Sanitation has long been recognised as a human right – the very basic right to dispose safely of human waste – yet we witness a persistent, exculpated and massively prevailing everyday rights violation endured by 60% of the urban population in Africa and 2.4 billion people worldwide. Despite these appalling figures, unsafe and insufficient sanitation remains an unspoken subject across almost every culture, and most African cities just get by, skirting around the sanitation ‘taboo’. Building upon the taboo framing proposed by Black and Fawcett (2008), we argue that rather than approaching the sanitation crisis as a site marked by a lack of facilities, infrastructure, technologies, and investments, the real question lies in understanding why urban sanitation has been historically relegated to an unpleasant topic rarely tackled in its own right and complexity.
Reframing of the urban sanitation challenge as a persistent ‘taboo’, enables us to expand our enquiry from its materiality to the unspoken drivers of inequitable sanitation. It allows us to unpack the historical and colonial narratives that underpin the sanitation taboo. This involves:
– a critical exploration of sanitation promises and the actual flows of investment as they crystallize in urban trajectories
– an examination of the practices and experiences of sanitation users and providers across the continuum between large-scale infrastructures and off-grid coping mechanisms
– an investigation into the design, fate and potential, of “equitable sanitation” interventions, to bridge gaps and foster dialogues between scales, sectors, and institutions, such as collectives of urban residents, municipalities, foreign engineering compagnies, informal sanitation services, and development banks.
We argue that forging a sanitary revolution across urban Africa requires a new perspective into the gaps and synergies between grid and off-grid efforts and the wide spectrum of practices and interventions in between. Drawing insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), feminist political ecology, urban geography and development studies, we aim to open new ways of framing the conversation that can generate meaningful and robust comparative evidence to inform action.
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