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... full DRO policy for further details. Abstract The global sanitation crisis is rapidly urbanizing, but how is sanitation produced and sustained in informal settlements? While there are data available on aggregate statistics, relatively little is known about how sanitation is created, maintained, threatened, and contested within informal settlements. Drawing on an ethnography of two very different informal settlements in Mumbai, this study identifies key ways in which informal sanitation is produced, rendered vulnerable, and politicized. In particular, four informal urban sanitation processes are examined: patronage, self-managed processes, solidarity and exclusion, and open defecation. The article also considers the implications for a research agenda around informal urban sanitation, emphasizing in particular the potential of a comparative approach, and examines the possibilities for better sanitation conditions in Mumbai and beyond. The global sanitation crisis is urbanizing. At least 23 per cent of the 2.6 billion people lacking adequate sanitation live in urban environments, usually in informal settlements (Black and Fawcett 2008) i . These neighborhoods are poor, underserviced, and urbanizing faster than cities more generally (Davis 2003; Neuwirth 2006) . There is a small but growing literature on urban informal sanitation, but we lack an understanding of how residents get access to, maintain, experience, and politicize sanitation on a day-to-day basis. In this paper, we examine the everyday constitution of informal sanitation and draw on ethnographic research on two contrasting informal settlements in Mumbai, a city with profound sanitation inequalities. We focus on four processes that play different roles in the production and maintenance of informal sanitation: patronage, self-managed processes, solidarity and exclusion, and open defecation. While we argue that these different processes are critical to the emergence and maintenance of informal urban sanitation, we do not claim that these are the only processes that matter here. We highlight others, and we are also very aware that there will be hidden processes that we have not examined. A central challenge for this research agenda is to form a relative appreciation of what are intimate, private bodily processes caught up in relations of class, caste, religion, gender, age, and so on. We focus on the everyday because sanitation is a socially awkward, if not taboo subject, and it takes time to understand how it operates and how people feel about it. Only through a close attention to the ordinary ways in which people materially and discursively interact with sanitation can we hope to understand how it is produced, transformed, and contested. But more than this, attention to the everyday reveals the practices, geographies, rhythms, perceptions, experiences, politics, and power relations that reproduce, disrupt, and remove 4 informal urban sanitation as they occur within the neighborhood. This is particularly useful given that sanitation is a key dimension of urban poverty and a wide-ranging set of processes the safe disposal of human waste encompasses issues from infrastructure provision, toilets, solid waste management, and public health facilities, to resources for soap and water, cultures of hygiene, environmental cleaning practices, and the ways in which animals are kept. Moreover, it is profoundly differentiated by relations such as gender, age, ethnicity, religion, income, and ability. A geographical approach to everyday spatial variation is useful for understanding the networked nature of sanitation as a process. A focus on the everyday can help in understanding not just sanitation conditions, but how changes occur and the role of people in those changes over time and space. We are able, then, to understand something of how sanitation processes are experienced and perceived by residents themselves, given that the everyday is both a key domain through which processes are regulated and normalized as well as an arena for negotiation, resistance, and potential for difference (see Rigg 2008; Graham and Thrift 2007). Our concern is with a particular space and kind of everyday: two contrasting informal settlements in Mumbai. While there is a generally good understanding of aggregate sanitation statistics in Mumbai, we know comparatively less about its quotidian nature (Bapat and Agarwal 2003) . This is true of most cities, and not just in the global South (Molotch and Norén 2010). In these two Mumbai neighborhoods, we find an everyday characterized by often highly impoverished and marginalized residents struggling to respond to urban infrastructure inadequacy and demolition. The resources with which this everyday can be produced, or responded to, or reformulated, or politicized, differ considerably not just within and across the two neighborhoods but across cities more generally according to vectors of socioeconomic, political and cultural position. We are interested in how residents in the two