Le Thierry D'Ennequin, Jonas; (2025) The Multiplicity of Infrastructure: Exceeding uniform waste management in the world's second most beautiful bay. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Urban African infrastructures often continue to be designed according to universalised, uniform models. While scholars have explored many characteristics of African infrastructures, few have captured the simultaneous forms and functions that these can have for different actors across cities. Infrastructures are less fixed and restricted than most theories suggest. This thesis expands on the concept of accretion to examine how multiple models of infrastructure can coexist. It defines the multiplicity of infrastructure as the possibilities enabled by accretions of practices, materials, discourses and technologies of coexisting infrastructure models. This thesis uses misalignments between interacting accretions as insightful entry points to analyse these models. While such misalignments have commonly been studied as undesirable disruptions to uniform infrastructures, here they are rethought through the analytical lens of friction. Using a situated urban political ecology approach, this PhD project studies infrastructures of municipal solid waste in Yarakh, a neighbourhood of Dakar’s (Senegal) highly polluted Baie de Hann; once considered the world’s second most beautiful bay. The research is informed by mixed qualitative methods applied in close collaboration with Senegalese researchers. Extensively complemented with photography, it explores how accretions of coexisting models have evolved and interacted in Yarakh from the 1980s until 2023. The study finds that friction may arise externally (between accretions of distinct infrastructure models) and internally (through incoherencies within accretions of the very same models), as well as intentionally (when certain actors consciously engineer misalignments) and unintentionally (as misalignments arise contingently). By recognising friction as one way to study the noticeable misalignments of accretions, this thesis acknowledges the infrastructural agency of women, garbage collectors and leaders of community organisations in Yarakh. Friction shows how misaligned accretions of Yarakh’s municipal solid waste infrastructure are managed by these actors who work together to operate a unique contextual infrastructure.

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