troika of donors in the water sector to lobby for this indicator. Today, in almost all their reports, the ministry of water and the regulator mention the calculated financial value of Kenya’s water utilities’ percentage of water losses. The pressure from the newly elected county governor of Nairobi, a former businessman who has acknowledged the economic value of this indicator, helped you to persuade Nairobi’s water utility managing director to set up a Non-revenue Water Unit with the help of a French engineering consultancy. Your government financed the deal between the government’s water asset manager of the hydrological area of Nairobi and Nairobi’s water utility. Unfortunately, since you were new to the city then, you underestimated the relationship between the water asset manager and the water utility. Even though the team of French engineering consultants has been keen to take over a performance-based contract to manage the water utility’s non-revenue water, they left the utility 14 months 54 into the two-year contract. The consultants argued that the state of the infrastructure was incorrectly outlined in the contract. Only afterwards did you realize that the water asset manager did not consult the water utility when developing the contract for the French engineering consultancy. At today’s conference, the utility’s engineers told you that they are capable of using the red card you showed them in your presentation on their own. Instead of channeling the money through the government-backed asset manager, the utility’s engineers plan to apply for direct financing from the donors. Now your problem is that the utility’s engineers are not providing the documents you have asked them to submit. You realize that the utility’s business plan is mostly a copy from a master plan study by the water asset manager, which even assumes that the utility and not the asset manager would finance the building of dams and treatment plants instead of the city’s pipes and metering.18 You decide to support the arriving business school researchers to help train the engineers in their water accounting to better calculate their potential revenues and investments in the things they basically lack, such as cars and offices, and not dams or treatment plants. Proper documentation would make it more likely for the donors to finance the utility’s capacity to maintain the planned upgrade and constant expansion of Nairobi’s water infrastructure. 4.1.1.2 Fluid state of hydraulics We need some historical and technical details to understand the desire to upgrade Nairobi’s water infrastructure. Concerning the upgrade of the water bulk supply (expansion of dams, treatment plants, and transmission pipes to Nairobi), we might say that the improvement of the city’s hydraulic water system was long overdue, not only 18 Water asset managers (so called water services boards) and water utilities (so called water service providers or water and sewerage companies) are corporate entities with complex institutional relationships that are formalized in the sector legislation. Kenya’s eight water boards were formed around river basins and water catchment areas. Nairobi is located in the Athi River Basin, which lends its name to the water board in charge for Nairobi’s water utility, the Athi Water Services Board. As a state corporation the water boards own all water assets to source and supply water. The water service providers are private companies with the majority of shares hold by local municipalities. A principal-agent contract between the water boards and the water service provider delegated the investment and development of water assets to the water boards and the maintenance and operation to the water service providers. For a more detailed analysis of the complex relationship between Nairobi’s water asset manager, Athi Water Services Board, and the city’s water service provider, the Nairobi City Water & Sewerage Company (see also Lehmann & Mudida, 2015; Rampa, 2011). 55 since 2014. The hydraulic system has not been upgraded since Kenya’s independence in 1963 (Nilsson, 2011)! The system was installed to serve the colonial division of the city into a European part and an African part. After Kenya’s independence, this racial distinction translated into income discrimination. Mostly the high-income groups inhabited the European parts of the city, while the African parts in the east of Nairobi grew massively in population, with rural migrants flocking to the city. The British colonial administration measured the city’s water supply per capita by separating the European and the African populations. This measurement of water supply per income group has been taken into the independence period; the difference has even increased (Ledant, Nilsson, Calas, & Fernandez, 2011). In combination, the calculation of water supply per income group and the separation of income groups into spatially separate areas of the city has privileged the supply coverage of specific estates in the city. These supply standards could no longer be kept apart with the increase of population in the former African parts and the slum settlements between the former European settlements. Even if there is still discrimination inscribed in the metrological calculations of the utility’s rationing program, the rise of the pro-poor water policies made the infrastructural system go awry. Since the 1980s, the development policies helped finance the last-mile expansion of service connections from the main pipes (transmission mains) in order to increase the access to water for the low income areas. If there was not any public funding available, the industries and the people often constructed its own distribution and service connections to the main pipes. In combination with the city’s growing volumetric demand for water, the water infrastructure’s hydraulic system, that is key to control the fluid’s flow, worsened. 56 Figure 7: City Reservoir and Distribution Management. (Text messaging about water flow and levels between reservoir, headquarters, and regions.) (Photo by the author.) In the years since 2010, the city’s water engineers began to admit that they had lost control over where which volume of water flows in the city. Nairobi’s hydraulic system has subtly become what the engineering science refers to as an intermittent water system19 – a system that is not fully pressurized with water 24 hours per day. One 19 The intermittent water system of the city of Mumbai in India provides a well-documented comparative case to Nairobi’s water system (see also Anand, 2011; Björkman, 2015). 57 significant effect of such a system is to ration the water at specific times for specific segments of the system. As water is a Newtonian fluid, subjecting it to pressure produces a proportional flow. Thus, the fundamental knowledge to govern such a system is the understanding and management of pressure. The pressure on water depends on the topology of where the water comes from and how the fluid flows through the city. Through the establishment of pressure zones, flow valves separate the pipes from each other to regulate the pressure in one zone and how much water can flow by when between the zones. Once new pipe segments cross between pressure zones, these zones lose their ability to stop the flow between zones to increase the pressure in the zone; thus, one also loses control over how much water flows between the zones if these new pipes are not metered, or as in the case of Nairobi, not even documented (more about the piping in praxiography 3). As a result, one increasingly loses control of the water flow in the system. The city engineer’s response to this emergent state was a manual system of flow valves to block pipes and build pressure for other areas. Once these valves are re-opened, the incoming water flushes the sand and dirt segments of the emptied pipes down the line. Thus, the varying pressures and the sediment damage meters and flush the sludge towards the taps of end users, such as households. Another problematic feature of empty pipes is that they cannot build pressure against fluids entering the pipes from the outside. As a result, a mix of storm water and sewage water slips into the pipes and mixes with the treated water This phenomenon of intermittent systems raised the profile of the practice of water leakage and loss reduction to regain control of the pressures of the hydraulic systems. For instance, the physics of electromagnetism describes this phenomenon as leakage flux – the magnetic flux that does not follow the particular intended path in a magnetic circuit. In electronics, this is a gradual loss of energy. For water, besides the hazardous health effects, the negative trust effects, and the loss of control over water quality, water engineering treats this phenomenon of the lost rate of water flow as water leakage. Since the 2000s, the international industry of water loss engineering grew immensely in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Some spearheading engineers who started water leakage work in the 1970s in the UK produced numerous reports financed by bilateral and multilateral donors to make the case for so-called non-revenue water in the cities 58 of the global South. This culminated in regaining control of the water infrastructure through the practice of managing physical and non-physical leakage. The dozens of more or less technical reports translated the engineering protocols for their less advanced water engineering colleagues in developing countries and the orchestra of specialists interested in urban water supply, such as donor agencies and nongovernmental organizations (Farley, Wyeth, Ghazali, & Singh, 2008). At the heart of this practice was the measuring, tracking, and demarcating of water flow and leakage of the infrastructure. 4.1.2 Measuring leaks: pacifying water hydraulics Nairobi’s water utility’s engagement with the practice of water leakage and loss management presents a particularly unique case of the interwoven ways of measuring water flow to pacify the fluidity of water hydraulics. The contracted French engineering consultancy established the standardized protocols of measuring the city’s water flow in the city and at a demarcated pilot district level. When the French consultancy left Nairobi’s utility, the newly set up Non-revenue Water Unit took over the consultants’ protocols to craft their own measurements of water flow. 59 Figure 8: Standardized Water Accounting Tool Used by Nairobi Water Utility. (Screenshot by the author.) The leakage industry was born in the UK and spread across the developing world in the name of revenue performance rather than leakage. The fact that aging water infrastructures leak profusely in cities all over the globe is not a new phenomenon (Anand, 2015; Bornstein, 2014). One of the industry’s key figures, an independent British water loss specialist, told me that he was becoming ever-busier at the end of his career, which started in the 1970s in the UK. While in the UK, his work is still called leakage management and not non-revenue water, the latter term has become popular in the developing world. Even after 40 years, leakage control is a key issue in the UK, he told me. “We are still looking at, can we get to zero leakage? That’s another forty years of work,” he said. I caught him on the phone in the UK while ending a call to Israel and preparing for an African utilities’ non-revenue water workshop in Dakar. Today, the water loss management industry is growing, with new and old players, similar to the French engineering consultancy in Nairobi offering services to African utilities. 60 The non-revenue water accounting protocols help the Nairobi utility to measure whether the physical (real) or non-physical (apparent) losses are critical to regaining control of the lost water flows. In Nairobi, I first came across the British engineer’s name in a thank you note in the non-revenue water accounting tool for conducting a water audit. His name was mentioned in the free Excel template the utility’s Nonrevenue Water Unit used for its water accounting. The WB-Easy Calculator (see Figure 8) was designed20 to help utilities to apply the International Water Association methodology, according to the software’s copyright notes. The Excel model is a free basic version among various commercial products that are all based on the same algorithmic principles. It takes the volume of water that is put into the network, the volume that is taken by customers, and the rest is the non-revenue water. It has become a standard way to find out if a utility’s priority is physical leakage of pipes or economic leakage at the customer metering level. In the case of Nairobi, the standardized water accounting protocols circulated into the computers of my participants’ study with the help of the French engineering consultancy. In Nairobi, the water accounting stabilizes the amount of the city’s non-revenue water percentage. Since 2008, even if the regulator has published Nairobi’s leakage figures at around 40%, the city’s water specialists had assumed that these figures were much higher than what the utility reported to the regulator. An experienced Kenya-based German engineer told me in 2012 that this figure might be about 50% or even 60%. In contrast to this vague approximation, the newly produced figure of 42% in 2013 by the French engineers was no surprise to the utility’s non-revenue water engineer. A similar figure had circulated within the utility since the first externally contracted water audit in 2010 (ASPAUtilities, 2010). Instead of fragility, the water accounting produced fairly stabilizing results that the staff took for granted as appropriate approximations. The translation of the non-revenue water percentage into a financial figure made this a stubborn fact for the utility’s accountants. The newly introduced distinction between physical and commercial losses made all actors aware of the economic possibilities of 20 The inventor of this Excel model, a former solo engineering consultant, has become the Asia head of Myia, a water loss interims management company backed by a multi-billion Israeli investment company. Myia’s work has received high praise in a New York Times op-ed about the water loss management industry’s growth (Bornstein, 2014). 61 reducing the latter. The primary reason for forming the Non-revenue Water Unit, an accountant told me, was that if you just talk about 42%, it may not trigger management, but if you convert the figure into money terms, it certainly does. What the utility’s managers previously assumed to be purely guesswork on the part of the engineers became a stubborn fact for the accountants. Water loss became a symbol of the performance of the utility’s accountants. But how has this monetary figure of water loss come to pass? The divergence of measuring physical and economic losses was a result of the non-revenue water protocols’ identification and use of pilot data to calculate the utility figure. The Nonrevenue Water Unit’s accountant showed me how he produced the measurements by weaving together the billing statistics with the water accounting tool. To generate the data requirements of the WB-Easy Calculator, the water loss calculation used a set of data from the first pilot project in a spatially demarcated and metered area of the city (district metered area). The Non-revenue Water Unit could not yet calculate any other particular regional water flow because there was only one production figure of water for the entire city. The French consultants’ protocols for the pilot identified a region with some presumably low physical losses (seepage and leakage) level, which made it easier to measure the flow, and a high “unauthorized consumption” (non-physical economic losses) water level. The high levels of unmetered connections and underregistering meters surprised the consultants and the utility’s managers. Thus, the results for the city’s water accounting demonstrated a large proportion of illegal connections and the critical state of the metering (meters under-registered or users were not metered at all). The non-revenue water data of this pilot area partially backed up the utility’s singular focus on an economic approach to water leakage. The emphasis on economic losses did not only result from the pilot data. The priority over physical leakage was also inscribed into the non-revenue water accounting protocols by valuing physical losses and economic losses differently. The water accounting protocols evaluated economic losses at the utility’s average water tariff. On the other hand, the tool evaluated physical losses at the utility’s water production costs. The tariff supposedly included all expenses, from production to distribution, in order to cover the utility’s operational costs. However, the production costs were only based on the treatment plant operating expenses. The assumption of the water accounting 62 protocol was that physical losses are economically less important than the economic losses. The economic losses became financially more significant than the physical losses after the shift from volumetric water losses to the financial figures of the losses (see Figure 9). Figure 9: Pilot District Metered Area (DMA) Non-revenue Water Calculations. (Final presentation of Seureca engineering consultants.) (Slide by Seureca/Veolia.) These measurements made the utility’s accountants respond. The overall utility figure of non-revenue water called the accountants to respond, and made the engineers shift the responsibility to the accountants. The accountants’ customer metering became more important than the engineers’ flow metering. The water accounting took pressure off the engineers’ trailing the water flows through the pipes from the North into and through the topography of the city. Instead, the accountants were taken to task to measure the customer-level water flow. Particularly, the activity of the customer meters on the ground became a key concern for the directorate. Without inner-city and regional transmission volumes from the engineers, the water accounting demanded that the accountants improve the flow data of the customer meters. 63 To sum up the assembling of the governance of Nairobi’s fluid hydraulics, I argue that the water accounting practice did not enable the city utility’s engineers to transform the hydraulic system into metrological facts with fixed qualities. On the contrary, the practice enabled the utility’s accountants to undertake further calculations that helped to strengthen their position and to render the controversies about the hydraulic system in economic terms. 4.1.3 Pacified hydraulics produce new realities 4.1.3.1 Re-imagine the governance of Nairobi’s water hydraulics You’ve just landed in Nairobi after a trip to Dakar, Senegal. You’re exhausted from the long flight (via Paris). You’re annoyed that meeting your African colleagues from the Non-revenue Task Force exhausts you more than flying to Europe or even the increasing business trips to China. The last mile to the utility’s headquarters takes half an hour. On the dusty road, you pass storehouses and manufacturing sites. The road is in poor condition. Along a section of the road, the string of lorries and cars pass to avoid a monstrous water cesspool on the road. You enter the industrial compound of the utility’s headquarters by passing the few covered parking lots that protect the bosses’ sizeable Japanese SUVs. You don’t see the commercial and the technical director’s cars, only the managing director’s car. As a Non-revenue Water Unit senior water engineer, you report to the managing director, and not to the technical director, who previously supervised the unit. You transferred from one of the utility’s key engineering positions in transmission management to head this new unit. In the background, some machinery pounds away, like a hammer. While the pebbles crunch beneath your feet on your way to the shabby barracks that is your office, you think how nice it would be to have your own covered parking lot and an office in the directors’ building. In the office, you open your notebook and check your company iPhone and your private Android phone. You have a funny text message from the UK engineer you met in Dakar: “If you want to hide something from an African, put it on paper.” You laugh at the muzungu’s joke. On the sideboard beside your desk, a fine layer of dust covers a large pile of reports. The sender of the text message produced one of the reports in the pile, the utility’s first water audit in 2010. There are two more such audits in the pile. You think aloud: “There’s no need for more reports and studies and 64 all that. We should go out and apply all these components of the water audit.” The last audit was done by a French engineering consultancy. At that very moment, you receive an email from the French Development Agency. Irony suddenly turns into stress. Bad news. The French don’t accept the funding proposal of your non-revenue water strategy. The email states that you should submit two pages, including financial packages, with a clear return on investment based on the recovery of water losses. With your team’s help, you prepared 15 pages. You put a great deal of effort into it, using text, figures, and tables from all these international reports, as well as the French consultants’ Excel sheets. But, how does one reduce the complexity of your unit’s assignment to two pages? From your previous position as a transmission engineer, you know that the water loss strategy is the key to improving the distribution network. Back then, when you oversaw the hydraulic network, you could see that the utility needed to abandon the pressure zones. At that time, in the 2000s, you needed to ensure that the water flow was rationed properly, without too many interventions from the regional directors, who always exerted pressure so as to open the valves longer for the flow into their regions. Today, you are charged to measure the flow in demarcated areas to re-establish some of the pressure and to improve the network’s performance. You assumed that, with the managing director’s backing, this job would be a ticket to get one step up the company ladder. But you have to be able to prove a reduction in non-revenue water to below 20% in only five years. However, while the company increasingly treasures the collection of tariffs from customers, the utility’s internal budgets are being killed by the people who control the accounting. Now, this email from the French development finance officer sits on top of your budget problem. You’re in a temper. You’re stressed out. If you want to get any funding from the donors, you need to come up with a discrete basis to calculate the proper budget requirements for reducing the water losses. After the consultants’ pilot study, your unit’s work to meter its first pilot district (Pipeline Estate/Plot 10) needs to show progress. Your boss has already mentioned that, instead of outsourcing the utility’s entire non-revenue water activities to a private engineering firm, Plot 10 could provide a proof of concept for a private-public partnership model. This would make the county governor and the donors happy, and would take further pressure off the utility. Stressed, you decide to call your unit team together to pick up the pace of the – slow – progress in Plot 10. 