Making Sanitation: Unpacking Mumbai's Blurred Terrains

Abstract

The dissertation examines urban sanitation infrastructure and everyday practices of different actors (contractors, community organisers, engineers and residents) in Mumbai, India. It uses an interdisciplinary lens to understand the gaps between policy aims and on-the-ground realities of urban sanitation in Mumbai. It draws on theoretical frameworks from urban studies, development studies and discard studies, using the concepts of urban infrastructures, everyday governance, situated knowledge and contamination to analyse the gaps between policy goals and actual implementation of sanitation initiatives on the ground. The research uses mixed methods combining ethnographic observation and document analysis of municipal reports. It draws on autoethnographic reflections navigating my own shifting positionalities that span activism, practice and academia. Primary data collection involved interviews with contractors constructing household sanitation infrastructures, community organisers assisting residents with sanitation-related issues, municipal engineers, and residents of urban poor neighbourhoods. Two overarching empirical themes emerged. The first explores administrative and construction delays in Mumbai's sewage infrastructure, demonstrating how it remains perpetually unfinished, and how urban poor communities experience and navigate these delays through incremental coping mechanisms and material improvisations. The second theme explores situated practices of sanitation infrastructure-making in Mumbai's self-built settlements amidst legacies of waste contamination. It builds on the work-life histories of contractors constructing household toilets on unstable, sinking urban grounds composed of colonial-era landfills, revealing how contemporary sanitation practices intersect with colonial waste legacies and contamination. Their grounded expertise in negotiating contamination and unstable ground conditions adds situated understandings of safety, challenging the notion of 'away' in sanitation discourse. The empirical contribution of this thesis lies not only in studying the different actors - contractors, community organisers, engineers and residents, thereby illustrating how they influence the relationship between urban space, planning, and everyday sanitation practices, but also in an autoethnographic perspective tracing my shifting proximity across activism, professional practice and critical scholarship. This reflexive perspective aims to open debate on ethical pathways for nurturing both academic and activist spaces.

Date of Award	6 Jan 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Nathaniel Millington (Supervisor), Alison Leigh Browne (Supervisor) & Deljana Iossifova (Supervisor)