Sanitation Citizenship

Keywords: sanitation, toilet, infrastructure, urban, India
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 50

Abstract

Although the Modi government declared India open defecation free in 2019, critics charge that not all urban residents have access to toilets, and that the sanitation infrastructure provided cannot be used sustainably due to the inability of the poor to maintain or repair facilities. In this paper, we reconsider the successes and failures of India’s national sanitation program as a shifting relationship between the state and the urban poor that we are calling ‘sanitation citizenship’—a relationship mediated through sanitation infrastructure’s multiple uses, disuse and misuse. The paper addresses a lacuna in the literature of critical infrastructure studies by bringing together two recent conceptualizations, namely “infrastructural citizenship” and the “temporal fragility of infrastructure,” to demonstrate the influence urban sanitation infrastructure’s life phases on the citizenship contract between the state and residents in informal settlements. Furthermore, we show that the particular forms of urban sanitation infrastructure, i.e., individual household latrines and community toilets, offer unique insights into conceptualizations of temporally-fragile infrastructural citizenship, given their discrete construction and shared maintenance, respectively. By exploring the theme of sanitation citizenship, we show that the mutual expectations of the state and citizens regarding the construction and maintenance of toilet infrastructure over its life course are critical to creating sustainable, pro-poor, urban sanitation.