Above: Build it and they will come? In the world of toilets, it’s not so simple. (Photo: Quicksand)
What if sanitation is not just about the kit? If sanitation solutions cannot be mass-produced at will, like a box of software, what, then, is the alternative?
Nearly half the world’s population lacks access to a toilet, so the desire for scale is understandable. By some accounts, eighty percent of the world’s illnesses can be traced to untreated fecal matter, and the health consequences of open defection are especially dire for poor people forced to live in densely packed urban communities. Nobody disputes that something major must be done.
Given the scale of the challenge, large-scale solutions that will improve life for large numbers of people sound like good news. India’s government, in this spirit, has proclaimed that ‘toilets are more important than temples’ and is committed to build five million toilets by September – or one every second.
If a lack of equipment were an obstacle, big breakthroughs would be near. The Gates Foundation, for example, having invested tens of millions of dollars in an ambitious attempt to re-invent the toilet, has now embarked on a similar effort to re-invent the sewage treatment plant. The Omniprocessor, an off-grid system developed for the foundation by Janicki Bioenergy, converts sludge into drinking water, electricity, and ash. The system features sensors and webcams so that engineers may monitor an installation remotely, diagnose any problems that come up, and communicate with technical support teams on the ground.
The technical prowess shown in these projects is admirable, but a tricky question has arisen: What if sanitation does not lend itself to omni solutions, and it’s not just about the kit? If sanitation solutions cannot be mass-produced at will, like a box of software, what, then, is the alternative?
Quicksand’s Ayush Chauhan and Babitha George, who have spent four years grappling with a toilet project called Sammaan, have learned the hard way that sanitation does not lend itself to mass-producable solutions.
Above: The toilet as artefact, however well-designed, is a relatively small part of the story. (Photo: Quicksand).
At last month’s Unbox Festival, in India, they told me that, because every context is different, so too will be every successful solution. The toilet as artefact, however well-designed, is a relatively small part of the story. Equally important threads in the narrative concern so-called ‘soft’ factors such as social conditions, cultural norms, business models, and governance.
For an installation to be sustainable over the long term, Chauhan explained, it needs to be ‘owned’ by the local community – and for this to happen, an effective framework for their participation needs to be put in place at the start. This foundational element is missing from the Indian government’s new-toilet-every-second campaign.
Toilets also also needs to be affordable, as well as functional, if local people are to use them two or three times a day. Pay-per-use is an obstacle to many poor people, Chauhan explained – but not all of them; different business models work in different contexts. Free public provision works sometimes, but many government supplied toilets, already built, have fallen into disuse. The use of microfinance to fund toilet business start-ups also works in some areas – but not all; in other contexts, a different mix of rewards and incentives have been found to work better.
For a community-led project to put the right mix of technical, social and economic components together, different local government departments – including water, public health, infrastructure, and education – need to be co-ordinated, too; but right now, local government silos seldom even talk to each other.
Simply telling officials to be supportive doesn’t work, so fostering their empathy and awareness is another priority. That’s a tough task by itself.
For Kris de Decker, toilets are a second-order question. The priority, for him, is a social business organization of the kind that served China and Japan for centuries before the development of artificial fertilizer transformed sanitation systems for the worse.
Although they were large and densely populated even by today’s standards, pre-modern cities were served quite well without toilets at all. City-wide economic infrastructures, often based on boats and canals, collected waste, processed and stored it to kill microorganisms, and used it as fertilizer, with great efficiency. Because human byproducts had economic value as a key input to sustainable farming, Chinese cities were a lot healthier than their contemporary European ones, too.
No-toilet sanitation solutions are not on the table in India right now, to put it mildly – but there are numerous efforts to turn human waste into viable social businesses.
Above: Bangalore lacks a city-wide sewerage network , but these ‘honey-sucker’ trucks have emerged as a self-service alternative; private tankers empty holding and septic tanks and the faecal sludge is used productively by farmers in the fringes of the city. The honey-sucker service has emerged without any form of financial or technical assistance, but operates outside the legal framework.
Hyperlocal
For S Vishwanath, a thirty-year veteran of water stewardship projects in Bangalore, the key success factor – is that sanitation projects should be ‘hyper-local’ and led by local citizens – and a small but growing number of success stories confirms that lesson.
