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<p>In the flood-prone rough neighbourhoods of the Global South, water and adaptation infrastructure are not simply technical matters of service delivery or humanitarian relief; they are arenas where belonging, visibility, and political worth are actively negotiated. This paper revisits and re-theorizes hydro-citizenship as a relational, performative, and contested practice through which marginalized residents convert everyday hydrosocial struggles into claims to recognition, dignity, and the moral right to remain. Drawing on political ecology, Southern urban theory, and ethnographic engagements in Cape Town, I advance the concept of Adaptation Citizenship to show how formal climate planning, through flood-risk maps, early warning systems, zoning logics, and infrastructure upgrades, can function as a regime of selective legibility, routinely rendering rough neighbourhoods “too informal” to count and “too risky” to protect. Against this technocratic triage, I document how trench digging, informal drainage construction, WhatsApp alert networks, participatory monitoring, and public clean-ups operate as vernacular infrastructures of presence: material practices that do not just cope with flooding but author political claims to the city’s climate future. The paper also argues that hydro-citizenship is not reducible to flood events alone; it is equally negotiated through intermittent supply, contamination and water quality, sanitation and drainage failure, affordability and metering regimes, and the policing of “illegal” connections. The paper concludes by calling for a paradigmatic shift from infrastructure-first to justice-first adaptation: one that recognizes rough neighbourhood residents as co-producers of adaptive futures, legitimizes everyday knowledges as planning intelligence, and evaluates resilience only where it expands recognition, redistributes decision-making power, and reduces unequal exposure.</p>

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Hydro-citizenship revisited: water, belonging, and the politics of adaptation in rough neighbourhoods in the Global South

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月25日

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  • Johannes Bhanye

摘要

In the flood-prone rough neighbourhoods of the Global South, water and adaptation infrastructure are not simply technical matters of service delivery or humanitarian relief; they are arenas where belonging, visibility, and political worth are actively negotiated. This paper revisits and re-theorizes hydro-citizenship as a relational, performative, and contested practice through which marginalized residents convert everyday hydrosocial struggles into claims to recognition, dignity, and the moral right to remain. Drawing on political ecology, Southern urban theory, and ethnographic engagements in Cape Town, I advance the concept of Adaptation Citizenship to show how formal climate planning, through flood-risk maps, early warning systems, zoning logics, and infrastructure upgrades, can function as a regime of selective legibility, routinely rendering rough neighbourhoods “too informal” to count and “too risky” to protect. Against this technocratic triage, I document how trench digging, informal drainage construction, WhatsApp alert networks, participatory monitoring, and public clean-ups operate as vernacular infrastructures of presence: material practices that do not just cope with flooding but author political claims to the city’s climate future. The paper also argues that hydro-citizenship is not reducible to flood events alone; it is equally negotiated through intermittent supply, contamination and water quality, sanitation and drainage failure, affordability and metering regimes, and the policing of “illegal” connections. The paper concludes by calling for a paradigmatic shift from infrastructure-first to justice-first adaptation: one that recognizes rough neighbourhood residents as co-producers of adaptive futures, legitimizes everyday knowledges as planning intelligence, and evaluates resilience only where it expands recognition, redistributes decision-making power, and reduces unequal exposure.