65 After the brief meeting with your team, you think of the Swiss researcher from the local business school who joined your team some days ago. You take him into your office. The meeting turns out to be much longer than you expected. When you realize that he is a Swiss muzungu who is not affiliated with a donor agency you let him ask more questions. You tell him that the French and Germans should know that your team is not just sitting around and that you do things for them. You ask him to comment on the non-revenue water strategy paper, which the French asked you to re-submit. Maybe he can help you to shop for funding, you think aloud. Figure 10: Data Analysis of Non-revenue Pilot Area Plot 10. (Component of an organizational memo.) (Source: Non-revenue Water Unit.) Your special project manager reports to you that the Swiss came up with some measurements for Plot 10. Your accountants could not conduct the water accounting for the region until the technical staff have installed flow meters, which seems to be more challenging than you expected. You wonder how the Swiss derived the water volumes and revenue figures for Plot 10, which your special project manager has sent you as an Excel spreadsheet. He tells you that the accountants’ water flow measurements for Plot 10 were only based on the collection deficit from the accounting database. Instead, he and the special project manager went to Plot 10 to make their own approximations of how much water is potentially consumed. They asked themselves: How many premises are there? How many people live in each of the premises? How much would they consume, on average? From all these consumption assumptions, they derived an approximation of the water flow into the district and how much this volume would be in water tariffs. Then they came up with a concrete volume of supply and of revenues. “You did this on your own? Our accountants don’t think like that,” you respond. 66 4.2 Managing invisibility: enacting Nairobi’s metering system In praxiography 2, I conceptualize the recursive dynamic between invisibility and visibility through the work of tracking the invisible operations of Nairobi’s water meter devices. In my descriptions, I show how the practice of tracking leakage is organized by and organizes the visibility of the invisible quality of infrastructure. In this empirical case, the new technologies of addressing (e.g. GIS, GPS, and SIM) track the invisible assembling of water meter devices in the field to render its operations visible for managers. Instead of general claims to precision, the flow-tracking practice redistributes the visibilities within the organizing of the infrastructure and discovers the micro-invisibilities of the water flow. The making visible of micro-invisibilities across the urban space produces the problem that the following praxiography addresses: demarcating the messy encounters of the piping system in the city. Praxiographic description 2 is structured in three sections, which correspond to praxiography 1. In section 1, I present an account of the managing of the invisible qualities of Nairobi’s meter operations. I do this in two parts. I open this praxiography with a ficto-postcolonial story. The story draws attention to a water utility manager’s efforts to engage with a local ICT consultant about the practice of meter reading to regain control of the city’s water infrastructure. I then provide a technoscientific account of the history and technical details of the invisible state of Nairobi’s water meter devices to understand the desire to track the water meter readers’ (staff) activities. In section 2, I trace the interwoven practices of tracking water flow of the French engineering consultants and the city’s water managers so as to render the invisibility of the metering system visible. Third, I close this praxiography with a ficto-postcolonial story. The story draws attention to how the tracking of water meter devices shapes the realities of a meter reading staff in her efforts to engage with the new visibilities. 4.2.1 Invisible meters 4.2.1.1 Imagine the management of Nairobi’s water meters Imagine you are the business manager at Nairobi’s water utility, in charge of customer metering. You parked your car some walking minutes from the utility’s offices in Nairobi’s central business district. The air is still fresh, and it is not yet busy. You’re 67 used to waking up early to avoid the jam-packed roundabouts. These roundabouts are another curse of infrastructure exports from the UK to the city, you mumble (see also The Economist, 2013). On the sidewalk, you stop when you see something suspicious. You bend down and clear away some of the mud and trash covering a small hole in the sidewalk. The dirt has covered one of the utility’s customer meters, installed outside a commercial building. Through its cracked glass cover, you can hardly see the meter’s small calculator wheels. You put on your glasses to read the serial number, which is barely recognizable. In the office, you tell your staff about your finding. You make a bet that this meter has never been read. You’re right. The serial number matches a customer account that has been billed at the standardized minimum estimate, which is the standard practice if your unit can’t collect the de facto meter readings. You’re annoyed that this can happen so close to your office. But you’re ambitious. You knew it wouldn’t be easy to transition from the well-performing power utility to the water utility. When you arrived at the water utility some years ago, you told the engineers that, concerning utility management, the meter is the primary tool. The company was not yet running systems that appreciate this. But things are starting to change. In two weeks, you’ll fly with the engineers to Guangzhou in China to evaluate a large purchase of smart meters for more accurate readings of large customers. You’re surprised and happy at how cheap the non-stop flight to Guangzhou is. But, the smart meters won’t be cheap and must have a good return on investment. An under-registering or faulty meter at a customer such as a water bottling company will miscalculate large volumes of water flow over time. These smart meters will allow your staff to track the meters from the office instead of inspecting the water meters every day and interacting with the customers. However, you worry about all the small customer meters, one of which you just found outside. The utility has been neglecting these. To date, the utility has focused on the 20% of customers who make up 80% of the company’s revenues. You are reminded of the French consultant’s disastrous report that estimated that the utility cannot locate more than 50% of the meters, and the other 50% are significantly under-registering the flow. Your Samsung phone tweets. You have a text message from a young Kenyan ICT consultancy. They’re stuck in the morning traffic. She and her research friend from Switzerland are late for the meeting, but you are used to this. You tell the Swiss 68 researcher that the utility needs young people like the ICT consultants who are technically competent and have strong commercial sense. You tell him that would be good for his business school to develop a training program for new cohorts, to make productive use of the planned new systems. You are not convinced that the country’s water training institute, which is just around the corner from your office, has the capacity to deal with these new technologies. You show them the photograph of the water meter device you discovered that you took with your smartphone. The ICT consultant’s team of Kenyan software developers has already implemented a very well received customer complaint software for the water utility. After the tender of an automated meter reading system to a foreign engineering firm failed, you think, her team may be a better choice to develop a home-made system. The consultants know the politics of water utilities very well by now and have learned to remain agile. The ICT consultants prototyped a system that equips the utility staff with smartphones to track and tag the specific locations and operation of the meter devices. Something like you just did by discovering the meter on the sidewalk by chance, but with GPS-tagged photos and a backend system, that integrates the accounting database. Today, 400 meter reading inspectors are on the water utility’s payroll. There are 200,000 meters registered in the company’s asset management. The meter reader inspectors feed the data into the utility’s accounting database that mediates the managers and engineers’ most discrete knowledge of where the water flows end up across the city. 69 Figure 11: Unjustified Complaint in Dandora Estate – Meter in the System Matches with Meter on the Ground. (Regional performance report. Photo: Nairobi water utility.) 70 4.2.1.2 Invisible state of meters We need some historical and technical detail to understand the desire to manage Nairobi’s system of water meters. At the beginning of the 1900s, the Uganda Railway Corporation introduced water metering to recover its water infrastructure investments in Nairobi through individual connections to water users (Nilsson, 2011; Nilsson & Nyanchaga, 2008). As a private corporation led by the British Royal Engineers, Uganda Railway could not generate income from taxation. When the colonial state bought the infrastructure in the 1920s, it retained the water metering system in fear of public protests against tax-based systems, which it witnessed in other colonies. Nairobi’s individual connection metering system has remained the norm for billing and cost coverage until today. The story of Nairobi’s water utility is that metering as a practice is a source of income, political networking, and even national pride. In the 1920s, Jomo Kenyatta started his career as a water meter inspector in Nairobi. He would become Kenya’s first president after independence in 1963. Being a meter reader helped him to connect with important allies who would later support his political career. Until today, some of the utility’s key figures started as water meters, working themselves up the hierarchy. The utility’s meter readers have the power to strike deals with customers and to issue fake meter reading bills. Even if a meter reader has not yet made it to the top management level nor bolstered his family income, the job still carries the pride of the popular presidential family of Jomo Kenyatta and the desire to make it from a meter reader to a millionaire or even to become president. Even though the technical details of the meter devices vary significantly, their primary technical purpose is specific. A good meter registers the flow of water as accurately as possible, handles the varying water flow qualities (i.e. sediments and varying pressures), and resists the environmental conditions in the field (i.e. temperature changes or human manipulation). 71 Figure 12: Water Meter Testing Bench at Nairobi Water Utility Headquarters. (Photo by the author.) I have observed the water meter devices in the ‘laboratory’ in order to describe how this small machine’s performance potentially varies across the urban field. The Nairobi Water Utility operates a test bench in the Non-revenue Water Unit to test the performance of suspicious meters in the field. It was silent in the workshop barracks before the operator started the pump’s engine to boost water into the meter-testing bench. Even though I have spent the past weeks in the next barracks with the Nonrevenue Water Unit I heard the pump’s noise for the first time. In the corner of the barracks there was a water tank, from which the water was pumped into the watertesting bench. The machinery looked like a self-made home brewery. The test bench operator opened a locker and took out a bucket filled with water meters. These meters were from Kahawa West. This was the residential estate where the unit conducted its first pilot project. By now, the water was flowing into the bench. He clamped three meters into the bench and tightened the tube where the water flowed out of the bench. 72 He took a writing pad and jotted down the serial number and each meter’s count. He was hunched over a meter to get a reading of its volumetric count. He failed to read the count through the broken glass. He successfully read another meter after wiping dirt from the glass window. He pressed a button that started another power level of the pump. The water pressure builds up slowly in order to prevent damaging a meter’s gear wheels. One meter’s counting wheel began to count. Another meter emitted a small fountain of water. The third meter’s wheels didn’t budge. We waited 10 minutes next to the buzzing machine. Only one of the meters was counting the water flow that was pushed through it. The operator stopped the machine and documented the results on paper. Two of the metering devices no longer worked. He read the third’s new count and wrote it down. He loosened the meters and put the one that was emitting water and the one that didn’t work on the floor. He put the third, which was working, into another bucket. He repeated this procedure for the next hour, until tea-time. In the meantime, the barrack had filled with staff members. Two men and a young woman joined us. We sit together to have tea with toast and margarine. After tea-time, I sit next to an operator on a computer. He took the paper sheets from the bench operator and typed them into an Excel sheet. The spreadsheet transformed the meter into a single serial number with the name of one of the 25 utility’s administrative zones and the result of each meter testing. If the reading varied by more than 5% from the amount of water the machine had put through it for 10 minutes, he took the meter out of the bucket and put it into another bucket. He said that under-registering or over-registering meters that were under 10 years old should be repaired, but they won’t be. He added that the company was too rich and would throw them away. Some of the meters we tested were more than 40 years old. 73 4.2.2 Tracking leakage: making water meters visible Figure 13: Meter Performance Analysis for Nairobi Water Utility. (Slide by Seureca/Veolia). The French engineering consultancy’s’ work included an analysis of the state of meters in the utility (Seureca/Veolia, 2012) . Their report estimated that, of the 197,000 meters, 18 were different meter types, with installations dating back to 1953, of which only 52% still worked. For long, it was hopeless for the utility’s management to track down the 190,000 meters and to ensure that they would continuously record the water flow. The allocation of the water meters across Nairobi’s urban space revealed the utility’s distributed operations of metering the water flow. In 2014, the commercial directorate began the effort to regain control over the customer meters. Prioritizing the water accounting’s economic losses appeared to be the quickest way to reduce losses. The utility’s first attempt to tackle customer metering in the field was to introduce prepaid meters in 2011. The prepaid meters were meant to make the customers pay in 74 advance by purchasing volumetric tokens at centralized points of sale. While the media announcements and coverage were extensive, the follow-up on the failure of the prepaid meter pilots was only a side-note in the news and was barely discussed in the utility. In 2014, a regional director’s report for the managing director stated that the installed prepaid meters in this particular region were replaced by normal meters. To regain control over the water meters, the utility introduced a new GPS technology that delicately accused that some customer metering staff members were responsible for some of the utility’s economic losses. It was assumed that many readings were incorrect. The pilot study results illustrated that 27% of the meters were underregistering. The managers used these results – the technical failure of the meter devices – to introduce the new GPS-based system to the agitated meter reading staff. The technology would help to make their difficult jobs in the field easier. But to understand how a simple technology like a water meter can become such a discretionary object, one needs to understand the practice of metering in the field. One must assume that the practice of tracking water flow through a meter is less simple than one might think in the dynamic environment of Nairobi. In Nairobi, there were dozens of metering practices, not one. This small technological device’s problem was that its networks differed immensely, depending on where in the city it was located. Every job in the field – from customer service, to meter reading, to billing, to revenue collection, and to technical support – was connected to the water meter device. Wherever I listened to the utility staff, their stories differed. The officers who supervised the field staff needed to handle multiple policies and organizing tools such as Excel spreadsheets to capture the operation of the water meters. Meters were buried in chamber rooms in the ground whose metal covers people steal owing to the metal’s market value. Without covers, the chamber room turns into a dangerous mix of water pods and loose electricity cables for a meter reader. Meters were hidden under sludge in front of slum dwellings whose location only the meter reading field staff knew. Meter reading officers changed the reading routes to avoid meter reading field staff becoming too entangled with their clients. Meters were locked behind residential gates, where residents tried to shut out meter readers, not distinguishing between a bandit and the utility’s field staff. The performance of the metering technology was also affected by these environments. Sediments and varying water pressures in the pipes affected the innards, slowly 75 damaging counting wheels. Displays were scratched, making serial numbers and counting wheels hard to recognize. On the other hand, customers opened meters to reverse the counting wheels or built their own small pipes to bypass the meters. I could continue describing these conditions indefinitely. The managers’ primary problem was that the meters could not be systematically tied to a particular place and customer. The meters were invisible to them. The utility operated its armada of 400 meter reading inspectors in a meticulous attempt to monthly read every meter. A region’s coordinator said that his 40 field staff are supposed to read 150 meters per day on average five days a week. Until 2014, the meter reading staff were equipped with a costly handheld device into which they typed their reading and into which the serial number of the meter at each particular site had been programmed. Then, in the office, their supervisors plugged the device’s data into a computer. The officers – managing the supervisors – loaded the data into the reading books, from where the coordinators – managing the officers – imported the data into the customer billing database. It is easy to imagine how prone to failure and misuse this process was. According to an informal story, meter reading field staff met in a bar or sit in the shadow of a tree at the end of the week to go over their books and plug any figure into the data logger that meets the field staff’s needs. For long, it was easy to manipulate meter calculations. But with the rise of the smartphone, customers started to take pictures of the reading on the meter, arguing against the volume the utility had billed. In response, meter readers also took pictures of meter readings. However, these images did not always match the customer meter’s serial number. Metering problems were a major cause of disconnections. Often, redressing these mismatches triggered what had become a ritualized practice: disconnecting the water connections. To exert pressure on a customer to pay the metered volumes, the service connection was blocked with a pipe wrench. While it was often impossible to determine which meter reading was the correct one, this uncertainty made it more legitimate for customers to systematically reconnect themselves by using a local plumber. The meters led to suspicious relationships among and between the field staff, the office staff, and customers; no one trusted anyone. The underlying problem became the physical address of housing in Nairobi. Nairobi did not have a reliable postal address system as I knew from Europe. Here, most roads 76 didn’t have a name and buildings didn’t have numbers. Even though Nairobi had plot numbers for land parcels the rapid housing and plot developments exceeded any regulatory and bureaucratic record keeping systems. If at all, the imaging of meter and customer locations remained in the heads of the utility’s field staff until then. Figure 14: Dashboard of Meter Reading Architecture. (Pilot demo: Field inspector interface of mobile application.) (Source: Wonderkid Consultants.) To address this complexity, the management hired a team of ICT consultants to develop a GPS-based meter reading system. In a previous World Bank-financed project, the ICT consultants used Nairobi’s utility as a national pilot for a customer complaint software. The consultants’ prototype won the World Bank’s first global Water Hackathon, which took place in 11 cities around the world in 2011 (Shemie et al., 2012). The young, locally recruited team of ICT consultants knew the utility very well, and the implementation of the GPS pilot looked promising to the managers and staff alike. The GPS system produced new evidence about meters in the field. The GPS based metering system replaced the analogue data loggers with cheap Asian smartphones. The smartphones required the meter reading field staff to take GPS-tagged and timetagged pictures of the meters in a particular urban environment. Suddenly, the GPStagged images made it much easier for the utility’s meter reading officers to settle negotiations with customers and meter reading field staff. The evidence that these images produced about the meters was not prone to the previously experienced manipulation and wild speculation. 