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Black Spots: Roads and Risk in Rural KenyaMelnick, Amiel Bize January 2018 (has links)
This dissertation examines “post-agrarian” transformations in Kenyan rural areas. But where rural transformation is usually written as a story about land, Black Spots is a story about roads. Kenya’s massive investment in roads infrastructure over the last decade has intersected with the decline in smallholder agriculture in such a way that, for many rural residents, fortunes are now imagined on the road rather than on the land. Roadside trade, transport, and even salvage from crashes provide supplementary livings for rural populations facing declining agricultural opportunities. The dissertation argues that in the context of austerity policies and rural abandonment, road work and its “fast money” not only expose roadside residents to physical danger, but also entrench entrepreneurial risk ideology into local imaginaries.
With the road accident as a lens illuminating a wider landscape of rural hazard, the dissertation shows how rural residents refashion relationships to land, work, technology, and loss in high-risk environments. At the same time, it demonstrates the limits of “risk”—that is, a calculated engagement with potential loss, conducted in the interest of profit—as a framework for managing contingency. In this sense, Black Spots is both an ethnography of risk and of what risk fails to capture. It tracks how rural residents learn to engage bodily and economic hazard and to understand it as risk; how they coordinate the disparate temporalities and technologies of life on the road and life on the land; and how they withstand loss when these attempts do not go as planned. The dissertation thus advances two parallel concerns: on the one hand, it demonstrates how economic practice is at once bodily and reasoned. On the other, it considers how experiences of and ideas about contingency are shaped in relation to shifting economic, social, and infrastructural possibilities.
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Rural road maintenance through labour-based lengthmen system in Zambia.Mwango, Abraham. January 2000 (has links)
Rural road maintenance has received little or no attention in Zambia for a long time,
resulting in an adverse impact on the economy. Meanwhile Road Authorities have
continued to use traditional capital-intensive periodic and routine maintenance at the
expense of scarce foreign exchange. The system has not performed well, hence the current
state of roads.
Labour-based methods for routine maintenance under the Lengthmen System used in
Kenya, Lesotho and other developing countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa have proved to
be technically and economically viable.
In this report the author examines the desirability of using the Labour-Based Lengthmen
System as an alternative to the existing capital -intensive methods in Zambia. This is done
through rev iewing rural road maintenance in Zambia and then carrying out a comparative
analysis of the same bctween Zambia, Kenya and Lesotho
The comparative analysis shows that Zambia is not performing well when compared to
Kenya and Lesotho. Meanwhile, the Lengthmen System is more desirable compared to
other methods under the current economic conditions. Recommendations, based on the
comparative analysis, have been given to improve rural road maintenance in Zambia. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.
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