The acceleration of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed, if not exacerbated, the systemic and institutionalized socio-spatial inequalities of many southern cities. In East Africa, the Kenyan government deployed far-reaching measures and directives to control transmission of the pandemic and mitigate its social and economic impacts. It put in place a number of public health measures, including travel bans and the closure of borders, schools, workplaces, open markets, places of entertainment and places of worship. It also implemented evening curfews and mandatory quarantines, authorized increases in health service capacity and supplies, and expanded mass testing in several cities in the country. Most of the measures and restrictions that Kenya employed between March 2020 and November 2022 were incremental, with evening curfews being the most consistent. Th is means that the government had to sensitize the public through different forms of media, as it set up portals and opened toll-free lines and WhatsApp channels to disseminate reliable information on the pandemic and enabled citizens to report suspect cases. While the lockdown and quarantine measures played a key role in curtailing the spread of the virus in Kenya, they exposed the enormous limitations of formal institutions of governance, conventional grid networks and infrastructural flows in general. For example, they caused apprehension and displacements, as well as immense uncertainty and despair among urban populations. More particularly, they exacerbated the risks and vulnerabilities experienced by women, girls and sexual minorities locked in under impossible conditions of working from home. Without access to vital water, sanitation, energy and food systems, and with increased vulnerability to police violence, new threats, security risks and forms of violence were imposed on vulnerable groups under lockdown in several communities. Reflecting on this, I highlight everyday coping strategies and mechanisms of individual and collective survival and beyond. I draw lessons and suggest solutions and strategies that tend to lie outside the structures and frameworks of the state and local governments. I demonstrate how the urban poor have developed the ability to solve their own problems through a combination of hand-to-mouth survivalism, smart improvisation, frugal innovation and creative calculations of risk. Th ese solutions and strategies, I argue, are produced incrementally through material configurations (Silver 2014), as hybridized forms of socio-technical production (Furlong 2014) and as vast ad hoc, improvized and creative possibilities (Simone 2004). They speak to the agency of preventive behaviour, critical consciousness, opportunistic knowledge and frugal technologies and infrastructures. As such, corporations and the state should not denigrate them as less developed and less sophisticated, as divergent and discrepant, or as lacking in their capacity to supplement and coexist with more modern, hegemonic approaches (Guma 2021), given that they characterize urban life across different spheres. Moreover, they are important in opening up a space for alternative conceptions of the urban.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)