77 The managers were shocked when the consultants presented the first results of this new software-based system. The emerging calibration between the estimations of water consumption volumes with the de facto meter counts on the ground showed significant anomaly levels. But what surprised the managers most was seeing location-specific calculations, which showed them how much water was in fact consumed in the distinct district estates across the city, compared to the previous billings, of which more than 50% were estimated volumes. A manager told me while guiding me through the anomalies, marked in red, in the software that some of the city’s estates displayed “notoriously unauthorized and illegal activities”, even in affluent places where the managers and the directorate didn’t expect it. While the rise of this new technological equipment better equipped the commercial directorate to track the invisibility of the water metering devices, there was no potentially ground-breaking technology one could apply to the messy devolution of the piping system. Compared to tracking meters, the detection of pipes was very different. Pipes are buried deep in the ground; detecting them is tedious work. The pipes’ ability to remain invisible in the ground rendered the situation even messier – who possessed knowledge about their location? (I will address this challenge in the third praxiograhic study.) 78 4.2.4 Visible meters produce new realities Figure 15: Dashboard of Meter Reading Architecture. (Pilot demo. Left: map of GPS tagged meter locations. Right: red marked reading anomalies.) (Source: Wonderkid Consultants.) 4.2.4.1 Re-imagine the management of Nairobi’s water meters Raindrops drip from a cloudy sky onto the bus windows. You are shaken about on your seat as the Matatu bus (14-seater) takes an unpaved road to circumvent some of the morning traffic on the main roads. You are a member of Nairobi water utility’s new cohorts of business graduates. In the past two years, you have served as a customer care officer and a revenue collection officer in the utility’s Southern and the Central regional offices. In both regions, you have come to know that the people of Nairobi differ concerning class and income. This makes little difference to whether or not they pay their water bills. In Central, you were surprised how many business owners try to argue against paying their bills. More than once, you have sought permits from the regulator to even block sewage connections. These people just switch their water supply to water tanker services or reconnect themselves to the utility’s water pipes, but a blocked sewage connection makes them pay their bills. In this period of the rotating program, you are a meter reading officer for the Eastern region. The Eastern regional office is at the far end of the distribution network. The strong water pressure reductions and all the sediment in the pipes that end up here makes this a tough region to work in. For you, it 79 also means a long ride in the morning from where you live with your family to the office. The meter reading inspection job is at the heart of the business side of the utility. “All the revenues go through the meter. A stopped meter is like a disease for the company, because it adds to the non-revenue water,” the manager told you when you started in the meter reading department. After an hour’s ride, you arrive at the open yard in front of the office before seven o’clock. This is not like the Northeastern office, which is protected by a barbed wired wall two meters high. Still you are annoyed when you see the derelict motorcycles covered in bird droppings and tree resin. One can barely read the company’s name on their tanks. All have flat tires. A forgotten motorcycle jacket decomposes slowly. Only one Yamaha shines in its original white, ready to be driven. Today, you are the acting meter reading coordinator. You’re excited. This is a first sign that you will soon become a coordinator, which will have you reporting directly to a regional director and the business manager. You enter the office building. It is ordinary, like all the utility’s offices, except for the central district office, which is more spacious. The morning sun dazzles between the curtains. It makes the supervisors’ and fieldworkers’ room appear quite dark. The atmosphere is hectic, yet focused. It is abuzz with activity. Two dozen staff members are already preparing for their day shifts, either in groups or at their computer-equipped desktops. Most people wear office wear. Others are dressed more casually, while some sport the new work gear. You feel proud. You suggested to the bosses that the fieldworkers’ PVC wardrobe be changed. The PVC is very uncomfortable, and field staff either sweated or froze. As the acting meter reading coordinator, the 10 meter reading officers wait for your introduction for the day to pass them on to the supervisors of the marketing assistants (meter reading field staff), who go out into the field to read their meter reading itineraries for today. You go to the whiteboard, on which there is a hand-drawn grid list of the region’s five administrative zones. Each zone is ranked according to the percentage of the de facto meter readings of expected customer accounts. The officers must report the daily progress of their supervisors and meter readers to their coordinator (today, this is you), who reports this to the regional director. As an officer, your zone is ranked 16 out of the 25 zones. Out of the 6,000 expected customers, you could bill 4,000 on the de facto water meter readings. Once you have 80 communicated the daily targets for the meter readers’ itineraries, the office empties quickly. As you know, some of your staff members do their daily work in the field, finding and reading the meters and dealing with the customers to allow them access to premises. Others, as is well known, will do their own business, and will meet at the end of the week to make up their readings. But, by now, everyone in the utility accepts that this will change. The meter reading coordinator you stood in for today is at the monthly meeting with all other meter reading coordinators and the meter reading manager to discuss the results of the new GPS-based metering system. This new system will make the meters even ‘smarter’, and will allow you to see the fishy things some customers and field staff do. Back in your office, you open your laptop to proceed with analyzing the meter readings from the database. One of your colleagues asks you to talk to a foreign researcher who works with a prestigious local business school. You are keen to talk to him to show him the new metering system. You pull up a chair to let him look at the dashboard of the new metering system on the screen of your laptop. The dashboard allows headquarters and the regions to see, in real time, the incoming meter readings and the exact locations of where the readings have been conducted. You are now getting a very clear picture of the meters on the ground, with a GPS tag and a photo from the meter or, if the water meter could not be accessed, at least a picture of a locked gate, for instance. Before, there was no such evidence. So, you expect this to be a significant change for the utility. You tell the researcher that you plan to write your MBA thesis at the University of Nairobi about the company’s strategic change. He suggests that you email your proposal. You feel somewhat intimidated, since you are not used to writing long emails and would prefer to talk about your ideas. Before leaving you, he asks you about a particular estate within your zone, the Pipeline Estate (Plot 10). Your confidence shrinks. In your work across Nairobi, you have come to realize that every estate is different. The people of Nairobi are different. But the Pipeline Estate causes you much stress. You say: “Sometimes, we can’t even get the meters, because they’ve removed the meters from the ground. There’s nothing for me to bill there. We’re dealing with people whose culture is stealing, with hard-core criminals… Water is a very precious commodity, it’s good business.” Fortunately, the bosses have realized that there is a problem. 81 4.3 Operating messiness: enacting Nairobi’s piping system In praxiography 3, I conceptualize the recursive dynamic between formalization and messiness through the work of demarcating the water pipes in the urban space that seeks to formalize the messy devolution of pipes. In my descriptions, I show how the practice of demarcating leakage is organized by and organizes the formalization of the messy quality of infrastructure. In this empirical case, the formalization of the discontinuous assembling of pipes in an urban district cuts off the various actors involved in sustaining flow in the emergent urban space. Instead of adhering to this messiness and its relation to the problems of infrastructure design in Nairobi’s urban space, its formalization ignores it/cuts it off, chasing the actors who made the expansion of pipes and water flow in the city work in the first place, at least provisionally. The formalization of messy piping produces a space for the emergent possibilities inherent in the dynamic of coordinating and stabilizing multiplicity. Praxiographic description 3 is structured in three sections, which correspond to praxiographies 1 and 2. In section 1, I present an account of the messy qualities of Nairobi’s system of pipes. I do this in two parts. I open the praxiography with a fictopostcolonial story that draws attention to a local plumber’s efforts to engage with the city utility’s Non-revenue Water Unit about the practice of demarcating the water piping to regain control of the city’s water infrastructure in a particular district. I then provide a technoscientific account of the history and technical details of the messy state of Nairobi’s system of water pipes to understand the desire to demarcate the system of pipes. In section 2, I trace the interwoven practices of demarcating water flow and pipes by the city’s water engineers and district residents in the attempt to formalize the messiness of the piping system. Third, I close praxiography 3 with a ficto-postcolonial story that draws attention to how the demarcating of water pipes shapes a water user’s reality. 82 4.3.1 Messy pipes Figure 16: Piping in Plot 10. (Photo: Non-revenue Water Unit.) 83 4.3.1.1 Imagine the operation of Nairobi’s water pipes You’re the chairman of a community-based organization (CBO) you named after the initials of the three founders. You started it some years ago in Mukuru kwa Njenga, but you expanded your activities from the slum into the neighboring Pipeline Estate (Plot 10). As the CBO’s chairman, you could afford to move with your wife and two children from Mukuru to an apartment in the AA plot of Pipeline Estate. The objective of your CBO is to provide people with clean water, to combat drugs and alcoholism among the youth, and to collect garbage. It’s early in the morning. Your partners, who still live in Mukuru, meet you at AA. You wear your rubber boots, but also your best button down shirt. The caretaker of a premise sent you a text message, complaining about the poor pressure and quality of the water he receives from one of your one-inch pipes. You must fix this quickly, because you don’t want him to switch his connection to one of the borehole owners who opened his business close by. You don’t have much time. The new area chief and Nairobi Water (a shortened version of Nairobi Water Company and the popular name of the city water utility) have invited the area’s community leaders to a meeting later that morning. The word of mouth is that the chief and the Nairobi Water plan to fight what they call the non-revenue water. You don’t know what this may mean for the water business of your CBO, but you and your partners must always be prepared when Nairobi Water comes. For this reason, yesterday, you met with other local groups. They decided that you will represent them as a water action group of the AA plot. You will report to them about what the chief and what Nairobi Water plan to do. But first you must fix the pipe problem of the plot caretaker. You discuss which of your three pipes may have caused the problem. Even though there has been much new construction since you laid the pipes, you exactly know where your pipes are buried beneath the shovel. You speculate which pipe it is, and you walk up the line. Some of the cesspools of storm water that you must cross are too deep for your rubber boots, and you need to jump. You think about how painful this must be for your wife and kids. On your way, you stop to speak to one of the youngsters you employ to deliver water canisters to some of your clients. You know him from Mukuru. He is a good worker, but you also know that, after work today, he will meet his gang and will drink the cheap liquor that makes them increasingly violent. Last week, you told them to scare off some Nairobi Water’s staff 84 members who wanted to inspect your one-inch pipe connections at the main pipes, which they found some weeks ago. But you heard they were too aggressive, throwing rocks at the vehicle. The boy fills his water canisters on a pushcart from one of your pipes. While you are chatting, a large white pickup truck approaches and turns into the road towards the chief’s huts. It’s a Nairobi Water car. Through an open window, you recognize a muzungu taking a picture. You show him a grim face. If they come with a muzungu, they may be serious this time. You must hurry up. You continue walking your pipeline. Fortunately, it isn’t raining. You detect a wet patch at a spot where you had used an intermediate piece to connect the ends of the pipes. One of your comrades digs carefully around the plastic pipe. The piece is broken and is leaking. You replace it and cover the hole. You cover the intersection piece with a plank. Maybe this will protect it from the pressure of the cars. This is fixed, for today. This small leak was not the only reason the pipe lost pressure. You discuss whether you have connected too many premises with this pipe. You can’t solve the problem, as you three are heading to the chief’s meeting. On your way, you greet some of the women who remove garbage from the water drains. They wear the shirts given to them by the United Nations Environment Programme, who pays your CBO to coordinate the garbage collection work. You don’t have time to talk to them because you’re in a hurry. Figure 17: Water Push-cart Refill in Plot 10. (Photo by the author.) 85 The venue is packed with community representatives from the area. You listen to what the chief and the Nairobi Water staff have to say. They repeat, several times, that this non-revenue water causes the low pressure of the pipes and the decreasing water connection quality. The utility’s special project manager asks all water providers to register their connections. If not, the Nairobi Water will disconnect them, because they will be illegal. To date, your people in the area have tried to confuse the Nairobi Water’s staff when they looked for your pipes. When the chief asks that the community representatives sign up people to help the Nairobi Water find the pipes in the area, you send your CBO partner to register. The Nairobi Water mentions that, with help from a researcher from ‘Swaziland’21, it has calculated that the company loses 200 million Shilling per year owing to the illegal connections. Towards the end of the meeting, you muster the courage to speak up for what you were sent for. You say: “You must be aware that there are people who know about this meeting. You are taking away their business.” You point at the Pipeline Area. At the end of the meeting, you accept Nairobi Water’s invitation to visit its dam site and its treatment plant upcountry. The Nairobi Water wants the local spokesperson to see where the water comes from and how much effort it takes to clean it and bring it to the city. Nairobi Water wants you tell your people. After the meeting, you talk with your partners in front the chief’s hut. The muzungu researcher approaches and asks you about what you had said. You tell him that the Nairobi Water employed you some years ago as a local plumber to lay the pipes in the area. It showed you how to lay the pipes and to manage the pressure, but also how to make a business of selling water to the people. Now they come back and want to take away the business that supports your family and your partners’ families. But Nairobi Water doesn’t care about your business model. It should share the revenues with you and your partners. You invite him to see your CBO’s work. You are interrupted by a Nairobi Water staff member. You know him. He’s a security guy. He tells the muzungu that you are water thieves. You switch to speaking Swahili. 21 My study participants often seemed confused about whether I said that I come from Switzerland or from Swaziland, which is a small African country. This confusion reminded me that the people of Nairobi rarely encounter people or things from Switzerland. 86 4.3.1.2 Messy state of pipes Figure 18: Map of Nairobi‘s Pipe Network. (Nairobi’s four hydraulic corridors, the utility’s six administrative regions, and the network of main pipes and roads. Wall map in operation and maintenance engineer’s office.) (Photo by the author.) We need some historical and technical detail as well an excursion into housing to understand the desire to demarcate Nairobi’s system of water pipes. The Non-revenue Water Unit was given the task to re-establish the networks’ pressure zones, from which one could measure the physical water flow within particular metered areas. But before it could install new flow meters to capture the volumes that go through the city, it needs to know where the pipes are buried in the ground. Detecting pipes is extremely laborintensive work. In Nairobi, the pipe network has transformed from a linear system of a tree arteries into a rhizomatic network of pipes. Water flows with gravity and pressure. In Nairobi, the flows are buried in the pipes. If one knows where these pipes are, one can control its 87 flow. As simple as this might appear, in Nairobi it is not. Imagine an arterial tree of water with the main branches being pipes that carry the water through the city. From the main branches, smaller pipes divert the flow to the districts. These hundreds of subbranches divert thousands of times to become service connections to plots of land. Engineers call this network – quite dispassionately – a reticulation system, even though, by design, it is more like a city’s arteries. In Nairobi, this network has grown rhizomatically, like a root in the ground. Instead of a linear system of independent main pipes, distribution pipes, and service pipes to the consumer taps, the pipes grew in the other direction and between the arteries. There are four such main pipe arteries that date back to Nairobi’s blurred water infrastructure design history. The engineers call them the four corridors. While three of them use the power of the gravity of the city’s topography, the fourth – Western – corridor requires an energy-powered system to pump water upwards to the European part of the city. In 1998, the city’s water engineers subdivided these four arteries into 11 zones. These zones were meant to pressurize the water flow in the network’s transition from a fully charged hydraulic system to an intermittent system of water supply. As described above, this is a system in which the pipes are no longer filled to capacity with water around the clock. These 11 pressure zones equipped the reticulation system with an armada of pressure-breaking valves to stop the flow of water into particular pockets, to build pressure for another zone, and to divert the water flow into and towards the end of particular urban pockets. The rationing of water increased the competition for flow and over the laying of pipes in the growing city. With the growth of the city’s population and industries, the competition for these flows increased through the last-mile extensions of distribution and service pipes. The control over the piping system lay in many different hands. By the beginning of the 2000s, the city’s water supply reforms aimed to cover all parts of the population with particular supply volumes via individual household connections. In 2005, the utility’s engineers adopted the policy of rationing the water supply to better allocate the available water flow across the growing city. Since then, the so-called equitable distribution program governed the valve operators’ work of pushing the water from one area to another. The competition between the utility’s six administrative regions was controlled by the transmission team at headquarters. The transmission 88 engineers scheduled the distribution cycles based on politically determined water demand quotas based on the area’s population demographics. The water demand classification inscribed in the program assumed that pockets of higher-income population required substantially higher water supply than low-income population areas. This discrimination against lower-income groups concerning how much water by when at what pressure flowed in a particular area depended on the relations between the distribution program, the valve operators’ work, the proximity to the water sources in the north of the city, the hierarchy of whether the service pipes were first or last in the distribution pipes to the main pipes, and how the pipes were controlled in their last-mile to consumers. Water flow was no longer constant; it kept changing, as a result of the evolution of old and new pipes across the city. But the (d)evolution of the pipes differed across the city, and the knowledge about the location and types of pipes were not completely mapped by the utility, if it was documented at all. Even a regional director with 20 years of experience in a district admitted that he could no longer say where the pipes were located: “It becomes very difficult to say. For this pocket, the only entry point comes from here and there. I can get the billing figures, but I cannot tell you this is the amount of water that was pushed to here.” 4.3.1.3 Excursion into housing With the city’s unregulated growth in all parts, the city’s water utility was usually the last organization to be informed about plot developments in order to connect them to the network or change to larger pipes. For instance, in the Northern and Eastern regions, many land and plot developments were happening, with no end of sight. A regional engineer said she could not know about the approval of new housing projects until she or her staff saw the new and uprising buildings with their own eyes. By then it was mostly the developers who came, after construction, to complain about the lack of water and sewage connections. Also, many of the new pipes were put in by the people and business that populated old and newly developed areas. The utility’s regional staff complained that “self-help groups raise money to build funny infrastructures”. On the other hand, the old pipes were prone to theft owing to the pipe metal’s market value. 