Citizenshit: The Right to Flush and the Urban Sanitation Imaginary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For many in the Global North, urban life means that your shit is not your problem. We postulate that a possible reason for the global sanitation failure in urban areas is a disconnect between sanitation expectations—what we term the urban sanitation imaginary—and the practices required by proposed sanitation solutions. The case study presented here is based on interviews with residents of Villa Lamadrid, a marginalized neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which faces significant public health impacts from an inadequate sewage management system. We solicited feedback regarding specific sanitation technologies frequently prescribed for poor urban communities—among them a urine diversion dry toilet with dehydration vaults. Even as this system is posited as ‘sustainable’ for the context of Villa Lamadrid in terms of ecological and economic factors, conversations with residents revealed why this option might not be sustainable in terms of social expectations. On the basis of interviews with community members we have defined four aspects of residents' urban sanitation imaginaries that we consider highly relevant for any consideration of sanitation solutions in this context: (1) an urban citizen does not engage physically or mentally with their shit or its management; (2) an appropriate urban sanitation system requires flushing; (3) systems that require user's engagement with their shit and its management signify rural, underdeveloped, and backward lifestyles; and (4) urban sanitation is a state responsibility, not a local one. Highlighting the urban sanitation imaginary methodologically and analytically goes beyond a discussion of culturally and contextually appropriate technologies. It examines linkages between user expectations and notions of urban citizenship and modernity. Ultimately it also draws attention to the sociopolitical dynamics and environmental justice issues embedded in discussions of sanitation and hygiene. While some of our results are specific to the Villa Lamadrid context, our research more generally suggests the need to consider sanitation imaginaries to reframe the discussion on sanitation interventions, particularly in underserved and impoverished urban areas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".