ABSTRACT
Informal settlements are urbanising faster than cities more generally, and by 2050 it is expected that three billion people – a third of the global urban population – will be housed in different kinds of informal urban spaces. The liberal conception of the sanitation crisis serves, in a curious way, to sanitise the crisis, and the lived nature of the urbanising sanitation crisis in the global South, its manifold politics and questions, its urban nature, and the potential ways forward, are profoundly truncated. The Social Justice Coalition (SJC) is a high-profile movement in the city that emphasises the process of auditing urban conditions for political intervention in sanitation, using the language of the state to hold it to account through a monitoring of toilet conditions in the large township of Khayelitsha. Despite the hostility between the City of Cape Town and SJC, the objective of the auditing work remains focused on addressing urban sanitation by creating a working relationship.
