Water, Cities, and Bodies: A Relational Understanding of Niamey, Niger.
Issue Date
2012-05-31Author
Hungerford, Hilary B.
Publisher
University of Kansas
Format
210 pages
Type
Dissertation
Degree Level
Ph.D.
Discipline
Geography
Rights
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
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This is a dissertation about how Niamey, Niger is experienced in neighborhoods, through bodies, and around water. I examine the particular colonial and post-colonial historical processes that impacted development and distribution of Niamey's water infrastructure, and trace shifts in governance of this infrastructure over time. To understand how the contemporary city is experienced, I explore it through households and neighborhoods and the very different ways that people outside the piped water network get water. The city, through this understanding, becomes not a city of fragments or splinters, but a city of neighborhoods and relational spaces. This understanding of the city highlights spaces of alternative practices and foregrounds local experience in ways that dystopian discourses of fragmented cities hold implicit, but fail to bring to the surface. I further foreground local experiences by looking at the ways in which water affects bodies, both materially and metaphorically. In this view of the city, bodies are intimately implicated in struggles over natural resource governance, and power over water infrastructure is also about power over bodies. These relational understandings of cities and bodies are brought together to imagine new governance possibilities and urban futures.
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