Peripheral citizenship & inequitable water access

 

Mathare, Nairobi. Photo by Alissa Everest/ Getty Images 

Nairobi’s outlaw spaces are places in which structurally maintained precarity is compounded by informal settlements being peripheralized. Outlaw spaces can be understood as places where people are both criminalized and forced outside the law, creating a situation where they are deprived of social and legal recourse to make basic claims to life (i.e. access to clean water) (Kimari, 2021) 

Nairobi's outlaw spaces. Map by Jadyn Ligoo, Data sourced from GADM

In terms of water access, this is reflected In the fact that 41% of Kenyans still use “unimproved water sources” despite a promise of “water for all” by Nairobi’s governor. (Kimari, 2019) Health concerns are not fully integrated into the infrastructural systems which runs the risk of contamination and disease outbreak. These issues often lay in the responsibility(ies) of different departments or ministries at the city level which may mean that a majority of peri-urban or informal slum settlements are served by informal providers working parallel to formal state-based providers.

An IDS policy briefing (IDS, 2019) recommended that poor sanitation can be made into a political agenda by framing it as a health and urban planning emergency and integrating this into urban policy, planning and management which they argue is presently geared towards infrastructural solution such as building toilets. Yet, I wonder if catastrophizing and understanding a long-durée issue as an emergency undermines the meaningful, long-term change-making that is required to address WASH associated issues. For instance, using my previous example of Kenya, it is this emergency politicization that maintains logics of short-term respite and relief without necessarily changing the sociopolitical conditions that entrench and worsen WASH…especially in urban informal settings. I argue that this is why we continue to see solutions such as the Peepoo toilet-in-a-bag whose biopolitics I find disturbing as a long-term sanitation solution. 

Peepooa bag. Image from SSWM

Recognizing the urgency of meeting an immediate need associated with inadequate water provisioning, the implementation of such a solution seems to implicitly coerce residents in informal settlements to accept such a solution despite the arguable indignity of a lack of a toilet and use of a bag. While addressing urban sanitation challenges posed by constrained water resources, solutions such as the Peepoo bag can be considered a technological fix of some sort that does not completely address the structural issue of poor infrastructural development. Yet, an immediately implementable dignified alternative is difficult to conceive.