89 Popular images of Nairobi’s housing development were no longer true (Huchzermeyer, 2011). One could witness this while on a – bumpy and squeezed – Matatu ride, or by comparing aerial photographs of the city, or by browsing the newspapers, online adverts, or local city guides. Nairobi is neither a city of slums nor a world-class African metropolis. Previously, development experts had painted Nairobi as a city of slums – like Nairobi’s Kibera, considered Africa’s largest slum – with wildly inflated population estimates. In Nairobi’s metro plan 2030, its city planners sketched the lofty contours of the modern planning of a world-class African metropolis. However, by 2005, Nairobi had already by far outstripped the highest tenement population densities recorded on the African continent and in the history of the West. During Western industrialization in the 19th century, the authorities of cities such as Berlin and New York had succeeded in regulating the high-rise buildings that housed the masses of industrial laborers. Initially, high-density districts helped Berlin to attract people from the countryside to work in the city.22 In Nairobi, since the 1980s, the phenomenon of unregulated large-scale private landlordism has emerged in response to the unmet housing demand owing to urban immigration (Huchzermeyer, 2007). The growing demand for housing in Nairobi laid the ground for the mushrooming of dense multistory tenement investments. In the absence of a pension fund industry, single housing investments have become a source of retirement income. These private investments were prone to the arbitrary enforcement of land and housing regulation, as well as unpredictable policy changes. To keep amortization periods to its minimum, the investors decreased the quality of materials, bypassed construction standards, and squeezed tenement plots and units into the available space. Informal bureaucratic practices made this new generation of landlords disappear into the provisional stability of title deeds. News of collapses of tenement buildings have appeared regularly in the news since the 2010s. Particularly, the torrential tropical rains during the rainy season negatively impacted on building materials, leading to buildings collapsing and the deaths of dozens of people. This pushed the landlords to further lower their profiles and to hide behind caretakers. Caretakers broker the usually verbal landlord-tenant agreements with no interest 22 According to Huchzermeyer (2011), Berlin’s city authority was even strong enough to dissolve these districts after laborers started to group to organize political resistance against the regime. 90 beyond rent collection for owners and occasionally taking care of the supply of electricity and water. This made tenants change apartments often so as to exploit rapidly changing rents. 4.3.2 Demarcating leakage: formalizing water pipes In 2014, the Non-revenue Water Unit was asked by the managing director to tackle water loss in the tenement district Plot 10 (Pipeline Estate). In 2008, the city’s water asset manager commissioned a local construction company, LocalConstruct Limited23, to build a district reticulation system that would connect Plot 10 to the two main pipes that passed the area. This piping was financed by a World Bank grant under its last-mile piping policy. The construction of the pipes was happening during the major tenement housing development had taken place. LocalConstruct ltd. received the contract to build the distribution and service pipe system, with the work being supervised by the utility’s engineering department at headquarters and field staff. However, the Non-revenue Water Unit realized that the engineering department did hardly any mapping of the laid pipe network. To complicate the situation for the Non-revenue Water Unit, during a preparatory meeting with the regional department, the technical coordinator of field staff explained that he was not involved in the construction of pipes. In the – documented – meeting, he argued that the water asset manager’s commissioned company, LocalConstruct Limited, teamed up with a “local cartel” to construct parallel pipes to the commissioned lines. The meeting almost ended with the recommendation to shut down the ‘LocalConstruct Limited Pipe’ of the local cartel. But the participants realized that they could not tell which one of the distribution pipes was this LocalConstruct Limited Pipe. The final proposal was to shut down all the distribution pipes and to temporarily serve registered customers via the utility’s water lorries (water tank trucks). 23 LocalConstruct ltd. is a pseudonym. 91 Figure 19: GIS Aerial Map of Plot 10. (Source: Non-revenue Water Unit). The Non-revenue Water Unit used GIS aerial maps, self-made sketches, and field tours to demarcate the networks of pipes in Plot 10. The district metered area protocols required the Non-revenue Water Unit staff to measure Plot 10’s water inflows, consumption, and outflows. As we have seen, this is tedious work in the absence of GIS-mapped piping and metered consumption. The unit did not have the budget at the time to buy detailed cadastral maps of the district from Survey Kenya. A state corporation, Survey Kenya made the licensing of the city’s spatial data expensive (see also Williams, Marcello, & Klopp, 2014). By then, the Non-revenue Water Unit staff were using two .jpeg maps, a Google Maps screenshot and a large-scale, low-resolution GIS aerial map to demarcate the boundaries of the Plot 10. Both maps were relatively new. The maps did not show the dense slum dwellings, previously part of Mukuru kwa Njenga, which had been demolished in 2010 before the construction of the new tenement buildings started (Mwau, 2013, p. 65). After the demarcation, the staff 92 squeezed small dots into the .jpeg versions of the maps to mark the end of the service pipe connections and water kiosks. However, they did not indicate the devolution of distribution and service pipes on this map. Instead, in the absence of GIS piping maps, the staff made very rough provisional ad hoc sketches to denote the pipes on white sheets of paper. The staff’s knowledge of the devolution of pipes was not only restricted by their ability to draw sketches, but also by the unit staff’s trips around the district and some incognito walks through the area. From the Coca-Cola Pipe, one of the two main pipes passing the district, two distribution pipes fed water in and through the district. These distribution pipes were officially built by a LocalConstruct Limited. The valve that controlled the water flow into one of the two distribution pipes was shut and broken. At this junction, dozens of one-inch so-called spaghetti pipes were inserted into the main pipe. The plumbing was done by someone with local knowledge of the hydraulics and technical plumbing skills. This part of the main pipe had been purposefully chosen because of its gravity. If the main pipe was closed, the remaining water would flow towards this part. With the distribution pipe’s valve shut, the spaghetti pipes now provided water for this part of Plot 10. The premises connected to the distribution pipe must have stopped receiving water. They were then connected to the spaghetti pipes, of which some were even metered and billed by regional utility workers. However, the more buildings were constructed and the more people moved into the district, the lower the pressure in these spaghetti pipes, and the more often they ran dry, causing shortages in a district passed by two large pipes filled with water around the clock. This scarcity and lack of pressure produced two effects. First, private businesses dug a series of boreholes to sell water from water kiosks to premises whose pipes and storage tanks often ran out of water. These were not registered at the utility company as boreholes or water kiosks. The owners argued that, without sewage connections in the district, they wouldn’t need to pay for borehole water. Indeed, the utility’s fee for water boreholes was a percentage of the fee of sewage water. This tariff was based on the assumption that the cost of borehole water to the water utility is its treatment as sewerage water after it is used. In the absence of sewage connections, the borehole owners’ argument was smart. The second consequence was that a fluid mix of open drainage water, overflowing sewage tanks, and street garbage soaked easily into the 93 under-pressurized spaghetti pipes, which were made out of simple plastics. Particularly during the rainy season, the water flow in these pipes was a noxious mixture of converging flows of natural activity and human excrement. The Non-revenue Water Unit is pressured by the management to cut the spaghetti pipes, which are fiercely protected investments by local operators. The managers continued to pressure the Non-revenue Water Unit’s staff to cut the spaghetti pipes from the main pipes. But, the staff had come to realize that these connections were key investments by local water operators, who fiercely protected their investments. During the first attempt to cut some spaghetti pipes at the main pipes, the staff was attacked with stones. Some staff felt traumatized by their colleagues’ stories of being seriously harmed in similar instances in other estates in the city. One concern of the regulator was that, at the time, water theft was charged with a small fine and not (yet) a criminal act, as electricity theft was.24 Yet, for poor people, these fines could be significant. The example of Plot 10 complicated the situation even further to find one approach to tackle water theft. With the help of the utility’s security personnel, the Non-revenue Water Unit took one resident who operated spaghetti pipes to the police. His fine was paid immediately. After only a few days, new connections had been built, which made the staff realize that these were the only functioning connections for this particular area. As a unit staff member noted: “If you are thirsty, you do everything to get water, and you dig deep. Water is not like electricity. People need it.” Thus, the unit staff not only had to cut these pipes under protection of the police force, they also had to walk all these spaghetti pipes and dig them out of the ground while ensuring that a distribution pipe would provide water again at the same time. The utility staff members formed part of the network of illegal pipe construction. In private conversations, the staff blamed their regional colleagues for this illegal construction, although no names were mentioned. Similarly, among the utility and chief meetings with the Plot 10 community circulated the rumor that field staff and a former engineer helped construct these spaghetti pipes. However, during the public town hall 24 Even large water users, such as governmental organizations, did not pay their water bills at that time. The group of donors suggested that government bodies should receive fenced water budgets to pay for their water bills. 94 meetings and in organizational memos the Non-revenue Water Unit blamed the city’s water asset manager and LocalConstruct ltd. for building the messy network of pipes. The chief and the utility unit persuaded the district leaders to realize that the illegal connections caused the poor-quality water, and not the utility. The town hall meetings were filled with various groups of people involved in the supply and sale of water, ranging from borehole owners, water action group members of the regulator, to local plumbers who had formed CBOs to sell water. The participants expressed concern about the illegal water connections and the hazardous quality of the water supply in the area. The Non-revenue Water Unit staff argued that these two concerns were interrelated. They organized for selected representatives a visit to Nairobi’s water production plants. The unit wanted to demonstrate to the community that the utility undertook efforts to clean the water and that it was not the utility’s fault that the water quality in Plot 10 had become so poor. Figure 20: District Chief Meeting in Plot 10. (Photo by the author.) The Non-revenue Water Unit field staff members were frustrated at how they had previously been misled by the locals in detecting the spaghetti pipes in the district.25 These spaghetti pipes ran under unpaved roads. The unit staff asked the community groups to help them walk the pipes so that the staff would know which pipes to replace before they could disconnect the spaghetti pipes. Once they had indicated the spaghetti 25 The local chief offered the selected local spokespersons who helped the utility to detect the pipes invitations to a popular presidential address. 95 pipes, the unit staff hired local youngsters to dig them out under unit staff supervision. By working with young people, the unit staff hoped they would not be attacked by the local cartels. Some locals demanded that the utility considers their income from these pipes and that it creates a joint business model that works for both. However, the unit staff made several attempts, with the local area chief, to arrest selected people and put pressure on others to register as groups for metered connections. A former local utility staff member who had operated a water business in the name of a CBO, at a town hall meeting, told the Non-revenue Water Unit that the utility should consider their business. The man, dressed in rubber boots and button-down shirt, had worked for the utility for two years in the district. 4.3.3 Formalized pipes produce new realities 4.3.3.1 Re-imagine the operation of Nairobi’s water pipes It is very dark when you wake up at around four in the morning.26 You no longer even need an alarm clock. Loud music sounds from the street sellers have woken you. You switch on the light and wake up your children. You give your husband a goodbye kiss. He needs to leave for work. You always worry when he needs to work during the night. You have hoped that this would end. “Working in the dark is for the devil”27, a priest once told you during a mass. You don’t know what exactly your husband is doing, but from the rumors, you suspect that it’s about his work with the City Water pipes (City Water is another term used for Nairobi’s water utility). But times appear to be good. You are still excited about yesterday’s gift. You’ll wear it when taking the kids to school today. He bought a red blouse for you on his way back from upcountry. He was invited by the area chief and the water utility to visit Nairobi’s largest dam site where the water for Nairobi comes from. He told you how beautiful it was at the lake, which reminded you of when you used to live in the countryside. More than 15 years ago, your arrival 26 Urban Studies researcher Baraka Mwau’s work served me as a primary source for re-imagining my field material for the following passage (Maina & Mwau, 2013; Mwau, 2013; Mwau & Maniki, 2013;). 27 This quote is borrowed from BBC’s Peaky Blinders series 3, episode 2. The TV series’ main storyline and this particular scene inspired the story that I am enacting in this ficto-postcolonial account. In the Peaky Blinders’ scene, a religious woman attempts to reform her husband who is head of a gangster family in the 1920s in the UK. The story depicts the family’s effort and struggle to transition to do legitimate business. 96 in the city was tough. It was only two years ago that you could afford to move from Mukuru into this one-room apartment in Plot 10. Your sister was not so lucky. She still lives in Mukuru, but you support her and visit as often as you can. One day, she might move in with you when you can afford a larger apartment in Plot 10. This one is too small for two families. You still share a bathroom with the other apartments on your floor. Your phone peeps. The caretaker text messaged that he has opened the tap for you. Figure 21: Water Canister Storage and Staircase, Plot 10 Building. (Photos: Baraka Mwau.) You exit the apartment and pass the smelly bathrooms. You have to be careful on the steep staircase. There is only some moonlight showing through the roof. There is no queue at the tap of the tank on the ground floor. Luckily, your husband has a good relationship with the caretaker. Initially, you felt ashamed that your family has the privilege to be first in line. But, over time, you accepted and began to enjoy this privilege. In this building, it is not as it has been in the slum. Everyone tries to get the best for their families. Every family lives separate lives, but you feel safer between these 97 walls and with a concrete roof over your head. Your husband usually helps you to carry the heavy water canisters up the six floors. By the time you carry up the last canister, there are many people in the queue. The situation reminds you how as a child you queued at the village well with your mother. The sun rises. You rearrange your apartment to make space for the day. The kids start playing on the balcony, which is the only place left. You do worry that it might to be too dangerous for them to play there, but the Bible has helped you to manage your anxieties. Figure 22: Digging Out Spaghetti Pipes in Plot 10. (Photos: Non-revenue Water Unit.) You wear your new red blouse when taking the kids to school. Today, you must pay school-fees. You feel proud to pay on time and want to look good. On your way back to Plot 10, you stumble and almost fall. During the rainy season, the unpaved roads sometimes become terrifying. Also, they stink. A honeysucker truck28 empties the 28 A privately procured system of trucks to empty septic tanks and latrines. The name honeysucker is used in cities of the South, apparently derived from the honey (bucket) latrine in which a plastic bucket is fitted with a toilet seat and a plastic bag. 98 sewage trunk next to you. You think about the poor people that live on the ground floor. But this will change soon. You have heard about a private initiative of district people to contract a private construction firm to build sewage pipes in the area. You do some shopping. On a corner, you see some youngsters digging a trench. From a distance, you stop to watch them. Two men in office clothes take pictures and seem to supervise the youngsters. A muzungu stands next to them, making notes. You are worried about what they’re digging out. The trench reveals a water pipe. You once heard your husband talking to his CBO partners that they manage a water connection in this street. In the evening, when he returns, you confront him and demand an answer. He concedes that one of his partners in his CBO has been caught by the police. He had to pay his fine. The city utility wants them to register their connections and open a water kiosk. The water kiosk tariff will not allow the CBO to make as much income as before and you don’t have sufficient funds to start a borehole business. He mumbles that the family may need to move back to your sister in Mukuru. A tear flows down your left cheek, onto your new red blouse. He responds to your tears. He will try to find a way to continue operating his pipe business, but this would mean more work in the dark. Figure 23: An Everyday Scene in the Tenement District Plot 10. (Photo by the author.) 