(image source : http://www.nationsonline.org/gallery/South-Africa/Cape-Town-Panorama.jpg )
This narrative is the result of 3 months of “on line” (off the field) research about sanitation issues which might exist at the bottom of the pyramid (Slums in India, Favelas in Brazil, townships in South Africa, technical solutions for sanitation services), followed by a one-week on the ground experience during which we interviewed several stakeholders to better understand the current situation of sanitation services in Cape Town townships.
We do neither pretend to solve the issue within such a short time nor to fully understand this complex issue, but we would like to shed new light and different perspective on it, and build a foundation for an actionnable plan to be designed and executed later on.
Our “on line” research focused mostly on identifying the nature of the issue which was analyzed using different angles:
- Sanitation services scope: beyond the sole defecation, hygiene, drinkable water access, sewages and grey/dark water treatment,
- Sanitation and health concerns,
- Sanitation and human dignity concerns,
- Sanitation: economy and technology,
Which provided us with a sense of the complexity of the sanitation services provisioning and delivery.
However, this remote envisioning of the sanitation services issue was far from being complete as we quickly discovered from the field exposure in Cape Town.
Maybe, unlike any other place in the world, Cape Town crystallizes several other complexity layers inherited from recent history of the Apartheid:
- Politics (Democratic Alliance in charge of the town and Province, African National Congress “in charge” of townships),
- Governance structure and lack of integration between nationwide institutions down to ward council and street committees within townships,
- Constitutional promised land rhetoric and absence of any incentive for private initiative,
All these dimensions being interdependent with the others, creating a full mesh dependency network which is quite “confusing” and possibly inhibiting for anyone who would try to solve the issue.
However, despite this multilayered complexity, we tried to identify some principles, some transformational initiatives which could help to structure the reflection about the sanitation issue, by exceeding a narrow-minded envisioning of the issue and proposing a framework embracing housing, urbanism, city planning concepts as well as a programmatic approach based on experimentation to change the game in the sanitation services for Cape Town and South Africa.
PDF version of this Part 1 can be found here:
highendsoftime 
