Rethinking Sustainable Sanitation for the Urban Domain

Abstract

Sustainable urban sanitation presents one of the most significant service delivery challenges related to poverty alleviation and sustainable development in the decades to come. To illustrate what putting sustainable sanitation into practice realistically means is crucial. In the developed world, the challenge is to initiate a transition from disposal oriented, water-based infrastructure regimes towards more sustainable, reuse oriented, and productive sanitation regimes. Decentralised approaches to "productive sanitation" (including e.g. the production of biogas, fertilizer, water for irrigation, etc.) with a source-separation focus (separation of flow streams with different properties) allow for considerable cost and resource savings and are thereby increasing sustainable. In the developing world, the sanitation challenge is about leapfrogging dead-end approaches and technologies as an opportunity, especially for those areas which are currently without sanitation services, and to overcome the huge service backlog. This paper gives an initial overview of the current state of urban sanitation with a North-South perspective, followed by a discussion of the new role of sustainable sanitation systems in future eco-cities. Planning innovations for urban sanitation, initial lessons learned and current challenges faced are addressed. Context specific challenges and opportunities are illustrated in a variety of urban settings, from non-tenured low-income settlements (slums) to middle-and high-income inner-city areas, to stimulate action on the ground.

Challenges to Achieving Sustainable Sanitation in Informal Settlements of Kigali, Rwanda

“…Focus group discussions and in-depth interviews were used to capture the informants’ perspective and allowed for more in-depth information on sanitation and helped us to better understand what was going on and why. This is important because in various fields of science, voices have been raised that research should be done with people and not on or for people [16,17]. Sanitation is an example for such a setting and thus in order to define sanitation technology options with a high chance of long-term success, a thorough understanding of the needs and concerns of residents (own occupiers, tenant, landlords) is essential.…”

My pipes say I am powerful: belonging and class as constructed through our sewers

“…These traditionalists not only feared the loss of the nutrient resource, but also saw the practice as one that would break notions of ‘urban symmetry’ and ‘a cyclical pre‐modern understanding of wealth creation’ (Ref , p. 366). This historical defense of human excrement as an important resource for agriculture nutrients is particularly interesting in light of current discussions related to ecological sanitation (EcoSan) and resource recovery that have returned to this view of excrement as a vital resource and in many ways fight against the now hegemonic waterborne sewerage model . I will return to some of the social and political implications of these interventions in the conclusion.…”

“…The urban sanitation crisis of the Global South is typically described as a public health crisis, caused by a variety of factors, notable lacking infrastructure and, in some cases, a lack of demand for this infrastructure due to varying cultural associations with open defecation . Over 700 million urban dwellers live without access to adequate sanitation infrastructure; even where sewerage connection does exist an estimated 90% of collected sewage in cities of the Global South is disposed of untreated into nearby waterways . This lack of infrastructure, lack of demand, and spotty treatment results in an estimated 2.2 million deaths per year .…”

“…This lack of infrastructure, lack of demand, and spotty treatment results in an estimated 2.2 million deaths per year . However, many scholars have argued that end‐of‐pipe systems are inappropriate in these contexts because of their high resource costs . This argument aims to avoid rolling out infrastructure already known to be unsustainable, and thus circumvent the problem of inertia faced by sewered cities.…”

Perspectivas da Gestão de Energia em âmbito municipal no Brasil

“…No entanto, um número crescentes de pesquisas aponta para uma tendên-cia mundial de descentralização do planejamento nas mais variadas áreas, como no saneamento e energia, por exemplo (Chittum; Østergaard, 2014;Shikha;Ravindranath, 2007;Hiremath et al, 2009;Lüthi et al, 2009), e sua correlação com a busca pela sustentabilidade nas cidades (Madlener;Sunak, 2011;Marins, 2014;Pohekar;Ramachandran, 2004;Sadownik;Jaccard, 2001).…”