Ordering Mbeubeuss: Contested Infrastructural Practices in Dakar

Abstract

Waste infrastructure in Dakar is a key element of the city's urban political ecology. The proposed closure of Dakar's dump, Mbeubeuss, one of the oldest landfills in Africa, and opening of a new high-tech modern “sanitary” landfill has been fiercely contentious. A key element of state modernization plans, the upgrade has sparked a vociferous mobilization by the community of waste pickers who currently live on the dump and face dispossession of their primary resource. This paper considers the dump “upgrade” as a lens into the vibrant political materiality of this waste infrastructure. Through drawing on dump planning documents, it explores the way that the upgrade is caught up in an effort to order people and places and examines the specific bodily technologies associated with the upgrade plans. The abstract visions of planners and policy makers preoccupied with the aesthetics of order are contrasted with the changing material conditions the upgrade will precipitate for those dependent on dump. Through illuminating the claims staked by citizen groups through concrete material practices to protest or sabotage the upgrade, it will highlight the contested knowledges, values, and material engagements underpinning different visions of development as they come to be codified in urban waste infrastructure. Overall implications will be drawn for thinking through the contested stakes of modernizing infrastructure for different citizens in Dakar and the wider insight for understanding urban political ecologies.