Phenomenology of Sewerage

Stephanie Tam, march I 2011

aCKnowleDgemenTS
The work that resulted in this thesis can roughly be divided into two parts: my field research in Ahmedabad, India and my writing and research at harvard and mIT. There are many contributors, readers, and supporters who have been central to this projects existence, and those named here are but a fraction of all the people who generously shared their time and resources with me over the past two years. ahmedabad, gujarat Bimal Patel, hCP planning department and administration staff, Manvita Baradi and the Urban Management Centre office, mukesh Shah, Jatin mehta, apurva Parikh, manjula Pradeep and the navsarjan Trust, ashish mishra, himanshu Parikh, Saswat Bandyopadhyay, Bijal Bhatt, Bharati Bhonsale, Kokilaben Bohra and her family, Devendrabhai Parekh, Sureshbhai Parmar, Kantibhai and lalitaben Solanki. Cambridge, massachussetts antoine Picon, James wescoat and the mIT water reading group, the harvard anthropology Departments Political ecology working group, Steve Caton and the harvard University Center for middle eastern Studies water workshop 2011, Susan murcott, reinhard goethert, PanCh, and the harvard gSD Penny white Committee. finally, thank you to the readers who tirelessly read, edited and commented on my drafts. In particular, thank you to adrian Kwek and adam Talsma for their detailed feedback.

aBSTraCT InTroDUCTIon an Industry in Stasis The Tyranny of necessity The Phenomenological method The literary landscape of Sewerage reversing Scatalogical Travesty Phenomenology of Sewerage grotesque foreignness in the roman Cloacae The harappan Sewer Carnival air in the Parisian egouts Ahmedabads Khric Drains ConClUSIon Perceiving Contemporary Sewerage worKS CITeD 78 84 21 37 49 62 1 5 8 15 19

aBSTraCT
Sewerage design has been in stasis for the past fifty years: prescribed by manuals and codes, sewers are assumed to be necessary to urban sanitation, and consigned to the expertise of engineers. however, the adequacy of current sewerage practices is questionable. Criticism of their environmental impact has surfaced, and it has become clear in urban planning that sewers have an influence beyond conveying sewage. Instead of looking at sewerage within the framework of its function, this thesis proposes to understand the influence of sewers within a broader framework, examining qualities that are superfluous to their operation. It is these qualities that afford opportunity for rethinking the meaning of sewerage, and how they can affect the experience of urban life. Deploying a method of phenomenological description, four sewer systems across different eras, cultures, and localities are used to illustrate the numerous experiences that can result from the superfluous qualities of sewerage. The majority of contemporary sewerage systems are designed for developing countries where there remains a pressing need for sanitation. It is in a low-income context that sewerage design can be recuperated as spatially relevant, and offer designers a pivotal role in responding to the needs of the urban poor. given the increasing emphasis on infrastructure as the primary component in low-income housing projects, sewerage is in need of designerss input to advance system design and thereby address the day-to-day lived experience of marginalized communities.

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InTroDUCTIon
an InDUSTry In STaSIS In 1967, the Urban Land Institute pointed out that the basic parameters for sanitary sewer design were set at the turn of the century and, for the most part, have remained unquestioned since that time (qtd. in Ben-Joseph 76). Sewerage design is presumed to have reached its consummate resolution, and there has been little effort in analyzing sewerss function over time, their environmental impact, the sociopolitical economy that surrounds them, and the funding mechanisms that commission, build and maintain them. Sequestered in government drainage departments, current processes of sewerage design are carefully guarded by engineers who defer design responsibility to manuals and rules of thumb. In the United States, cities publish individual sewerage codes, while other countries prescribe national guidelines. australian sewers conform to the water Services association of australias Sewerage Code of Australia, while the Central Public health and environmental engineering organisations Manual on Sewerage and Sewage Treatment governs Indian sewers (Bandyopadhyay). In the latter, one finds on the first page an announcement that the manual is prepared by The Expert Committee (Ministry of Urban Dev.): the invocation of this self-validating body justifies the manual as the foremost national dictum on sewerage. The association of sewerage design with expertise resurfaces in Tabors, Shapiro and Rogerss Land Use and the Pipe, which advocates for the inclusion of planners in sewerage design while admitting that the [d]etailed design of sewerage systems requires a high level of professional expertise (2). While planners

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can identify and quantify parameters for sewerage design, engineers remain the experts when it comes to the actual designing. While sewerage is admittedly complicated, by no means have engineers solved it nor does its complexity place it beyond the critique and understanding of non-engineers. extending Tabors, Shapiro and rogerss work, eran Ben-Joseph questions whether current sewerage represents the best solution and suggests that it instead belongs to outdated engineering and planning practices (79). Indeed, sewerage design has largely been in stasis: the latest peerreviewed papers introducing innovative sewerage design date from the 1980s. recent papers are concerned with developing models for sewerage ventilation and sewage flow in existing systems rather than proposing new ways of sizing pipes or of dealing with sewage altogether. Ben-Joseph suggests that maintenance of sewerage status quo is due to path dependence (93), where a particular technology is allotted to a professional group that is acknowledged to be the expert (94). Once engineers were deemed the guardians of sewerage, other professions have avoided interfering, and have assumed that sewerage is the best that it can be. even in 1824, Parisian public health expert alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchtelet complained of the reluctance of non-engineers to engage with sewers. he sent acclaimed academics and even an architect to sound out the Rome and London sewers, mais toujours inutilement; un sujet aussi humble peut-il fixer lattention du curieux ou du simple amateur, et quel intrt peut-il offrir lartiste? (10).1 Sewers were not exciting enough to garner popular
1 but always uselessly; how can such a humble subject capture the attention of the curious or the simple amateur, and what interest can it offer to the artist?

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attention, nor were they aesthetically compelling subjects for artists. alex Scobies study of Roman sanitation similarly finds that [l]iterary evidence concerning sewers and latrines in the Roman world is extremely meager (408). Despite the Roman cloacaes renown, information about them is and has always been oddly lacking: [a]rchaeologists rarely concern themselves with either latrines or sewers. hence the extent of the underground sewer-networks of Pompeii, Ostia, and Rome are [sic] still very imperfectly known. nor is the current lack of archaeological reporting in this area counterbalanced by a sufficiency of evidence in ancient literary sources (400) Panelists at the 2008 world economic forum observed that there is a blatant resignation across sectors to extant sewerage conditions. margaret Catley-Carlson of the Un Secretary-generals advisory Board on water and Sanitation and the global agenda Council on water Security points out that [s]ystem managers tend not to be sufficiently aware of change possibilities; financial institutions work from current concepts of what a wastewater system is; and politicians tend to shy away from programmes related to sanitation and wastewater (124). Standards and codes have fossilized sewerage, making it a legal liability to propose radical changes to the way sewage is handled. Moreover, the presence of sewerage experts intimidates other disciplines and dissuades them from engaging with sewerage because they deem themselves inadequate.

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Sewer engineers may have a fairly developed perspective on sewerage, but by no means should theirs be the only valid perspective. even though sewers are not visually prominent, they have an immense impact on urban life and affect many other disciplines, including urban planning. They are necessary to urban development, which depends upon the availability of serviced sites: in fairfax County, Virginia, it was sewerage, not planning, that determined development patterns (Tabors 1). In 1963, Chapin named sewerage as one of five major techniques for shaping urban growth (Tabors 110), and the 1974 Council on Environmental Quality concluded that [s]ewers and sewage treatment plants are replacing highways as prime determinants of the location of development (qtd. in Tabors 1). Not only does sewerage have an influential role in planning, it also consumes a significant amount of funding. Ben-Joseph estimates that american communities will spend over $1 trillion to upgrade and build new wastewater infrastructure over the next twenty years (78). Sewerages influence is extensive and far beyond the engineers concern with conducting sewage. Aside from functional influence, sewerage has impact upon behaviour. In her expos on global sanitation, British journalist rose george calls attention to the importance of understanding perception and behaviour rather than imposing top-down decisions: [top-down bureaucrats] are the ones who put toilets on peoples heads while not thinking of making the nearby bush seem an unattractive option instead. They are the engineers and wastewater managers, the workshop attendees and the gray suits who dont want to do it differently. They are the stagnant status quo of sanitation (237)

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not only does george attribute sanitations stasis to an institutional reluctance to innovate, she argues that innovation should stem from an understanding of how sanitation is perceived. how sewerage is perceived affects the way the public treats it, which is crucial to the effectiveness and efficiency of sewerage as a sanitation device. Making sewerage available is by itself insufficient since behaviour is what enables structures to be relevant. Sewerage is integrated into our everyday routines, and we cannot evaluate its success based on its performance as an isolated system: Our most basic bodily function, and how we choose to deal with it, leaves its signs everywhere entwined with everything, as intricately intimate with human life as sewers are with the city. Under our feet, at the edge of sight, but there (George 12). The Tyranny of neCeSSITy lack of sewerage innovation is largely due to the belief that the way sewer systems are currently designed is necessary. Under the aegis of necessity, not only are the design and construction of sewer systems justified, but also the maintenance practices that they entail. ashish mishra is an advocate for manual manhole workerss rights in ahmedabad, and argues that manhole cleaning should be understood as a social need rather than an occupation. In his view, manhole cleaning is inevitable because sewers are necessary. while manhole cleaning cannot be eliminated, the status of manhole cleaning as a job ought to be revoked because the conditions that workers are subject to are far from fulfilling any legitimate definition of work. Instead of criticizing the way that sewers are designed, mishra focuses on changing the legal status of manual manhole workers.

