Sanitary civility: sanitation and urban co-existence in Maputo City, Mozambique

In the absence of well-maintained public sanitation infrastructures and adequate service delivery, negotiating sanitation forms an important component of urban life. In Maputo, Mozambique, the responsibility for keeping bodies, houses, toilets and spaces clean falls on the residents. We document these responsibilities and the material and social work they entail. Residents continuously engage in negotiations over what it means to be sanitary, and over the distribution of sanitary responsibilities. These negotiations help enact and sustain wider societal norms about ways of living together. We propose the term ‘sanitary civility’ to capture this relationship between sanitation and city-making. Beyond the importance of agreements on sanitary behaviour in making urban life possible, the term helps to explain how ‘being (seen as) sanitary’ importantly depends on arrangements with neighbours. This understanding challenges prevailing development and public health approaches to, and interventions in, urban sanitation that focus on individual behaviour change.