A feminist takes on the experiences and struggles of those living at the margin of sanitation grids
- By Priscila Izar (*)
A feminist take on the experiences and struggles of those living at the margin of sanitation grids across urban Africa
Adriana Allen, Professor of Development Planning and Urban Sustainability at University College London (UCL) delivered her keynote address on the last day of the Feminising Urban Struggles virtual seminar, on November 8, 2024. She spoke about the struggles, lived experiences and imaginations of women and girls, as well as men and boys living off the grid for water and sanitation, in the context of urban Africa. Her notes drew from an action research project, OVERDUE, which she leads and involves seven countries, including Tanzania, one of the hosts of the Feminising Urban Struggles’ series.
Professor Allen argued for the need to reframe sanitation across urban Africa from a feminist perspective, specifically by “unpacking the historical and colonial narratives that underpin the sanitation taboo.” Water and sanitation in Africa are treated in ways that are familiar in the discourse of modernization: as a technical issue, a matter for engineers, measured in terms of, for example, the number of portable toilets distributed in so called temporary settlements, or deficit and/or construction and distribution of kilometres of pipes, drainage lines and so on. In these terms, the sanitation debate, and a “so-called sanitation crisis”, exists primarily in the context of territories in the city that are somehow already covered by infrastructure, or, at the very least, visible to policy makers.
Allen refers to these territories as the cemented city, where investment in sanitation infrastructure is also a condition for the urban economy to reproduce. However, as she points out, this focus on sanitation infrastructure and on the cemented city territories help cover up and make invisible key urban and gender justice issues, including that over 60 percent of the population in urban Africa does not have access to sanitation systems. Worldwide, this is equivalent to 2.4 billion people. Thus, despite access to sanitation being recognized as a human right, “just access is still in the making.” Indeed, at the level of the territories outside the cemented city, women and men, girls and boys rely on pit latrines and on traditional methods such as open defecation. In rapidly changing urban contexts, these unspoken lived experiences contribute to multiple forms of violence and stigmatization.
Furthermore, in city-level and national-level contexts with strong colonial legacies, and with urban planning and development frameworks also founded on patriarchal values, some of the technical solutions further victimize and stigmatize the populations that they are supposed to benefit. This is because such said solutions ignore the daily production of sanitation happening in the territories. Allen’s presentation put forward a feminist, intersectional approach to help unpack these several layers of injustice, prejudice, and stigmatization, as well as local “creations.” She elaborated this idea by presenting Overdue’s three-pronged, action research approach: tracking sanitation’s “promises and investments,” recording situated sanitation experiences and practices, and reimagining sanitation futures, based on current off-grid practices. Four main themes emerging from the research were also presented: bodies, practices, things, and imaginaries.
Adding a more intentional feminist lens to Abdul Maliq Simone’s notion of people as infrastructure, Allen spoke of the bodies of women and men who live off the grid being simultaneously exposed to multiple levels of violence and stigmatization. She spoke of the stigma that women and girls suffer while using public toilets in their neighbourhoods, with “their noises, smells and matter seen as offensive to their partners and neighbours”. However, a toilet, she argued, “is not just a place to wee and pooh, for women it is a place of privacy and intimacy, a place to look at yourself in a mirror, a place to care for yourself.” Additionally, young men are dehumanized for cleaning the compacted faecal sludge that accumulates inside pit latrines – something that is needed to prevent its overflow; yet they are criminalized within their own communities for doing such a job. Feminist research that allows for investigating the multiple intersections between the production of sanitation and gender, while also looking critically at colonial legacies and Eurocentric practices, is more likely to highlight the inherent injustices and inequities of these practices and to propose other possibilities based on principles of gender and human rights and justice, Allen proposes.
The session was a potent conclusion to the three-day Feminising Urban Struggles virtual seminar, which also featured Veronica Gago, Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of San Martín, and Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and Faranak Miraftab, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The seminar included over fifty research presentations in nine virtual thematic sessions, video productions, and publication of the seminar’s proceedings.
Overall, these debates and materials point to a prolific and urgent research agenda that is also mostly collective. It is noteworthy how an atmosphere of collectiveness and solidarity was felt during the three days of the virtual event, in the presentations and in the interactions amongst the organizers, the hosts, and the support team. This helped emphasize the nature of research work that seeks to highlight the urgency of the critical moment in which all of us live currently and how it disproportionally affects the most vulnerable, marginalized and stigmatized individuals and communities. Simultaneously, the engagements pointed to methods and methodologies of knowledge production and action taken alongside these very same groups.
It is not by chance that the Feminising Urban Struggle’s keynote sessions started with Veronica Gago’s research on women’s experiences of financialization and indebtedness in Argentina, a highly urbanized and financialized country, went on to Faranak Miraftab’s talk on Sumud as Everyday Practice of Radical Care and Resistance, a reference to lived experiences of Palestinian refugees in camps in Lebanon and elsewhere, and concluded with Adriana Allen’s study about living off the grid in Africa, the world’s fastest urbanizing region. In diverse ways and through different angles, the three speakers alluded to processes and outcomes that fit within the hyper neoliberal, financialized capitalist reality of today and how these converge in different parts of the world that are, in their own specific ways, peripheral in relation to capitalism’s so-called centres. At the same time, it would be too simplistic to circumscribe their research to analysis of social reproduction within capitalist regimes. Their intersectional approaches aim at “peeling off multiple layers,” draw on lived experiences of those living at the margin, producing knowledge not only for knowledge’s sake, but also for purposive action.
(*) Priscila Izar is a Centennial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, hosted by CUBES