How do past, ongoing, and projected infrastructural aspirations define and address sanitation deficits and to what effect?

The connections and disconnections between infrastructural promises (what infrastructures are expected to do) and actual infrastructural trajectories (what infrastructures actually do) bring into play a full array of relational practices in-between city-makers which elude binary definitions of the formal and informal. Such encounters only become visible when looking closely at the multiple and incremental iterations enacted in the financing, design, construction, operation, maintenance, tweaking and repair of urban infrastructures. Tracing the history and geography of such encounters and trajectories through infrastructural investments, Work Package 1 reveals not only the tensions but also the generative materialization of possibilities to co-produce the city, to disrupt exclusions and to carve new infrastructural trajectories that speak to social and environmental justice.

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How do the temporal, spatial, and social configurations of sanitary interventions shape the distribution of infrastructure, services, and benefits?

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Work Package 1 tracks the multiple capacities and efforts through which cities and citizens produce lived sanitation infrastructures. Infrastructural investments – whether bulk or incremental – are closely related to land tenure structure, for instance, where (financial) land values are increasing rapidly, it becomes more difficult to reserve land for sanitation infrastructure. Further, lack of, or low levels of, investment in private (off-grid) sanitation infrastructure is often linked to poor understanding of land rights, the history of settlements and insecure tenancy, especially for migrant residents. WP1 thus particularly investigates the nexus between sanitation and land supply.

We draw on archived colonial and postcolonial maps, contemporary satellite images, semi-structured interviews with “memory holders” and residents to:

• Document the spatio- temporal sanitation trajectory for each city, capturing specific snapshots across time where spatial configurations appeared to have changed.

• Scrutinise the intended and actual spatial sanitation configurations of each city (intended objectives, technological artifacts, planned and actual investments and intended benefits and beneficiaries), while examining changes over time and the political economy behind them, including their drivers and legitimisation narratives.

• Overlay grid and off-grid infrastructural provision with land planning, use, reclamation value and density changes to identify a typology of the material sanitation systems in each city.

The outcomes informed a second round of interviews and a series of Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) in each city, with policy makers, planners and senior staff from utilities; low and medium rank technicians, sanitation provider collectives; and collectives of users across different socioeconomic groups and locations to identify the wide range of practices at play across the sanitation chain.

• Fora da rede, dentro das injustiças: planear um saneamento inclusivo nas cidades de Moçambique (Brief)
• No tenant left behind (Video)
• Mwanza: Sanitation promises and trajectories (Video)
• Land and sanitation (Video)
• Unpacking sanitation access and construction (Video)
• Making space for sanitation justice (Blog)