Colonial Legacies: Intra-Urban Sanitation Inequalities

Aerial image of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, depicting intra-urban inequalities. Source: Johnny Miller.

Last week, we looked at how knowledge production in the WASH sector, re-entrenches colonial power relations. Today, let’s explore how urban sanitation inequalities, are the consequence of, and continue to be re-entrenched by, legacies of colonial rule, notably: ‘disjointed modernisation’. 

‘Sanitation Syndrome’ and Urban Planning.

Segregationist ideologies of the colonial era are undeniably linked to sanitation discourses through the concept of ‘sanitation syndrome’, which equated black urban settlement and living conditions, with threats to public health (Swanson, 1977). This played a pivotal role in urban planning processes, as pipe technologies were imported to SSA by European colonial powers to; ‘sanitise’ neighbourhoods; engineer a Western ‘smell-scape’ (Jackson & Robins, 2018); and pursue Eurocentric ideals of ‘progress’ and modernisation (Nilsson, 2017). However, these sanitation infrastructures were installed disproportionately, and sometimes exclusively, in European residential areas – thus, inherently entrenching racial segregation within the physical urban landscape (Fox, 2014)

Pipes = Progress? 

These legacies of colonial water and sanitation access inequalities can be identified in cities across SSA today, including in Kampala, Uganda; Accra, Ghana; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, due to ‘mechanisms of path dependency’ that perpetuate colonial regimes of urban service allocation, and development. Most relevant to this post, is the socio-technical configuration that: pipes = progress, which was adopted as a ‘vehicle for African nationalism’ post-independence, an idea which persists today, even though these technologies are clearly unable to expand with rapidly growing urban populations (Nilsson, 2017). As of 2017, only 8% of urban populations in SSA had access to piped sewer networks, this disproportionately impacts the urban poor, and inextricably restricts development due to public health impacts due to proximity to human waste. 

Water vendor pushing his cart in Lagos, Nigeria. Source: The Guardian.

Figure 1. Informal water markets and modes of water transactions in the Mathare slum in Nairobi, Kenya. (Sarkar, 2019)

The absence of piped infrastructure in low-income urban areas also creates economic opportunities for informal water vendors, who can exploit captive users with high prices and poor water quality. A recent study in the Mathare slum of Nairobi, Kenya, found that water vendors make profits of 33% – 99%, depending on where water is sourced from, which as shown in figure 1, is often a public, or unprotected: posing risks to public health if contaminated (Sarkar, 2019). Interestingly, poorest households are most reliant on vendors, due to a lack of water storage devices at home (ibid). Therefore, intra‐urban inequalities in sanitation and water access, disproportionately impact the poorest urban residents, and contributes to the creation of the poverty-trap. 

So, if piped sanitation technologies are so obviously incompatible with development aspirations in SSA, why are state actors so intent on maintaining them? 

Community protest against land racketeering in Enugu City, Nigeria. in 2019. Source: Vanguardngr.com

Profitable Underdevelopment

Well, it’s more so that sanitation inequalities are a by-product of the failure of post-colonial governments to disengage with colonial land-use planning (of which racial segregation is the underlying structure) – choosing instead to exploit, and maintain, urban underdevelopment for profit, by forcing people into informal rent markets and insecurity (Ocheje, 2007). This is most prevalent in urban areas via the practice of land racketeering, of which bureaucrats and politicians are often the beneficiaries (Fox, 2014). This practice is extremely profitable, for example in 2004, residents of Kibera paid ~ US$31 million in rent (Gulyani & Talukdar, 2008), despite extremely poor (sanitation) infrastructure provision, as most landlords are absent, and thus have no incentive to improve living conditions. This demonstrates that  legacies of colonial rule can actually generate economic incentives for state actors to explicitly resist reform, and keep the poor, poor – both in monetary and health terms -, thus, inevitably maintaining urban slums. 

To conclude: the general trend of ‘urbanisation without growth’, and proliferation of urban slums in SSA, can be traced back to two key legacies of colonialism: 1) highly centralized (and often corrupt), ad hoc urban governance, and 2) unequal investment. In terms of sanitation and water, these legacies have created self-reinforcing dynamics by: a) privileging the maintenance of, and elites access to, piped water and sanitation infrastructures, and b) generating economic opportunities out of public services delivery failures. Thus, creating a poverty-trap which perpetuates intra-urban (sanitation) inequalities, and urban underdevelopment. 

To turn back to last week’s post, can we identify these colonial legacies within contemporary WASH interventions? It certainly seems that the path dependency on ‘hard’ sanitation infrastructures as a vessel of ‘development’ persists. Whilst, the hegemony of Western institutions, and funding tied visions of success, seems to echo the socio-political and economic objectives of urban development under colonialism. So, if these legacies are so obvious, shouldn’t we be more critical of current WASH interventions? - More on this next week!