Working toward infrastructural citizenship: state-society relations and community waste labor in Cape Town

Abstract

As a conceptual device, infrastructural citizenship looks to bridge performed and legal interpretations of citizenship, recognizing infrastructure as a space where citizenship is practiced and upon which political identities are based. While emerging discussions surrounding infrastructural citizenship have largely focused on issues of access, this article proposes engaging with infrastructural labor as a way of extending and developing how infrastructural citizenship is understood and leveraged. I begin by bringing infrastructural citizenship into conversation with ongoing geographic discussions surrounding infrastructural labor, and grounding analysis within the particularities of waste geographies and South African community waste schemes. Attending to the labored dimensions of infrastructural citizenship within a state-led community-waste initiative in Cape Town, I outline how community facilitators perceived their labor contributions, and expectations of the state. On this basis, I propose that infrastructural labor merits further consideration within infrastructural citizenship’s emergent framework.