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Mishras acceptance of the sewerage system as a necessity reflects a pervasive understanding of sewerage as inevitable. In The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, rose george dedicates a chapter to londons construction of Public Necessities. In 1848, the Public Health Act decreed public privies a necessity in order to alleviate public stench and disease (qtd. in George 132). Privies were presumed to be the only way that public defecation could be dealt with. Today, the United States continues to associate sanitation with necessity by mandating the need for a Certificate of Convenience and necessity before a person or entity can construct or operate a sewer utility. Sewers are built at the behest of public need or in the public interest (Jones 428). That which is necessary answers to the survival rule: something is necessary only if it affects the ability to survive. Indeed, lack of sanitation does have consequences on the survival of children under the age of 5 whose primary cause of death is diarrheal disease, largely from faecal ingestion (WHO Preventing Disease). The multiplying effects of sanitation can lead to improvements in education, income, and life quality, but sewers can also have deleterious consequences upon health: Jeff mcKays documentary Crapshoot: The Gamble with our Waste warns that sewers are polluting the environment and turning recyclable faeces into toxic sludge. McKay reveals that sewers do not actually solve the problem of human waste but simply remove it from sight, transporting it untreated to rural sites or dumping it into the ocean. Sewerage centralizes and agglomerates faeces, combining them with industrial chemicals and

film still from Crapshoot: conveyor belt carrying sludge through a sewage treatment plant. Source: national film Board of Canada

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piling it into unusable heaps, while faeces would be compostable if it were decentralized and kept free from industrial substances. while ecological sanitation2 offers a means of decentralized sewage collection and treatment that is environmentally friendly, it requires consistent maintenance by owners, which entails large-scale behavioural change and long-term commitment. led by Balakrishnan rajagopal, mIT attempted to establish ecological sanitation in Paliyad, India3, but it was too sophisticated for the villagers to maintain (Pradeep). Even an organization such as the environmental Sanitation Institute, which promotes decentralized sewage systems in rural areas, admits that sewers are ultimately needed (Parekh). Decentralized sewage systems have yet to be developed to a point where widespread use is feasible, making transportation of faeces to a centralized location the most promising option. assuming that sewers provide needed centralized transportation of faeces, there remains the question of whether the sewers currently prescribed by manuals are necessary. That which is necessary has certain causal properties (Shalkowski 56) that fulfill the need which called for its existence in the first place, but it also possesses properties that are extraneous, unexpected and non-causal (62). If we were to consider sewers necessary, we would have to accept that some parts of them are extraneous, and therefore not predetermined and open to reinvention. Extraneous or supervenience properties are not only inevitable, they are interlinked with causal properties: hume and David lewis propose that all causal properties of one thing are non-causal properties of other things (71). In turn, [c]ausal relations are fixed by the noncausal
2 3 Ecological sanitation or eco-san treats human excreta as a resource that is processed on site via toilets with processing chambers that retain and compost excreta. for more information, see esrey et al. Ecological Sanitation. Stockholm: SIDa, 1998. For a full account of the project research and proposal, see Rajagopal et al. From Promise to Performance: Ecological Sanitation as a Step Toward the Elimination of Manual Scavenging in India (2006). PDF.

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relations of other events (71). The properties that are necessary to sewers are superfluous to other events and objects, just as properties that are superfluous to sewers are necessary for other events and objects. There is no way to isolate sewerages causal properties from the influence of the rest of the world: [i]f we were given complete information about the intrinsic qualities of a sequence of events, there would be nothing in that information which could tell us whether that sequence is causal. Causal distinctions are dictated only by the entire history of the world (71). Things that are deemed superfluous to the sewerss causal relationship with human waste have an impact upon other causal relationships. The material qualities of sewers, the kinds of underground spaces that they form, the kinds of amenities they hold, the relationships that they foster between the city and the underground all of these characteristics are extraneous to the sewerss function, but they in turn determine the causal relationship of other sets of events. They affect the way that spaces, objects and people behave around sewers, instigating a series of external events that then appear to be determined. Sewerages superfluous qualities result in ashish mishras assertion that cleaning sewers manually is a necessity. In that way, qualities that seem superfluous within the framework of sewerage are in fact necessary and have the same importance as the conveyance of sewage when one enlarges ones framework to include other objects and events. To truly embrace the definition of sewerage as a necessity is to recognize how much potential there is for change, and how much sewerss superfluous qualities can determine external conditions. Sewerages superfluous qualities are pivotal to its future development: not only are these qualities opportunities for rethinking sewers, they also have the capacity to determine new relationships between people and objects outside of the sewers.

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The PhenomenologICal meThoD Instead of looking at the causal properties that allow sewers to do what theyre supposed to do, this thesis will be focusing on what sewers are: their presence as phenomena, and the effects they produce that are extraneous to their purported function. Their affective value, the kinds of perceptions that they engender it is through exploration of these supervenience qualities in a range of extant sewer systems that the potential for sewerages development can be discovered. Selecting sewerage from different continents and eras that deploy varying methods of handling sewage, the intent of this study is to impart to the reader an understanding of the diverse perceptual qualities that sewers possess. while these qualities can be learned from and applied to the design of other objects and spaces, the intent is to consider these qualities as catalysts for reimagining the way that sewers can look, feel, and be. each sewerage description is to be treated as a separate experience for the reader to react to a provocation, rather than a design guide or a comparison between extant systems. There is admittedly a danger to focusing on existing systems since it encourages replication of extant experiences instead of inventing new ones. however, part of the objective in describing these experiences is to advocate for designing from a perspective of perceptual impact, and it is difficult to conceive of such abstract and subjective qualities without extant examples. extant sewers do have perceptual effects, and it is these effects that ought to be considered in rethinking what sewers can be like.

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The phenomenological method is deployed to describe the experience of these sewer systems because it focuses attention on phenomena and their effects instead of reading phenomena as products of external forces. In doing so, it emphasizes the malleability and arbitrariness of sewer design, rather than portraying it as determined by political maneuvers, engineerss intents or available construction methods. The superfluous qualities of these systems are not causally determined, and represent a distinct design choice that can be changed. Following Merleau-Pontys definition of the phenomenological method as a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing (ix), this study seeks to represent the essence or facticity of various sewer systems by describing the experience of them. Sheree Dukes points out that the phenomenological method is not a method in any usual deployment of the term, but a perspective on what constitutes knowledge in the human sciences (202). It does not have the usual purpose or procedure that is usually associated with methodology, and embraces a non-linear aesthetic. Through protracted contemplation of the phenomenon as it unfolds itself to the perceiver, phenomenological description seeks to understand, rather than to explain (198), striving to discover the meaning of an experience (199). It asserts that there is a logic to human experience, no matter how obscure or random it may seem; husserls concept of eidos contends that there is a meaning that underlines the sequence of thoughts and emotions generated by an encounter with a phenomenon (199). Phenomenological description needs to be distinguished from automatic writing and the closure of representation. although phenomenology is often understood as something that is

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already there before one begins to reflect upon its presence (Merleau-Ponty vii), representation of the experience entails a process of reflection that blurs Merleau-Pontys distinction between analysis and explanation (ix). Analysis is implicit in the way one goes about writing a phenomenological description since it is a reflected reconstruction of the primary encounter. To write a phenomenological description of sewerage is to therefore embed analytical reflection within subjective perception. Phenomenologys appreciation for subjective perception is another characteristic that makes it conducive to the aims of this study. The design of sewers needs to take into account subjective perception, since the way that sewers are used and maintained is dependent upon how sewers are perceived. merleau-Ponty points out the validity of subjective perception: [a]ll my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless (ix). Even though fact is often extolled as objective, every fact originates from a perception of reality, a perception that is inevitably subjective. If anything, phenomenology is more honest in bringing to the fore the subjectivity of any description or analysis. That does not, however, mean that phenomenology operates outside of the subject-object polarity. as Latour points out, although phenomenologists no longer attribute any essence either to pure subjects or to pure objects, they are beholden to tracing a line between poles that are thus given the greatest importance (58). Phenomenology self-consciously occupies an in-between space that avoids subscribing to purity of the subject or object, and ironically affirms the subject-object polarity by continually obsessing over it.

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Phenomenologys playing field is a tense one that constantly attempts to validate both subject and object. Rather than disparaging material fact, phenomenology is deeply invested in material reality and is unwilling to simply cite information, but endeavours to engage with it in a transformative manner. Taking material presence as a starting point, phenomenologys work is in transmuting fact into meaningful experience. In doing so, the energy invested into establishing the initial encounter with the phenomenon often becomes invisible: the process of accruing information is no longer evident after one has digested the information and turned it into perception. Because there is little trace left of the process, phenomenology is often castigated for being ungrounded, fanciful, and a way to evade thorough research. we have become used to perceiving and valuing work through the sheer quantity of information that is accrued and produced, whereas phenomenologys work is in extracting a response from information, with the initial information oftentimes occulted. much of the discomfort surrounding phenomenology is due to its rejection of objective criteria as the sole means of evaluation. In valuing the subjective, phenomenological description seems to be a solipsistic process with no possibility for judgment, and no external relevance. however, such an understanding stems from two assumptions: that subjectivity is synonymous with introspection and withdrawal from all that is external, and that the goal of any analysis is to describe a truth that is applicable to every scenario. firstly, phenomenology does not disparage external forces, but questions their causal relationship to phenomena by ontologically positioning phenomena as independent of psychological, social, political or economic circumstances. That does not mean that the there is no relationship to psychological, social, political or economic entities, but that the relationship is focalized through the phenomenon; the phenomenons existence does not stem from [its]

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antecedents, from [its] physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them (Merleau-Ponty ix). Rather than restricting itself to the phenomenon and dismissing the phenomenons relationship with external entities, phenomenology takes up the perspective of the phenomenon in order to reach out to externalities. Phenomenology is rooted in, but not limited to, the phenomenons material presence. Secondly, the goal of phenomenological description is not to describe a truth that is applicable to everyone and everything, but to defamiliarize phenomena for the reader, to reveal the world as strange and paradoxical (xv), and to compel awareness in the reader of the multiple realities that reside in any phenomena. It aims to relieve the prejudged world of what husserl calls the historical sediment of historical traditions and rituals (Flannery 28), and to allow the reader to look at it anew. In order to offer this defamiliarization, the phenomenological method opens itself up to imaginative possibilities through an act of empirical suspension. husserls method of epoch enables the imagination to suspend preconceived and taken-forgranted realities, so as to question them as being able not to be (Depraz 156). It is through this bracketing that one can reach the intuited essence of a phenomenon. meanwhile, what constitutes the primary phenomenological encounter needs to be addressed in light of my dependence upon the representation of sewers rather than a direct encounter with every one of the sewer systems myself. Constructing an encounter with each sewerage system through varying combinations of drawings, photographs, field visits and texts, this phenomenology of sewerage follows Bachelard in asserting the validity of representation as a primary phenomenological encounter. Bachelards phenomenological study of poetic space

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argues that readers ought not to consider poetry as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality (xv). Spatial images created through poetry enact an experience for the reader that is just as real and valid as any encounter with physical space. likewise, the encounter with the sewers that is created through visual and textual representation is as real an experience of the sewers as a physical one. moreover, the goal of phenomenological description is to express subjective perception and raise awareness of the cognitive filters that intervene even in direct, physical encounters with phenomena, not to focus on what constitutes the phenomenon that is perceived. In reconstructing each experience, temporal consistency is sometimes broken. There are references to the world that the romans, harappans, and Parisians experienced, which in turn change my perception of the sewers. The past becomes a basis for the formation of my present primary encounter, and since it seems a bit ludicrous to refer to civilizations that clearly no longer exist in the present tense, the occasional past tense is used. In the case of lothals sewers, the imagined past when the open trenches were actually being used to conduct human waste, is taken to be the primary encounter. moreover, the encounters are restricted to the main sewer trunks of each system that is described. not every pipe in the roman sewers is the size of the Cloaca maxima, and the modern domestic pipes that have been added to romes system are not included in the description. The aim of these descriptions is not comprehensiveness. They are meant to serve as points of discovery and ways of rethinking the way the underground can be understood, rather than complete documentations of each system. finally, a note on the images: they are meant to complement the text rather than substitute for descriptions or provide a point for verifying the descriptions. If anything, they furnish additional material for the reader to perceptually respond to.