99 4.4 Summary In this chapter, I have presented a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies about the organizing of Nairobi’s water infrastructure. Condensed from a fouryear case study including eight months of on-site fieldwork in Nairobi, I have described the engagements of Nairobi’s water utility in three water leakage and loss management practices: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Inspired by a feminist and postcolonial understanding in theorizing technoscientific worlds and practical ontologies, I have deployed a creative non-fictional writing process to empirically and politically account for how these technoscientific practices pattern the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure. I have tracked this technoscientific enactment process of the ontological transformations of Nairobi’s water infrastructure through a corpus of ethnographically collected and imaginatively re-assembled material. I provided a thick performative description of how Nairobi’s water infrastructure materially assembles together multiple worlds; how organizing practices coordinate and stabilize these multiple, yet partly, incommensurable worlds by weaving together the innumerable actors who inhabit them; and with what potentializing effects on the capacities and actions of my study participants. My theoretical resources helped me to understand how Nairobi’s water infrastructure is organized through the recursive ontological dynamic between the potentiality of multiplicity and stabilization efforts – a contemporary and key concern in assemblage thinking and practical ontology (C. Gad, et al., 2015; Jensen, 2016). I have described the technoscientific work that goes into the stabilizing of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and how this process experimentally assembles ontological transformations. In three praxiographic studies (bundled stories about practices and processes in technoscientific world-making), I have shown that the reality production – the worlding – of Nairobi’s water infrastructure is both experimental and imaginatively entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I have described insights into the ontological transformations of infrastructure by tracing the ways in which the practices of measuring, tracking, and demarcating are organized and organize the pacification, 100 visibility, and formalization of infrastructure. Each of the three praxiographic studies have described the sociomaterial processes that organize an infrastructure understood as an assemblage of emergent systems, technoscientifically designed practices, and ficto-postcolonial imagination. 101 5 Discussion In this chapter, I will discuss my performative thick description of Nairobi’s water infrastructure to facilitate theory-building about the organizing process that links the sociomaterial assembling of infrastructure to technoscientific coordination and its inventive imagination, and organizational assemblages in general. The organizational study of the dynamic between the sociomaterial assembling of infrastructure and technoscientific intervention is in its infancy. There are very few conceptual and empirical studies that examine the recursive processes and enactive practices that connect these two forms or studies that examine infrastructure as organizational assemblage. In the empirical chapter, I presented the case of Nairobi’s water infrastructure as three separate praxiographic building blocks. Through an analysis of the praxiographies’ synchronic emplotment, I further exploit variation between these three praxiographic studies to address the solidity of the central idea: infrastructure is organized in an iterative dynamic that recursively links multiplicit assembling and technoscientific stabilizations. I will also use documented comparison cases of technological assemblage studies to strengthen the bracketing of the identified organizing process: (1) registering the sociomaterial assembling of emergent systems, (2) enacting the stabilizing efforts of technoscientific coordination, and (3) demonstrating the reinventive capacities of the shared ontic imagination of infrastructural worlds-in-themaking. 5.1 Registering the organizing of emergent systems Nairobi’s water infrastructure’s materiality co-produced and distributed the worlds in which the infrastructure was organized. The fluid, invisible, and messy qualities of materials and technologies of the hydraulic, metering, and piping systems participated in the sociomaterial process of multiplying and distributing the infrastructure’s organization. Particularly, Nairobi’s infrastructure users actively participated and intervened in the organization of the infrastructure’s emergent systems. This subtle historical and topographical transformation co-created the infrastructure’s ontological 102 multiplicity, which produced an organizing dynamic that was beyond a particular organizational ontology. In the first section of each praxiographic study, I traced how the organizing process of registering the historical and topographical assembling of the systems of hydraulics, metering, and piping diluted the central idea of a single organizational ontology. One must see how an infrastructure historically and topographically constructs the multiplicit worlds that organize its emergence. By associating three material systems with three types of multiplicity – fluidity, invisibility, and messiness – I traced the ways in which this qualified materiality registers forces that assemble the situated historical and topographical composition of a water infrastructure’s organizational assemblage. 5.1.1 Historical materiality of infrastructure organizing The historical composition of the infrastructure has shown that the material systems of hydraulics, metering, and piping have never been independent material and technological entities, but emerged from the participation and agency of a historically distributed spectrum of actors and ontic capacities. The hydraulic system was particularly designed and metrologically governed to serve a spatially distinct set of users in order to separate beneficiaries/users into racially and economically distinct groups. However, people’s increasing desire for water and their spatial mobility over time caused the designed hydraulic pressure zones to fall apart. The beneficiaries intervened in and competed for the hydraulic flow and organized their own material and political pressures. A cosmopolitan city in which ethnic associations and distinctions became ever more important multiplied the political pressure of particular areas and groups of people to shape the hydraulics. However, this form of infrastructural emergence needed to be observed over time owing to the mobility of the people in the city and the ‘longue-durée’ of the hydraulic system. The collapse of the designed hydraulics could be observed over time and was key to understanding the desire to technoscientifically intervene into its organization. The metering system, although not a quintessential system to manage water infrastructures, had been central in managing Nairobi’s infrastructure from its early beginning. The customer metering system, and the meter device in particular, became an important organizing device. However, the historical composition of meters had 103 shown that rather than centering the infrastructure’s organization, the meter devices had helped to decenter the organizing of the infrastructure across the expanding and political urban landscape. Metered water connections had not emerged as a primary tool to technically manage the infrastructure, but to use it as a financial device, which had turned out to become a tool to politicize the infrastructure and to distribute the revenue potential of the infrastructure. The social networks that formed around the meter devices and the staff who were in charge of the devices used them to extract money and buy political favors. While it was impossible to distinguish whether the meter device was primary a political tool or a financial resource, the technoscientific intervention clearly sought to make it a central organizing tool for financing the system, but also to technically track and control the hydraulic system and to thereby connect the as yet separately treated systems of hydraulics, metering, and piping. Similarly, the piping system emerged as an interdependent system that the utility treated as a separate system. The piping system, designed and built in unity with the hydraulic system, became a matter of many agencies. Infrastructural users started to deploy their own piping materials, thereby participating in the construction of the pipe systems. What was once a hierarchical unity of pipes and hydraulics became a de-centered system of piping that grew with the desire to access the system (and available capital from powerful actors such as the World Bank, but also crowd-based capital from the people and economic actors). In this historical transformation, organizing tools such as the documentation of mapping pipes no longer applied to the informal deployment of materials, which caused a system of piping that was no longer controlled by any single actor and ontology. The technoscientific desire to formalize the pipes through demarcating the systems was a primary sign of the topographically situated composition of the infrastructure organization. 5.1.2 Topographical materiality of infrastructure organizing The topographical composition of the infrastructure has shown that the material systems of hydraulics, metering, and piping strengthened the idea that the infrastructure’s organization spatially emerged from the participation and agency of a distributed spectrum of actors and spatial capacities. The hydraulic system separated the urban space into pressure zones, which cut the city into distributed zones of the interdependent systems of hydraulics and piping. Nairobi’s southern and eastern sloped topography 104 made water pressuring relatively cost-effective, since little pumping was done. Nonetheless, the city’s unregulated growth into higher buildings and land (re)developments made pressure management a matter of locally situated and distributed performances. The tenement buildings, local district community organizations, and land developers actively intervened in learning how to cope with and manipulate pressure, for instance by learning about the pressures of the distribution pipes and by developing entire housing projects and districts in proximity to the pressurized main pipes. The metering system showed how a small mechanical device such as a meter can make the organizing of an infrastructure invisible to and incommensurable with a single organizational ontology. Even at the level of the single meter device unit, performance could vary radically. Meter devices’ performance depended significantly on their locality and the sociomaterial networks built around a meter in a particular site. A meter device not only possesses the potential of measuring the flow and informing the topographic qualities of the hydraulics, but also determined the micro-space for the encounter between users and utility. The meter reading staff had developed independent local networks around the metering devices that partly co-produced a user’s ontology of what the utility was. The quality of these associations could not be separated from how the local topography was hidden under and determined by concrete constructions and urban climate conditions. The local assemblages, which the meter device formed part of, often produced conditions that made people ignore or exploit the situation. The utility had re-organized its administrative units into smaller topographical units to make these conditions more visible to management. The piping system further showed that the topographical conditions of the infrastructure co-produced its organization. All types of materials were assembled to overcome the barriers of laying pipes through the city’s topography. The pipes no longer grew from the drawing board, but emanated from the available local experience, which was more or less adjusted to the activities of other infrastructures such as housing or sewage. The construction of undocumented pipes not only occurred in not yet developed areas in the city, but also in the midst of already well developed areas where the demand for water had increased and more or larger pipes were required. Similar infrastructural registering has been noticed in Mumbai by Lisa Björkman and Nikhil Anand, who labelled this emergent form of infrastructure organizing as 105 geographies of pressure and hydraulic citizenship (Anand, 2011; Björkman, 2014) . My findings are similar to these observations in Mumbai, which show how the historical and topographical assembling of materials forced beneficiaries to become actively involved and skilled at organizing the infrastructure. Andrew Barry has noted that the spread of new sociotechnical assemblages shaping this form and demand on the citizen is not in itself good (Barry, 2001). Similarly, Nikhil Anand argued that Mumbai’s reliance on its water users for governing their own water supply has contributed to a temporary order that always falls apart and in which beneficiaries must constantly depend on middle men – brokers who operate beyond the formal organization (Anand, 2011; Hansen & Verkaaik, 2009). For an organizational assemblage perspective, this suggests that infrastructure organizing must be seen as how the registering of multiple material systems emerge with the active participation of historically and spatially situated forces of organizing, in this case, the increasing role of (inter)active beneficiaries. The role of active beneficiaries, consumers, and citizens in contemporary organizing has often be seen as an accomplishment of modern organization. However, this form of interactivity has also been denounced as “inter-passivity” in which the user or participant has little scope for initiative but the one the organization has framed (Michel Callon, 2004). According to Andrew Barry (2001), the organization should create a space in which the beneficiaries could engage in processes of experimentation to learn how to behave as active technological citizens and consumers. My case shows that this form of required participation asks users and beneficiaries to learn to handle tools and devices and to form networks that are technologically invasive. Spaces of experimenting with technological citizenship and consumerism exist only when water specialists listen to citizens and citizens observe water specialists, as I could observe them in public stakeholder meetings. However, there were potential places, such as town hall meetings (which the utility called customer clinics) to engage in processes that partly allowed street-laboratory-like experimentation to learn and reflect about the important roles citizens play in organizing Nairobi’s water infrastructure and on the invasive impact of technology on subjects. Yet, these spaces were not consciously framed as experimental spaces, but were structured bureaucratically, even though they were experimental in practice – anything could have happened. 106 5.2 Enacting the stabilizing of technoscientific coordination The technoscientific practices of measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow enacted a stabilized – pacified, visible, and formalized – assemblage. This dynamic showed how the technosciences reproduced and thereby black-boxed a wide array of established distinctions between engineering and economic paradigms, technology and society, and bureaucracy and politics. Particularly, instead of problematizing, in practice the technosciences tamed the distinctions between the natural sciences (water engineering) and the social sciences (economic accounting); the technoscientific desire to make – non-human and human – behavior visible re-iterated beliefs in the technological control of society; and its focus on formal bureaucracy produced a policing of the people’s participation in the infrastructure’s organization. The stabilizations of these ‘traditional’ distinctions partly helped to energize the utility’s efforts to coordinate the infrastructuring multiplicity, but in practice, the emergence of specific ontologies could never be assumed to become crystallized. In the second section of each praxiography, I traced how the organizing process of the coordinating efforts of the technosciences – pacifying, making visible, and formalizing – stabilized the ontological multiplicity of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and intensified well-known, path-dependent distinctions. It needs to be shown how the emergence of technoscientific practices aims at coordinating a stabilized assemblage. By enacting the stabilizing efforts of three technoscientific practices – measuring, tracking, and demarcating leakage – I traced the ways in which the technosciences practically enacted energetic yet path-dependent distinctions of singular ontological claims that nonetheless bore the potentiality of the technosciences to demonstrate inventions as new becomings. 5.2.1 Engineering and economics The coordination of the technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management has shown that the practical efforts to measure, track, and demarcate the flow of infrastructure has intensified a set of ontological distinctions in order to stabilize the infrastructure’s emergent multiplicity. The practice of measuring leaks was particularly designed to separate the flow into physical and economic losses of the infrastructure to pacify the water flow variability. While the designed inscriptions labelled the physical flow as real flow and the economic flow as apparent flow, the 107 latter produced a much ‘stronger’ reality. Even though most of the senior water engineers had been trained in (civil) engineering, the practice of measuring leaks stabilized an economic reality of water flow. This distinction was concurrently enacted in the design, implementation, and actualization of the practices that metrologically governed the infrastructure organization. At the design level, the science of engineering constituted the practices’ protocols to govern water infrastructure through measuring leakage flux in order to develop indicators for which to improve and compare hydraulic systems. This practice had emerged in the 1980s at a time when engineering had to defend its position in governing infrastructure against the rise of industrial economics and increasing demands on the public financing of infrastructure in Europe and the U.S. Since the 1980s, both in Europe and the U.S., the discourses of engineering and economics had been in constant and fruitful exchanges about their differences (Hausman & Neufeld, 1989). The practice of water leakage and loss management can be associated with the emergence of the science of industrial engineering, which had developed, contrary to traditional engineering disciplines, a systems perspective on managing technological systems. Instead of decomposing a system into parts before understanding the whole system, in industrial engineering, one cannot understand a part without understanding the whole. The water leakage practice had by then developed so as to improve the efficiency of water systems by systematically integrating the interplays between the economics and engineering of leakage flux, a design that remained more or less the same until the 2010s. Nonetheless, during implementation, this systemic perspective, which incorporated the interplay between the civil engineering and industrial economics of water systems, became lost in the translation to Nairobi, owing to various mediators. The governance of Nairobi’s water infrastructure has always favored political reasoning at the expense of debating engineering solutions, which made the latter subject to the simplified articulation of bureaucratic policies. For instance, the rise of the practice of measuring leakage flux only became a primary indicator for governing and comparing the efficiency of Nairobi’s water utility when the accounting foregrounded its economic potentiality to politicians. Instead of an open debate about the science of managing Nairobi’s water infrastructure as an emergent system, the measuring of leakage percentages tremendously simplified the to be implemented solution. 108 The European engineering consultancy that implemented the technoscientific practice in Nairobi’s water utility had not sufficient capacity, political support, or funding to implement a systems perspective of the practice. Instead, the engineers themselves simplified the solutions, which favored the low-hanging economic fruits of the utility’s governance of the infrastructure. Instead of translating between the engineering and accounting logic in the city’s utility, the latter became the dominant logic of conceiving leakage as an economic failure of governing water flow. The intensification of the economic logic fed into a discursive change that had already began with the utility’s reforms in the 2000s as part of a commercialization of the entire sector. During the actualization of the practice, the accounting tool-driven economic logic of measuring leakage further intensified. This tool-oriented governance of the variability of flow cannot be said to be ‘bad’ in general, but was problematized by the standardized copyright-free tool of measuring leakage that had been developed to facilitate the translation of the practice for water utilities in developing countries. The water balance calculator functioned without the staff really understanding the complexity the tool’s protocols tried to emulate. In the utility, it was fitfully operated by an accountant without even basic knowledge of water engineering science. The water utility unit’s engineers were busy installing technological components, such as flow meters. A fact that re-assembled a traditional engineering logic to attend to problems of fixing parts of a system to make the whole work. The whole – the hydraulic system – remained hidden and distributed in the water balance tool’s protocols, the reports that were produced by consultancies, and the well-trained engineers of the engineering consultancy and the city’s water asset manager. 