Experiencing is learning: urban dwellers’ flood defenses in Accra’s waterways

Source abstract

This article positions small-scale flood defenses as part of urban flood infrastructure. Extending work on everyday infrastructures and urban flood-risk management, it centers the role of resident-initiated interventions in processes of infrastructural development. Drawing on research in Accra, Ghana, I explore how a range of city residents mobilize in response to flood risk in and around the urban waterways by constructing and maintaining drains and barriers. How do urban dwellers turn their experiential knowledge on flooding into auto-constructed interventions? And how does this relate to the governance of the urban waterways and their overflow? I suggest that in this context, residents are developing a form of expertise as they learn through efforts to keep flooding at bay, their interventions reflecting the multidimensional dynamics of Accra's flooding problem. I discuss these interventions and the institutional response, concentrating on how residents’ know-how is appraised by technocrats. By linking the complexity of the city's drainage to these small-scale interventions, the article proposes that they may be integrated as a coordinated mode of flood-risk management.