To the loo: migrant women’s everyday sanitation access and the fluid borderline of home in urban Shanghai

Keywords: sanitation access, everyday urban inequality, urban ethnography, migrant women, home
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

Public discourse often takes home as a taken-for-granted concept, being pictured as a complete, functioning existence that stands separately to what’s called ‘public space’, i.e, neighbourhood space, streets, public square, café, etc. This is however hardly the case in the non-western context where the home can be much less a self-contained space. This concerns, for instance, where critical infrastructures are not included in the domestic, particularly water and sanitation. The everyday journey in searching for critical infrastructures has led to an inevitable change in the commonly clear ‘borderline’ that separates the home from the city. Recognising the ambiguity of home as a site and home-city interplay, this paper discusses the spatial boundary between migrant homes and the city. By revealing migrant women’s everyday sanitation access in central Shanghai, the paper demonstrates how the intersecting notion of accessing public sanitation infrastructure has expanded the borderlines of migrants’ homes. This fluid spatial boundary is constitutive of migrant women’s perception of home in the city. We argue that inequal access to critical infrastructure is a trigger to everyday social vulnerability, exclusion, and resilience. Our ethnographic study suggests migrant women’s intersectional identity constitutes their urban living experience, housing choices, and their longings for a permanent home elsewhere.