Living with fragile infrastructure: The gendered labour of preventing, responding to and being impacted by sanitation failures

摘要: While infrastructure is often understood to operate ‘in the background’, scholars have increasingly attended to the labour that enables urban material flows. Drawing on empirical material collected through fieldwork and document analysis in Lilongwe, this paper explores how different residents of the city experience and respond to the regular failures of infrastructure. We examine sanitation in one middle- and two low-income areas, considering the contamination of drinking water and the collapse of latrines. Attending to the gendered, embodied, affective, and intimate dimensions of maintenance and repair labours, we develop three interrelated arguments. First, we frame incidents of failure not as individual accidents but as part of persistently fragile infrastructures. Second, we contribute to extending the gaze of infrastructural labours beyond manual work and ‘expert’ knowledge to consider a range of unpaid …