Maps cannot tell the whole story: Interpreting the shitscape with a mixed methods approach

Abstract

This article describes the participatory methods used for mapping the expectations and understandings of Kampala city and its shitscape. I defined the shitscape as the collective sanitary apparatus that the city’s inhabitants utilise, and the relationships that mediate these infrastructures and practices. Analysis of Kampala’s shitscape therefore encounters flush toilets and latrines, septic tanks and sewage pipes, and extends to plastic bags and bottles and the wastewater channels that are used to dispose of them. The analysis examines what assumptions are made about particular toileting performances and engages with knowledge(s) of the city and its sanitation infrastructures and practices. Interviews, observations and participatory mapping were conducted in numerous places throughout the city and I utilised the city’s main drainage-channel-cum-river, the Nakivubo Channel, as a transect – observing, interviewing, and conducting participatory mapping with the city’s inhabitants I met along the Nakivubo’s course. Whilst the participatory mapping methods illustrate clear distinctions in the imagination of the city as un/sanitary, un/civilised and un/modern, the qualitative research contradicts this representation. This research suggests, then, that maps – whether archival or participatory – cannot and do not tell the whole story of a city. The ethnographic and in-depth qualitative research shows that different sanitary performances, such as using a flush toilet and using a plastic bag to shit in, are in fact bound by the same moralities of waste disposal and minimising smell. Flying toilets are not, then, a symbol of disgusting and uncivil behaviour, but rather as effective toileting solutions in highly restricted circumstances.