Urban Marginality: Everyday practice of building resilience to flood in the informal Settlement of Dar es Salaam

Over decades now, urban scholars have highlighted the limitations of floods control measures in facilitating resilience especially in the cities of the global South. In response, studies have researched about how urbanites draw civic engagement, social power, cooperations, collective savings to minimize vulnerability to hazards in cities of the global South. Moreover, the place of mundane practices of marginalized urbanites in the resilience building processes remains understudied. Motivated by the potentials of ordinary practices, we contribute to debates on urban resilience, urban marginality and bottom-up initiatives of urbanites by introducing the everyday practice lens into disaster and risk studies as an alternative way of theorizing urban disaster. Together, we explore the day-to-day acts of marginalized residents in building resilience to flood hazards, by unpacking how residents develop adaptive capacity to flood hazards; recover; and build redundancy of the community sub-systems in the events of floods. We show how the act of building social cohesion and relations in the event of flood works to improve the adaptive capacity of marginalized residents, enable some level of recovery and redundancy of the community sub-systems. The findings suggest that while ordinary social relations and networks may exist loosely among marginalized urban residents in the absence of hazards or disasters, they become constricted bonds that exert influence to foster preliminary recovery from flood hazards. We argue that analyzing ordinary social networks including the (in)visible acts of marginalized urbanites can further understanding about how resilient is built in everyday life in the informal settlements. This paper recommends further studies to pay attention to social differentiations among marginalized groups in fostering resilience to flood hazards and disasters.