5.2.2 Technology and society The practice of measuring leakage enacted the demand for discrete spatial information about the infrastructural water flow. While distribution meters (so-called flow meters) were central for an engineering solution to track the distribution of flow as part of the management of the hydraulic system, the accountants’ customer meter device emerged as a central actor to track this flow. As outlined above, this was partly because of a translation of the practice at the expense of more durable engineering solutions and in favor of a more short-term economic logic. Another reason was that the accounting managers had partnered with software engineers to develop a new system in which the 109 customer meters could be managed differently. To the managers, it was clear that they could only manage the flow of water if they could make the calculative entanglements of the meter device visible. The flow tracking practice enacted a complex imaging of the infrastructure’s enactment of Nairobi’s technological society. It showed how the strength of digital technologies and software engineering weaves through this complex intertwining of technology and society. The meter device and the inspectors’ equipment to read the meters caused a situation in which water flow had become a key resource for the conjoint human and non-human manipulation of the system. The managers could not say what, who, and how the information about water flow was produced. Utility staff manipulated the production of information, for various reasons, while the meter devices produced unreliable information about themselves and the discrete information they were supposed to deliver. These forms of invisibility for the managers, staff, and customers were mediated by both the meter device and the meter reading device (data logger). This invisibility was systemic and was caused by the emergent systems’ heterogeneity, but it also produced and was produced by what I call the technological society of Nairobi. The utility’s managers had experimented with various structural (smaller urban units for reading meters) and bureaucratic devices (such as Excel tools) to address the invisibility produced by the meter devices. It is tempting to say that, in a highly technologized society – entangled through water infrastructure – the managers seemed to use social solutions to address an invisibility produced by the interplay between the social and the technological. For me as the analyst it was no longer possible to argue whether the social (the people of Nairobi) or the technological (unreliable meters and meter reading devices) produced the problem in the first instance. The interplay raised the need to equip the utility with a technological solution that would suit the highly distributed (if not hyper-distributed) metering system. The flow tracking practice’s enactment of this sociomaterially emerging invisibility produced a creative solution that considered the various local technological devices and systems that the local actors were familiar with. This creative resonance assembled a seamless interconnection between mobile phone technologies, digital images, GPS, a software back-end, and the familiarity with these technologies in everyday life. This 110 new meter reading system addressed the contingent and fragile relations between technology and society produced by the systems that were in place. This apparently suggests technological solutions to technological problems rather than political or economic solutions. While this statement is only partly true, there is much faith that new digital technologies can solve Nairobi’s urban and urban problems caused by public infrastructure around the world. But, on the other hand, it also shows that the complexity of technological societies and the invisibilities produced by the many interacting technological systems in place are produced by the kind of systems thinking that had been neglected in the measuring of the hydraulic system. However, the new system provided a new layer of micro-visibilities that demanded non-apolitical (hence, political) procedures to deal with these visibilities. Instead, the results showed evidence of unexpected anomalies of illegitimate behavior across the urban space as a whole that would have demanded a new political procedure on how to deal with the emergent visibility. This confirms that emergent visibility can be a valuable starting point for the evaluation of novel relations between technology, society, and politics produced by the assembling of infrastructural arrangements. 5.2.3 Space and politics The technoscientific practice of demarcating water flow in the city enacted how the utility’s efforts to organize the messy system of pipes re-produced well-established distinctions between the spatial and political organization of the city’s water infrastructure. The city’s emergent piping system clearly demonstrated how it contributed to the displacement of Nairobi’s urban society. It was no longer possible to know what and who was involved in the construction and operation of this system. The technosciences’ protocols demarcated the city into pilots (experimental sampling) with clearly technological and scientific markers. The utility’s engineering directors could have selected from a large range of areas that applied to these protocols. The staff used various economic reasons as to why a particular area was chosen such as economic potential and proximity to an important pipe, the Coca-Cola Pipe, to an influential consumer. The engineers’ reasoning and decision about the demarcated areas were central to how the technoscientific options were used to avoid the spatio-urban politics in the first place: This district, Pipeline Estate and Mukuru kwa Njenga, did not represent an ethnic 111 community that could have raised political controversy of ethnic favoring on the utility company’s board. Even though the districts’ Kamba community comprised a majority group, it was not represented in parliamentary politics. On the other hand, the district community’s ethnic composition was more diverse than others. In districts inhabited by competing ethnic groups with parliamentary representation, political changes put any infrastructural project at risk. This suggests how the city utility’s engineers used the specificities of the technosciences to help them to circumvent the spatio-urban politics that constrain administrative procedures. However, urban politics were usually the reason why infrastructural projects, such as rehabilitating or installing pipe systems, came to be in the first place. For instance, the vastly growing tenements of Eastleigh, a district dominated by a growing Somali diaspora, were able to exert political pressure to build new water and road infrastructure only when the community had an elected parliament member. In my case of the Pipeline District, more technocratic reasons caused the construction of pipes: The World Bank provided the necessary capital to the water asset manager to develop the infrastructure for the new land developments, which were driven by the Bank’s urban development funding schemes. The technoscientific intervention helped to evade political procedures. Yet, it were similar technocratic procedures which had co-produced the infrastructural messiness in the first place. Another key distinction organized the technoscientific practice. The utility had formed a technical department that was in charge of informal settlements. This cost center operated with external funding from donors and subsumed all interventions in Nairobi’s slum settlements. Accordingly, the technoscientific demarcation of the piping system was done along the lines between the informal settlement and the emerging tenement district. However, as described above, the piping and the hydraulic pressures could no longer be separated spatially between the fluid social and material entanglements of such administrative boundaries. Not only the pipes but also the people, owing to their upward mobility, crossed between these administrative boundaries. For instance, on the land of the slum, after evictions, new tenements were built, and it was unclear whether this land could be categorized as informally or formally occupied, blurring this distinction as to whether the urban space was part of a political process of unregulated urban planning and formalizing infrastructure projects. The utility was not allowed to 112 provide formal connections to unregulated housing projects. However, most of the new plot and housing developments in the Pipeline Estate did not have proper legal titles. Eventually, the technoscience reproduced the distinctions between spatial registers and urban politics, whose interaction had first co-produced the messy assemblage. Similar stabilizing efforts of the technoscience have been noticed in Mumbai by Nikhil Anand, who argued that the expertise of the technoscience to control flow is challenged by the “hidden and subterranean amalgams of physical and social relations, the technologies and politics of water infrastructures” (2015, p. 324). Anand thinks of the technosciences as the limits of traditional audit cultures of neoliberalism in the compromised democratic politics of the Southern metropolis that encourages leaky technologies of rule. According to Anand, “Leakages are often easier to leave be than to repair, seal and foreclose” (Anand, 2015, p. 325). In the case of Mumbai, this analysis is appealing, since the World Bank consultant’s proposal of flow measurements was successfully challenged by the city’s engineers owing to the fragility of almost any metrological regime, but particularly of water’s resistance to calculation and hydraulic modeling. However, in the case of Nairobi, the water audits had performed beyond the conventional political power games of an audit culture. In Mumbai, Anand could only track how the metrological practice performed in a symbolic power struggle of an audit regime. Similar to Mumbai, even though Nairobi’s utility engineers confessed that they had lost control of the infrastructure, they believed that they could manage it better than an external engineering firm. Contrary to Mumbai, in Nairobi, the technoscientific practices were enacted as performance indicators, and the engineering and accounting practices were translated by the city’s engineers. These practices not only partly stabilized the assembling of infrastructure, but also enacted several more or less problematic distinctions that energized the assemblage to act upon the types of multiplicity and the types of stability that challenged the organization. The case of Nairobi shows in particular that the technosciences had a stabilizing effect on Nairobi’s infrastructural worlds. The practices of measuring, tracking, and demarcating helped to temporarily stabilize a very unstable world that had been coproduced by the city’s emergent sociomaterial systems of the infrastructural assemblage. On the one hand, it allowed the foreign capitalists to pacify their relations with the local technocrats; new information technologies created new visibilities and 113 the urban space to be demarcated anew. All of these stabilizations unfolded some energy, the directions of which have reproduced problematic distinctions of Nairobi’s urban society: the dominance of economics over engineering, the technological governance of society, and the technopolitical rule of the spatial order. These asymmetries reminded me of the complex associations between disciplinary forms of knowing in the concrete complexity of infrastructural heterogeneity. For an organizational assemblage perspective, Annemarie Mol’s (2002) understanding of the coordination of multiplicity through technoscientific practices is appealing to generalize the infrastructural flow of relations. Mol argued that there is an infinite number of pragmatic ways in which relations are coordinated in order to make a system work. Instead of subsuming worlds, the technosciences add worlds together and calibrate multiple worlds. The technoscientific coordination of infrastructural multiplicity reproduces path-dependent distinctions between the social and natural sciences, technology and society, and space and politics. The costs of stabilizing the assemblages need to be weighted against the energies released by regenerating established differences and paradigms. By this I mean that the technosciences will be useful to those already in a privileged knowledge position who can exploit the differences to their benefit. According to Mol, the technosciences coordinate by adding and calibrating between different infrastructural worlds which requires skill and embodied capacities. These capacities require a more relational understanding of the aforementioned and technoscientifically enacted distinctions. There is a normative force in the space of relations that the technosciences potentialize, from the technological to the political. Yet, there are no clear directions in the outcomes produced by adding up and calibrating infrastructural multiplicity. Thus, the capacity to act differently is not inherent to the technosciences, but what they do to infrastructure worlds is that they put different demands on humans to use them inventively. 5.3 Demonstrating the inventive capacities of stabilized worlds Clearly, it was difficult to decide for a common denominator for all these different developments – infrastructural multiplicity and technoscientifically stabilized distinctions – but, in the ontic-fictional sections of the praxiographies, I argued that what they signify is a transformation of the entangled bodies, technologies, and 114 scientific knowing that demonstrate the re-inventive capacities that depend on which version of these technoscientifically coordinated and infrastructural worlds is enacted. The minutiae performativity of infrastructural moments, technoscientific micro-worlds, contributed to the situated yet distributed analysis of the technosciences as rather mundane standard organizing tools of numbering, visual evidence, and bureaucratic utility policies of formalized connections. This dynamic showed that the technosciences’ mania for over-determined and reproducible systems produces gaps that create moments to improve practice. These moments do not follow a normative or a rational logic, but one that alters the efficacy of organizing. The inventive capacities of these technoscientific gaps steered attention to the multiplicity of infrastructural micro-worlds that bore the potential to anticipate the distributed practical ontologies. The organizing capacity of the imaginative anticipation of what will show up when and where constitutes the central power over and of what links the infrastructural ordering and the technoscientific coordination of organizational assemblages. In the ficto-postcolonial sections of each praxiography, I traced how the various types of infrastructural multiplicity – fluidity, invisibility, and messiness – and types of technoscientific stabilizations – pacification, visibility, and formalization – colluded in the micro-worlds of the bodies of the people who inhabit these worlds, including my body as narrator. My own involvement in these moments not only increased the epistemic flourishing of these ecologies of encounters, but contributed to the ways we can re-imagine the inventive capacities of which version of numbers, visualization, and bureaucratic formality we enact. That the technosciences align with a singular, pacified version of the assemblages was no longer true. By creatively re-imagining how the technosciences lead to very practical demonstrations of increased potentiality, I traced the ways in which the technosciences, in alliance with the analyst, can contribute to a demonstration of epistemic expressions and a harnessing of the marginal potentiality of transforming organizational assemblages. To speak of ontological politics or ontological politics of organizing may be too grandiose; instead, one can speak of an imaginative agency, one that is partly human by creatively foregrounding the technologized unconsciousness produced by distributed ontologies that go beyond the limits of the ontologies of ourselves or a single ontology of organizing. This form of inventive capacity is about creating partial and temporary connections in worlds 115 assembled by various types of stabilized multiplicity. This form of agency – to open up the management of technoscientifically coordinated micro-worlds – is not intentional nor technoscientifically determined, but was experimental, and its potentialities are a matter of harnessing efficacy to alter the relations between bodies, technologies, and the sciences. 5.3.1 Numbering I suggest that the technosciences, together with the imaginative capacities of the bodies of people, offer demonstrations about the worlds in which we live and that surround us. In moments of minutiae performativity of the technosciences, numbers become standard organization tools and technologies. When I let the worlds of a French development professional collide with that of a utility engineer, I realized that measuring leakage, instead of being a tool to govern from a distance, was potentially inventive as a standard organizing technology of numbering. The engineering staff were required to produce numbers about the water flow in a particular district that would enable the utility to connect to the world of international finance. However, to produce these numbers, the staff would have been required to include the various participatory forces that had emerged in the assembling of the infrastructure. This appeared to be an impossible task, given the bureaucratically organized technologies for producing these numbers. To me, the exercise to calculate the water flow and accompanying accounting numbers was not a difficult task. I did not feel constrained by the utility’s accounting system and the consultant’s standardized measuring tool; I also did not feel constrained by the engineers’ domain of being in charge for measuring water flow and the accountants’ domain of producing financial numbers. I added together the physical and commercial flow of water in my numbering to produce numbers for both physical and commercial flow. This imaginative numbering of measuring the flow incorporated a differently type of infrastructure multiplicity instead of a bureaucratic one. The incommensurability between the bureaucratic worlds of the international finance professional and that of the utility’s staff remained incommensurable; yet, numbers could have bridged them. Although it would be speculative (and outside my scope here) to argue that such a connection would have allowed the French to further finance the implementation of the 116 technoscientific intervention, it may have allowed the utility unit to become more powerful in shaping the infrastructure’s organization. But it is less speculative to argue that a number which would have more precisely covered the potential revenues of the de facto water flow in the particular district may have altered the negotiation between the utility and local water operators. An inventive – and more reflexive - use of numbers could have demonstrated that the potential revenues would be sufficient to share with the actors who participated in the emergence of the infrastructure system. The imaginative capacity of numbers may sound radical, but could have established different relationships with local operators as substantial actors who made the infrastructure work. This argument is not about precision, or the cultural differences about precision; I suggest that more articulate and discrete numbers would do wonders to help the people to make more connections, increase agency, instead of narrowing associations by shutting up and making distinctions via numbers. These numbers would consider the multiplicity of infrastructural participation and a less bureaucratic and singularized demonstration of these numbers (not only in reports), but in sites and moments of public demonstration (such as town hall meetings). On the other hand, my intervention in the field – by producing numbers differently and articulating how I was producing them – had co-produced real effects on a utility report and a town hall meeting. The department’s engineer was already stressed, since he could no longer ignore the unit’s problem of producing a report about the district’s realities, which would align with the French agency’s funding criteria. My numbering had reiterated his affective response; like he had said, his accountants would not be able to work with the numbers in a different way, like I did. Further, the product of my numbering was mobilized during the town hall meeting, but with potentially disconnecting results. Instead of providing a participatory demonstration of the production of these numbers to the district’s spokespersons, the acting utility staff only presented the (final outcome) number of how much revenue the utility loses. This number co-produced the local operators’ response in the demand, or rather offer, to the utility to share their revenues with the local operators. I suggest that the presence of this number was contingent. Its circulation produced the hope of realizing an association between local operator and utility; on the other hand, it actualized the disconnection, since the utility forced the local operator to give up his 117 business. This contingent effect of present potentiality and actualization intensified the incommensurability between the worlds of the operator and the utility, instead of creating a novel relation and opening up the politics of who is responsible and who is supposed to receive which economic share of the operation of the infrastructure. 