Planning Kampala: histories of sanitary intervention and in/formal spaces

Abstract

For rapidly growing cities of the global South, infrastructure is often presented as being in a state of crisis by virtue of its absence or deficiency. There is an imperative for infrastructural projects to manage and hide the defecation of urban inhabitants in order that the post-colonial city is to be thought of as modern, ordered, and worldly. Yet the urban landscape of many cities of the global South also bear the vestiges of colonial attempts to construct sanitation infrastructures that were, and remain, limited to elite spaces of the city. Kampala is one example of such a city where the stamp of colonial heritage is felt and experienced in the material reality of starkly divided sanitation infrastructures. This article takes a historical look at Kampala's sanitary planning and finds patterns that elucidate the contemporary city's absence of sanitation infrastructure. A historical approach that highlights the sanitary aspects of the production of Kampala goes some way to explaining why so few inhabitants of the contemporary city are connected to the municipal sewerage system. The article suggests that this historical absence of formal infrastructure has been constantly cultivated to perpetuate informality and abjectivity.

Keywords:

• Kampala
• sanitation
• urban planning
• infrastructure
• abject space

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for their detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Sincere thanks also to the editor, Betsy Olson, and James Smith for their suggestions and observations.

Funding

The Economic and Social Research Council supported this research.

Notes

1. Following Inglis and Holmes (2000, 242), for the sake of brevity ‘defecation’ here refers to acts that produce faeces and/or urine. I recognize that there are important bodily, temporal, spatial, and material differences between the two acts but here treat the two synonymously for concision.

2. The essay title is translated in English as ‘Abjection and miserable forms’.

3. An ethnographic study was carried out during 2010–2011 as part of a wider PhD research project. Fieldwork was carried out between July 2010 and June 2011; 48 interviews were conducted with Kampala residents, in addition to three focus groups, and 31 interviews with elite stakeholders in urban planning and sanitation in the city.

4. Inhabitants viewed faeces with suspicion, and considered human waste – from faeces to placenta – as powerful. There was a real sense of fear over using the same piece of land to toilet in more than once, and common toileting grounds were perceived with alarm. Placentas were buried in fields, along with all other excretions from babies, in rituals to appease ancestral spirits and ward off harmful ones (Roscoe 1911).

5. Kisenyi translates as ‘swamp’ in Luganda.

6. The Bugolobi STW manages a flow of sewage anywhere between 12,000 meters cubed per day (m³/d) and in excess of 25,000 m³/d, depending on the daily rainfall. This can, however, increase beyond 40,000 m³/d on a day of torrential rain, particularly if the rainfall has been heavy and sustained over a period of days, something that happens with some regularity during the rainy season. Bugolobi STW was initially designed to have a daily capacity of 30,000 m³/d when operating fully, a load designed to manage a population of one million. Given that Kampala's daytime population is conservatively estimated in excess of three million people (see Figure 3) it is evident that the Bugolobi plant is struggling to manage Kampala's wastewater.

7. ‘Problem’ is mentioned 106 times in 249 pages of text.