Sediment as Unintentional Infrastructure

Abstract This article examines the sensorial and material conditions of urban decay through the lens of sediment as both an ethnographic object and analytical tool. It explores how sediment is experienced and politicized in Ethiopia’s capital, tracing the accumulation of human waste and particulate matter. As the space where the wastes of the city’s more than five million residents seep in, coagulate, and build up, Addis Ababa’s polluted riverways have become unintentional infrastructure. Recent urban renewal efforts aligned with national leadership aim to overhaul the city’s sanitation infrastructure and rehabilitate the riverways. Attuned to sediment’s material form, temporal transformations, and physical forces, this article suggests that sediment’s disputed traces reveal the tense relations between the municipality’s grand schemes of cleaning and greening and urban citizens struggling for dignity.