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The lITerary lanDSCaPe of Sewerage each of the four systems treated in this study are surrounded by existing literature that tends to explain them as if they are causally determined. Tracing sociopolitical networks, relaying historical and archaeological details, or explaining technical function, most existing texts tend to justify the existing state of sewers rather than open them up for reinvention. moreover, existing literature tends to ignore the perceptual qualities of sewers, using the sewers as evidence to construct an argument about external entities such as society, sewer workers, or political figures. Sewer scholarship reached its heyday with the Parisian sewers. not only were the Parisian sewers made iconic via engravings and photographs of its sublime interior such as nadars The Sewers, they were at the center of a political agenda that sought to suppress dissenters. as such, the sewers were a palpable part of the city, a presence that promised escape from the State and also threatened to reveal the States darkest secrets (Reid). In examining the sewerss sociopolitical significance, much of the literature forays into the sewerss perceptual effects, which were what gave the sewers their political power in the first place. However, these discussions of perceptual effect remain rooted in history: it is not the perceptions originating from the sewers that are usually discussed, but how politicians, writers, and the populace have historically perceived and represented the sewers. for example, Donald reids Paris Sewers

flix nadar. The Sewers (1864-1865) Reproduced from Matthew Gandy, The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space.

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and Sewermen documents the sociopolitical events that surrounded the construction of the sewers, and in so doing describes the evolving historical perception of the sewers. Strewn with dates, sewer lengths, and historical figures, Reids voice is that of a distant observer intent upon showing how the sewers were the result of sociopolitical movements and economic circumstances. Similarly, Matthew Gandys The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space takes up the position of a temporally and culturally removed observer who uses the sewers to demonstrate how the health of the human body informed planning ideologies of the period. The sewers for both reid and gandy are symptoms of a particular historical circumstance that they are interested in proving. The sewers themselves are only means of proving their respective theses about Parisian society, and are not the ultimate subjects of study. In counterpoint to these historical accounts, agns Jeanjeans Basses Oeuvres brings the reader into the sewers through the body of the montpellier sewer workers. her ethnographic study describes an encounter with the sewers as focalized through the workers and their daily lives. She describes the way the sewers feel, smell, and look, however, the sewers play an incidental part in her narrative. as a social anthropologist, her focus is on the individual lives of the sewer workers: her sewer descriptions serve to reconstruct the experience of the workers and enlist empathy for their conditions. Centuries earlier, alexandre-Jean-Baptiste ParentDuchtelet similarly wrote a vivid description of Pariss ancien rgime sewers to generate public sympathy for sewer workers. Although somewhat inflated in his portrayal of sewer workerss intelligence and wholesome character, Parent-Duchtelet describes the smells, temperature, and the consistency and appearance of sewage with the factual tone of an investigative reporter.

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Victor hugos accounts of the Paris sewers operate on an entirely different register. His well-known poem Lhistoire a pour gouts des temps comme les ntres (Les chtiments) only mentions gouts in the first line, but has come to associate his work on the sewers with political critique of the Second empire. although the poem is not a phenomenological account of the sewers, hugo does use the sewers to elicit a particular perceptual reaction from his readers, coopting the sewerss nefarious material presence to make a political point. It is in Les Misrables (V: Jean Valjean) that Hugo does his phenomenological work on the sewers. Jean Valjean becomes lost in the sewers, giving hugo the opportunity to take the reader on a tour of the system, which adopts various material and spatial characteristics in correspondence to aboveground buildings. however, his most notable phenomenological work on sewers is not about the Parisian system, but the Roman one. Lgout de Rome (Les chtiments) evokes the visceral experience of climbing down into the sewers and walking through them, vividly describing the sounds, smells, and textures of the space. aside from hugos poem, studies of the roman sewers are largely archaeological, attempting to connect newly discovered sewer segments to ancient texts and sorting out which parts of the sewers were built when. Thomas ashby, h. Bauer, marion Blake, and C. mocchegiani Carpano restrict themselves to documenting the sewerss materials and measurements without remarking upon any spatial or perceptual effects. John Hopkinss The Cloaca Maxima and the monumental manipulation of water in archaic rome is an exception to these purely archaeological accounts, venturing to draw sociopolitical conclusions about the practical and symbolic function of the sewers.

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likewise, the harappan sewers at lothal have been prone to archaeological treatment, with adequate documentation of the system but little engagement with its perceptual effects. Since little is known about the harappan civilization, sociopolitical conclusions are sparse, and most of the scholarship limits its conclusions to a note about the surprising sophistication of the drainage system (Jansen, Leshnik, Mate, Shaikh). while sophistication is marveled at in the case of the harappans, contemporary sewerage literature is intent upon simplifying systems. Since the mid-1970s, a contingent of sewer engineers championed the need for low-cost sanitation, arguing that sewers built in the age of empirical domination are no longer appropriate for modern urban needs (Bakalian 1). Since cities in most developed countries have long been sewered, sewerage engineers have begun to realize that their clientele lies in the global South, where the expenses of traditional sewerage maintenance and construction cannot be footed. as a result, sewerage literature has become littered with the language of efficiency and low-cost technology in the service of the urban poor. however, in emphasizing functionality and its attendant social, cultural and economic felicities, the supervenience qualities of sewers are often ignored. The perceptual effect of sewers on the urban poor are not taken into account, even though perception prompts behaviour and is therefore crucial to the sewerss actual impact on the well-being communities.

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reVerSIng SCaTalogICal TraVeSTy Describing the scatological acts of political figures has long been a rhetorical weapon in the hands of satirists the likes of franois rabelais, Jonathan Swift and alexander Pope. associated with bestiality, vulnerability and ugliness, scatology is readily deployed in travesty the debasement of a serious subject by representing it as ridiculous. as conduits of scatalogy, sewerage is subject to the stigma of travesty, resulting in its material presence being passed off as a frivolity prone to being laughed at rather than taken seriously. It is because sewerss material presence is perceived as contemptible that sewerage literature generally focuses on all the factors surrounding sewers rather than engaging directly with the experience of the sewers themselves. It is this thesiss contention that the subjective and superfluous qualities of sewers deserve serious attention because they are key to the future of sewerage development, and are instrumental to the way that sewers structure external spaces and objects. In choosing to approach sewerage through the phenomenological method, this thesis endeavours to reverse scatalogical travesty by elevating the perception of sewers to a position of primacy as the main subject of interrogation. The impact of sewerage is not only on the order of thermo-tolerant coliforms and reduced disability-adjusted life years, but on the order of perceptual effect. even if sewers are a necessity for the city, they contain superfluous qualities that are open to subjective decision-making. Such decisions need to be given the same critical attention that is bestowed upon all other parts

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of the built environment, especially since constructed sewers are not easily modifiable. Once sewers are installed, they are locked in by road networks and become indispensable to residents. Bostons current project to split Dorchester, Stony Brook and South Bostons combined sewers into separate storm water and sewage systems will involve extensive roadway resurfacing and infringement of private property (Boston Water and Sewer Commission). It is an example of the pains cities must go through in rectifying sewer decisions that were made without considering their consequences from multiple perspectives. There are many sewer projects currently under way in new cities, unsewered slums and rapidly urbanizing city peripheries, and they offer opportunities for innovation and cross-sector input.

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Phemenology of Sewerage

groTeSQUe foreIgnneSS In The roman CloaCae Pietra gabina4 blocks simultaneously hold open and stand as sentries to romes underground, breaking the smooth surface of the retaining wall that defines the banks of the Tiber. The blocks bring the entrails of the underground briefly to the surface, their crude texture carrying the mystery of a subterranean world that is yet unquarried, unseen, and unknown. They are out of place in the sunlight, exposed for all to see, like an intruder who accidentally stumbled outside of his haven. at the same time, they bear the mark of a conscious spectacle in their uniform size and intentional stacking. The care taken in their construction questions their wholesale allegiance to the hidden realm of the underground. The blocks form one end of romes earliest intestine: the Cloaca maxima, a half-breed born of the polis and of nature untamed. Dating from ca. 450 B.C.E. (Hopkins), the cloacae5 are grotesquely uncategorizable. They dwell in a perceptual limbo, suspending the process of comprehension: The interval of the grotesque is the one in which, although we have recognized a number of different forms in the object, we have not yet developed a clear sense of the dominant principle that defines it and organizes its various elements [] Resisting closure, the grotesque object impales us on the present moment, emptying the past and forestalling the future (Harpham 16)
4 also called cab stone, pietra gabina is said to be a harder, more porous volcanic rock that was used by the ancients for millstones. It is brought from gabii, twelve miles from rome (The Edinburgh Journal of Science 9:35-36) 5 The term cloacae is used to refer to Romes sewers in general in this section. It is distinguished from the Cloaca maxima, which is capitalized and always referred to by its full name.

