Blueprint Seminar: World Toilet Day with ROCA


To mark World Toilet Day on 19 November and highlight the aims of Roca’s We Are Water Foundation, Blueprint gathered together a panel of experts to discuss sanitation in developing countries and disaster areas. The conversation at the Roca London Gallery ranged from the future of sanitation without sewers, through gender issues, to the delivery of life-changing projects


Blueprint
Photography by Gareth Gardner

Peter Clegg is founding partner of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, established with Richard Feilden.

Peter Clegg

He is also the chairman of trustees for the Richard Feilden Foundation, a charity that provides skills and transfers knowledge to enhance educational infrastructure across Africa. Projects include Lake Bunyonyi Community School in Uganda and the Mzuzu University Medical Centre in Malawi.

Jordi Corral is Innovation Lab project manager of Roca.

Jordi Corral

He joined the Roca Design Center in 1998, after several years as a development engineer in the automotive industry. Corral helped set up Roca's Innovation Lab that seeks to find solutions to existing situations in the bathroom space, involving aspects such as sustainability, an ageing population and new lifestyles.

Robin Cross is managing director of Article 25, a team of architects and engineers that commits its skills to an expanding programme of international development and post-disaster reconstruction.

Robin Cross

Cross' experience includes delivering construction projects and advising governments in Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Haiti.

Carlos Garriga is project manager of the We Are Water Foundation, a charitable initiative from Roca.

Carlos Garriga

He is responsible for developing projects carried out with international organisations -- Unicef, Oxfam and World Vision International -- as well as various initiatives that promote the awareness of global water issues worldwide, including the We Are Water Film Festival.

Barbara Penner is senior lecturer in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Barbara Penner

She is author of Bathroom (Reaktion, 2013), awarded the 2014 RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-located Research, and co-editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Temple University Press, 2009). She is also a regular contributor to architecture journals.

Professor M. Sohail Khan is Professor of Sustainable Infrastructure and the director of Research and Enterprise at WEDC (Water, Engineering and Development Centre) at Loughborough University.

Professor M. Sohail Khan

He is currently developing a Gates Foundation funded toilet which turns human waste into water, minerals and biological charcoal that can be burned, so avoiding the need for sewers.

Danny Wills is an architect, researcher and design studio critic at the Urban-Think Tank and Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH Zurich.

Danny Wills

It is an interdisciplinary design practice focused on creating bridges between first world industry and third world, informal urban areas. He investigates sustainable development through ecological systems in food, sanitation and water.

 

Johnny Tucker: Maybe I'll start with the really big question. Is it true that the global community is not meeting its sanitation targets and why is this? Is it a funding issue?

Robin Cross: It's true that we're not meeting the targets. The Millennium Development Goals included a target to, I think, halve the number of people who do not have access to toilets by 2015, and we missed it. At the current rate of improvement, we wouldn't meet the target until 2076. You have the feeling that this problem is completely out of control - not only are we not meeting the target, we're way off.

JT: Why? Where will the neccessary impetus needed come from?

RC: There's not a simple answer. In international development there is an enormous lack of interest, commitment and funding towards long-term needs, so money is poured into emergency relief when there is a disaster, but that's all short-term stuff: food parcels, tents, inoculations, bed nets, etc. The donors, funders and NGOs are, understandably, all under pressure to show rapid impact.

Carlos Garriga: I think one of the signs that international governments aren't reaching the targets for sanitation is that the human right to have access to water and sanitation was only created in 2010. Before that it was not taken as a human right. I ask, how is it possible that something so important, without which it's impossible to develop, to have dignity, wasn't taken as a human right?

RC: It's partly that money's not available, partly that what is available is reserved for relief, but also you would need a degree of organisational capacity and decision making in the country. It's organisationally very challenging to do the kinds of things that were introduced in the UK, in the Victorian era.

JT: Where's the global organisation, which is going to bring this all together so that we can start hitting the targets?

RC: It's a possible challenge to the industry, to Roca and the like, but if you could generate the organisational change, the political change, in the countries that lack sanitation, you would then be able to sell more toilets that you can dream of!

Jordi Corral: But do you really think that a company like Roca could really be that thing moving the world forward?

CG: I wouldn't say there is a market with 2.4 billion people waiting for toilets. You can see cell phones everywhere, there was an opportunity and we didn't have to go to the politicians to create the desire in people. The people need to desire to have a toilet. After all we are human beings and we desire things.

Peter Clegg: The mobile phone analogy is actually quite interesting, because one of the reasons it has been hugely successful is that it bypasses infrastructure. Our conventional way of working with sanitation is that you need huge amounts of pipework, drainage and water supply, and I'm sure what we're going to get around to saying is, is there an equivalent of the mobile phone in WC terms?

Professor M. Sohail: The conventional sewage system - and that's not just the toilet but the whole infrastructure and treatment plant - is not likely to deliver the sanitation that is needed. If you were to bet on it delivering in the next 50 years, you would lose the bet. I think that there's a real need to think about this whole thing in a totally different way and I would suggest we stop doing what we have been doing because we would be wasting more money.

JT: So the idea of a water-borne sewerage system is no longer valid?

PS: It is valid, but it is too costly for it to be accessible to the people who really need it the most. I think it is not an issue of developing countries, it's a global thing. The thing has become so unsustainable, so environmentally unfriendly, that we are forced to think about something different.

Barbara Penner: When I went to Durban in South Africa it was to look at a roll-out of 100,000 urine-diverting toilets in peri-urban areas beyond what they call the waterborne edge, so beyond the reach of conventional sewerage. I met the head of eThekwini Water and Sanitation, Neil Macleod, and he really turned the whole conversation on its head. He said, 'You in the global north, you're dinosaurs and you've become completely locked into a certain way of thinking about sanitation because you have these very old, established structures to support it, but these are not options for us.' We can't just think of the sanitation problem as something out there, affecting sub-Saharan Africa or South-east Asia, it's also affecting us as well, and that has to be part of the conversation.

PS: Even in Europe many countries are not meeting targets and many cities are not treating water as they should. Many countries still believe that they will have the proper working sewerage system in times to come and until that happens they're not really ready to think of anything different.

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