How often, if at all, do you think about the politics behind fulfilling your daily need of going to the toilet at home, at your workplace, and in public spaces? Thinking about the sanitation service chain in urban areas – from the construction of adequate facilities to storage, transport, treatment and the re-use of faeces and urine – is a fundamentally networked issue. Sanitation impacts our health, education, well-being, livelihoods, the environment and the economy, among others. As urban geographer Colin Mcfarlane argues in his latest book “Waste and the City”, fulfilling the right to sanitation is essential for people’s ability to enact their right to citylife – their human right of living and thriving in the city regardless of their gender, age, class, race and other identities. The book draws attention to the multiple facets of the global urban sanitation crisis, in which infrastructures like toilets, latrines, cesspits and treatment plants are often absent and inaccessible; in which the (low-)paid and unpaid work of toilet caretakers, manual pit emptiers, and other sanitation workers is deeply gendered and dangerous; and where menstruating girls miss school due to inadequate facilities, stigma and taboos. Despite the urgency of comprehensively addressing the sanitation crisis – and while acknowledging ample knowledge, innovative policies and practices by civil society organisations, researchers and others to tackle it – the book rightly highlights that sanitation in its connection to human rights and social justice in cities continues to be a neglected issue.

The latest “Urban Political Podcast” episode, which reviews “Waste and the City”, provides a welcome public platform to highlight and expand some of the key ideas of the book. Hosted by Nitin Bathla from ETH Zurich, the author Colin Mcfarlane from Durham University discusses his book with Vanesa Castán Broto from the University of Sheffield and Julia Wesely, thereby positioning it within wider debates of urban development and rights-based global agendas. In her interventions, Julia draws from research as part of the OVERDUE project to highlight why it matters to discuss sanitation upfront as a political rather than merely technical issue. Moreover, she reflects on how a feminist lens is key for sanitation justice, as it fosters more nuanced individual and collective recognition of the conditions shaping everyday sanitation experiences, particularly those of women and girls living in off-grid urban areas.