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The cloacae are strangers to every governing principle and organizational logic, forever slipping between systems like an illegal fugitive that refuses State identification. As grotesque entities, they do not utterly reject the order of the polis, but stand within it while refusing to fully assimilate to it. on the one hand, the cloacae seem to signify their alliance to the city in their physical appearance. They have material affinity to Romes monuments of civic culture, which stand upon the same kind of cappellaccio6 blocks that keep the earth at bay in the cloacae (hopkins 9). The Regia, one of the most important religious buildings of its time, structurally fuses into the Cloaca maxima, physically incorporating it into the rituals that dominated civic life in the Forum Romanum. Their close affiliation is borne out in written accounts by Varo and Festus that describe the regia not in relation to other buildings, but in relation to the Cloaca maxima (Brown 59). The Cloaca Maxima becomes the context for understanding the Regia, as if the sewers are a representation of the civic life that the regia partakes in. not only are the cloacae integrated into civic monuments, they are incorporated into romes ancient port and defense walls (Mocchegiani Carpano 168), plugging into the citys token commercial and political structures. They are entwined with the everyday activities of the polis, signifying civic life even more strongly than religious buildings. The construction methods deployed in the construction of the cloacae affirm their civic status. while other waterways of the same period are constructed of clay and gravel-lined
6 Grey, granular volcanic rock that was fairly accessible to the Romans, and often quarried locally as large blocks. It was easy to work with, but not particularly strong (Anderson 141).

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troughs that mark their servility to the polis (Hopkins 11), the cloacaes expensive masonry is consistent with the grandeur and sophistication of aboveground life. Born at the same time as the Capitoline Temple and the regia, the sewers share with these structures the same late-sixthcentury technique of mounting block after block upon the faith of precision rather than mortar (9). The sheer size of the cappellaccio blocks, which measure up to 73 by 43 by 31 cm (Blake 123), belies the painstaking labour involved in the construction of the cloacae. according to reports by livy, Pliny and Cassius hemina, many labourers attempted to escape and even committed suicide to avoid the work (Hopkins 11). In addition to the significant resources that are invested in their construction, time and effort is expended in achieving an innovative design: the sewers possess the earliest voussoir arch in all of Rome (Blake 123). They are the apogee of Roman ingenuity and wealth, reifying the citys values. however, the cloacaes professed function undermines their civic airs. Their bricks are overdressed for a nonexistent audience, and their expensive construction and innovation are wasted upon the trickling stream of faecal matter that inhabits them. removed from the context of aboveground rome, the glamour of their elaborate construction becomes nonsensical. Urban display is foreign to the subterranean world, and for all their pretentions of civic affinity, the cloacae are not altogether a part of the city. Undeterred by its underground location, the cloacaes construction subscribes to the poliss valorization of solids over voids. The sewers are produced through the manipulation of solid materials rather than carving out a void: space for the passage of sewage is a byproduct

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of the form created by masonry walls instead of being directly hollowed out from the solid ground. The use of solids to shape form is an aboveground logic derived from the practical need for structures to be freestanding. In the underground, voids take precedence since form is no longer dictated by structural concerns, and spaces become the direct object of construction in the process of hollowing out earth. The roman cloacae are foreign to the logic of the underground: their masonry walls impart to them the freestanding status of objects, heedless of the earth that surrounds them. They appear like aboveground structures that were unwittingly placed below ground, as if a part of the polis slipped beneath the surface. Indeed, the sewers mirror parts of the polis, closely resembling aboveground circulation spaces. They are dimensioned in response to city streets, the standard width of a roman highway measuring three to four and a half meters (Blake 129) in comparison to the Augustan portion of the Cloaca Maxima, which measures a little over three meters in width (159). The dimensions of the sewers have more to do with extending city movement below ground than with accommodating the citys sewage load. Oversized for the effluents they purportedly serve, most of the cloacaes volumetric space is perpetually unoccupied and thereby affords opportunity for human circulation. Indeed, it is large enough for subterranean navigation: Pliny the elder tells of how Agrippa was able to take a boat through the sewers (Mocchegiani Carpano 167). He also describes the cloacae as a subterranean transportation project: [] e inoltre le cloache, lopera pi colossale che dir si possa, in quanto furono perforati i monti, e, come abbiamo detto poco sopra per Tebe, la citt divenuta pensile pot essere navigata nel sottosuolo (qtd. in Mocchegiani Carpano 165)7
7 [...] and also the sewers, the most colossal work said to be possible bcause they were drilled into the mountains, and, like as we have just said above regarding Thebes, the city became navigable in the underground

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Pliny seems to perceive the underground as always having been part of the city, and the cloacae as simply a means of accessing this hitherto unreachable realm. His assertion that la citt divenuta pensile pot essere navigata nel sottosuolo (165) suggests that construction of the sewers did not co-opt a new realm, but were modifications made in the existing city. and yet, the cloacae do not altogether belong to the polis. as post-settlement insertions that lag behind the citys development, the cloacae are excluded from the poliss pattern of growth. They do not correspond to romes urban logic, constituting their own alternative urban order of unfulfilled and outmoded aboveground intentions. An apt example is the segment of the Cloaca maxima that is beneath the basilica aemilia et fulvia, which speaks to an earlier urban order that can only be pieced together by excavated remnants of structures. The cloaca is oriented orthogonally to an ancient road built out of tufa slabs that was likely a part of the Sacra Via as it existed during the period of the roman republic. It belongs to an obsolete urban logic that dictates the orientation of not only the cloaca but the republican Curia, the Comitium, the rostra, the faade of the Carcer, the regia, the temple of the Vesta, the older atrium Vestae, and the front of the Juturna shrine (Ashby 138). While the Sacra Via changed its route over time, in response to which many of the structures of the republican Curia were dismantled and displaced (Richardson 339), the cloaca persists in maintaining the Republican urban logic. It lives in a past that no longer exists outside of itself, like an orphan haunted by the memory of its lost parents. The sewers occupy a temporal space separate from that of the city and progresses at a different pace.

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Time is not linear or gradual in the cloacae, but a patchwork of interruptions and juxtapositions. The brickwork reads like geological strata, registering different historical periods, but in an achronological manner. reparations disrupt temporal strata: near the Imperial and roman fora, archaic, mid-republican, Julian, augustan, early flavian, and Domitianic masonries are juxtaposed (Hopkins 2). While all structures register the passage of time to some degree, what is significant about the plurality of temporalities is how their juxtaposition undermines every historical bricklaying technique. new additions and reparations insert themselves without any regard for completion of the extant construction logic. Crumbled cappellaccio blocks are often not repaired or removed before a new stratum of material is laid so that old and new construction logics interrupt each other. For new brickwork to fill in voids left by the old cappellaccio blocks, new bricks must be stacked irregularly to conform to the ragged edges of the missing cappellaccio, undermining the logic of regular stacking that is embedded into the dimensions of the bricks. at the same time, the logic of mortarless mounting embodied in the massive size of the cappellaccio blocks is disrupted by the intrusion of the new brick unit with its attendant logic of mortared construction. The cappellaccio blocks and bricks interrupt and modify each others logic of construction, rendering each masonry technique dysfunctional. not only do the citys construction techniques devolve to dysfunction in the cloacae, the clarity of the citys urban order is reduced to confusion and redundancy. excess sewer apertures and stunted lines that grew too slowly for the citys changing needs recall Bakhtins grotesque apertures, the convexities, [] and offshoots (26). The oldest portion of the Cloaca Maxima is
Bricks and blocks intermingle in the cloaca near Colisseo. Source: Sotterranei di roma: centro ricerche speleo archeologiche

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interrupted by a newer cloaca that responds to the basilica aemilia et fulvias orientation (ashby 138). Later, a third more devious (138) cloaca responding to the restoration and rechristening of the basilica (Platner 72) rendered the two previous cloacae redundant. Many sealed sewer shafts languish in disuse (Hopkins 2), attesting to the cloacaes non-compliance with the polis. Simultaneously apart from and a part of the city, the cloacae are romes grotesque double, a repository of embryonic intentions that celebrate perpetual incompletion of the urban order. They are defiant foreigners that reside within the city but do not obey all its rules, a reminder that the polis is but a tenuous construct. They engender a state of alienation by turning that which is ordinary, commonplace, belonging to everyday life, and recognized by all (Bakhtin 39) into something meaningless, dubious and hostile (39). Bakhtin associates this terrifying world, alien to man (39) with the Romantic grotesque. The cloacae are strangers who not only do not belong to any system but insidiously pose as a part of every system and undermine each system from within. although they are materially contiguous with civic buildings, they constitute an urban order separate from that of the city an order of dysfunction and redundancy. They are not altogether part of the city, but not altogether apart from it either. The breaking point of urban order, intruders in a homogeneous fabric, spaces where civility can no longer hold, the cloacae are, in Badious terms, symptomal torsion: points of systemic failure that reveal the artifice of the city (iek 131). It is by participating in the polis that the cloacae are able to subvert the values of the polis. Their adherence to the poliss system of civic values allows them to provoke a systemic failure from within that invalidates all of the

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poliss habitual values. The cloacae make the monumental trappings of the polis meaningless, dubious and hostile (Bakhtin 39) by extending them to the underground. however, the cloacaes constant presence operates in a way that is different from Badious symptomal torsion. Whereas symptomal torsion is a one-off malfunctioning that has the power to destabilize the entire system, the cloacae maintain a persistent and pervasive presence that undermines the city. against Badious conception of subverting an a priori, established system, Kristeva posits the existence of a subverting force at the very birth of any system the foreigner. She points out that foreigners are inevitable to the city, that the civic system cannot exist without a counterpointing force. The foreigner and the citizen are mutually dependent, each being defined through the exclusion of the other. Foreigners are therefore inevitable to the city: le problme des trangers dcoule dune logique classique, celle du groupe politique et de son apoge, ltat-nation. Logique qui [] reconnat quelle repose sur certaines exclusions (Kristeva trangers 143)8. as foreigners to the city, the cloacaes presence is fundamental to the existence of the polis. roman civilization cannot exist without the cloacae: the very concept of rome is rooted in the presence of the sewers. Students were taught that the Cloaca Maxima signifies civilization in history manuals and latin classes:
8 the problem of foreigners derives from a classical logic, that of a political group and its culmination, the Nation-state. A logic that [...] recognizes it depends upon certain exclusions

