IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section B

Abstract

Urban infrastructure in African cities is often framed as dysfunctional or absent, reinforcing narratives of crisis and deficit. This paper challenges such framings by examining hair salons in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, as ordinary infrastructures of care and kinship. The research approaches the salon as a site where space, community, and urban life are co-produced through gendered labour and relational practices. Drawing on feminist and southern urban theory—particularly Ahmed’s queer phenomenology and Simone’s people as infrastructure—this study explores how salons operate across multiple scales: macro (the salon as a space), meso (social and economic relationships among workers and clients), and micro (the tools, energy devices, and artefacts that sustain the work). These ordinary materials and relationships are read as infrastructures, shaping how women access resources, build networks, and make claims to citizenship and belonging, redefining what it means to inhabit, sustain, and co-produce livable urban space. This paper contributes to broader debates on urban livability by foregrounding how African cities are made not only through formal systems but also through everyday, situated practices. It asks: How do women’s salon practices constitute infrastructures of care and belonging? What can attention to the device and the body tell us about wider systems of access, energy, and equity? Framing salons as infrastructural, this paper contributes to broader debates on how African urban infrastructures are conceptualised, valued, and made legible and visible. This study invites a rethinking of what constitutes infrastructure, who builds it, and how it operates, highlighting aesthetic, relational, and multilingual practices as central to everyday city-making.