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Southern cities have become increasingly inscribed in broader postcolonial and neoliberal development forces. In tandem with global pandemics, digital threats, and migration and climate crises, these forces have posed critical implications for all residents, decimating the middle class, widening the gap between elites and masses, deepening the cost of living for the urban majority, and making it harder to rise through the ladder. In such an environment, navigating everyday life increasingly becomes synonymous with survival, constituting a proactive process of inhabiting the city, where the self and the urban are always in the making. This paper examines prominent accounts of the urban way of life as survival. We take one large city of Nairobi in eastern Africa as a representative case, highlighting manifold rhythms and ensembles of survival, such as how residents make ends meet, optimize for a soft life, niche social infrastructures, and cultivate technological infrastructures. In their material manifestations, these rhythms and ensembles demonstrate the role and centrality of urban residents as proactive producers and co-creators of multiple urban forms. They draw us to a mode of survival that is continuous rather than intermittent and of inhabitation that is reparative rather than castigatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Nigerian city of Jos, everyday life is shaped by interlacing rhythms of disconnection and reconnection. Petrol, electricity, water, etc., come and go, and in order to gain access inhabitants constantly try to discern the logics behind these fluctuations. However, the unpredictable infrastructure also becomes a system of signs through which residents try to understand issues beyond those immediately at hand. Signals, pipes, wires and roads link individuals to larger wholes, and the character of these connections informs and transforms experiences of the social world. Not only an object, but also a means of divination, infrastructure is a harbinger of truths about elusive and mutable social entities—neighbourhoods, cities, nations and beyond. Through the materiality of infrastructure, its flows and glitches carefully read by the inhabitants, an increasingly disjointed city emerges. Through new experiences of differentiated modes of connectedness—of no longer sharing the same roads, pipes, electricity lines, etc.—narratives are formed around lost common trajectories. By focusing on how wires, pipes and roads are turned into a divination system—how the inhabitants of Jos try to divine the city's infrastructure and possible ways forward, as well as how they try, through the infrastructure, to predict a city, a nation and a world beyond—this paper strives to find ways to grasp a thickness of urban becomings—a cityness on the move according to its own unique logic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]