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Cloaca Maxima: cela na pas manqu de valoir, jusques et y compris dans le plus insipide des manuels dhistoire ou dans lenseignement le plus lmentaire du latin des lyces comme le significant mme de la civilisation, lexemple quon donne avant tous, avant le ciment et en mme temps que laqueduc, du haut degr de civilisation auquel taient parvenus les romains [original italics] (Laporte 23)9 laportes comparison of the Cloaca maxima with cement points to the material importance of the sewers. The association of roman civilization with the Cloaca maxima is not merely symbolic, but material. The sewers materially create a foreign space against which the city can define itself conceptually. By creating a space for civic exclusion, the sewers allow the city to become a space for civic inclusion. The cloacae do not represent romes high degree of civilization, but provide a foil for it, allowing romes high degree of civilization to be perceived. The cloacae can hardly be taken as a display of Romes aesthetic refinement, nor did they provide the Romans with adequate sanitation. Built with the softness and imprecision of cappellaccio, the cloacae appear grotesquely uncouth next to the elegant sculptures that emerged during the same period,
9 Cloaca Maxima: it has not failed to claim, up to and including the most insipid of history manuals or in the teachings of the most elementary of Latin classes, to be the signifier of civilization itself, the example we give before all else, before cement and alongside the aquaducts, of the high degree of civilization that was reached by the romans

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and alex Scobie points out that they harboured vermin, foul odours, and combustible gases, posing more as a health hazard than an amenity for the romans. The cloacae are not paragons of roman taste or sanitation. what makes them important to roman civilization is not their conformity to civic expectations, but their foreignness to them. The choice of cappellaccio as the dominant construction material yokes together geometric regularity with a highly irregular material in a contradiction of intentions that thwarts the fulfillment of both. Hovering between the crudeness of raw nature and the exigencies of human rationality, cappellaccio blocks are grotesquely foreign to both nature and human craft. although the romans impose a geometric logic upon the material, cutting it into regular blocks with enough precision for mortarless assembly, the material itself opposes geometric purity. Block edges inevitably appear fuzzy and imprecise because of cappellaccios coarse, porous texture, arising from its heterogeneous composition of black lava, limestone, white farinaceous leucite, brown mica, black and greenish augite, and felspar. Cappellaccio is also susceptible to decomposition by air, its dissolution over time adding to its amorphous quality (The Edinburgh Journal of Science 9: 35-36). Cappellaccio possesses an embryonic beauty, which resides forever in the realm of the potential because of its aesthetically unfinished state. In Uvedale Prices On the Picturesque, roughness is conceived of as the fringe of beauty, that which gives it life and spirit, and preserves it from baldness and insipidity (qtd. in Harpham 33). Roughness keeps one in anticipation of beauty by suspending the process of beautification. Cappellaccios quality of

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inchoate beauty is grotesquely between acceptance of the materials natural state and the anthropogenic demand for grace and elegance. Cappellaccio blocks simultaneously signify continuity with and foreignness to the cloacaes subterranean context. Quarried from the underground, cappellaccio blocks are a natural material for subterranean construction. However, they bear the traces of human intervention upon their reinsertion underground, being subdivided into blocks that are thoroughly unnatural. Pliny the Elder tells of how Tarquinio Prisco, the builder of the first cloaca, would take a scale to the construction site to ensure that the right amount of cappellaccio was being used (Bauer 165). Unitized, quantified, weighed, distributed, and assembled, the cappellaccio blocks are imprinted with human logic despite the natural logic of their subterranean placement. They do not fully belong to either anthropogenic or natural orders, creating a subterranean space that is perceptually unstable. In positing the underground as constructed and therefore reconfigurable, the cloacae call into question terrestrial stability: the very grounds upon which rome stands are semianthropogenic structures prone to the fallacies of human judgment and the vicissitudes of human politics. rather than a given condition of divine origin, the underground is a distorted double of the aboveground world, an interlocutor of the logic of the city. although they engage in a dialogue with aboveground structures, the cloacae are not fully civilized spaces. They lack the material homogeneity of romes public spaces, the geometric precision and polish of human

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craft. The transformation of nature is incomplete, aborted mid-way through the process of anthropogenic beautification. The space of the cloacae is a terrifying world, alien to man (Bakhtin 38) and alien to nature. It is a stranger to all systems, resistant to the logic of the aboveground and to that of the subterranean. Its defiant non-conformity makes it threatening because it is an intentional undermining of the dichotomy between us and the other, a challenge to the very notion of place with its implications of boundedness and localization. Dostoevsky describes such resistance to classification as underground, a kind of ideological refusal of comprehensive knowledge and certainty. The cloacae are not only topographically underground, but their very presence disturbs perceptual classification in a way that is underground. Dostoevskys underground is a valorization of the foreign. His Underground Man is a bystander who observes society, who is simultaneously a victim of bourgeois values while sneering at them, and a participant in certain social rituals while excluded from others. rather than accepting defeat, the Underground man declares his foreignness a desirable state: So, long live the underground! although I may have said that I envy the normal man with all the rancour of which Im capable, I wouldnt care to be him, in the situation in which I see him (although I shant stop envying him all the same. no, no, in any event the underground is more advantageous!) (Dostoevsky 34)

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In establishing his own system that is autonomous from extant classifications, the Underground man constructs a framework within which he is not at the bottom of the food chain, but on top: A novel needs a hero but here Ive deliberately gathered together all the features of an antihero [original emphasis] (117). By selecting his own criteria for self-judgment, the Underground man endows himself with the power of self-determination. he styles the foreigner as one who is in control of his identity, not a pariah who wears the stamp of social disapproval, but a consciously crafted anti-hero. The cloacae do not fall short of being civic spaces or emulations of nature, but deliberately abscond from these systems and their expectations. like Dostoevskys Underground man, they establish their own terms of judgment separate from extant systems, terms that place them in a position of power. They are unapologetic in their inchoate gestures towards the human and the a-human, their formidable dimensions forcing one to consider them as legitimate spaces rather than forgotten leftovers. Varying from approximately three to four meters in height (Richardson), the cloacae have a grandeur that defies marginalization. Theirs is a grandeur that is compelling not because of their glamour but because of their strangeness, which lends them mythic authority. Because they lie outside of any clearly identifiable human intention, the sewers acquire a superhuman gravitas that often accompanies instances of the grotesque. harpham asserts that the grottesche designs of or pertaining to underground caves (27) originates in primitive or mythological cultures that had no concept of meaningless design (50). In the absence of a human explanation for grotesque phenomena, one ascribes to them mythic meaning.

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romes sewers are presided over by Venus Cloacina whose votive shrine marks the beginning of the cloaca near the original basilica Aemilia et Fulvia (Ashby 138, Bauer 289). Bourke claims that she was Romes first god, supposedly named by Romulus himself (127). The cloacae have an aura of sacredness, a primeval quality that precedes and is oblivious to human purpose. all social hierarchy is dismantled in the sewers, where everyone is stripped down to their essence: flesh and blood, susceptible to death and decay. Victor Hugos poetic description of Lgout de Rome evokes the impartial and omniscient gaze of the sewers: et rome tout entire avec tout son pass, joyeuse, souveraine, esclave, criminelle, dans ce marais sans fond croupit, fange ternelle (603)10 The sewers proclaim their judgment upon human life with no discrimination between des chiens crevs ou des csars pourris (604)11. accumulating all the impurities of the empire, they have the power to expose all of romes darkest secrets because of their removal from the city. however, implicit in their position of autonomy is a vulnerability stemming from isolation and abandonment. agambens elaboration of homo sacer is an apt description of the paradox inherent in the cloacaes sacredness. recalling Kristevas understanding of the foreigner as necessary to
10 11 And Rome as a whole with all of its past, Joyful, sovereign, slave, criminal, In this bottomless rotting swamp, eternal mud dead dogs or rotten caesars

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the foundation of the polis, Agamben posits the sovereign as the pre-order to order (16), the element that traces the threshold to what is inside and what is outside of juridical order (19). As sovereigns answerable to no one but themselves, the cloacaes mythic power is at the expense of being protected by anthropogenic order. They constitute a zone of exception, a place where one is free to do what one will but at the cost of ones value supra bare life. Hugos Lgout de Rome describes the sewer space as a realm where all are valued equally for their bare lives, stripped of sympathy and pre-established meaning. [D]es chiens crevs and des csars pourris (604) are indistinguishable in the sewers, turned into a heap of material, ce tas monstrueux (604)12. In the sewers, everything is reduced to material presence, freed from what elizabeth Povinelli calls the genealogical contraptions that allot meaning to everything13. In the sacred space of the cloacae, all acts can be freely committed, as censure is suspended and myth validates even the most socially objectionable rituals: Bourkes scatological ethnography concludes that disgusting rites are distinctively religious in origin (2). myth legitimates autonomous regimes: Povinellis examination of deregulated spaces concludes that [m]any counterpublics practice forms of spirituality that are a panoply of religious, cultural, and social traditions (164). The cloacae establish their otherness through spaces whose dysfunction imbues them with mysterious import. Small pits at the end of the
12 13 this monstrous pile Povinelli defines genealogical as discourses, practices, and fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances (4).

