Written by Huijoo Shon, CFK Africa Peacock Fellow and PhD candidate in City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
It has been nearly half a year since I returned to North Carolina from Kibera, but the lessons I learned during my Peacock Fellowship have stayed with me and continue to inform my research.
My central project during my fellowship was mapping shared water and sanitation infrastructure, carried out with CFK Africa’s staff, field assistants, and residents I encountered along the way. The fieldwork did not follow a tidy plan. It evolved by walking and spending time in the community. The maps also gradually took shape through the paths we followed and the diverse conversations we shared.
As a doctoral candidate in City and Regional Planning, I have been interested in how infrastructure functions where formal systems are limited. Experiences in African cities before the fellowship had drawn my attention to practices of sharing around streets and basic infrastructure, and shaped the questions of this project: How do people share water and toilets in Kibera? How do these practices relate to spatial conditions and everyday routines? To approach these questions, I began with something simple – mapping where these facilities were located and how people used them.
Early in the fieldwork, I started to notice that the spatial structure of neighborhoods mattered. In particular, everyday movement was significantly shaped by how main streets narrowed into paths, and how small alleys connected houses to water points and shared toilets. The routes people took influenced whether facilities were accessible and at what times. I thus explored narrow alleys that are easy to miss unless one tries to reach them. Each small passage was full of life—children playing together, neighbors chatting, and people moving toward water points, toilets, and roads.
Along these paths, patterns in the arrangement of shared facilities emerged. Some facilities were fully open along busy routes, others sat along semi-open routes that often functioned as compounds, and still others were located inside compounds used by nearby households. Water taps and toilets in open locations tended to serve more people, while those in gated spaces were shared by fewer users. Across all settings, residents adjusted how they used facilities depending on their needs, time of day, and changing conditions.
After mapping across villages, differences in sharing practices became more visible. Even among open-access water and sanitation facilities, local conditions shaping use varied depending on whether they were located on wide, flat roads or on slopes near rivers. Operation and maintenance arrangements were also diverse. Facilities are run by landlords, private operators, NGOs, or community groups, each following distinct logics. Practices such as usage fees, opening hours, cleaning rotation responsibilities, and shared contributions for repairs and improvement varied across these settings. I realized that shared infrastructure performance depends not only on the facilities themselves but also on localized context and negotiations among residents.
Despite the diversity in how facilities were shared, the better-functioning cases often rested on collective agreements and respect for rules. This insight led me to consider that creating spaces for young people to think together about better ways of sharing could be important. I organized participatory mapping and discussions with local youth, naming these sessions “Geographies for All.”
Over three half-day gatherings, 12 youth reflected on how they see their neighborhoods and what they hope could change. By drawing maps from everyday memories, we discovered how differently the same place can be remembered. Some highlighted green streets with trees, others focused on playgrounds, and others drew clusters of houses along the river. These maps also revealed diverse perceptions of water points and shared toilets. Building on these reflections, we sketched ideas for improving living environments as a way to practice collective planning. These sessions showed that there are multiple ways of working toward better neighborhood futures.
Looking back on the project, I continue to think about how maps and stories can be woven together to improve basic infrastructure and surrounding street conditions. While we produced simple maps of existing facilities, I see mapping as a way to tell stories about everyday practices and local knowledge. Through my ongoing research, I aim to document these stories to support more equitable and safely managed infrastructure.