Infrastructural childhoods: children, care, and sanitation insecurity

Urban political ecology links sanitation inequities to socio-political structures, yet children's and caregivers’ intimate experiences navigating everyday toilet struggles remain under-documented. Through three ethnographic narratives from Pune's informal settlements, this paper foregrounds lived experiences demonstrating how sanitation insecurity intertwines with gendered violence and spatial exclusion, while theorising children as infrastructural actors who actively shape urban space, time, and care practices, even when mediated or silent. Drawing on storytelling, interviews, and participatory observation, the paper develops ‘infrastructural childhoods’, a framework to understand how childhood in urban precarity emerges through embodied entanglements with infrastructure's presence and absence. The three narratives focus on an adolescent girl, elderly caregiver and young mother revealing how toilets, plastic potties, and improvised spaces become sites where care, survival, and dignity intersect, and how children's presence fundamentally reorganises household strategies and temporal rhythms. Sanitation insecurity, the paper argues, produces infrastructural chronopolitics, the violent mismatch between bodily rhythms (urination, defecation, menstruation) and infrastructural schedules. The paper contributes to children's geographies by centring infrastructure as constitutive of childhood while showing how children's needs and agency reshape infrastructural practices, urging scholars, urban planners, and policymakers to recognise sanitation as a socio-political, relational space where childhood, care, and urban citizenship are enacted and contested.