5.3.2 Visualization When I let the world of a utility’s manager at headquarters collide with that of a regional coordinator, I realized that tracking water flow, instead of being a tool to manage invisibility of the metering system, was potentially inventive as a standard organizing technology for visualizing the social. It was not possible for the manager or the staff coordinator to articulate one discrete meter device and reading practice, because no single reality was able to aggregate the multiplicity generated by the metering devices’ invisible operations in the urban space. The device’s type of invisibility had co-created the proliferations of relations and interactions between the technology, utility staff, and water users. This proliferation particularly affected the people who were charged with knowing how to coordinate these relations. The implementation of the technical solution of tracking the meter devices with GPS images appeared as a technological solution that would and actually did disentangle these highly political relations. The disentangling of relations had the potential to recognize these relations and to transform them. In this sense, the combination of new information technologies and hard-wired metering devices appeared to be inventive via technological force. Some of these associations between meter reading staff and Nairobi’s water users, mediated by the metering devices, appeared to be potentially easily transformed once a meter device could be made visible. Once the meter device was visible on the manager’s and the coordinator’s screens, only one way remained to deal with this micro-visibility: keep tracking its variety of performances. But this new type of visibility not only produced new visibilities for the manager and the coordinator, it also produced a surprising range of aggregated micro-anomalies, which could have raised the issue that, across all categories of water users, there was continuous non-payment and disregard for the metering devices. Thus, the tracking of flow visualized the social in a potentially new way, which nevertheless – and 118 unfortunately – was not further discussed. As a way of technologically foregrounding the culture of non-payment in Nairobi, which everyone was aware of, since many study participants (poor or rich) did not pay their water bills, it potentially failed to re-invent the sociomaterially produced associations between the people of Nairobi and their coproduction of an unstable (what they call unreliable) public service. Yet, the obvious risk of technological solutions to transform the worlds in which the people of Nairobi prefer to pay everything else before they pay for water also bears the potential to demonstrate the ambiguity of holding the government accountable to deliver a reliable public service while disrupting it at the same time. In this view, the technosciences demonstrated various options about how to enact which version of visualizing the social. But, together with the practice of demarcating leakage, they had energized the enactment of separating a distinct group of water users, which the people perceived as non-payers, poor people, or the emerging lower middle class. Yet, the emerging anomalies would have also presented lines in which it could have been questioned why – across all social classes, income groups, government, and private organizations – people exploit the conditions produced by the metering system’s invisibility. Clearly, this visualization of the sociomaterial entanglements of the meter devices, meter reading staff, and water users helped to transform the worlds of the manager and coordinator, who sought its transformation. But it remained unclear how this technoscientific intervention would have incorporated a solution to its effects on meter reading staff and water users whose associations may have not been cut that easily. Would the staff be punished, fired, or confronted with the hazards of Nairobi’s urban environments that had caused these relations in the first place (as in the case of the anxiety of the meter reading inspectors to go out into the field to read meters)? Yet, the technoscience did not demand that the utility’s engineers and managers talk to politicians and institutional spokespersons about the anomalies their water meter devices displayed, in contrast to their water bills. 119 5.3.3 Bureaucracy When I let the world of a local operator of pipes collide with that of a water user, I realized that the practice of demarcating leakage was potentially inventive as a standard organizing technology of urban bureaucracy. The demarcation of the particular urban area of the tenement district into a technoscientific zone of hydraulic pressures and interconnected pipes demonstrated the unregulated character of its bureaucratic organization. The technosciences’ attempt to formalize the infrastructure would potentially prove that the formal/informal nexus is hard to maintain in practice by the people. It was no longer clear whether the local operator had a formal relationship with the city’s water utility, which made him enter and learn the business of constructing and operating a local pipe system. Instead of cutting connections through a distinction of legitimate and illegitimate materials, the operator would have been in a (spatial) position to procure the improvement of the local infrastructure system. The bureaucratic procedures of the utility’s connection policies offered only individual household and water kiosk connections. The regulatory scheme of water kiosks, which had already acknowledged the desire and benefits to operate networks locally, could have been more inventive if the business model and governance would acknowledge the influence of local middle men, such as the local operator. Standard bureaucratic procedures cut off such social organization, usually under the label of the shadow, grey, or illegal economy, even though its emergence goes hand in hand with bureaucratic procedures. As seen above, the emergence of a social organization such as the one that the local operator formed part of was co-produced by historical and material forces which, similarly, were not controllable or governable. While he and his family strived for the legitimacy of his pipe business, the World Bank, water asset manager, and housing investors have all operated in similar complex and unregulated arenas that produced this assemblage. And one does not need to speculate or imagine that these powerful actors don’t face policing of their actions. Thus, the inventiveness demonstrated by the technosciences was that it would be able to show that the material configuration of technologies often cuts across regulatory regimes that would require more adaptive bureaucratic procedures to adjust to local contingencies. 120 It was no longer possible to separate the operator and user. In this specific case, the user is part of the family of the local operator. She, the user, experienced both the benefits of being part of the local organizing of pipes and the disadvantages of being a user who needs to constantly negotiate access to this network. Her family benefited from the messy emergence of the infrastructure, but was also threatened by continuously being afraid of being cut off and sent back to where they came from (descending socioeconomic class and giving up concrete material life). A similar inventiveness of technoscientific demonstrations (here of numbering, visualization, and bureaucracy) has been noticed by Anand, who argues that the technoscientific design of infrastructure is constrained by the people’s and engineers’ ignorance of concrete infrastructural arrangements. My findings are similar to Anand’s observation that people try to actively ignore and circumvent the multiplicity of the assembling of infrastructure. However, I continued my analysis where Anand stopped his. While I highlighted the analyst’s role in this process of demonstration, I presented the technosciences as demonstrations, while Anand was silent on his possibility to frame the technoscientific demonstration. Anand would not have been able to capture the engineers’ ignorance if the technosciences would have shown him his way as an analyst. Thus, Anand suggests that the technopolitics of intervention failed in Mumbai or that “water exceeds the technopolitical systems that govern it” (Anand, 2011, p. 559). Although my analysis is in line with Anand’s point, I suggest a more reflexive stance in which the analyst participates in the sociomaterial assemblages’ imagination and embodied capacities of re-invention. While in Mumbai the engineers made the infrastructure predictable by ignoring the multiple claims made by leaks and flows of the city’s infrastructure, in Nairobi, my own coordination of the narrative sought to go beyond this sense-making of individual ontologies and to imagine the collectively distributed ontologies. Going beyond the limits of our own ontologies, our impotentiality is what makes an assemblage human (cf. Agamben, 2000). For an organizational assemblage perspective, I suggest that organizing must be seen as how infrastructural and technoscientifically co-produced political ontologies of organizing demonstrate the inventiveness of our intellectual imaginations across these worldings – world-making capacities of assemblages. Organizational assemblages are representations of the tools and methods through which they are conceptualized and 121 brought into our consciousness; thus, one should always go beyond the limits of the method and the tool to imagine what else it can potentially demonstrate. The transformation of organizational assemblages and its directions, thus are enabled, tinkered with, etc., not only through materializing multiplicity and technoscientific stabilizations, but through our imaginative capacities to harness the range of capacities that can or could be actualized. The technosciences offer tools and technologies of organizing – such as numbering, visualization, or formalization – that can always be reimagined and re-invented, and it is a political and ethical task to make a case for them to go beyond essentializing categories of what the organization is and what organizing is (such as leaky and ignorant), but rather to continue asking about what the organization and organizing could be (otherwise)? How does the organizational assemblage enable us to imagine it differently? 5.4 Summary In this chapter, I have discussed my performative thick description of Nairobi’s water infrastructure, which I presented in the empirical chapter as three separate praxiographic building blocks. Through an analytical discussion of the praxiographies’ synchronic emplotment, I have further exploited variation between these three praxiographic studies to address the central idea’s solidity: infrastructures are organized in an iterative dynamic that recursively links multiplicit assembling and technoscientific stabilizations. I have used documented comparison cases of infrastructure assemblage studies to strengthen the bracketing of the identified recursive process of organizing infrastructural assemblages: (1) registering the sociomaterial assembling of emergent systems, (2) enacting the stabilizing efforts of technoscientific coordination, and (3) demonstrating the re-inventive capacities of the shared ontic imaginations of infrastructural worlds-in-the-making. The case of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and a water utility’s engagement with three practices of water leakage and loss management – measuring, tracking, and demarcating leakage – in Nairobi helped me to facilitate theory-building about the organizing process that links the sociomaterial assembling of infrastructure to technoscientific coordination and re-inventive imaginative capacities, and organizational assemblages in general. I have presented a rare conceptual and empirical organizational study – a 122 performative thick description enacted through three praxiographic studies – that examined the recursive processes and performative practices that link sociomaterial assembling and technoscientific intervention – and that examined an infrastructure as organizational assemblage. Thus, this study’s contribution consists of having documented how the organizing of infrastructure is sociomaterially assembled and enacted in technoscientific practices. I found that the sociomaterial assembling of Nairobi’s water infrastructure co-created the multiple worlds in which its organizing took place (Jensen, 2016). The water specialists’ and the utility’s enactment of the technosciences’ concern – the fabrication of a stabilized assemblage – articulated a broad range of well-established categories and distinctions (Michel Callon, 2004). The ‘demonstration’ effects associated with the technoscientific stabilizations rendered the infrastructure organization analyzable and open to manage its potentially inventive capacities and articulate new political issues (Barry, 2001; Thrift, 2006). Thus, the technosciences played a key coordination role not only in stabilizing the infrastructure’s multiplicit assembling, but also demonstrated – by reflexively performing possibilities – that the emergent assemblage could always be (at least partly) managed differently (Kenney, 2015; Verran, 2001). This infrastructural assembling and technoscientific coordination produced an understanding for organizing assemblages in a recursive dynamic that links the sociomaterial emergence of multiplicity, the stabilizing efforts of technoscientific coordination, and the nonrepresentational demonstration of not definite and stable identities, but potential imagination that emerges with and in the process of organizing assemblages (cf. Beyes & Steyaert, 2011; Thrift, 2008). What the analysis has articulated as a core insight is that the assembling of infrastructure and the inventive capacities of the technosciences exceed a stable, unified political ontology of organizing and an organization’s power of control (Jensen, 2016). The moments and places where the overflows – novel relations – of infrastructure organizing and the technosciences’ inventiveness can be imagined, will be of experimental quality, hardly representational in a positivist sense, across the multiple worlds in which the organizing of an assemblage is achieved (Verran, 2001). The capacity of anticipating what will show up where and when in an assemblage constitutes the power over and of infrastructural organizing and organizational assemblages (Thrift, 2004). 123 6 Conclusion It took me more than four years to fully tune into Nairobi and embrace the disorder through which Nairobi’s water infrastructure is organized and to acknowledge that, to learn from an orphaned intellectual place such as an African city like Nairobi, any conceptual intervention is political (cf. Jane I Guyer, 2007; Verran, 2007). Over the past four years, I have embarked on a wide range of fieldwork and conceptual (ad)ventures to better understand the organizing of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and what we can learn methodologically, politically, and theoretically from such a study. I started this thesis with an ethnographic picture in which I framed a small section of Nairobi’s water infrastructure at the intersection of the slum of Mukuru kwa Njenga and the tenement district of Pipeline Estate. Yet, even though I could not experience the scene’s multiplicity and materiality while I was in the field, this photo, combined with the theoretical resources of ‘infrastructure assemblage’ thinking, made me fully embrace the disorder, chaos, mixtures, and hybridity through which Nairobi’s water infrastructure is organized, and what I experienced and often suffered through in the field. I stopped suffering and being disconcerted when the disorder of infrastructure organizing became normal to me. My study of the organizing of Nairobi’s water infrastructure provides a unique empirical contribution of this performative process of reflexive disconcertment as an enactment of the iterability between the limits of ethnographic immersion and empirical investigation, the conceptual sense-making of studying truth and reality as multiple, incommensurable worlds-in-the-making, and the liberation of creative non-fictional writing and the production of shared imagination. This conclusion is structured as follows. In the first section, I re-capture the development of the study’s research framework. Second, I discuss two particular contributions of my study to the anthropology of science and technology and organizational research on the phenomenon of a world that is increasingly made up of infrastructures and the conceptualization of infrastructure thinking. Third, I re-structure my contribution to make three general points in social theory – one procedural, one political, and one theoretical. 124 6.1 Research framework In this section, I present how my research framework evolved during my four-year case study of Nairobi’s water infrastructure. Based on eight months of fieldwork between the city water utility’s headquarters’ specialized Non-revenue Water Unit, the utility company’s six field offices, a tenement estate redevelopment project in Eastern Nairobi, and Kenya’s national and international ‘orchestra of water specialists”, I presented one vignette so as to introduce the reader to the study’s sites and Nairobi’s imbroglio of water loss. To introduce the reader to the study method’s postcolonial and feminist accountability, I referred to an ethnographic moment that fleshed out the human sensibilities required to learn not only the language but also the ambience of Nairobi’s urban water infrastructure, which were necessary for me to understand the multiplicity and materiality of the assembling of water infrastructure within the urban arena of Nairobi. In the next step, I presented a ficto-postcolonial account – a creative account that produces an epistemic flourishing of worlds-in-the-making based on assembling non-fictitious stories – to embark on the inconceivable attempt of my study participants to manage the urban water infrastructure’s (d)evolution and divergence. I argued that these two descriptive accounts – my personal reflection about a field photograph and a utility worker’s struggle to produce situational fixity – were produced and coordinated by the technoscientifically designed intervention of water leakage and loss management practices. These observations led me to the assumption that the ways we conceive of the organizing of infrastructure requires one to continuously wrestle with the conceptual and empirical interplay between technoscientific coordination and ontological multiplicity, which the organizing of infrastructural assemblages simultaneously demands. I then presented my conceptual and empirical research question: How do technoscientific practices potentialize the organizing of socio-material such as an urban water infrastructure? Empirically, I explored this assemblage perspective on the organization of infrastructure and the sociomaterial organizing of techno-organizational phenomena by asking how Nairobi’s water infrastructure materially and practically assembles the city water utility’s enactments of the technoscientific intervention of water leakage and loss management. In the theoretical chapter, I proposed a practical ontology framework for studying how technoscientific practices coordinate, in pragmatic and imaginary ways, the organizing 125 of infrastructural worlds. I provided three conceptual frames – theoretical resources – that linked the technosciences with infrastructure thinking to better understand how infrastructural assemblages are organized. These assemblage thinking-inspired frames conceptualized the organizing of infrastructure, first, as emergent systems – such as the hydraulic, metering, and piping systems of Nairobi’s water infrastructure – that materially and practically assemble a disparate range of non-human and human actors beyond any single ontology into a multitude of ontologies (Jensen & Morita, 2015; Larkin, 2013; Stewart, 2014); second, as technoscientific intervention – such as the practice of water leakage and loss management – through which realities are coordinated and stabilized (Barry, 2001, 2006; Michel Callon, 2004); third, as reinventive imaginations – distributed across the sociomaterial enactments of water specialists, infrastructure workers and myself, the analyst – through which the technosciences unsettle as organizing tools the designed stabilizations (Kenney, 2015; Strathern, 2005[1991]; Thrift, 2004; Verran, 1998). These three frames helped me to analytically frame the development of the evolution of my theoretical research question: How do technoscientific practices potentialize the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages? In light of these three conceptual frames, I developed three analytical research questions that allowed me to conceptualize the experimental ontological dynamic of infrastructure organizing in a recursive and iterable process that links the material emergence of ontological multiplicity, technoscientific coordination and stabilization, and the creativity of human actors (including the analyst) to imagine the infinite possibilities through which infrastructural assemblages emerge. These three questions guided my practice and process analysis: • How do an infrastructure’s emergent material systems co-create the multiplicit worlds of organizing it? • How do technoscientific practices coordinate the stabilization of this infrastructural multiplicity? • How, in these stabilized moments, do technoscientific practices potentialize the imaginative capacities that re-invent infrastructural ontologies? 