Rethinking the Sustainable City: An Anthropological Approach to the Urban Through the Hybridization of the Social and the Spatial

The construction of the sustainable city as an emanation of sustainable development is based on the triple pillar of economic, social and environmental sustainability. The problems posed by urban sanitation can be approached from several angles. On the one hand, political anthropology is concerned with communal public sanitation policies and the relationship between municipal technical services for waste removal and citizens. On the other hand, social anthropology deals with the study of domestic sanitation and cleanliness practices, neighborhood conflicts generated by popular wastewater disposal methods and the resulting nuisances. While the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) n°11 are dedicated to sustainable cities and communities, the socio-cultural logics in the cities of the South augur compromising perspectives to the production of cities concerned with intergenerational equity. In this perspective, it is important that reflections are made in order to determine the contribution of gender to the problem of urban sustainability. What cultural practices are women incorporating that are antinomian to urban sustainability ? How are they more concerned with domestic urban sanitation practices ? To what extent does the use of tools, technologies and equipment by women reflect social relations of gender domination ? This article is theoretically rooted in the Chicago School's sociological theories of the urban phenomenon, in the sense of the city as implicated in the vital processes and lifestyles of the people who make it up. In a hypothetico-deductive anthropological approach, a documentary perspective as a secondary source focused on grey and academic literature complements the empirical tools resulting from semi-structured interviews and direct observation. The result is that the sociocultural logics internalized by urban populations are an obstacle to the production of a sustainable city.