Louvain Institute for Landscape, Architecture and Built Environment, UCLouvain, Belgium
Water management is proving to be a major challenge for our urban environments: soil sealing, land cover, climate change, demographic pressure are some of the drivers exacerbating water urban challenges from North to South. Despite the peculiarity of each urban context (social, economic, topographic, …) and the diversity of water related risks that have to be tackled, a methodological challenge is shared among these contexts: how to reframe social and administrative scales of intervention within hydrographic territorial rationales?
This contribution focuses on the description and analysis of socio-spatial water geographies of Kinshasa (DRC) experiencing an increasing pressure of hydrogeological risks (e.g. landslides and flooding) due to fast paced and unplanned urbanization accentuated by more recent climate change effects. The sub-watershed of the Bumbu River, a tributary of the Congo River, nested in the dispersal urbanization, is taken as a research ground for a trans scalar analysis aiming to link the human scale of local practices to the hydrographic scale of river basin. Despite his central position within the geography of Kinshasa, the valley is weakly connected to the public utilities and his water management system is sustained by hybrid forms of governance: based on the participation of several actors from public and private domain.
Following a nine-month period of immersive field research through three years, and drawing on a variety of representation tools (cartographies, sketches, pictures & videos), the contribution aims to develop a methodologic approach starting from storytelling of collective and personal water trajectories. Acknowledging the inadequacy of the local "Urban Plan" to deal with complex urban dynamics (i.e. demographic explosion and land occupation) and to tackle social and environmental injustice in the context of a sub-Saharan African metropolis, the research intends to focus on the management of water resources (rain water, underground water) as urban commons capable of shaping place-based solidarities as well as place-based conflicts at different scales.
In contrast with diffused geographies of socio-spatial injustice at the urban scale, local carto-graphic chronicles are presented as counter-geographies challenging the socio-ecological spatial gaps within the city. In this sense, the study and description of the specific spatiality of hydro-social narratives embedded in the urban territory of Kinshasa constitute a first step towards the recognition of the systemic relations structuring its specific urbanization.
