Urban sanitation: Everything,everywhere,all at once

Waste and the city: The crisis of sanitation and the right to citylife describes the overwhelming nature of sanitation challenges as permeating through everything, everywhere, and all at once. Through his career, Colin McFarlane's scholarship has underscored the importance and urgency of multi-scalar sanitation inequities and has helped put sanitation infrastructures on the agenda in geography more broadly. In Waste and the city, he builds upon this strong tradition of urban infrastructural geographies in treating urban sanitation as a networked challenge and contributing the analytic of the ‘right to citylife’ towards advancing more equitable urban futures. The book largely (though not exclusively) looks to Southern cities and the contributions of infrastructural scholarship based in informal settlements, which problematize the colonial notion of the modern infrastructural ideal and call for theorizations of the uneven and heterogeneous infrastructural experiences of the global majority (Doshi, 2017; Millington and Lawhon, 2018). The book spans decades of McFarlane's own work in Southern cities to show how the frequent treatment of sanitation as a technical domain has the effect of obscuring the political-economic, socio-cultural, and embodied exclusions of infrastructural provisioning and access.

In the book, ‘sanitation’ evades a singular definition in traversing across spaces, materials, time, and bodies in contemporary urban life. Mohammed Rafi Arefin similarly describes sanitation as an impossible and always incomplete project (Arefin, 2019). Sanitation infrastructures may thus usefully be thought of as being constantly produced and re-produced not only through policies and practices, but also through emerging extensions and arrangements – particularly as sanitation has become an area for technological innovation, surveillance/data production, and profit generation (Arefin and Prouse, 2025). It is in this context that I embark on this response where I think alongside some of my current work to extend ‘urban’ infrastructural theory and explore the relationships sanitation infrastructures materialize beyond the city. The book also prompted further questions for me about the power and intersecting roles of technology, data, and capital in global sanitation networks and public health infrastructures beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.

Extensions beyond the city

Reading McFarlane's book alongside my ongoing work on sewage and wastewater prompts me to wonder about the material and social extensions of sanitation networks and the right to citylife beyond the city and into/through rural and peri-urban geographies. The book usefully draws upon extensive research and examples of urban sanitation policies and practices from around the world. However, I wonder how the lens of urban sanitation may be relationally extended to encompass the multi-sited nature and/or metabolic flow of the network of things, policies, people, and capital that comprise ‘sanitation’ as they intersect across spaces.

First, I consider the materiality of sanitation. While researching wastewater-based surveillance practices in Bengaluru, India, my colleague Vishwanath explained that if I wanted to learn about wastewater in the city, I needed to ‘follow the sewage pipes’ out of the city. I returned a year later and ventured with him beyond the city to several peri-urban and rural communities where Bengaluru's treated wastewater is being pumped as part of a massive state-funded wastewater reuse program. ¹ The physical extension of pipes and treated wastewater beyond the city translates into both formal and informal uses of the water (i.e. some of these uses could be categorized as ‘non-recommended’ uses) and the continuation of various uses of local untreated/raw wastewater and sludge in these areas. In thinking with McFarlane's book, I wonder how the analytic of the right to citylife might intersect with the people and places receiving a city's treated wastewater. Vishwanath and I have discussed in depth the emerging tensions around project communications in ‘recipient’ communities. In this case, the rapid and top-down roll-out of these projects has created a space of misinformation, where the initiative is frequently framed and understood (locally and in the media) as either enacting climate resiliency or as the unsafe dumping of waste into low-income rural communities.

These tensions highlight the impermeability of the urban boundary as sanitation infrastructures, politics, and discourses intersect with ecologies and everyday lives beyond the city, as is often the case with urban waste disposal practices (Liboiron and Lepawski, 2022). McFarlane poses this question in terms of the urgency of faecal sludge management and its reliance on transportation and disposal elsewhere, often accumulating beyond the city. Yet, the extension of sanitation across urban, peri-urban, and rural spaces brings a bundle of questions about ethics, resourcing, and how sanitation infrastructure transforms governance practices and experiences of wastewater and climate ‘elsewhere.’ In thinking with the extension of wastewater pipes, I wonder how if/we also extend the right to citylife to the human and more-than-human populations beyond cities.

