Urban Sanitation Technologies management: The Challenges of the informal settlement Case Study: City of Tabriz

In the densest urban areas of the world, it is impossible to treat and manage excreta and greywateron site. Instead it must be transported out of the city and be safely disposed of. The problem ofdelivering sustainable sanitation services in these conditions is one of scale, to deal with the excretaand greywater from millions of people. Particular care must be taken when extrapolating resultsfrom pilot projects of a few hundred households to whole cities, due to the institutional complexitiesthat arise and the sheer volume of sewage. For 2,000 years, various societies have used a pipedsystem with water as the transport medium in dense urban areas. The problem then as now hasbeen an inability to treat of the sewage before discharge into the environment. This is demonstratedby the fact that only 8% of the sewage in the developing world is currently treated. Although thepoor generate less greywater than the rich, mainly due to lack of access to water, this is not a stateof affairs that is desirable or likely to persist. Any solution will eventually have to deal with vastlyincreased volumes of greywater.Given the institutional complexities surrounding dense urban slums it is unrealistic to expect thatsustainable sanitation services can be provided. The objective is to minimise risks as far as possibleso as to maximise the health benefits to the residents. This paper discusses the various technicaloptions and makes recommendations for how to achieve this

Keywords:

Urban , Technologies management , informal settlement , Tabriz