Place-making and place-taking: water geographies in reaction to changing flood management in Dakar.

Abstract

In the past decades, flooding events have become increasingly prominent in sub-Saharan areas. The extent of flood victims and material damage in Senegal spreads like ink stains over different urban areas during the winter season. The growing population and urbanization, along with the lack of urban planning and flood prevention, climate change, and the increase in major urban infrastructure, are considered the most rooted causes. Consequently, over time, urban flood resilience programs became a key item on the Senegalese urban planning agenda. In Dakar, planning strategies shifted towards the facilitation of stormwater drainage (Bottazzi, Winkler and Speranza, 2019). Climate change and reduced infiltration opportunities are the main causes. Due to the lack of central drainage systems, a drainage network—either formal or informal—is under construction in various places. The city is thus overgrown with plans and construction works for underground drainage systems that aim to reduce the flooding problem at a local level (Cissé and Séye, 2015). The decrease in natural areas is significant, and the natural water system is heavily disturbed.

The premise of this paper is to analyze two 'reactions' on institutionalized stormwater management and water drainage systems: place-making and place-taking. Using fieldwork outcomes, the aim is to explore how water bodies gain or lose their place in the city. In addition, the work seeks to characterize co-production in place-making reactions and nature-based solutions in place-taking reactions. This may lead to further understanding of these systems' sustainability (Faldi, Ranzato and Moretto, 2022; Woroniecki et al., 2022). The paper departs from fieldwork observations and explores different scales on which the flooding strategies can be projected and critically described. Different cases in the Dakar region were selected based on the involvement of citizens, the inter-scalar actions towards flooding issues, and the specificity associated with a particular period in the history of Dakar. With this approach, the importance of framing a site-specific context to understand urban planning is considered (Faldi, Fisher and Moretto, 2021). The cases demonstrate that major infrastructural interventions and residential land intake are the main drivers of the spatial changes that cause flooding. Herein, the importance of citizen involvement—defined as co-production in this paper—is pointed out.

The paper aims to analyse the historical evolution of these two types of action as they reveal the connection between human beings and nature. Historical research on the spatial and environmental development of Dakar discloses significant changes in the natural water system. These site-specific changes have played a major role in the spatial development of the urban territory. For example, during the 1990s, Senegal experienced a 70-year-long drought period in which many former wetlands were developed for housing. In this paper, the author aims to put forward some of the main outcomes of the spatial analysis over time at the scale of the urban area.  A buildup of map analyses on flooding issues and flood prevention strategies in the past can give more insights about their flexibility in any future scenarios. Hereby, situating flooding issues in time and through place-specific analysis can work towards a better understanding of the visible outcome of flood prevention strategies.