Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife

I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time, so it means a lot to me that it has now been published. The book is an argument for positioning sanitation at the heart of the urban question. Below, I provide a brief overview of what I try to do in the book (it is published with Verso and if you are interested in it you can order a discounted copy from them or find it freely available at this link).

Sanitation, I argue, is fundamental to living and thriving in the city. Sanitation tends to get understood as either a technical engineering problem or as a set of health concerns, and while it is both of those things for sure, it is also very much more. Sanitation is important in urban social relations, livelihood, eduction, gender, race, ethnicity, age, and more. It is a networked politics of citylife, and not just one of toilets alone. In the book I argue that sanitation is about the right to citylife, and that it ought to be given greater space and urgency in urban political debate and struggle.

More than half of the global urban population is forced to live without safely managed sanitation. More than a billion people are forced to regularly defecate in the open and hidden spaces of the city, under bridges, at garbage grounds, by railway tracks, along riverbanks and shorelines. In 2016 alone, diarrhoea led to the entirely preventable deaths of more than 1.5 million people, over a quarter of whom were children under five. As the world continues to urbanise, it is the poorest neighbourhoods that are growing fastest, and it is here that the sanitation crisis is at its most acute. Cities are expected to grow by another 2.5 billion people by 2050, placing huge demands on already woefully insufficient sanitation, water, and waste systems.

Sanitation in the city is far more than simply the safe removal and containment of human waste; more, too, than managing the supply and demand of technologies. It is about governance and provisioning, but it is also about bodies and their wastes, broken and inadequate toilets and pipes, municipal officers and activists, places and political economies, cultural politics and people, microbes and legal rights. Sanitation erodes health, deepens the exploitation of especially women and girls, limits people’s ability to move around the city, keeps children out of school, stops adults getting to work, reflects and exacerbates local tensions around religion, race, or ethnicity, stunts bodily growth, curtails the nutritional value of food, acts as a vehicle of disease, becomes a fulcrum for urban protest and resistance – and so on. And climate change is intensifying the sanitation crisis in cities, particularly through flooding and drought.

I sought to make the book global in scope. After all, it is not only economically poorer countries that face growing sanitation challenges. In richer countries, climate change is rapidly exposing ageing infrastructure and years of disinvestment. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency states that cities with old combined sewer systems increasingly violate the federal Clean Water Act. In November 2021, the Canadian city of Merritt was ordered to evacuate following the flooding of a wastewater treatment plant. The water system was contaminated by sewage and deemed undrinkable even if boiled. In 2015–16 in Flint, Michigan, water contamination created a public health crisis caused by lead leaching into the water supply from ageing pipes. In Britain, the Environment Agency has said that not a single river, lake, or stream is known to be in ‘good status’, and public concern over untreated sewage spilling into rivers, waterways, and coastlines has grown in recent years. Away from sewage, there has also been a dramatic collapse in the number of public toilets in Britain, and there is no legal obligation on local governments to provide public toilets (and, thanks to years of austerity, little resource to provide or maintain public sanitation).

Sanitation has too often been pushed from the political and public imagination of cities and their futures. While city leaders have been grappling with boosterist discourses of smart cities and the emerging impacts of AI, the most basic and fundamental infrastructures beneath our feet have been crumbling. Meanwhile, city governments too often respond to the crisis in sanitation through a politics of ‘cleaning up’ the city that displaces the poorest, sometimes violently. In 2021, for example, the government of Pakistan embarked on a campaign of bulldozing homes and evicting residents who live along the city’s narrow waterways (‘nullahs’). The government, with the support of the Supreme Court, argued that clogged nullahs are the cause of floods during the monsoon rains. Activists countered that the main impetus for the evictions is to clear the way for new roads, and they called on the World Bank, which is funding water and sewage work in the city, to condemn the acts and remove support.

And yet, there is also a history of interventions in city sanitation that are welfarist and enabling, addressing sanitation poverty and inequality with ongoing commitment. As I argue in the book, these are instances of ‘affirmative sanitation’. In Salvador, Brazil, for example, 2,000 kilometres of small sewer pipes were built between 1996 and 2004 through state investment, connecting 300,000 homes. In Karachi, Pakistan, the Orangi Pilot Project of civil society organisations built a network of small sewer pipes, improving public health and local environmental conditions. In Kampala, Uganda, between 2003 and 2015 the government worked with civil society organisations to increase the amount of human waste being treated by thirty times. In South Africa, the eThekwini municipality cross-subsidised water costs for the urban poor and provided more than 80,000 households with toilets. Ethiopia reduced the numbers of people answering the call of nature in open spaces by more than half by 2015, following government prioritisation of public health. Across the urban world there have been thousands of small-scale interventions led by residents, activists, and practitioners, from toilet blocks that double up as community centres to eco-sanitation initiatives that generate fertiliser for growing food while reducing water use.

Across the book, I build the argument for addressing sanitation inequality through a focus on five key areas, which the book is structured around: people, things, life, protest, and allocation. Together, these operate as different entry points into sanitation as a networked urban experience. What I mean by that is that sanitation is always already an entanglement of people, infrastructures, services, wastes, microbes, political claim-making, and the political economies of provisioning and distribution (land, housing, spending, and so on). I end with an argument for urban sanitation forums that might be able to respond to its networked nature, and which could position sanitation more centrally in urban policy, planning, budgeting, and debate.

This is a topic that has been important to me since I did my PhD research in Mumbai in 2002-3. I hope it’s of interest and that it contributes to a greater focus on what I think is a vital but too often neglected part of urban life and change.