Water, Sanitation And The Modern City: Colonial And Post-colonial Experiences In Lagos And Mumbai

The two case studies presented here — Lagos and Mumbai — share important features: a majority of the urban population in both cities lack direct access to municipal water supplies; the urban poor are largely reliant on exorbitantly priced private sources such as tankers and street vendors; and the municipal sector faces formidable fiscal, organizational and political challenges. In both cities there is intense debate over how to improve services and widespread scepticism towards externally imposed privatization programmes. There is a high level commitment in both cities to improve the efficiency, transparency and equity of service provision but this rests on securing sufficient capital for investment, employing high calibre dedicated staff and re-building public confidence in municipal government.

Executive summary

Introduction

Conclusions

Bibliography

List of figures

 

The development of water and sanitation infrastructure is now the focus of a vibrant debate that combines the established insights of urban history with emerging perspectives drawn from other fields such as architecture, critical theory and urban studies. Emphasis on the administrative, technical and political dimensions to urbanization since the nineteenth century has been supplemented by a greater emphasis on the micro-spaces of the modern city — in particular the body and the domestic interior — along with an expanded theoretical discussion of themes such as the ideological rationale for urban governance, the role of public works projects in the construction of a functional public realm and the social, cultural and economic implications of technological networks in urban space (see, for example, Gandy, 2004; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Heidenreich, 2004; Kaïka and Swyngedouw, 2000).

Implicit within this current debate is a sense that a relatively stable period extending from the mid-nineteenth century until the last quarter of the twentieth century has been partially supplanted by a new set of socio-technological developments. This report begins with an exploration of the movement towards of a distinctive constellation of space, society and technology that is referred to here as the “bacteriological city” in order to differentiate this historical phase from the early industrial era and also from a range of developments over the last thirty years associated with the emergence of neo-liberal approaches to public policy. Placing an extended period of urban history under one conceptual frame risks a degree of elision between different developments but it does help to identify some of the commonalities and anomalies that have characterized processes of capitalist urbanization since the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This urban epoch has been variously referred to in the literature as the “hydraulic city”, the “sanitary city”, or the “modern infrastructural ideal” but the term “bacteriological city” is deployed here to denote a distinctive set of interrelated developments ranging from science and technology to new forms of municipal administration.

In exploring the development of water infrastructure the first part of this report examines the transformation of the modern city as part of an interrelated set of developments that transcend the interventions of individual engineers, planners or medical advocates. The relatively stable urban form that emerged out of the chaos of the nineteenth century is presented as a historical compromise that emerged in order to enable the modern city to function more effectively. Yet in circumstances where the modernization process was never fully completed — most notably in a colonial context — the underlying weaknesses of the bacteriological city as a universal ideal are sharply revealed. The colonial experience is explored in the report using the examples of two megacities in the global South — Lagos and Mumbai — and deploys findings from two international research projects entitled Cyborg urbanization and Rethinking urban metabolism funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. We find that the current crisis in the provision of water and sanitation in these cities cannot be understood without reference to the historical development of inadequate infrastructure systems and the current political and economic constraints on investment in the physical environment. A core argument articulated is the need to combine an understanding of water infrastructure with the development of citizenship rights and the construction of the public realm as a tangible expression of collective social and political goals.