JOAB OCHIENG ODERO

PhD Student

Research Title: Regional Waters and Urban Lives: Lake as Infrastructure in the Making of Kisumu
Research Group: Social and Cultural Geographies (SCG)
Thesis Advisor: Dr Allen Xiao

Regional waters and their bordered cities are deeply interconnected urban life drivers. In the context of Africa, most city perspectives revolve around the port-centric potentials of ocean shorelines and lakefronts in terms of their economic impacts on urban populations. Considering Kisumu city as the third largest lake city in Kenya and East Africa, its human population lives are in many ways, inseparable from Lake Victoria water. This does not only occur at the waterfront but extensively to the rest of the city’s geography. In some invisible forms, it surpasses even the city boundaries to other adjacent towns and to the whole East African region. However, this Kenya’s lake city and its changing urban lives which interact with the fairly established lakefront infrastructure to further re(produce) other socio-cultural infrastructure, remains scholarly hollow. My research will therefore, integrate urban political ecology and social network analysis approaches to study regional waters of Africa’s Lake Victoria as an intrinsic infrastructure in the making of Kisumu city lakefront lives and other urban infrastructure both spontaneously and wholesomely.