Last week I was in Washington, DC at the World Bank Water Week. I went to the sessions on urban agriculture and WatSan services for the urban poor. The latter was especially excellent (organized by Martin Gambrill, a Leeds PhD graduate) since a presentation on condominial systems was given by the truly illustrious José Carlos Melo who developed condominial sewerage in the early 1980s in Natal in northeast Brazil. The event served as the launch outside of Brazil of his new book Sistema Condominial: Uma Resposta ao Desafio da Universalização do Saneamento (in English: The Condominial System: A Response to the Challenge of Universal Access to Environmental Sanitation − “saneamento” means more than just sanitation; it encompasses water supply, sanitation, drainage and solid waste management). The book is available in Portuguese as a zip file here; an English translation is being prepared by the World Bank. Zé Carlos is the author of The Experience of Condominial Water and Sewerage Systems in Brazil which was published by WSP in 2005.
All the presentations made at the WB Water Week will be available on the World Bank Water Week website in a couple of weeks. The presentations made at Water Weeks 2001−2007 are available here.
Oh, I nearly forgot: not a mention of EcoSan all week!
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.