The Poolitical City: “Seeing Sanitation” and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town

Abstract

In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understanding its relation to the political. We chart Cape Town's contemporary sanitation syndrome, its condition of crisis, and the remarkable politicization of toilets and human waste in the city's townships and informal settlements in recent years. We identify four tacticspoolitical tactics-that politicize not just sanitation but Cape Town itself: poo protests, auditing, sabotage, and blockages. We evaluate these tactics, consider what is at stake, and chart possibilities for a more just urban future.

Navigating the city: dialectics of everyday urbanism

“…Amin ; Appel et al . ; Björkman ; De Boeck ; Gandy ; Graham and McFarlane ; Larkin ; McFarlane and Silver ; Silver ; Simone ). ‘Social infrastructure’, however, has received less attention.…”

“…In our previous work in Indian, South African, Ghanaian and Ugandan cities, we have examined how people learn to live in cities under conditions of precariousness and uncertainty (McFarlane ; McFarlane et al . ; McFarlane and Silver ; Silver ; Zeiderman et al . ).…”

Fragment urbanism: Politics at the margins of the city

“…Through a politics of shock and spectacle that might -and did -force a new debate in the city, the activists (Robins, 2014) -dubbed 'poo protestors' in the media, but known as Seskhnona or 'We are here' -inverted and mobilized material fragments in order to stage a critique of urban development in the city, connecting histories of race, class and gender to fragments of infrastructure, urban space, political economy and policy (McFarlane and Silver, 2016). This was a politics of juxtaposition that powerfully entwined both fragments and the larger city, an urbanism that makes its performative mark through what Walter Benjamin (2003) called 'dialectical images': the entanglement of distinct spaces that reveal something wider about the nature of urbanism, while at the same stroke creating a new context.…”

“…This politics of attending to includes rhythms of maintenance, improvisation, incremental improvement, and the often gendered labour of holding things together even as they break down and fall apart. Given that in many informal settlements, people are forced every day to manage the uncertain oscillations "between the provisional and incessantly mutating practices required to viably 'make do'" (Simone, 2008: 13), this politics of attending to is an unfolding urban learning process (Larkin, 2013;Björkman, 2015;Schnitzler, 2013;McFarlane and Silver, 2016). I will illustrate this through an example from Mumbai.…”

The Urbanization of Nature in a (Post)Socialist Metropolis: An Urban Political Ecology of Allotment Gardening

“…Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000;Gandy, 2002;Heynen, 2006;Swyngedouw, 2006). Silver, 2015), waste (Demaria and Schindler, 2016;McFarlane and Silver, 2017), as well as air pollution (Véron, 2006), swiftlet farming (Connolly, 2017) and climate change governance (Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2013). Silver, 2015), waste (Demaria and Schindler, 2016;McFarlane and Silver, 2017), as well as air pollution (Véron, 2006), swiftlet farming (Connolly, 2017) and climate change governance (Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2013).…”