Vol. 24 No. 1 (2026): Urbanisation, Sanitation, and Social Justice in South Asia: Addressing Inequities Through Social Work and Policy Interventions

Social work is historically as well as currently related to urbanisation. This is true for different contexts around the globe since the 19^th century. The fundamental political-economic and socio-cultural transformations, called industrialisation and modernisation, had been and are still characterised as a spatial concentration: People move from more rural areas to the cities and existing cities grow – sometimes massively, like the so called mega cities, not at least in Asia and North as well as South America, can show in the last decades. Issues of housing, of vocational training, childcare or care of elderly have to be answered in the urban context in a different way. But living conditions and public infrastructure is not only a question of these conditions of living and education. At the same time all this is based on ensuring sanitation. Otherwise, not only combating sources of infection and similar hazards moves to the forefront. But people would be also faced with the need to ensure sanitation themselves, what is more or less impossible. So, the question, who is doing the sanitation jobs, is not only a logistic question, but related to the existence of urbanised societies as such. But under what conditions do sanitation workers their job and what are the living conditions for them in existing societies? Often, they themselves live in situations of exclusion – socially as well as spatially.

Therefore, to relate urbanisation and sanitation introduces a general question of socialisation: In what ways do societies ensure adequate living conditions for potentially everyone? On the background of this general interest, Vikram Singh (Amarkantak, India) has coordinated and organised the new SW&S.Special Issue on “Urbanisation, Sanitation, and Social Justice in South Asia”.

Social Work & Society is more than happy to be thus able to present its readers the new Special Issue that comprises 25 papers on the Indian situation of sanitation work, the existing welfare and welfare service reactions and the missings in that context.

The current special issue of SW&S is complemented, as always, by highly interesting forum articles, which we therefore really recommend to all our readers.

Our readers can thus look forward to a highly stimulating reading of the new issue.

SW&S.Co-Ordinating Office