Tributary sewer splitting off of the main line. Source: Steve Duncan, Undercity.org: Guerilla History and Urban Exploration

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earliest cloaca gesture towards subterranean votive practices (Ashby 138), and the irregularity of the Cloaca maximas course leaves one in a constant state of disorientation, stumbling onwards upon faith rather than knowledge of what is ahead. The space of the cloacae is utterly enclosed, permitting no glimpses of external indicators to mark ones progress in relation to the city or, for that matter, to the rest of the system. To move through the cloacae is to commit to a journey of uncertainty and incomplete apprehension. The Cloaca maxima splits into multiple tributary sewers under the steps of the Basilica Julia (Blake 160), so that selecting the wrong route could easily lead to a dead end. The maze of twisting and turning tunnels denies one full comprehension of the sewer systemss extents. There is no position of privilege available, no point of omniscience where one can obtain visual mastery over the system. one must submit to a fragmented experience of its spaces, suspend ones rational expectations of how spaces ought to flow, and surrender oneself to darkness, both metaphorically and literally. one is a foreigner in the roman sewers. maladroit intruder, uninitiated to the cloacaes particular logic of contortion and redundancy, one is perpetually a visitor to the sewers, never a resident. The cloacae compel mobility, offering no niches for resting so that one is always traveling through them with the restlessness of one in exile. It is the fate of the foreigner to search for a home that is out of reach, un ailleurs toujours repouss, inassouvi, inaccessible (Kristeva trangers 15)14. Themselves in exile from both the realm of the human and the realm of nature, the cloacae reproduce their state of alienation in those who enter them.
14 towards an elsewhere that is always pushed away, unfulfilled, inaccessible

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The haraPPan Sewer CarnIVal embedded into an acropolis in the Indus Valley15, brick-lined trenches cordon off each sector of the harappan16 settlement at lothal17 (Leshnik 914). The trenches cut through retaining walls and dive below ground between each topographic tier of the settlement, guiding sewage around and downwards from sector to sector. They knit together the settlement, uniting together residents through their daily reminder of collective life and collective bodies. They are the only built structures that lend lothal coherence, as no traces remain of paths linking together the sectors. not only are the sewers shared throughout the settlement, their contents have a unifying presence the bodily contributions of the residents are as visible as the conduits, and form part of the network that binds together lothals sectors. The network is a popular structure in its undiscriminating service to all the people, as well as popular in the physical sense of being composed of the people. The system is literally built out of the peoples excretions. The sewerage-sewage conglomerate is not merely a representation of the harappanss collective life, but a physical product of the community. each households faecal matter intermingles with that of others, yielding an anonymous stercoral stream that reifies Bakhtins concept of bodily processes as having a cosmic and at the same time all-peoples character (19); Bakhtins idea of a communal body is given physical realization. While Bakhtin admits
15 northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent that is located primarily in the Indus river basin. The area straddles modern-day India and Pakistan. 16 The Harappans were an Indus Valley Civilization that existed around 2500 to 2000 B.C.E. (Rissman 209). The earliest urban civilization of South asia, there is little information and much controversy surrounding their ethnicity, religion, language, and sociopolitical structure.(Clark 235-236). 17 lothal is a harappan settlement in western India, about 50 miles southwest of ahmedabad.

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that his cosmic body is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words (19), Lothals faecal streams produce a communal body that is thoroughly physiological. Sewage subsumes individual excretions, fusing them into a universal substance that does not simply represent[ ] all the people [my emphasis] (19) but is a physical agglomeration of the peoples bodies. Faeces are, after all, mostly composed of dead bacteria and cells (Sabbath 20) that are the very make-up of the human body. as such, they are not merely an index of the peoples bodies, but are the peoples actual body parts. faeces undergo a transformation in the process of being dismembered and ejected from bodies, departing from the realm of the individual to enter the realm of the cosmic. The cosmic here denotes the natural elements that enter into dialogue with the human body: we must here stress that it was in the material acts and eliminations of the body eating, drinking, defecation, sexual life that man found and retraced within himself the earth, sea, air, fire, and all the cosmic matter and its manifestations, and was thus able to assimilate them (Bakhtin 336) once detached from individual bodies, faeces enter natural cycles beyond the life and death of humans, reconnecting the human body to the earth. In their pantheistic merging with nature, they adopt a character of immortality and indestructibility (Bakhtin 256), their decay feeding into a process of regeneration. Intermingled with ones contemplation of lothals open sewers is ones recognition of their terrestrial roots and their fecundity.

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The formation of the cosmic body transgresses the boundary between the other and the individual self, creating an abject condition that pushes the limits of ones perception of the internal and the external: [] labject na rien dobjectif ni mme dobjectal. Il est simplement une frontire, un don repoussant que lautre, devenu alter ego, laisse tomber pour que je ne disparaisse pas en lui mais trouve, dans cette alination sublime, une existence dchue [original italics] (Kristeva Pouvoirs 17)18 The subsumption of the self in the cosmic other unsettles the familiarity of the self, thereby effecting a state of alienation. faeces are both part of the self and an externalized other that one can observe objectively, allowing one to reflect upon oneself with the detachment of an external entity. This detached contemplation is accompanied by feelings of horror, disgust and repulsion, which Kristeva describes as a result of the in-between state of the abject. In apprehending the repulsiveness of Lothals sewerage-sewage system, one finds oneself contemplating the repulsiveness of the self out of which the system is built: le sujet trouve limpossible en luimme: lorsquil trouve que limpossible, cest son tre mme, dcouvrant quil nest autre quabject [original emphases] (Kristeva Pouvoirs 12)19. oozing with ambiguity, the system
18 19 [...] the abject is not objective or even objectal. It is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become an alter ego, drops so that I dont disappear in him but find, in this sublime alienation, a stripped existence the subject finds the impossible in itself: when it finds that the impossible is its very own being, discovering that it is nothing else but abject

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betrays the sanctity of the corporeal envelope, pulling out and presenting to oneself the filth that lies within ones own body. one is turned inside-out, ones entrails spilling into the environment and submitted to the geometric regulation of the brick trenches. lothals sewers are like prosthetic extensions of their residents, destabilizing subject-object binaries in the creation of what Donna Haraway terms a cyborg. from this exteriorized interior a new body emerges, establishing new boundaries of the self and of nature, ripe for continual transgression. Bakhtins description of defecation as performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body (317) speaks to this transformation of self and environment that is in constant rebirth. haraway describes the relationship between subject and object as a set of boundaries that are constantly redrawn because the two remain essentially problematic and contingent (Prins 356). While the perceptual difference between self and object is continually questioned, the two possess distinct values that resist complete coalescence. They remain on opposite ends and in constant tension because the subject has an accountability that the object is never beholden to (Prins 356). As much as Lothals residents are bodily integrated into their environment, they must respect the independence of the environment, which refuses to simply be a delegate of human will. Sewage pulsates in response to the cycle of the harappans lives and the cycle of the seasons, fusing together human processes and cosmic rhythms. Sewage rises to its peak with the increase of residentss and wastewater-producing economic activities as the monsoon season

The sewers on the periphery of one of lothals sectors. Source: S. Tam

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unleashes its torrents. It dwindles upon the arrival of the dry season when the harappans are faced with the hardships of water scarcity. The dynamism of the system presents a spectacle of uninterrupted continuity of [the peoples] becoming and growth, of the unfinished metamorphosis of death and renewal (Bakhtin 256), but the systems course is static. The fixity of its course is an assertion of the systems objectness its independence from the human. Similarly, while sewage is temporally tied to the subject, its conduits remain indifferent to human lifecycles, appearing atemporal and permanent. Bakhtin describes the scatological grotesque as bringing about a mighty awareness of history and of historic change (25) because of its susceptibility to change over time. Indeed, faeces force one to face ones past: they are artifacts from the bodys past, conglomerates of bacteria that constitute the past self (Sabbath 20). As a consolidation of the past brought into the present, faeces are a temporal register that marks growth. however, the trenches resist all manifestations of temporal change. flow is directed from one trench to another, the systems efficiency and completion revealing no traces of growth. The trenches appear to have been built all at once without a history or any anticipation of future expansion. They are indebted to sustaining a homogeneous appearance that enforces the unity of the settlement in a permanent manner. encircling each sector, the sewers prevent sectoral growth by enacting a static boundary that is both protective and coercive. The sewers are front gates to each of the sectors, erecting a boundary that must be forded to access the interior. Their defensive demeanour contradicts the vulnerable process that produces them: it is in defecating that organisms are most exposed, which has led certain species

Individual residents connect to the main sewers in full view. Source: S. Tam

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to adopt defecation positions that allow for quick escape (Lewin 55). The alliance of defecation with security is a carnivalesque profanation of the basic instinct for self-preservation. The seriousness of communal safety is reduced to humorous paranoia in the sewerss adoption of an attitude where [n]obody cares what may happen to him, while freedom and lack of ceremony are balanced by good humor (Bakhtin 246). By degrading security, transferring it to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity (Bakhtin 19-20), the sewers appeal to a pantheistic unity that makes security and its presumption of division a foolish concern. In erasing division, all displays of hierarchy are suspended in the sewerage system. rank and status are submitted to profanation in the public presentation of each households faeces. Individual bathrooms connect to the sewers in full view, broadcasting the intimate act of defecation to reveal the crude common physiological compulsions of all residents. for goethe, such suspension of all hierarchic differences is marked by absolute familiarity (Bakhtin 246), a sensitivity to the common humanity of all residents that is borne out in the harappanss careful presentation of socioeconomic equality. rissmans examination of distribution and display of wealth in harappan settlements concludes that the harappans were highly conscious of the appearance of wealth and tended to mask disparities to preserve a semblance of homogeneity. The appearance of homogeneity is used to enforce coherence within lothal, materiality becoming the cause rather than the effect of social order.

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It is the atemporal, permanent quality of lothals sewers that confers upon them the power of material presence. As fixed elements that circumscribe the settlement, the sewers structure the way the harappans live and inhabit. In profaning notions of security and division, they establish a regulating regime of homogeneity and unity. Sewerages utility obliges other elements to conform to its order, the settlements sanitary dependence leading to sewerages regulating influence within Lothal. The civic systematization that the sewers enact has been likened to American cities (Fitzsimons 13), and archaeologist H. D. Sankalia has remarked upon the Harappanss unfailing uniformity (qtd. in Fitzsimons 13). To the external visitor, however, the sewers offer conflicted declarations of sophistication and barbarism. as one of the earliest drainage systems in the world, lothals sewers present a shockingly advanced specimen of civil engineering. attention to details such as traps that prevent entry of solid waste into the sewers (Mulchandi) announces Lothals highly cultivated sensibilities. At the same time, territorial demarcation via faecal matter is a bestial tactic performed by many animals (Sabbath 50). Bourke associates faeces with the animal, referring to defecation as mans grosser and more animal propensities (2), while Laporte points out faecess association with the wild and savage (17-19). Moreover, the act of defecation entails the abandonment of a bipeds superior posture: Sabbath notes the anatomical necessity of squatting to gather sufficient abdominal strength for excretion (11). Humans must momentarily forego their upright position in order to participate in the sewer system.

