Innovations in sanitation for sustainable urban growth; modernized mixtures in an east african context

Innovations in sanitation for sustainable urban growth; modernized mixtures in an east african context

Letema, S.
Van Vliet, B.
Van Lier, J.B.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Water Management

2012-12-31

Urbanisation of poverty and informality in East Africa poses a threat to public health and environmental protection, perpetuating social exclusion and inequalities, while it creates service gaps. Neither conventional on-site sanitation nor modern centralised off-site sanitation provisions are tenable citywide, giving rise to the emergence of sanitation mixtures to meet sanitation demands. However, existing mixtures are not successful in meeting basic sanitary goals and show severe gaps in basic service provision and/or protection of human and environmental health. The evolved sanitation mixtures are theorised as a form of reflexive sanitary modernisation in tandem with local context variables. To achieve long-term sustainability in these mixtures, each sanitation option should undergo a modernisation process before it complies with specified sustainability criteria linked to 1) public and environmental health, 2) public accessibility, and 3) technological flexibility to adopt future amendments. The proposed modernised mixtures approach is helpful as an analytical tool for describing, mapping and assessing sanitation systems and their reconfigurations in societies where sanitation mixtures are a norm rather than an exception. It is also very helpful as a conceptual model for organizing a research agenda along the four categorised modernised mixtures dimensions, i.e. 1) its technical and spatial scale, 2) its scope of management (centralised – decentralised), 3) the nature of the flows (excreta – sewage), and 4) end-user participation. Translation of the proposed conceptual modernised mixtures model into a mathematical model is a challenge yet to be explored. Considering its intrinsic dynamic character of dependence on varying spaces, flows and scales of city development, a mathematical modernised mixtures model would provide a regulatory design tool for city planners for adopting amendments to existing sanitation solutions .

modernised mixtures, on-site/off-site sanitation, sewerage, sustainability, East Africa

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ff398280-d465-40fb-ae31-8cccc665f54c

SIWI

9789197587280

On the water front: selections from the 2011 world water week in Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden, 1-6 Sept. 2011, Vol. 3

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2011 Letema, S., Van Vliet, B., Van Lier, J.B.