Good sewers cheap? Agency-customer interactions in low-cost urban sanitation in Brazil

Condominial sewerage is a low-cost, waterborne system developed in the early 1980s in Brazil. Residents who wish to access service consult with implementation staff to choose from three layout design options. This study reviews experiences in seven Brazilian cities where municipal and state agencies built condominial sewerage over the past twelve years. Most of the systems were placed in poor neighborhoods, though condominial sewerage has also been built in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods. This study asks how public agencies learn to adopt not only significant design modifications, but also a fundamentally different service approach for a customer base that they are largely unaccustomed to working with, the urban poor. It also examines how communities organize themselves formally and informally to work with public agencies toward service provision. The survey used for this study revealed mixed results. In roughly half the cases, condominial projects performed as well as conventional sewerage, but cost between a third to a quarter of those systems. Thanks to unconventional layout options, condominial systems may reach customers living in high density irregular settlements who have historically been excluded from conventional service. Some systems, however, suffered from low connection rates, poorly constructed networks, and inadequate operations and maintenance. Most of the problems associated with condominial sewerage, then, are institutional in nature rather than caused by an inherent design problem or an uneducated customer population, as some infrastructure planners in Brazil have urged. Successful projects have all involved: 1) city block-by-block customer consultations; 2) demonstration projects in each neighborhood; 3) gradual acceleration of project pace driven by customers' demand; and 4) local contractors.