126 In the methodological chapter, I laid out the fundamental message of STS’s take on actor-network-theory and the postcolonial and feminist understanding in STS that constituted the theory of knowledge of my praxiographic ethnography of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and water leakage and loss management. I deployed a combination of an anthropologically inspired multi-sited ethnography and actor-network-theory to collect and manufacture the field material. I enacted the collection of my field material in the description of two field episodes as well as my emergent diplomatic skills and my affiliation with a local business school to manage my field access across the spaces, networks, and knowledge flows between water specialists, the city water utility’s engineers and accountants, and the water flow along the infrastructure from production, distribution, to consumption. I deployed a logic of incremental discovery and analytical abduction to re-assemble my large corpus of interviews, photos, field notes, and documents into a thick description that provided a flattened and symmetrical account of the relations of my performative description of infrastructure assembling and organizing. In the final step, I laid out my performative process analysis of this thick description to separate it into three praxiographic studies of the technoscientific practices of measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage, which followed a synchronic emplotment of my three analytical questions developed in the theoretical chapter. The empirical chapter, the core of my thesis, presented the case of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and the technoscientific intervention of water leakage and loss management as three separate yet connected praxiographic studies through their synchronic emplotment. Through each study, I showed how Nairobi’s water infrastructure assembled a particular type of multiplicity, how three technoscientifically designed practices coordinated this multiplicity into partially stable assemblages, and how the ontological transformations of the technoscientific intervention unsettled the assemblage’s partially achieved stabilizations. In the first study, Nairobi’s hydraulic system of water flow and pressure zones co-produced the fluid qualities of its water infrastructure. The practice of measuring leakage through a water accounting device coordinated the hydraulics’ fluidity into a pacified, measurable assemblage. The pacified hydraulics emerged with and in the process of how the measuring practice assembled the incommensurable, yet through the technoscientific intervention partially connected, worlds of a development finance officer and a city utility engineer. In the 127 second study, Nairobi’s water metering system of domestic flow meters co-produced the invisible qualities of the water infrastructure. The practice of tracking leakage though a GPS tracking system of meters coordinated the metering system’s invisibility into a visible, tracked assemblage. The visible meter system emerged with and in the process of how the tracking practice assembled the incommensurable yet partially connected worlds of a city utility manager and a meter inspector. In the third study, Nairobi’s system of pipes co-produced the messy qualities of its water infrastructure. The practice of demarcating leakage through mapping urban areas coordinated the pipes’ messiness into a formalized, demarcated assemblage. The formalized pipes emerged with and in the process of how the demarcation practice assembled the incommensurable yet connected worlds of a local pipe operator and a water user. Each of the three praxiographic studies of measuring, tracking, and demarcating untangled the recursive ontological dynamic between types of multiplicity and stabilizing of Nairobi’s water infrastructure and the distributed ontologies among those most affected by these transformations. The discussion chapter explored variation and exploited counterfactuals between the three separate praxiographic studies and with other documented assemblage studies about urban water infrastructure. First, the discussion showed how the registering of the historical and topographical materiality of emergent systems reveals an infrastructure’s participatory organizing of human and non-human actors. Second, I discussed how the technoscientific coordination reproduced traditional distinctions between engineering and social sciences, technology and society, and politics and space. Third, I discussed how the technosciences demonstrated the inventive capacities of the standard organizing tools of numbering, visualization, and bureaucracy. This comparative discussion of the empirical results deepened the analysis and further generalized the relations between emergent systems, technoscientific coordination, and distributed ontological transformations. 6.2 Contributions to research on infrastructure assembling Anthropologists and STS researchers conceived of infrastructure as ontological experiments; as an outcome of the interplay between the intentions of design and the unpredictability arising from the complex and often overlooked participation and interactivity of especially a motley crew of non-human actors (Jensen and Morita, 2015). 128 My study provides an empirical account of how to continuously wrestle conceptually with the interplays between a technoscientifically designed intervention and the recursive ontological multiplicity of infrastructure, which the infrastructural organizing of sociomaterial assemblages simultaneously demands. Yet, my research has shown that the ontological experimentation of infrastructure unfolds in a recursive process between various types of stabilizing multiplicity, in contrast to one type of singularity against the multiple that emerge within the imaginary inventiveness of the distributed ontologies across human actors, including the analyst. This gives concrete meaning and an in-depth empirical case to attempts to combine assemblage thinking and actornetwork-theory as pulling together the forces and politics that assemble multiplicity and stabilize networks (Müller & Schurr, 2016). My study emphasizes the conceptual and empirical strength of the infrastructure perspective to combine these two sets of process philosophies to study the work of stabilizing assemblages in a recursive dynamic as a sociomaterial process mediated by the (im)material affect – imaginary capacities – of interacting human bodies. Concerning my proposition about the recursive qualities of an infrastructure’s ontological multiplicity, such imaginary capacities not only emanate from the concrete material arrangements of infrastructure (Jensen, 2016), yet they are also not purely symbolic and conceptual fantasies of designers, operators, and users (Larkin, 2013), but emerge as part of the process of producing the situational fixity of infrastructural worlds-in-the-making. A second contribution concerns the assemblage efforts to radically decenter the infrastructure and the work of John Law’s notion of heterogeneous engineering (Jensen, 2016; Law, 2002), which stands in opposition to an ethnomethodological study of infrastructure work. My focus on the work of the technosciences as not only capturing and containing differences, but potentializing new entanglements, went beyond an ethnomethodological interest in the agency of creative human capacities. According to Janet Vertesi (2014), the seamful spaces of infrastructure provide analytical opportunities for studying agency when infrastructural work fails to interweave an infrastructure’s multiple arrangements. Rather than over-emphasizing the blockages of incompatible practices and device ecologies, seamful spaces of infrastructure show how infrastructural work artfully aligns infrastructural multiplicity. Vertesi argues that these spaces demonstrate the effortfulness of producing centrality amidst complexity. Certainly, infrastructure both enables and constrains infrastructure participants’ actions. 129 But if action is infrastructured, and infrastructure is multiple, then the challenge is not only to develop an ethnomethodological vocabulary that describes how humans cope with infrastructural heterogeneity, but at the same time places our analytical focus on the shared ontic imaginations that go beyond the individual ontologies of creative actors and their practices at the local level as they encounter and manipulate so many infrastructures in deployment (Vertesi, 2014, pp. 267-268). Instead, an infrastructure’s ontological multiplicity means that ontology is not only situated in action, but is distributed across the heterogeneous elements that make up an event. According to an infrastructure’s ontological multiplicity, “This is why no actor has privileged access to ontology, even to his, her, or its own” (C. Gad, et al., 2015, p. 81). My study provided a more symmetrical understanding of Vertesi’s analytical vocabulary of seamful work. By this I mean that Vertesi’s ethnomethedological claim of situated action in seamful spaces co-produces a politics of ontological and epistemic commitments of where and when seamful, or leaky, spaces show up. The qualities of technoscientific coordination and imagination – i.e. practices that grasp and imagine the aliveness of things as they leak (Ingold, 2010, 2012) – enact the multiple and fleeting alignments of the heterogeneous work that organizes the assembling of infrastructure. If our commitment to multiplicity in assemblage thinking is not to be eroded, the emergence of an infrastructure must allow for a symmetrical stance with the technoscientific intervention as capturing realities and as rendering analyzable the emergence of new political issues (Barry, 2001). Verran’s postcolonial enactment of technoscientific worlds-in-the-making is sensitive to what Vertesi calls the production of shared experiences of seamlessness despite an infrastructure’s colluding discontinuities (Kenney, 2015; Vertesi, 2014).29 Verran’s clunky practice lens helped me to enact the locally situated and distributed infrastructure work (and ontologies) differently as the actors struggled not only in leaky spaces but across the leaky worlds of organizing produced by infrastructure assembling. 29 Vertesi (2014, p. 281) calls for a feminist STS approach to study multi-infrastructural spaces in order to discover how and where such networks are cut, where and how the edges are redrawn, which agencies are said to matter, and which boundaries are produced. 130 6.3 Contributions to organizational research My study also extends work on the impacts of organizational research in technological societies, in which technoscientific designs and interventions are a political conduit for the cross-contamination of the relations between the organization of markets, the management of companies, the roles of engineers, and the performance of technology (Barry, 2001, 2002). Many techno-organizational researchers have focused on the distinct spheres between technology and organization, such as how robots materially enact distributed knowledge work and coordination (Beane & Orlikowski, 2015). Yet technologies and material objects are much less coordinators between distinct boundaries but sociomaterial enactments and political performances of materially inscribed theories of the social (Alcadipani & Hassard, 2010; Latour, 2005). My study contributes to the increasing engagement of organization theorists with STS and actornetwork-theory to conceive of the organizing of technologies and material objects as experimental ontologies (Johansson & Metzger, 2016) and political performances of which world(s) we want to see performed through the organizing of material enactments (Roscoe & Chillas, 2014). The study suggests a recursive link between these two theoretical arguments of organizing sociomateriality. The use of actor-network-theory and the performativity thesis in organizational and market research has over-identified the concrete-contingent sociomaterial networks and (overtly economic) theories that perform markets and organizations at the expense of how these networks are assembled through abstract capitalist or technoscientific processes (Roberts, 2012). Yet, my research suggests, drawing on a postcolonial and feminist understanding in STS, that writing about organizational and market phenomena functions as a narrative practice of the myriad possibilities for actualizing these virtual forms of social transformation (Prasad, 2016). Assemblage thinking and the critical performativity thesis give concrete meaning to not only repetitively enact the instrumental performativity of techno-organizational phenomena, but to experiment with the infinite possibilities – alternative trajectories towards the future – of the multiple worlds our study participants and we as analysts share and how we can imagine and want to see them performed differently in coproducing and manufacturing – when writing – the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages (Johansson & Metzger, 2016). A second contribution concerns the translation of the recent turn to infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities for organizational research (Anand, et al., 2017; Blok, 131 Nakazora, & Winthereik, 2016; Harvey, et al., 2017b; Howe, et al., 2015). The forthcoming body of anthropological and STS compendiums on infrastructure will hopefully affect the type of organizational research that is interested in the analytical entry point on materiality and in organizing as worlds-in-the-making. The turn to infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities is neatly connected to the ontological turn in anthropology (Boellstorff, 2016; C. Gad, et al., 2015) and STS (Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013, 2015). One of the many promises of infrastructure thinking is the conceptual-empirical proliferation, divergence, and variance that makes them productively entangle diverse phenomenon with the empirical philosophies of anthropology and STS (Harvey, Jensen, & Morita, 2017a). My study provides a rare, if not the first, attempt to deploy the strength of an infrastructure’s continuous variation between the conceptual and the empirical in an organizational research case. My case study suggests a mode of infrastructural organizing that emphasizes on the recursive approach of relations between the making of infrastructure and the shaping of society, as well as the recursive emergence of organizational ontologies and politics which offers an image of “relations that are a priori underdetermined and thus subject to experimentation” and imagination (Boellstorff, 2016; Harvey, et al., 2017a, p. 20). My research on organizing ‘infrastructure assemblages’, or infrastructure organizing, offers an image of the recursive movements of organizing in which the emergent material form of infrastructure – not distinct technologies – generate effects on organizing and organization that, in turn, re-shape the emergence of the organizing of sociomaterial assemblages. 6.4 Selling hope for the business of infrastructure The organizational analysis of ‘infrastructure assembling’ lies somewhere between the ontological turn in the anthropology of science and technology and the politics of reimaging the stories that perform technoscientific worlds. On the one hand, it implies the need for an analysis - of the ontological dynamic of a particular infrastructure arrangement - that enacts infrastructure recursively through a repertoire of confidence and doubt; of the singular and multiplicit. On the other hand, it implies attention to the ways in which a researcher participates through her storytelling efforts to rationalize and improve infrastructural worlds-in-the-making. In this study, I have outlined how these two arguments are indissolubly entangled with each other by the ways Nairobi’s 132 water infrastructure weaves through the city’s bureaucratic institutions, its complex society, and its urban topography. In following Nigel Thrift’s (Thrift, 2006) conceptual analysis of the re-inventive capacities of capitalist inventions, I conclude with three points to capture the type of social theory that emanates from my study of the organization of Nairobi’s water infrastructure – one procedural, one political, and one theoretical. According to Thrift, while the procedural point has been made many times, it bears repeating. In the new worlds of capitalism, there is a bitter disjuncture between an impoverished periphery where anarchy often reigns and a powerful accumulative force of companies which, and this is the main point, are often involved in both worlds. By following Nairobi’s water infrastructure across the traditional institutional, social, or spatial categories has shown how the luxurious and mobile worlds of international finance and technology are indissolubly linked to what appears to be an anarchic organization of the city – of criminal cartels and corrupt regulatory regimes. The same engineers who participated in the design of a very fragile infrastructure are making a business out of solving the problems that their designs have caused local organizational forms to take over their work in quite different ways than they had, if at all, imagined. On the one hand, this raised my concern to re-imagine the ways in which these formal and informal forms of organizing are conceived in the search to improve these rationalized distinctions. I deployed a repertoire of doubt throughout my study to make these distinctions remain in the background as long as possible. Yet, I have not replaced these doubts with a managerial logic of confidence, but instead deployed a repertoire of confidence that would allow for the re-imagination of how technoscientific designs and local forms of organizing infrastructure come into being. My key point, similar to Thrift, is that we must pay attention and raise flags in accounts that argue about the distinct spheres of organizing in which the one is formal and glorified and the other is informal and condemned. This is not an ethical point. If we wish to understand the organizing of infrastructural assemblages, we cannot neglect the entanglements of forms of organizing in multiple worlds that make them partially emerge and survive. And then there is Thrift’s political point. Concerning a capitalist description, there is another side to the technoscientific depiction of the world that is not about what it wishes simply comes into existence. Even though the entanglement of science and technology is a powerful force, it is often a political toy without conceiving this force 133 as an important democratic agent. Technoscientific developments are black-boxed in the engineers’ proposals without considerable investments in disentangling them. My point is that the technosciences, by operating in the back of political action, are a political force, but one without a clear mandate. In parliament, so to speak, the technosciences need a much better – a more pluralistic – spokesperson than only the engineering sciences. This suggestion does not necessarily mean that we must doubt the engineering sciences; it means, first, that we must raise our demands about their capabilities and, second, that we must raise our confidence in others (e.g. the social sciences) to be able to speak on behalf of the technosciences in order to improve representation within political controversy. My second political point concerns the inventiveness of the technosciences by raising their potentiality of producing more open-ended and less predictable outcomes. This means that we must raise doubt about any singular effect of the technosciences. Instead, it needs a repertoire of confidence that illustrates the experimental quality of the technosciences in the field – no engineer in the laboratory would deny this. Thrift’s theoretical point follows. According to Thrift, developments in social theory have shown considerable developments in raising doubt about the role of business. For social theory, the world has become more vital and vibrant. There are not only humans who make a difference, but a powerful legion of objects and systems that has left us with a world full of infrastructure around us, ready to take action on our worlds. Yet, and this is Thrift’s point, the world is being constructed by business that increasingly “uses the theory as an instrumental method, a source of expertise and as an affective register to inform on everyday life that is increasingly built from that theory” (Thrift, 2006, p. 301). Accordingly, a theory of infrastructure organizing risks either bracketing off business as an ignorable and independently deplorable force or embracing business as one of the many things that make up the vibrant order and material matters of a world that is increasingly made up of and gets assembled through infrastructure. 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University of St Gallen, Graduate School • • 2003 – 2009 Research area: Social studies of science and technology, cultural anthropology and organizational sociology Thesis: Leaky matters: organizing water infrastructure in Nairobi Diploma in Management & Economics (Dipl. oec.) University of Witten/Herdecke • • 2001 – 2003 Majors: Entrepreneurship and international economic relations Thesis: Scaling social impact: the case of Aravind Eye Hospitals Apprenticeship in Banking Deutsche Bank AG (Munich) • Capital market sales, corporate/real estate finance und private banking