"Over half the world's population now lives in urban areas and a large proportion of them lives without improved sanitation. Efforts to tackle open defecation in rural areas has been led by the Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) movement. But how can the community mobilization techniques of CLTS be adapted to the more complex situations and transient populations in urban areas? How can landlords as well as tenants be motivated to provide and use safely managed sanitation? Innovations for Urban Sanitation has been developed in response to calls from practitioners for practical guidance on how to mobilize communities and improve different parts of the sanitation chain in urban areas. Urban Community-Led Total Sanitation is potentially an important piece of a bigger puzzle. It offers a set of approaches, tools and tactics for practitioners to move towards safely managed sanitation services. The book provides examples of towns and cities in Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia which have used these approaches. The approach has the potential to contribute not only to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 on water, sanitation and hygiene and SDG 11 on cities but also those concerning the reduction of inequalities and the promotion of inclusive societies. As a pro-poor development strategy, U-CLTS can mobilize the urban poor to take their own collective action and demand a response from others to provide safely managed sanitation, hygiene and water services which leave no one behind"--

A “gripping” behind-the-scenes look at New York’s sanitation workers by an anthropologist who joined the force (Robert Sullivan, author of Rats). America’s largest city generates garbage in torrents—11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don’t give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not? On a schedule so regular you could almost set your watch by it, someone always comes to take it away. But who, exactly, is that someone? And why is he—or she—so unknown? In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle introduces us to the men and women of New York City’s Department of Sanitation and makes clear why this small army of uniformed workers is the most important labor force on the streets. Seeking to understand every aspect of the Department’s mission, Nagle accompanied crews on their routes, questioned supervisors and commissioners, and listened to story after story about blizzards, hazardous wastes, and the insults of everyday New Yorkers. But the more time she spent with the DSNY, the more Nagle realized that observing wasn’t quite enough—so she joined the force herself. Driving the hulking trucks, she obtained an insider’s perspective on the complex kinships, arcane rules, and obscure lingo unique to the realm of sanitation workers. Nagle chronicles New York City’s four-hundred-year struggle with trash, and traces the city’s waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it’s ever been. “An intimate look at the mostly male work force as they risk injury and endure insult while doing the city’s dirty work [and] a fascinating capsule history of the department.” —Publishers Weekly “[Nagle’s] passion for the subject really comes to life.” —The New York Times “Evokes the physical and psychological toll of this dangerous, filthy, necessary work.” —Nature “Nagle joins the likes of Jane Jacobs and Jacob Riis, writers with the chutzpah to dig deep into the Rube Goldberg machine we call the Big Apple and emerge with a lyrical, clear-eyed look at how it works.” — Mother Jones

The authors examines water supply and waste disposal in U.S. cities from Colonial times to the present day.

Urban sanitation and solid waste sectors are under significant pressure in East Africa due to the lack of competent institutional capacity and the growth of the region’s urban population. This book presents and applies an original analytical approach to assess the existing socio-technical mixtures of waste and sanitation systems and to ensure wider access, increase flexibility and ecological sustainability. It shows how the problem is not the current diversity in waste and sanitation infrastructures and services and variety of types and scales of technology, of formal and informal sector involvement, and of management and ownership modes. The book focuses instead on the lack of an integrative approach to managing and upgrading of the various waste and sanitation configurations and services so as to ensure wider access, flexibility and sustainability for the low income populations who happen to be the main stakeholders. This approach, coined "Modernized Mixtures", serves as a nexus throughout the book. The empirical core addresses the waste and sanitation challenges and debates at each scale - from the micro-level (households) to the macro-level (international support) - and is based on the results of a five-year-long interdisciplinary, empirical research program. It assesses the socio-technical diversity in waste and sanitation and provides viable solutions to sanitation and waste management in East Africa. This book provides students, researchers and professional in environmental technology, sociology, management and urban planning with an integrated analytical perspective on centralized and decentralized waste and sanitation configurations and tools for improvement in the technology, policy and management of sanitation and solid waste sectors.

Local environments such as cities and neighbourhoods are becoming a focal point for those concerned with environmental justice and sustainability. The Citizens at Risk takes up this emerging agenda and analyses the key issues in a refreshingly simple yet sophisticated style. Taking a comparative look at cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the book examines: the changing nature of urban environmental risks, the rules governing the distribution of such risks and their differential impact, how the risks arise and who is responsible The authors clearly describe the most pressing urban environmental challenges, such as improving health conditions in deprived urban settlements, ensuring sustainable urban development in a globalizing world, and achieving environmental justice along with the greening of development. They argue that current debates on sustainable development fail to come to terms with these challenges, and call for a more politically and ethically explicit approach. For policy makers, students, academics, activists or concerned general readers, this book applies a wealth of empirical analysis and theoretical insight to the interaction of citizens, their cities and their environment.

Popular belief holds that throwing the contents of a chamber pot into the street was a common occurrence during the early modern period. This book challenges this deeply entrenched stereotypical image as the majority of urban inhabitants and their local governors alike valued clean outdoor public spaces, vesting interest in keeping the areas in which they lived and worked clean. Taking an extensive tour of over thirty towns and cities across early modern Britain, focusing on Edinburgh and York as in-depth case studies, this book sheds light on the complex relationship between how governors organised street cleaning, managed waste disposal and regulated the cleanliness of the outdoor environment, top-down, and how typical urban inhabitants self-regulated their neighbourhoods, bottom-up. The urban-rural manure trade, sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal technology, plague epidemics, contemporary understandings of malodours and miasmatic disease transmission and urban agriculture are also analysed. This book will enable undergraduates, postgraduates and established academics to deepen their understanding of daily life and sensory experiences in the early modern British town. This innovative work will appeal to social, cultural and legal historians as well as researchers of history of medicine and public health.

Resisting Garbage presents a new approach to understanding practices of waste removal and recycling in American cities, one that is grounded in the close observation of case studies while being broadly applicable to many American cities today. Most current waste practices in the United States, Lily Baum Pollans argues, prioritize sanitation and efficiency while allowing limited post-consumer recycling as a way to quell consumers’ environmental anxiety. After setting out the contours of this “weak recycling waste regime,” Pollans zooms in on the very different waste management stories of Seattle and Boston over the last forty years. While Boston’s local politics resulted in a waste-export program with minimal recycling, Seattle created new frameworks for thinking about consumption, disposal, and the roles that local governments and ordinary people can play as partners in a project of resource stewardship. By exploring how these two approaches have played out at the national level, Resisting Garbage provides new avenues for evaluating municipal action and fostering practices that will create environmentally meaningful change.