Infrastructures of disposability [electronic resource] : waste, belonging, and the politics of a clean Kampala
Keywords: Anthropology.

This dissertation examines the politics of cleanliness in contemporary Kampala, a city that is undergoing a dramatic process of techno-political transformation, as the municipal authority embarks on an ambitious program to improve infrastructure, regulate the informal economy, and bring order to a city they approach as chaotic and unruly. Waste is at the center of this contested transformation. It is both an object and a byproduct of municipal reform; it is cited by different actors as evidence of governmental abandonment and failure on the one hand, and as evidence of individual moral decay and popular incivility on the other. Urban transformation is narrated as an effort to clean the city -- both its physical spaces and its governmental institutions -- yet technocratic transformation is achieved by criminalizing many of the routine infrastructural practices that produce cleanliness for the majority of the urban population. In the abstract, cleanliness has a nearly universal appeal in the city, but the techniques of cleaning are highly contested. Radical demographic shifts have led many scholars to label the 21st century the urban century. However, the emergent forms that cities like Kampala are taking challenge foundational theories of urbanization and citizenship premised on industrial employment and state-lead planning. An ethnography of the moral values at the center of struggles over urban space, Infrastructures of Disposability examines how urban planners and residents are beginning to grapple with ethical questions that will remain at the core of urban life for the duration of the urban century. Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kampala's worlds of waste conducted between 2010 and 2014, this dissertation explores the dynamics of development and disposability in a city undergoing rapid growth, diverse environmental challenges, and dramatic political upheaval. The concept of disposability to refers to the processes whereby people, places, and things are rendered as waste. This dissertation is an anthropological study of disposability that investigates the cultural, moral, ideological, and representational ways that disposability is produced and asks how lives that are cast as disposable are, nonetheless, lived. Through the ethnography of Kampala's worlds of waste, it develops a framework for understanding the infrastructure of disposability through four interconnected points of departure: surplus, embodiment, displacement, and contestation. It argues that people disposable like garbage sets up a parallel that takes disposability as self-evident and obscures the mechanisms through which people become disposable with, through, alongside, against garbage. Garbage and garbage infrastructure provided a unique vantage point on urban inequalities because of the ways they link the most intimate spheres of social reproduction to large scale projects of urban development and transnational economies. The dissertation asks how people, places, and things become disposable and how conditions of disposability are challenged and undone. How are moral values embodied in, reproduced through, and transformed by surprisingly mundane material infrastructures like dump sites, skips, trash fires, drainage channels, and garbage trucks? Because cleaning is a powerful form of world making, it is necessary to inquire into the worlds cleaners aspire to. How waste is posed as problem matters. Who is empowered to define and resolve that problem makes a difference. Where responsibility for the problem is located dramatically defines the contours of urban belonging. The argument that unfolds through this ethnography is that contemporary urban cleaning techniques produce disposability. However, Infrastructures of Disposability also demonstrates that encounters with waste do not simply produce disposability; they also afford people across the city's class structure an opportunity to define what a clean Kampala would mean, to assert their sense belonging in the city, and to engage in novel practices of urban citizenship. Waste economies and the moral project of cleaning, in other words, both produced disposability and offered a way to challenge and undo it. Citizenship and disposability are thus relational, each shaping the contours of the other and defined in contrast to its opposite.