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The harappanss lapse into feral postures in their display of urbanity recalls Jacksons description of the frontiers advancement through a return to primitive conditions (2). It is in regressing to a rudimentary state that social development (2) occurs. For Jackson, this return to the primitive signals a perennial rebirth (2) that is echoed in the fertility, growth and prosperity with which faeces are often associated (Laporte 39). However, whereas Jacksons ever-growing frontier line gradually absorbs the primitive into its civilized core, lothals sewerage forms a static boundary wherein the primitive is never resolved with the civilized. The sewers are not zones of expansion, but petrified juxtapositions of wilderness and civilization. Although Jacksons Frontier thesis identifies the paradoxical primitiveness that is needed to become civilized as a distinctly american phenomenon, the frontier is by no means geographically, culturally or temporally exclusive. like Jacksons american hinterland, lothals sewers embody the meeting point between savagery and civilization (Jackson 3) while simultaneously serving to divide the space of wilderness from the space of civilization. They are a literal frontier in the sense of being a contested zone where wilderness and civilization butt up against each other; they are the interface between nature and one of the earliest human settlements. The harappans faced conditions similar to those that Jacksons american pioneer faced: there is no naturally occurring topographic boundary, no coast, and no mountain that provided a ready line of delineation for human inhabitation. In this context, the sewers and the order that they impose are brutally novel, carving out a space for humans in an indifferent environment. They present a complete vision of civilization that did not develop over time but occurred all at once, having no precedents or former iterations (Jansen 179). Renowned British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler describes the Harappans as having the skill to master an exacting and minatory environment, and must have it from the outset [] Its victories, like its problems, must have been of a sudden sort [original emphasis] (qtd. in Fitzsimons 14). The

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sewerss conformity displays the single-minded will to impose order in the wilderness. The closure and completion of the system refuse any adaptation or compromise. lothals sewerage boldly confronts the wilderness and the visitor with a faecal spectacle that declares the settlements contempt for decorum. Ones first encounter with the settlement is faecal: one becomes imbricated in the most intimate acts of the residents, enfolded into the settlements peculiar logic of the inside-out (Bakhtin 11). Faeces make visible all that is buried deep within the body, laying bare the residentss state of health (Lewin 39, Sabbath 32-33) and even their emotional state (Sabbath 36). One is unwittingly turned into a voyeur, made culpable of intruding into the inmost depths of residentss bodies and minds. Despite the visual spectacle, it is the odour of faeces that dominates ones encounter with Lothal. Effluents slowly wend their way down the slightly graded trenches, fanned in the open air like faeces plated onto platform toilets. wafting throughout the settlement, the odour of faecal deposition corrupts the view of neatly ordered sectors: la ville ne sera pas moins rendue la vue: elle devra pouvoir se parcourir du regard, ne pas choquer loeil ni le corrompre, se constituer mme en image difiante, signifiante de lordre. lassomption de la vue ne se fera pas cependant sans la disqualification parallle de lodeur. La primaut du visible entranant cette consquence quon verra pousse par Kant que ce qui est beau ne sent pas (Laporte 41)20
20 The city is not to be less displayed: she must be able to be scanned by a glance, not shock the eye or corrupt it, even to constitute herself as an image - edifying, signifying order. however, the assumption of sight does not occur without the parallel disqualification of odour. The primacy of vision brings with it the consequence that is proffered by Kant that that which is beautiful does not smell

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ones perception of lothal is tainted by the odours pervasive presence, an ether of pollution and contagion that bathes everyone and everything in the sewerss vicinity. Uncontainable and ubiquitous, odour penetrates the body like a pathogen. The association of infection and smell recalls how in France, [o]n ne dsinfectera pas autrement que dans la forme de la dsodorisation [original emphasis] (Laporte 70)21. like a disease, foul odour creates suffering (Laporte 73). while faecal odour is an undesirable byproduct of the human body, faeces themselves are not altogether without use value. lothals trenches are integrated into a system of commercial production, facilitating the disposal of wastewater not only from residences but also a bead factory22. Faeces are a commodifiable object that enters into both physical and commercial circulation, transformed and made valuable as it goes through the sewers and begins to decompose. The harappans were highly conscious of the transformative power of process: Clark observes that [m]any materials were intensively manipulated and transformed in the Indus artifact assemblage (256) despite the inefficiencies and incongruities that such a process entailed. The order of creation and assemblage possesses ritual importance. likewise, the faecal journey through the sewers has choreographic significance, the visual relationship between faeces and the residentss everyday activities having a transformative value not only upon the residents (i.e. creating the cosmic body and the abject), but upon the faeces as well.
21 We do not disinfect in any way other than in the form of deodorizing 22 Lothal produced exceptionally refined beads of agate, precious metals and soap stone, and was particularly known for its micro-beads. The bead factory consisted of workers quarters, warehouses, and a courtyard (Mulchandi).

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In being conducted through a mechanism, faeces take on a different mien and meaning. For example, faeces are transformed into a medical specimen and rechristened stool upon being discharged from a chair with a hole of the same name (Lewin 7). Likewise, Lothals sewers are not neutral conductors but leave an imprint upon faeces, mixing it with industrial waste and incorporating it into the commercial cycle. faeces are expelled from the residences as undesirable goods, enter into the economic cycle as a valuable resource (manure), and then re-enter domestic life in the form of agricultural goods (food). The cesspools wherein faeces and industrial effluents are discharged act as natural filtering devices, allowing liquids to infiltrate the surrounding soil. The solids decompose into manure, servicing lothals agrarian economy of wheat, rice and cotton (Leshnik 912). Faeces become desirable under the label of manure, the word carrying with it the knowledge that what seems to be waste in one segment of the cycle in reality has value in another (Sabbath 2). Their time in the sewers is an incubation period before their full rebirth as a useful substance. In this cycle of neverending transformation, death and fertility become synonymous as manifestations of the same substance at different stages of its existence. Faeces are transmuted into something that is immune to destruction: ce qui est limin de la production, dchet, ne manque pas, aprs stre converti, de rentrer dans la circulation o il apparat, au terme de la transmutation, incorruptible (Laporte 24)23.
23 that which is eliminated in production, waste, does not fail, after it is converted, to return to circulation where it appears, after transmutation, incorruptible

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The sewers attenuate the cycle of faecal transformation, preventing immediate faecal contact with terrestrial organisms that speed up the decomposition process. In slowing down the faecal cycle, the sewers emphasize potential by deferring to future possibility: the promise of fertility lingers in full view, anticipated but unfulfilled. The procreative capacity of faeces is fetishized, a perception that the Harappans seem to have shared in their cult of explicit fertility (Fitzsimons 19). Sex is implicit in the sustained display of faeces, entwining pleasure and faecal revulsion: Freud suggests that faeces are sublimated into pleasure (Laporte 23). Faeces have a sensual dimension that the romans and greeks drew upon in their cosmetic applications of faecal matter (Laporte 82-83). The capacity for mutation that is embodied in faeces is mirrored in the malleability of sex and human life. Presented with the process of faecal transformation on a daily basis, the Harappans arrived at a complex and fluid conception of sex and gender (Clark 243) where male and female body parts are interchangeable. In the very naming of Lothal one finds an awareness of endless transformation. Signifying place of the dead in Gujarati (Leshnik 911), Lothal offers a place to live that is dependent upon death, recognizing life and death as manifestations of the same process. The faecal cycle makes visible the mutability that is at the core of what it means to be human: man is superior to all beings, including the celestial spirits, because he is not only being but becoming. he is outside all hierarchies, for a hierarchy can determine only that which represents stable, immovable, and unchangeable being, not free becoming (Bakhtin 364). lothals open trenches are a spectacle of human life, exhibiting the transformative processes that are what constitute the human.

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aIr In The ParISIan goUTS The air thickens with humidity in the Parisian gouts, the faint odour of putrescence hovering in ones nostrils with each inhalation. Despite the gnawing sensation of impending suffocation, the gouts are quite spacious, with ample room for sewage, humans, maintenance equipment, and thousands of meters of metal conduits. everything has its place in this eclectic assemblage of organic and mechanical parts, each nested within defined, custom-dimensioned cavities. In older sections of the sewers, roofs are enlarged to accommodate niches for conduits (Belgrand 153), and the very size of the sewers is determined not by the volume of effluents passing through them but by the conduits that need to be housed (156). Each component is given its personal space; even in the sewers, classical french decorum reigns. Care is taken to maintain a buffer between each object, preserving its integrity and respecting its individual identity. There is a politesse to the way each component minds its own business: although reid claims that Belgrand24 engineered a multipurpose sewerage system (35), within the sewers proper, objects and spaces do not multitask but have allotted territories. Metal pipes striate the walls of the gouts, but dont graze them they float in front of the masonry, held aloft by brackets whose novelty garnered much public attention in its day
24 eugne Belgrand was plucked from provincial obscurity to become haussmanns chief engineer in the mid-19th century rebuilding of Paris (Reid 29). While he was full of technocratic optimism, he respected and sought the wisdom of both ancient and contemporary precedents in undertaking the design and construction of Pariss new sewers.

Vault of an older sewer is enlarged in order to accommodate a conduit on the side. reproduced from eugne Belgrand, Les travaux souterrains vol. 5, 153.

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(Parent-Duchtelet 45). Their novelty lies in their ability to inhabit the sewers without gn[ant] la circulation de leau de lgout (Parent-Duchtelet 175)25: their value is in creating visual clarity by physically separating elements. more cumbersome but effecting the same end are brick pillars that provide physical separation of the conduits from the sewer walls (Belgrand 153), maintaining distance and material distinction. Parts are supported and hinged together via cold connections, juxtaposed against one another without altering any of their forms. Cold connections do not attempt to resolve incongruous parts, but present them as uninflected and unrelated to each other. In abstaining from fusing parts together or amalgamating functions, the gouts present a multiplicity of parts that are unabashedly materially and spatially inefficient. Clunky and inelegant, the conduits sprawl out across the surface of the sewer vault, a floating constellation of metallic masses. They do not attempt to be more visually palatable, their crude material finish and awkward locations belying the priority of mechanical functioning rather than aesthetic consideration. Their dimensions do not respond to the dimensions of the human body, and even challenge human apprehension: the conduits stretch beyond the ken of the stationary eye. Despite their substantial mass, the conduits effect a lightness that is not simply the feigned weightlessness of their lofty positions. greg lynn points out that the perception of lightness is relational: one understands gravitational forces and, in its absence, lightness through the relationship of multiple masses.
25 impeding the flow of water in the sewers

Vault of the large collector sewer beneath rue royale. from Paul Strauss, Paris ignor (1892). reproduced from rosalind williams, Notes on the Underground, 73.