Second, I currently live on the island of Newfoundland, Canada, where most municipalities send their raw sewage into the ocean and where at least 100 municipalities are on boil water orders at any given time. In this context, the persistent materiality of sewage effluent and unsafe drinking water pose daily challenges in places where sanitation is experienced as a localized threat, an infrastructural inequality, and a source of additional, often gendered, labour. ² In my ongoing work, I am investigating the gap between federal (or ‘mainland’) policies which regulate wastewater management and the everyday infrastructural realities on the ground in cities and settlements that do not meet federal effluent regulations by having the required secondary treatment facilities. ³ In the meantime, being ‘out of compliance’ with the regulations requires municipalities to produce monitoring data and to apply for exemptions, which are a burden on time and resources for small and remote municipal staff (The Signal, 2026). In this context, I am tracing how private companies have started to emerge on the scene to fill these policy-infrastructure gaps by providing technology services for wastewater testing and/or application writing services for a fee. These companies establish multi-year contracts, use proprietary technologies, and add an additional financial burden to already financially strained small municipalities.

In reading McFarlane's book, I kept thinking about how his argumentation might extend across global geographies (i.e. from Southern cities to Northern peripheries), but especially in terms of how the concentrated power of policymaking in cities can have significant resource and labour implications for sanitation in rural and remote places. Finally, a huge elephant in the room when it comes to sanitation at the global scale is that of the emergence of the private sector, technology solutions, and profit.

Profitable and ‘smartified’ sanitation infrastructures

I agree with McFarlane's prompt in the book, that tackling sanitation inequalities requires a type of urban imagination that can think across and connect fragmented things, promises, and people as a network. I also appreciate his scalar navigations through the book between global policy to embodied experiences and his thinking forward about what can be done to produce more equitable futures. However, I wonder what this multi-scalar and integrated urban imagination of sanitation equity looks like in a global context where sanitation interventions and infrastructures are increasingly mediated by the private sector and through technocratic mechanisms that seek to produce profit. McFarlane cites Karen Bakker's (2010) work on water privatization in stating that water is both a human right and a ‘frontier for capitalism’ (p. 213). This is especially true in moments of scarcity and crisis. Scholars continue to identify the ways in which sanitation is a focus area for value-infused smart technologies, algorithmic analyses, and datafication processes that enable claims to enhancing good governance and evidence-based decision-making while also tackling gender inequalities, poverty and hygiene, etc. (Prouse and Arefin, 2026; Scassa, 2022; Taylor, 2016; Wittmer et al., 2025). Sanitation (in the case of my work, wastewater) is now widely understood as a space open for business for biotech firms to develop and sell technology solutions that promise to improve public health, predict disease outbreaks, measure ‘wellness’, etc. I am reminded of a key concern that emerged in an international workshop on wastewater surveillance I co-hosted with Rafi Arefin & Carolyn Prouse on ethical implications of producing sanitation surveillance technologies across uneven geographies. For example, we wondered if this enthusiasm and increased reliance on biotech companies for producing novel sewage surveillance technologies might outweigh the urgent need for robust investments in basic sanitation services, particularly in informal settlements and rural geographies (see Arefin et al., 2025).

This tension speaks to a major theme that pervades across McFarlane's book around the inefficacy of technology solutions and the need to tackle structural root causes of inequality. However, in a contemporary context where partnerships between companies and states (and increasingly, technofascist authoritarian states – see, Prouse, 2025) are increasingly normalized in providing urban services and monitoring public health through technologies and algorithmic analyses, I wonder about how a commitment to the right to citylife might stand up to the apparent right companies assert to profit in sanitation governance. In other words, how do we secure sanitation and public health as rights to citylife across uneven geographies in this moment?