Near Bangalore, for example, a community of 1,700 households in eight villages eliminated open defecation in a project that was led by a respected local woman and suppported by outside experts. For the eighteen months since the locally-owned plan was launched, the community’s infant mortality rate has been zero.
Local leadership is also key to the restoration of lakes and rivers. Bangalore, we heard from Vishwanath, was once called the city of a thousand lakes – but, thanks to the ravages of urbanization, sewage dumping, and encroachment, barely 34 remain in their original healthy state. Now, pioneering groups called Friends of the Lakes are coming together to in towns and cities across India and beyond, to help revive and protect rivers, lakes and watersheds.
[Above: For volunteer groups working to restore Jakkur Lake, near Bangalore, educating communities about the value of the ecological context is a priority. Information graphic by Aajwanthi Baradwaj]
No-So-Ugly Indians
A hacking ethic inspires an inspiring anti-trash movement called The Ugly Indian. Started by design students in Bangalore, it’s all about cleaning up India’s sidewalks, bus stops, and illegal rubbish dumps. Small groups take unilateral action to clean up a stretch of sidewalk, for example, and then they talk to everyone involved in that street: the garbage collectors, shop-owners, municipal cleaning staff, office workers who dump trash on the street, and so on.
Above: Thanks to an Ugly Indian group, a former rubbish dump is now an urban park.
Each group uses the visible result of their initial action to start conversations – “look how clean our street could be” – and ask people who are part of the problem to imagine themselves as co-owners of a clean street, not a filthy one.
Ugly Indians don’t blame their fellow citizens, or politicians, or ‘the system’: They act first, and then they talk – to everyone. They make it “our” problem, not “your” problem.
This combination of social smarts with systems thinking is remarkable. The Ugly Indian movement has spread to a dozen Indian cities, and a similar project has started in Karachi.
In another ultra-local project – in Shimla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh – the focus is on the capability of local authorities to work with local communities. An EU-supported programme is helping 1,500 households from poorly served slums work together with city administrators, elected officials, and managers of various technical services, and some NGOs. Together, they are developing the plan for decentralised sanitation and water reuse in which low-cost sewerage systems are being implemented at a community level.
Cellularity
Suppose, as a thought experiment – and as experience seems to indicate – that the optimal size for a social change action is two to five thousand people – such as the group of villagers in Bangalore that Vishwanath mentioned; or the number of people who might have a shared interest in cleaning up an urban street, as practiced by The Ugly Indian movement.
In that case, for every 100 million people in need, 50,000 community stewards need to be identifed, trained, and supported – and on an ongoing basis. That sounds an especially tall order when one considers that Ashoka, which has a long-standing commitment to the development of local leaders, has been able to nurture 3,000 fellows since 1981.
But in other walks of life than sanitation, local mobilisations on a large scale have cropped up throughout history. There must surely be some potential in adapting their models to a waste and water stewardship context.
Religious orders such as the Benedictines, or the Jesuits, have grown huge congregations over centuries using a ProAm model in which priests and missionaries would recruit lay people around a shared belied system. In content terms, features of their agenda could be obnoxious – but their success in recruiting whole populations to a new social practice was phenomenal.
The growth model of religions has been updated to huge effect in recent times by the evangelical christian movement; at least forty million Americans participate at a local level today in a religiously based small groups. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, for example, is comprised of thousands of church cells in which groups of six or seven people who meet in one another’s homes during the week to worship and pray.
As Malcom Gladwell recounted in a celebrated profile, Warren’s small groups ‘focus on practical applications of spirituality…not on abstract knowledge, nor even on ideas for the sake of ideas themselves’. His innovation was to improve and supercharge the recruitment, training and support of thousands of volunteer leaders that emerged from these small groups. His website, pastors.com, supports this fast-growing learning network of local leaders.
Local churches, for Warren, are ‘the biggest distribution network in the world. Millions of them are spread out around the world. Even in villages which lack a school, a grocery store, or a fire department, they have a church’.
Water wisdom
For S Vishwanath, water stewardship in general, and sanitation projects in particular, are neither a spiritual nor a practical matter on their own. We need both. The prosaic, day-to-day management of waste and water needs to be organised at a hyper-local level; otherwise it will not be adaptive to the unique properties of each social and ecological context. At the same time, water stewardship requires the mobilisation of immense cultural commitment; for that, the spiritual dimension of water needs to be rediscovered, too.
