Sewer: Sociology & Shit (from Vertical by Stephen Graham)

(Footnotes)

1 Edwin Chadwick, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, 1842, ed. Michael W. Flinn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965 [1842]. 2 Like most commentators in London in the 1840s, Chadwick believed that diseases like cholera were transmitted by ‘miasma’, fetid gases and odours, rather than being waterborne. Chadwick, Sanitary Condition, p. 369. 3 Ibid., p. 370. 4 Paul Dobraszczyk, London’s Sewers, London: Shire, 2014, pp. 15–17. 5 See Martin V. Melosi, Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, chapter 2. 6 See Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990, chapter 5. 7 See David L. Pike, ‘Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London’, in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 51–77. 8 ‘The undrained clay beneath the slums oozed with cesspits and sweated with fever’, historian Harold Dyos said about 1880s London. ‘The gravelly heights of the suburbs were dotted with springs and bloomed with health.’ Dyos, The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol[…]”

9 “Geographer Chris Otter calls the Victorian age the ‘age of inspectability’. See Otter, Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, chapter 3. 10 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 194. 11 We must not forget, of course, the visceral reality of verticality and gravity in unsewered cities. The gravitational dropping of ‘night soil’ from higher windows had its own terrible notoriety for those unfortunates below who got in the way. Jan-Andrew Henderson tells of the experience of visitors to Edinburgh’s notorious Old Town. ‘If you didn’t live in Edinburgh and you heard a cry from above’, he relates, ‘you were quite likely to look up and see who was calling to you – which didn’t do much for the tourist trade.’ Jan-Andrew Henderson, The Town Below the Ground, London: Mainstream, 1999, p. 30. 12 Steve Duncan, ‘The Historiography of Urban Sewerage in the Transition from Early Modern to Modern Cities’, unpublished paper, n.d., available at academia.edu. 13 Quoted in Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, p. 204. 14 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, New York: Modern Library, 1992 [1862], p[…]”

15“Matthew Gandy, ‘The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24:1, 1999, p. 24. 16Hugo, Les Misérables, p. 1058. 17Jean Valjean, in Hugo, Les Misérables, ibid. 18Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 88–9. 19Gandy, ‘Paris Sewers’, p. 32. 20Ian Roderick, ‘Household Sanitation and the Flow of Domestic Space’, Space and Culture 1, 1997, p. 122. 21Rose George, ‘The Blue Girl: Dirt in the City’, in Rosie Cox et al., eds, Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, London: Profile Books, 2011, p. 159. 22Ivan Illich, ‘The Dirt of Cities, the Aura of Cities, the Smell of the Dead, Utopia of an Odorless City’, in Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall and Ian Borden, eds, The City Cultures Reader, London: Routledge, 2004; Prendergast, Paris, p. 79. 23Michael Dutton, Sanjay Seth and Leela Gandhi, ‘Plumbing the Depths: Toilets, Transparency and Modernity’, Postcolonial Studies 5:2, 2002, pp. 137–42. 24See Maria Kaika, ‘Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28:2, 2004, pp. 265–86. 25In the process, attention is also removed[…]”

26“Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City, London: Routledge, 2012, p. 47. 27Lahija and Friedman, Plumbing, p. 41. 28Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, London: Penguin, 2003 [1919].”

30 “Gandy, ‘Paris Sewers’, p. 34. 31Pike, ‘Sewage Treatments’.

32“Chang, ‘City of Rats, City of Swallows’. 33Such blockages are an especially serious problem underneath fast-food districts because the discharged liquid fat solidifies, blocking the sewer in the process. Bodily sclerosis can quickly translate into urban sclerosis. See Simon Marvin and Will Medd, ‘Clogged Cities: Sclerotic Infrastructure’, in Stephen Graham, ed., Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 85–96. See also Rebecca Ratcliffe, ‘10-Tonne Fatberg Removed from West London Sewer’, Guardian, 21 April 2015. 34Manfred Sack, ‘Messages from the Bowels of the Earth’, in Peter Seidel, ed., Underworld: Sites of Concealment, Berlin: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1997, p. 9. 35Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, p. 207. 36Pike, ‘Sewage Treatments’, p. 53. 37For a full list, see ‘Subterranean Horror: A List’, available at imdb.com. 38Pike, ‘Sewage Treatments’. 39Jennifer Toth, The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1993. 40See Morgan, ‘Plumbing of Modern Life’. 41Forth, ‘Health, Hygiene, and the Phallic Body’, p. 109. 42See Roderick, ‘Household Sanitation’, pp. 124–5. 43George, ‘The Blue Girl’, p. 158. 44Ibid., p. 159. 45Annette Prüss-Üstün, David Kay, Lorna Fewtrell and Jamie Bartram, ‘Unsafe Water, Sanitation and Hygiene’, chapter 16 in Majid[…]”

Ageing infrastructure and the corroding effects of vibrating roads above, along with legions of rats, accumulations of fat and noxious gases below, have rendered many nineteenth-century sewers in need of urgent and massive repairs.

“Huge interceptor sewers, in particular, have often been essential as city authorities redirect sewage that was initially discharged into rivers into large chemical treatment plants established in the far suburbs or exurbs.”