Urban Political Podcast · Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Mais Jafari, Nitin Bathla, Julio Paulos, Nicolas Goez, Talja Blokland

78 - Book Review: Waste and the City

·1 hr 17 min·1 clip

Urban Political opens by introducing Colin McFarlane's recent Verso book, *Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and Right to City Life*. The host frames the discussion around McFarlane's wider work on how cities are known, lived, and politicized, especially at the economic margins. McFarlane is described as a professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University whose work has moved between urban living, densities, fragments, learning, and urban worlds. Vanessa Castambroto and Julia Wesley join as guests. The conversation then turns to the fact that sanitation is never just a technical issue. It is also a political claim about who gets to live in the city and under what conditions. McFarlane argues that city life is built on interdependence. That includes people, things, infrastructure, microbes, and other non-human worlds. He uses the everyday act of using a toilet to show how private routines depend on entire systems of people, resources, and histories. The apparent individuality of sanitation, he suggests, is part of the illusion the book tries to break. Waste does not stay neatly contained in private life. In the example discussed from Mozambique, it can move outward into water supplies, agricultural systems, animals, and surrounding environments. The discussion makes clear that sanitation problems are rarely isolated. They are urban and rural at once. They are material and social at once. They are also moral and legal questions, because the right to city life depends on how a city organizes care, exposure, and survival. The host and guests keep returning to the discomfort built into the language itself. Even the words used to talk about waste, rights, and humanity carry assumptions that need to be examined. The episode closes by stressing that this discomfort is part of the work, not a distraction from it. The result is a slow, serious conversation that treats sanitation as a window onto politics, interdependence, and collective life.

As heard by us

A grounded discussion of sanitation, city life, and the right to city life.

Colin McFarlane's Waste and the City is presented as a case for thinking about sanitation, city life, and the right to city life together. The strongest stretch of the discussion comes when waste is treated as a route into infrastructure and interdependence, not as a separate…

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An urban theory conversation about Colin McFarlane's Waste and the City, where sanitation becomes a way to think about city life.

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