Urban sanitation and solid waste sectors are under significant pressure in East Africa due to the lack of competent institutional capacity and the growth of the region’s urban population. This book presents and applies an original analytical approach to assess the existing socio-technical mixtures of waste and sanitation systems and to ensure wider access, increase flexibility and ecological sustainability. It shows how the problem is not the current diversity in waste and sanitation infrastructures and services and variety of types and scales of technology, of formal and informal sector involvement, and of management and ownership modes. The book focuses instead on the lack of an integrative approach to managing and upgrading of the various waste and sanitation configurations and services so as to ensure wider access, flexibility and sustainability for the low income populations who happen to be the main stakeholders.

This approach, coined "Modernized Mixtures", serves as a nexus throughout the book. The empirical core addresses the waste and sanitation challenges and debates at each scale - from the micro-level (households) to the macro-level (international support) - and is based on the results of a five-year-long interdisciplinary, empirical research program. It assesses the socio-technical diversity in waste and sanitation and provides viable solutions to sanitation and waste management in East Africa.

This book provides students, researchers and professional in environmental technology, sociology, management and urban planning with an integrated analytical perspective on centralized and decentralized waste and sanitation configurations and tools for improvement in the technology, policy and management of sanitation and solid waste sectors.

Catherine Alexander is Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has carried out fieldwork in Turkey, Britain and Kazakhstan, and has published on domestic space and cities. Most of her research has been engaged with changing relationships between state, society and market including privatisation, property relations and welfare and the third sector.

Victor Buchli is Reader in Material Culture in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His research interests focus on the material culture of socialism and post-socialism, modernist architecture and urbanism in Russia and Kazakhstan, the archaeology of the recent past, and theoretical understandings of material culture and materiality.

Caroline Humphrey is Professor of Collaborative Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has worked extensively in Russia, Mongolia, and North-West China, and also more briefly in Nepal and India. She has published on economic change, ritual and religion, and her current interests concern socialist/post-socialist urban cultures in China and Russia.