Decentralised and distributed systems: what will it take to make them a sustainable option for urban sanitation in the 21st Century?

摘要

Across the globe, adequately managed decentralised and distributed sanitation systems are being increasingly recognised as a cost-effective long-term option for protecting public health and the environment, and a preferable alternative to centralised sewerage in many urban settings (Pinkham et al., 2004). An increasing variety of decentralised and distributed systems are being installed around the world, serving neighbourhoods and high-rise buildings in developed and developing countries using a range of simple and complex technologies. Even so, they face significant barriers to scale-up, partly from hidden biases that favour centralised sewerage, but also because perceptions of performance are mixed (Watson, 2011), largely due to historically poor management.