Decentralised Water Infrastructure in Urban Slums
I. Introduction The modern concept of sustainable development has emerged in the 1980s as the need for environmental protection was recognised in the practices of development planning around the world (Cobbinah et al., 2015). Widely used definition of sustainable development is by Brundtland Commission, which defines it as development that “[meets] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Satterthwaite, 1997). As various problems have appeared in this urbanising world, sustainable development was perceived as a paradigm shift and a new notion of development (Du Pisani, 2006). Achieving sustainable development in cities require a number of factors that play a significant role, such as sustainable consumption of finite resources and implementation of renewable resources. For instance, the provision of water and sanitation systems in cities serves as a crucial part in the sustainable development of cities. Especially in the developing countries, rapid urbanisation has caused uncontrolled growth of population, causing numerous problems such as increase in urban density, vulnerability, insecurity, and poverty (Cobbinah et al., 2015). This further creates uncontrolled and unplanned growth of slums, and insufficient provision of water and sanitation systems aggravate the situation.
i. Research Background According to UNICEF and WHO (2019), 1 in 3 people do not have access to safe drinking water, and around 3 billion people lack basic handwashing facilities with soap and water. This is a major issue especially for the countries in the Global South. Particularly, the low-income groups of the society, many living in slum areas, do not have the privilege to be connected to centralised water infrastructure. A recent report by the World Resources Institute on 15 cities in the Global South, including Lagos, Mumbai and Caracas, states that 42% of the households in these cities lack access to in-house piped water (McDonnell, 2019). Moreover, it is also reported that the number of residents in the urban areas that lack access to piped water has increased by over 200 million since 1990. In urban slum areas, those who do not have access to in-house piped water often get water from a tanker truck. In the case of Mumbai, however, the cost of the water from the tanker truck is 52 times more expensive than the water from public pipe (McDonnell, 2019).
Jong Hee Paik
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