Laboratory for Microclimates
Under what circumstances would we become mindful stewards of living systems, not just their expoiters? The Dutch artist Annechien Meier re-connects us – viscerally, and emotionally – with our social and ecological surroundings.
[Above: De-paving begins in Arnhem. Photo: Laboratory for Microclimates]
Human beings are clever in many ways, but our attention is easily distracted from the support systems that our lives depend on – food, water, soil, and climate. Paved surfaces, and pervasive media, amplify our tendency to leave living systems out of sight, and out of mind. This prompts a question: Under what circumstances would we connect with, and look after, the living systems we depend on?
This is where Annechien Meier’s cultural and aesthetic practice comes in. Meier is among a vanguard of artists to explore real-world interventions that that re-connect us – viscerally, and emotionally – with the living systems we’ve lost touch with.
[Above: Pandersquare, The Hague. Photograph: Marc Heeman]
In contrast to policy makers, or activists, who tell us things, artists like Meier focus our attention on the positive qualities and potential of often small-scale, humble, living things that surround us.
In her recently established Laboratory of Microclimates Meier, together with film maker Gert-Jan Gerlach, uses a variety of artistic tools – installations, performance, and visual media – to draw peoples’ attention their social and ecological surroundings.
[Above: Depavement project, Arnhem. Photograph: Koos Schaart]
The aim of each installation is to excite curiosity about the potential of their micro-context among people who might not otherwise have connected with their place – or with each other.
During fifteen years of projects to do with urban agriculture – in gardens, allotments and other food producing sites – Meier has demonstrated that art projects can be highly effective social catalysts. Citizens, who may previously have been socially isolated, and inactive, have often been motivated by her work to participate collaboratively in local processes of food production and exchange.
With her Mobile Allotment Garden project, for example, Meier whets a city’s appetite for urban agriculture street corner by street corner. Meier would park her mobile garden temporarily in spaces that were often the opposite of green: a footpath, square, pavement, a motorway. These green ‘hacks’ of public space created physical evidence of how a forlorn corner of a city could come, literally, to life.
A project at Panderplein (Pander Square) in The Hague, hidden away near the city centre. shows how Meier’s approach works on a larger scale. In what used to be an anonymous, paved and little-used space, Meier ‘s public art project mobilized local people to take an active part in the transformation of this shared local territory.
A diverse patchwork of beds was planted with edible flowers and old strains or otherwise forgotten vegetables – including unknown strains such as Portuguese cabbage. These planted beds not only increased biodiversity in this inner-city site – they also transformed the social climate: Local people now linger in the square rather than just walk or bicycle through it.
[Above: Panderplein,The Hague. Photo: Laboratory for Microclimates]
This positive outcome is long-lasting, too: Three years after its inauguration, Panderplein has become an urban agriculture laboratory that is visited by local citizens and curious officials from the city and beyond.
Bringing Panderplein back to life involved the removal of large areas of hard paving – both to make space for the beds, and to allow rainwater to drain directly into the neglected soil. This technical aspect of the Panderplein project stimulated Meier to contact Depave, in Portland, Oregon, where community-led de-paving has become part of the city’s planning process. Meier hopes that The Hague and other cities can be persuaded to embark on schemes of equal ambition.
Art projects can stimulate demand for urban farming, but social practices are important if these kinds of urban transformation are to be sustained through time. The design of ways to share, and collaborate, matters just as much as what kinds of plants to put in the beds.
Citizen action on its own is just one part of the transformation process. If urban farming to thrive, official support is also needed on such planning issues as land tenure, access to water, health and safety, and security. These tasks are not easy always for a city government to deal with – but cost is a powerful incentive: It costs 200 euros per square metre to build a road, but just 50 euros, including de-paving, to open up the space for an urban farm.
Encouraged by the success of these early projects, Meier has now established a Laboratory for Microclimates (LfM) to undertake similar projects on a larger scale and with new partners.
