Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife
In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Waste and the City is a call to action on one of modern urban life’s most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All.
The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’, it uses the notion of ‘citylife’ to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.
Guests:
Colin McFarlane
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University. His work focusses on the experience and politics of urban life. This includes an interest in urban knowledge, learning, densities, fragments, and infrastructure, especially sanitation. He is author of Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (University of California Press, 2021), and Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage (Wiley, 2011), and Principal Investigator on the DenCity project.
Twitter – @ColinMcFarlane3
Julia Wesely
Julia Wesely is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Urban Studies Working Group, Institute of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in development planning from The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London and been a Research Fellow at the DPU in programmes including Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality and OVERDUE-Tackling the sanitation taboo across urban Africa. Her research, teaching and public engagement broadly focuses on the intersections of urban (in)equalities, environmental (in)justices and critical pedagogies. Julia has worked in collaboration with universities, civil society organisations, NGOs and social movements from several Latin American, African and European cities and she is part of the ECR collective “Overlooked Cities” as well as a nimbly organized network discussing the “Public Role of Universities in International Engagement”.
Twitter – @nitin_bathla
Vanesa Castan Broto
Vanesa Castan Broto is a Professor of Climate Urbanism at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield where she takes a feminist perspective on questions of sustainable urban innovation, just transitions, urban resilience and infrastructure systems.
Twitter – @VaneBailo
Host:
Nitin Bathla
Nitin Bathla is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, where he works as part of the transdisciplinary project on agri-urbanisms at the Chair of Sociology. He also coordinates the Doctoral Programme at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies at the Department. His research practice actively combines academic research with artistic practices of filmmaking, and socially-engaged art. He is the director of award-winning film Not Just Roads, which premiered at several important film festivals across the world.
Twitter – @nitin_bathla