Paper short abstract:

Should toilet blocks in informal settlements be regarded as communal or public facilities? The paper considers Cape Town’s informal settlement toilet provision and the consequences of misrecognising sets of residents as communities.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa's basic services policy requires that all residents of informal settlements - of which there are close to four hundred in Cape Town - should be provided by the municipal (local) authority with basic sanitation. The City of Cape Town has interpreted that to mean that there should be at least one toilet provided for every five informal settlement households. But how does such sharing work? Who is responsible for cleaning and maintaining such toilets? Can those responsibilities be imposed on residents as if they constitute communities? Why have there been repeated 'poo protests' in Cape Town where informal settlement residents have emptied buckets of faeces in public places such as the provincial government offices and the international airport? Why do many informal settlement residents demand that each household should be provided with a full flush toilet? What is the role of a local activist group in relation to such demands? The paper addresses those questions and considers especially the challenges that arise when local authorities, when designing and installing either scattered individual toilets or toilet blocks, describe them as 'communal' facilities to be 'owned' by local residents, rather than 'public' facilities that remain the property of the local authority.