[Photograph above: Laboratory for Microclimates]
A microclimate, or biotope, is a small patch of life in a surrounding landscape which may appear to be monotonous, or even dead; microclimates can be found in hedges, roadside verges, drainage ditches, abandoned buildings, car parks. Meier’s idea is to attract peoples’ attention their social and ecological surroundings; demonstrate that there is more life there, already, than it may appear; and then, based on the potential that has been revealed, to stimulate local production and social interaction in those locations.
One of LfM’s first projects involves a fascinating coastline protection project in The Netherlands called Zandmotor (The Sand Motor).
[Photograph above: Satelliet Group]
A number of artists, including LfM, have been commissioned to create art installations on Zandmotor as a way to involve the public in discussion about man’s changing relationship with the sea. This discussion is not theoretical new kinds of infrastructure that will be needed to keep Holland above water in an age of climate change – and citizens need to be involved to help make them work..
For the last fifty years, The Netherlands has relied on a vast network of concrete dykes and dams, called Delta Works, to protect this man-made country from the sea.These expensive man-made structures have had unforeseen side-effects: They disrupt natural ocean flows on the coast, which increases erosion; and they upset the natural balance between salt and fresh water upon which the health of large coastal ecosystems depend.
With Zandmotor, the Dutch authorities are taking a radically different tack. Rather than use brute force and concrete to keep the sea under control, they now treat the sea as a partner in coastal protection. The ‘motor’ is a hook-shaped peninsula, made of sand, that extends one kilometre into the sea and is two kilometres wide where it joins the shore. Although sand-dredging machines have been used to instal the ‘motor’, nature will do the rest of the work for the next 20 years; the sand will be moved by the natural action of waves, wind and currents along the coast.
This hybrid man-with-nature infrastructure is more affordable than the Delta Works approach; it will also reduce the disruption to natural sea flows caused by dredging and dike maintenance.
Although Zandmotor’s government developers describe the area as a “new wilderness’ – Meier’s art project will question the implication that nature, and the man made world, can ever be truly separate. The tiniest physical changes can change the ways that dunes develop, for example – intended, or otherwise.
Meier’s project for Zandmotor will demonstrate this. In Portugal, she points out, small but artfully-placed fences have been shown to help young dunes to develop quickly. The sensitive introduction of pioneer plants is another small but important way that human action can shape the evolution of such a ‘wilderness’.
In another sandy environment – the Black Rock desert, in the United States – Laboratory for Microclimates is working on another small installation within a larger agenda.
[Gerlach, Nevada]
Meier’s partner in LfM, Gert-Jan Gerlach, is working in a small desert town that gears his name – Gerlach, Nevada.The project is to capture rain and dew so that the community garden and greenhouse of a local school may be re-hydrated by natural means.
The water collection system consists of recycled PET bottles, grouped in a circle around a native desert plant; LfM calls their installation the ‘Desert Flower’.
The larger context is that Gerlach lies on the road to the huge annual Burning Man Festival. Regular participants in Burning Man, called Burners, are supporting efforts to raise funds for the Desert Flower project. http://burners.me/2015/01/05/gerlach-school-community-garden/
Mosaic cities
When parks were built in past centuries they were promoted as the “green lungs” of towns. and cities. Today, the greening of cities is less about big green spaces and more about patchworks, mosaics, and archipelagos of small but numerous projects.
The potential number of micro-climatic sites for such grassroots projects is huge. There are parks, cemeteries, watercourses, avenues, gardens, and yards to adapt. There are roadside verges, green roofs and facades to plant. Sports fields, vacant lots, abandoned sites and landfills can be repurposed. There are large and growing numbers abandoned buildings and ruins, empty malls, and disused airports with the potential to be re-imagined as living sites.
As connections between these micro-sites are made by blue-green corridors of different kinds – from urban rivers, to pollinator pathways – the city’s overall metabolism begins to be transformed.
This mosaic concept is one reason why projects like Laboratory for Microclimates are significant within the larger narrative of urban transformation. LfM’s public art actions are not just to be looked at, but act as catalysts for social innovation on a broader urban canvas. They are also important for their attention to the social dimension: when new ways of knowing are introduced by artists, they enable people to act differently, too.
In this sense, LfM Is as much about green infrastructure, as it is about art. Whether the policy agenda concerns food security, biodiversity, soil restoration, or public health, artists are now as important actors in the renewal of cities as are engineers and economists.
(The writer thanks Stroom for their financial support in the development of this story).