Improved sanitation for Bhubaneswar & Cuttack
In an earlier post, Khyati from Anagram Architects talked about some of the architectural design principles that will be adopted across the toilets in Bhubaneswar & Cuttack.
Here are some additional features across the 92 community toilets that we will build across Bhubaneswar & Cuttack, that will be unique and will facilitate a better user experience:
As keen readers of the Project Sammaan blog and people deeply invested in the project, you already know that the signage tender for 4 community toilet typologies has just been sent out. As we work on refining the designs for the signs themselves, and creating the specifications for the remaining typologies, this seemed like a great spot to take a step back and reveal the signage program for the Project Sammaan toilet facilities.
There are four different categories of signs in the Project Sammaan facilities:
As we’ve written about rather extensively, Project Sammaan can be viewed as the implementation phase that builds off of insights gleaned from the year-long research study of India’s urban sanitation facilities, the “Potty Project”. Part of this study involved researching the architectural infrastructure of existing facilities to evaluate where problems were arising and what could be done to alleviate them.
One such area of exploration revolved around menstrual waste disposal and the options that were made available to women and girls. Unfortunately, we found that most facilities do not provide mechanisms for disposal of menstrual waste, nor do they provide communications interventions that foster awareness around sanitary practices regarding menstrual hygiene. As a result, many toilets are blocked by pads and towels women attempted to flush and the facility grounds are littered with used sanitary towels. In several instances, toilet booths were blocked and rendered useless due to sanitary pads being dumped in there.
Equity and efficiency are both important considerations when it comes to evaluating intervention choices. In resource-constrained situations, one obviously wants to invest in an intervention which gives more “bang for the buck”. While a rights-based approach to development may consider the access to sanitation facilities and the dignity it affords, a basic human right, it may also be important to compare the costs of provision and the benefits arising from it.
The World Bank’s Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP2) takes the perspective of Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), and looks at the expected reductions in diarrhea resulting from the provision of various levels of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene and arrives at the cost-effectiveness figures.
Project Sammaan aims to rethink urban sanitation services by applying holistic, systems-based thinking and principles informed by user-centered design insights from the field. These improvements are broadly categorized into four “Pillars of Innovation”:
• Business Models
• Operations & Maintenance models
• Architecture & Infrastructure Design
• Branding & Communications
The Branding & Communications stream, led by Codesign, aims to develop and deploy a system of improved messaging, including the branding of the facilities themselves, as well as the system of visuals (signage, use of color, etc.) throughout the Project Sammaan facilities.
Operations & Maintenance (O&M) is one of the four pillars of innovation, primarily due to the fact that shortcomings and failures within this largely determines the success of the facilities.
Given the importance of this workstream, a great deal of time and effort has gone into understanding the current models that are employed, while exploring practical changes that can be made to operating and maintaining these facilities while improving the quality of life of the caretakers themselves, both through their perceived value and position within the communities they serve and by addressing unfair business practices that put an undue financial strain on them.
Potty Project research led to insights around opportunities to improve sanitation service delivery and, consequently, end-user perceptions around sanitary practices. These learnings were cased in four “pillars of innovation”: Operations & Maintenance, Branding Communications, Architectural Infrastructure, and Business Models.
1. O&M
Community sanitation facilities are in an ever-deteriorating physical state with derelict toilet hardware, broken doors or tiles, and accumulating layers of filth seeming an inevitable end for most. Overcoming people’s perceptions around participation in cleaning and maintaining these toilets will be a key challenge.
Project Sammaan will lead to two things: 1) the reduction of open-defecation and improvement of health amongst urban poor, and 2) the creation of a “toolkit” for successful sanitation interventions that can be replicated throughout South Asia.
The second point served as the impetus for a recent Quicksand field visit to Bhubaneswar to meet with project partners for a review of activities, milestones, learnings, frustrations, and other pertinent developments. It’s hard to believe, but the project has been underway for over 6 months now and the team felt it was a perfect time to get all the partners together.
Incorporating these conversations into the toolkit is certainly a daunting task considering the number of partners involved and the complexity of their individual workstreams. However, these concerns are part of the challenge that got us excited about this grant and they continue to motivate us.
Meeting with experts, conducting “Potty Lab” exercises, and general field research led to key insights and corresponding decisions across several facility components:
WC
One of our major learnings was, though a lower-height western-style WC might be an ideal choice in terms of comfort, there was a fair bit of resistance as it differed from their preferred habit of squatting.
The reasons weren’t hygiene-related as we had previously believed, but about ingrained behavior and the belief that squatting would help with bowel movements.
From a design perspective, this left us with an interesting dilemma: how could we provide support through a western-style WC and keep it high enough for wheelchair users to side-transfer to while also allowing other users to squat? After some discussions within the team, we realized that the best solution was a ‘low height hybrid WC’.
Users living with physical disabilities, arising from disease (such as polio), accidents, and simply old age, get the shortest end of the stick in urban slum sanitation.
We met disabled users in many slums while conducting our research and realized that designing for this small group is essential. Otherwise the project would fail to live up to its name and its associated goal of providing dignity to all through better sanitation access.
We started allocating space for a universal access stall early on, but only had a very vague idea of what the actual design would be until we worked towards our first design milestone, ‘Sketch Design 1‘. An important caveat to point out is that we focused solely on designing for mobility impairments.