Colin McFarlane's (2023) Waste and the City examines the diffuse and deeply contested geography of human waste through the right to citylife. His chapters – People, Things, Life, Protest, and Allocation – provide a relational and networked approach to understanding the multiple dimensions of sanitation, richly describing how ‘urban sanitation is always already about life itself’ (p.21). As these chapters illustrate, the right to citylife is about the conditions of full social membership: the ability to move through the city and use its facilities without shame, to participate in its social and economic life, and to have one's needs and aspirations recognized as politically legitimate. This right is systematically denied to women who cannot find a toilet in the city's public spaces, to Dalit sanitation workers whose labor is essential to the city's functioning but whose bodies are treated as pollutants, to refugee women whose menstrual needs are not factored into the design of camp facilities, and to disabled people whose right to accessible toilets is legally recognized but ignored in practice. We’ve incorporated McFarlane's conceptual ways of seeing and his emphasis on the right to citylife to our own work using Q Methodology as a means to examine shared ways of seeing and focus our attention and intention to the goal of producing real possibilities for political participation in the production of the city.

Seeing sanitation as the right to citylife demands critically thinking about social difference and various forms of power and possibility in relation to the powers of the state. By seeing sanitation from the perspective and experience of women and girls, McFarlane is able to underscore the ways ‘that gender is always already connected to other social identities and urban conditions’ (p. 41). The accounts of Farida and Sameera in the chapter on People are exemplary in this regard. For Farida, sanitation is inseparable from the collapse of her husband's income, the management of sleeping children, and the threat of shame at the mosque gate with a water bucket. For Sameera, it is organized around queues, the unreliability of water pipes, and the geometry of neighborhood surveillance. In both cases, the body's needs are managed through forms of labor that are largely invisible in exsisting policy and mainstream rights discourse. These are not merely illustrative vignettes but analytical tools, demonstrating that what appears from above as a sanitation deficit is experienced as an intricate, exhausting choreography of water, timing, social obligation, bodily management, and financial calculation. Here, the city is not a place or stage, it is the process of living, and way of seeing. The framework of citylife presents the body as the site at which infrastructure fails (or succeeds) and the city as the unit from which any adequate politics must begin. We propose that Q Methodology (hereafter Q) as practical tool for critical geographers to apply the right to citylife as a basis for research, which serves as a means of identifying different ways of seeing and an ends to articulate a right to citylife.

Research methodology is the connection between theory and practice, and we find the procedures of Q are especially suitable for seeing sanitation in regard to citylife. Q is a unique qualitative–quantitative methodology that emphasizes a holistic approach to measure, understand, and examine subjective differences and social perspectives. Although it was developed in psychology nearly a century ago, Q has been meaningfully applied to a variety of topics in many disciplines, and increasingly in geography (Sneegas, 2020). Unlike more commonly applied statistical methods that aim to ‘reduce and/or eliminate the qualitative and subjective. Q methodology maximizes the qualitative and subjective and makes it the main focus of analyses’ (Ramlo, 2016: 29). Following geographer Gretchen Sneegas’ case for critical Q Methodology (2020), we propose applying critical discourse analysis alongside Q. The mixed methods research procedures in Q provide a relational assessment of different ways of seeing situated knowledge and day-to-day lives of people. We present Q as a tool uniquely capable of simultaneously investigating, articulating, and potentially expanding rights to citylife.

All Q studies consist of several iterative procedures that embrace holism and aim to address situatedness of subjective differences. First, the creation of the data collection instrument starts with the compiling a full set of stimuli (e.g. statements, images) that represent the variety of viewpoints on a given topic (known as a concourse), which is then narrowed down to a manageable and representative subset used for data collection (known as a Q set). Next, comes the Q sort, where the participants are tasked with sorting through all the stimuli and ranking each one relative to one other based on levels of agreement or disagreement. Then, Q factor analysis is used to identify the different subjective perceptions that the participants hold about the topic. We argue that each step of the ‘empirical-contextual’ (Robbins and Krueger, 2000) process of a Q study, from identifying the topic of investigation to the presentation of the results, can be designed to enable a way of ‘seeing’ the relationship between networked infrastructure and different ways of articulating rights to citylife.

