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Sanitation in rapidly growing cities of developing Asian countries is a complex problem that often appears intractable and unyielding to standard problem-solving approaches. It falls within the class of messy planning-related problems, characterised by multiple perspectives, key uncertainties and conflicting interests, whose resolution requires going beyond the confines of traditional disciplinary boundaries. This book uses transdisciplinarity as a basis to explore resolution of urban sanitation in alignment with sustainability, integrating concepts from diverse disciplines ranging from systems theory and thermodynamics to ecological and Buddhist economics . The author highlights, amongst other things, that dominant perspectives and worldviews of a wide range of stakeholders policy makers, sanitation service providers, academics, students, activists, the general public are critically important in the organisation of sanitation practice, and hopes that this book might reach at least some of them and begin to create the necessary shifts in thinking.

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Kumudini Abeysuriya holds a PhD in sustainable futures, and MS and BSc in physics. She is a research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney, where she specialises in research into distributed urban water,sanitation and energy infrastructure.

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