The project gathers a team of researchers with a background in social sciences and water quality. Community members from low-income neighbourhoods will train as community research assistants and participate in qualitative research. Local associations will accompany the work of the team.

Three principles that guide our work:

Local associations will select community research assistants (12 per city) who want to train and work in water diaries, body-mapping, relational interviews, and life histories, conducting research in their own homes and communities. These women are compensated for their work with the respective legal minimum wage, depending on the country. They will sign 11-month contracts and receive monthly payments.

Homescapes will study everyday life in low-income homes in Semarang, Maputo and San Andrés. It will not treat these 3 cities as sources of data or outliers BUT as sites of theorization in their own right.

By exploring ecological changes, homescapes takes the ecology in political ecology seriously. The physiochemical/microbiological changes in domestic water, as well as the breeding of mosquitoes, will be systematically captured through Water Quality Work. This work will be conducted by locally recruited research assistants with a background in biology.