The first way Q can be used to facilitate seeing citylife is the development of concourse. The concourse (typically expressed in statements) can be drawn from a range of sources (e.g. interviews, newspapers, speeches, social media) and refined into a representative set of stimuli that adequately reflect the existing discourse (e.g. themes, perspectives, opinions, views) about a given topic. Here, the construction and refinement of the concourse provide the discursive foundation used for data collection (Sneegas, 2020). In this regard, Q is research practice that can ‘answer the problem of geography’ alongside calls for ‘sanitation for all’ and, most importantly, address McFarlane's observation that any solutions must be ‘flexible enough to respond to the social heterogeneity we find in cities and to the specific needs and limits of different contexts’ (p. 193). Here, the definition of the concourse can be used by critical scholars as a way of seeing citylife. The data collection instrument becomes a primary representation of the always already conditions of urban existence. Furthermore, a Q data collection instrument can be designed to provide direct engagement with the diffuse character of the state and represent the relational dimensions of locally situated People, Things, Life, Protest, and Allocation, whereas data collection procedures can place the perceptions and experiences of local people at the center of the participatory processes in a straightforward and relatively simple way.

The second way Q can be used to facilitate seeing citylife is through the process of data collection itself. Q requires purposefully identifying appropriate respondents to make nuanced distinctions based upon relative levels of agreement and disagreement in a forced distribution similar to a bell curve. The sort provides the data used to represent individual viewpoints (and shared worldviews). This structured form of data collection allows researchers to measure and query things that are normally taken for granted or go largely unexplored (e.g. hidden, invisible, unspeakable). Q data collection is a practice of thought in action, a radically different form of spatial analysis that is based on ways of seeing discourse, and is itself a reflexive and discursive practice. For example, if participants are presented with a Q set drawn from statements from people in positions of power and authority, they indirectly enter into conversation with those who are creating this discourse; thus, Q can be used to facilitate political dialog. For example, the statements could be collected from decision makers – urban planners or prison administrators as the opinions of authorities that can be ranked by the participants. Being deliberate about participant selection, like ensuring Dalit women are recruited, can provide much-needed nuance within this conversation. Here, a Q sort can be seen as an individual articulation of the always already urban existence and citylife.

A third way that we propose Q as a way of seeing citylife is through the data analysis, which reveals social perspectives that are shared among participants. Once data collection is completed the individual Q-sorts are inter-correlated with all other Q-sorts and factor analyzed to define the categories of analysis – factors – that represent commonly held views. The tenets of Q eschew explanation based on predetermined categorical variables (e.g. race, gender, class, sexuality, caste). The factors that emerge from the analysis are defined by the interests and core beliefs of the participants. Q factor analysis can provide rich descriptions of common ways of seeing the networked infrastructures that expose persistent socio-spatial inequalities and potentially reshape rights to citylife. Q reveals subjectivities and social worlds that can be purposely applied to make sense of the mess of the city and the networked and intersectional circumstances of citylife. Moreover, the resulting factors can be employed to create new forms of politics and political actions that surpass traditional identity politics to engender political and social alliances capable of articulating and, potentially, appropriating rights to citylife.

The fourth way that we propose Q as a way of seeing citylife is through the presentation of research results in ways that could have direct implications for urban planning and governance. We argue that critical geographers can adopt Q to make the subjective dimensions of citylife analytically visible through the use of Q factor analysis, which provides both legibility and leverage that is often unavailable to purely inductive approaches. The quantitative procedures inherent in Q can mollify a fundamentally qualitative exploration of state power through the use of statistical measures, therefore strengthening the validity of the results for audiences that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with inductive reasoning or interpretation. In this regard, Q can be presented in a way that is especially palatable for people accustomed to seeing like a state: as a technique for empirically grouping people into statistically significant shared points of view. Whereas, in practice, Q can be used to upturn urban relations and provide structured opportunities for shifting power relations. A Q study could be designed as a means of listening. Listening, which as McFarlane stresses, ‘demands careful attention to place and social heterogeneity. This is listening as a politics of pluralism … Rather than seeking to whittle differences down to singular views, the challenge here is to build consensus while keeping a hold of the differences’ (p.229–230). We argue that a well-designed Q study is capable of addressing this challenge precisely.

Actualizing McFarlane's networked rights to citylife framework demands a methodology capable of moving between the biographical and the structural, the deeply personal and the explicitly political. McFarlane's Waste and the City is, among many other things, an argument that the subjectivities of women managing sanitation contain a political intelligence that urban theory and urban governance have systematically failed to take seriously. The procedures in Q provide a relational approach to measure and understand political subjectivity, which can provide a means of taking that intelligence seriously on its own terms, and also to compare and contrast ways of seeing citylife, and thereby discover the political possibilities that are otherwise latent. We assert that the unique procedures in Q can be usefully applied to other areas of urban governance, as we are doing in our forthcoming work on transportation networks. We combine Q methodology with McFarlane's reasoned right to citylife in order to provide a practical way to address, assess, and expand possibilities for political participation in the production of city.