This paper by Barbara Evans was presented at the Rockerfeller Foundation Urban Summit (1-6 July 2007), Bellagio, Italy from the Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, The Earth Institute, University of Columbia. The paper highlights the plight of millions of urban dwellers who are excluded from formal systems of water and sanitation service delivery. Without access to piped water and acceptable sanitation services, these households and individuals are forced to use limited supplies of water, often of poor quality, from unreliable sources and usually at a high cost. Thus, safe sanitation and the means to practice hygienic behaviours are often entirely absent in these populations, informs the paper.
This paper argues that one of the root causes of this exclusion has been the long-standing inability of utility and city managers and their advisers to plan and implement water and sanitation systems, which respond to the reality of the lives of the urban poor. Rigid approaches, based on inappropriate norms and standards, leave little room for regulated vending, licensed onselling, small scale network operation, and community-managed systems, which could extend utilities’ reach into previously unserved urban spaces.
Such an extension could enable utilities and cities to ‘recapture’ the systems of delivery which are now largely unregulated, often illegal and almost always substandard. The physical location, lack of voice, and day-to-day reality of many poor urban people form their greatest vulnerability in accessing services, which are currently often captured by the urban elite.
Sanitation is harder than water supply in urban areas for a range of reasons, but its proper delivery and management alongside appropriate hygiene programs have the potential to massively increase the quality of life of poor people and improve the status and potential of the city as a whole. The paper argues that poor people are particularly vulnerable to the ill effects of lack of adequate sanitation and ends by warning that it can thus no longer be neglected.
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