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The sewer walls provide a gravitational framework that allows the conduits to appear light. In what Rudolf Arnheim describes as a very complex hierarchy of weights, each operating as the center of a field of its own (46), the heavy sewer masonry out-pulls the gravitational force of the conduits and defines a visual center of gravity for the space. The ovoid shape of the sewer vaults reorients the gravitational vector, its concavity creating a new, curved ground against which the conduits float. The diffused distribution of the conduits adds to their perceived lightness, each conduit attempting to pull its own weight against the others without the benefit of collective action. The space between the conduits creates enough distance between object and ground to give the conduits an increase in power and independence (Arnheim 46). They appear free and autonomous from the sewer walls, ceas[ing] to seem merely the most remote outreaches of the earthbound structure (Armheim 46). The conduits have a planetary relationship to the sewer cavity, each possessing its own gravitational characteristics. Within each of the conduits is a microcosm of differential gravities (Lynn), the substances that are conducted possessing a gravitational force that competes with the force of each pipe. While public and private drinking water flows through two of the conduits (Belgrand 205, Reid 35), telegraph signals, electricity and mail are conducted through the others (Belgrand 208, Reid 35). In the two drinking water conduits, water must fill the entire pipe to maintain continuous flow and avoid air blockage, constituting a dynamic volume with a gravitational force that outweighs that of the container. The drinking water pipe becomes a light shell that wraps around the solid stream of water. In conduits supplying other amenities, a more planetary

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relationship is generated between the pipe and its contents, the balance of gravitational forces being less asymmetric. Telegraph wires are bundled into lead pipes (Belgrand 208), as are electricity wires supporting the system for traffic lights (Reid 35), creating a dense core inside the hollow pipes. The wires are suspended within the pipe, while the pipe appears suspended around the wires; contents and container possess similar gravitational force. The steel conduits of Pariss pneumatic post are vacuums with the occasional metal mail capsule and rapidly expanding compressed air passing through (Cermak 1). The pipe becomes the gravitational framework within which the capsules float: the gravitational force of the static pipe outweighs that of the mobile capsules. The apparent weightlessness of the capsules is a matter of gravitational difference (Lynn), the weight of the capsules being less than the weight of compressed air that is released at the same time as the capsules. Despite its invisibility, air physically pulls the most weight within the pipe. outside of the pneumatic tubes, the air of the gouts is laced with hazardous gases, and the risk of asphyxiation is heightened (Belgrand 256-257). In areas of poor maintenance, the air is streaked with various foul odours that Parent-Duchtelet identified as odeur fade (82), odeur ammoniacale (83), odeur dhydrogne sulfure (85), odeur putride (85), odeur forte et repoussante (86), and odeurs spciales (87)26. It is ironic that air is sanitary in the tubes, whose occupants have no regard for its quality. rather than sustaining life, air is used for mobility, sending the thoughts and aspirations of Parisians throughout the city. The very term
26 sickly odour, the odour of ammonia, the odour of hydrogen sulfide, putrid odour, strong and repulsive odour, special odours

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aspiration has the alternative meaning of breathing forth: implicit in the use of compressed air for communication is human breath. Instead of using breath to speak, breath becomes a mechanical operation that delivers messages in the form of les petits bleus cards. The act of breathing is no longer performed by a human, but by an air pump; communications are no longer spoken, but turned into physical goods. In Samuel Becketts 35-second play Breath (1969), the act of breathing replaces actors altogether. while human presence is implicit in the pre-recorded sounds of inhalations and exhalations, the plays title and the notable absence of humans on stage focus on breath as a phenomenon independent of humans. Breath is automatized, overturning the relationship between breath and human life. In the gouts, Luce Irigarays claim that [b]reathing corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of the living human being. To come into the world supposes inhaling and exhaling oneself (73), turns into breathing as indifferent to human life. Unlike human breath, the automated production of air movement in the pneumatic tubes is unidirectional. There is no inhalation or exhalation, no exchange of air from one end of the tube to the other. mail traveling through the tubes often ends up covering double or triple the amount of distance necessary to achieve its destination (Messagerie en sous-sol). Mechanized breath facilitates quick movement, but not efficiency. The directness of human communication is foregone in the single-directional constraints of automatized communication. automated action is similarly deployed in the gout maintenance process. wagon-vannes and their aquatic counterparts, bateau-vannes, glide through the gouts, dredging sewage

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sediment without human intervention. Sitting atop rails, barges, or water, they are carried along by the flow of the sewage, their sluice gates collecting sediment up to 100 m in length (Belgrand 187). The collected sediment is kept moving not only by the physical force of the sluice gates behind it but by the flow of sewage, so that the wagon-vannes and sediment move together as one at a consistent pace. Belgrand describes the slow displacement of the sediment as dune-like (187), the flow of sewage operating the same way that wind operates in the desert. The flow of sewage resembles the flow of air. Sewage flow produces the same lightness as air flow, minimizing friction between objects so that everything glides. The bateau-vannes progress through the gouts is guided by rails to maintain a sewage buffer between the body of the bateau-vanne and the sides of the sewage trough. The sewage that wraps around the bateau-vanne is effective because it is gravitationally heavier than the boat, just as the weight difference between the bateau-vanne and the sewage keeps the bateau-vanne afloat. The same principle of harnessing differential masses to impel movement is applied in the siphon that connects the left Bank gouts to the right Bank gouts. The siphon operates automatically: passing beneath the Seine, two tubes made of sheet metal flush wastewater from the Left Bank using differential air pressure (Belgrand 112). Self-cleansing is facilitated by drawing upon the difference in the material densities of wood and water, eliminating manual

wagon-vanne on rails. reproduced from eugne Belgrand, Les travaux souterrains de Paris vol. 5, 185.

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maintenance. A wooden ball that is fitted to the diameter of the tubes is inserted into the Left Bank end of the siphon and carried along by the current. when it reaches the right Bank, the siphon becomes vertical, and the ball rises to the surface more quickly than water due to its lesser density, generating a moving vacuum that draws in all the sediment in the tubes. It surfaces on the right Bank, bringing with it solid materials that can clog up the tube (Belgrand 112, Reid 32). The force of non-human phenomena is retained and respected in the gouts, obviating human participation in its functionings. humans have little to do with the primary operations of the gouts. workerss bodies do not enter into a relationship with the wagon-vannes, the bateau-vannes or the sewage, which form complex systems of gravitational difference that determine their position in relation to each other. The very form of the gout cavity denies the human body a central position from which to perceive space. Belgrands formal approximation of an ellipse creates a concave space that is passive (Arnheim 97). The volume seems to be hollowed out by an invading possessor (97), but at the foci of the volume one does not find the human occupant that Arnheim describes. Humans can only inhabit the lateral ends of the ellipse while the conduits are relegated to the periphery of the sewer, leaving the foci occupied by an invisible invader: air. It is air from which vectors issue radially and fill the empty space (96), air that is being amplified and extended, pushing the walls outwards until the resistance of the surrounding soil forces them to a halt.

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air is what puffs out cavities in subterranean structures, giving underground spaces an effect of lightness. Lynn claims that the relationship of the burrow to the ground is light because there is no single gravitational force that fixes the space [] practically any direction or orientation is gravitationally and structurally possible (23). Below the ground plane, the gouts no longer refer to the horizon but freely float in soil, weightless. Despite the dominating role of air in the gouts, the height of every cavity is calibrated for erect human movement (Reid 35). The form of the sewers is not perceived as an extension of the human body as per arnheims description, but the dimensions of the sewer are considerate of human body dimensions. within the sewers, humans are passive occupants, allotted an appropriate space that keeps them at a proper distance from the other systems housed in the gouts. like the conduits that are carefully separated across the sewer vault, human space is designed so that there is no contact between humans and other elements within the gout. The conduits are installed high enough to allow for human passage beneath, side paths are wide enough for human occupation without brushing against the gout walls or falling into the sewage trough. The path is uniformly sloped at 3 cm per meter to allow sewermen to walk through the sewers without slipping (Reid 30), separating human movement from sewage movement, which is sped up through the use of varying slopes at different points of the gouts (Belgrand 104-105). humans are treated like any other equipment in the gouts: objects with designated places that clearly separate them from other objects.

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Descent into the sewers is a bodily experience of suspension. Climbing down the wells and manholes, the human body inhabits a vertical column of air and is minimally supported by rungs clinging to the surface of the masonry. In deeper wells, the rungs end in a floating platform off of which staircases hang, leading to paths on either side of the sewage trough. These spaces are specified for human habitation and defy gravity, creating a sense of weightlessness that separates the human body from the materiality and mass of the gouts, like the conduits that float away from the wall of the sewers. The bodys capacity for interaction is frustrated by the ever-present spatial buffer that keeps humans separate from everything else. humans become bystanders to the automated operations of the gouts, spectators who supervise the execution of automated actions. Sewermen are not their only audience, as spectatorship has been expanded to the public. Dramatic lighting has been installed to emphasize the spectacular aspect of the gouts (Reid 41), and deluxe wagon-vannes used to shuttle 400 visitors daily on tours of the Sbastopol and Rivoli sewers (Belgrand 209). The spatial separation between visitors and the material substance of the gouts made the gouts

ladders and staircases leading down to the sewer cavity when the manhole is located right on top of the sewer. reproduced from eugne Belgrand, Les travaux souterrains de Paris vol. 5, 73.

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a genteel albeit provocative experience. Visiting dignitaries have been taken on tours of the sewers, and the general public in Belgrands day flocked to partake in this form of dignified entertainment: Il nest pas un souverain tranger, pas un personnage important qui ait quitt Paris sans avoir visit les collecteurs. les Parisiens eux-mmes, ordinairement si indiffrents ce qui se passe autour deux, ont tenu visiter ces ouvrages, dont il semble que le nom et la destination eussent d les loigner (Belgrand 209)27 Demarcating a space for humans apart from the space of filth and crude industrial objects is a polite gesture that preserves the hierarchic distinctions prescribed by decorum. It is due to this perceived politesse that the sewers became attractive spaces for the usually repulsed public. Amply buffered from their environs, ladies dressed in their finery could tread the sewers with no reservations (Reid 40). Maintained regularly, Belgrands sewers leave only an innocuous odeur fade (qtd. in Reid 44), and visitors are afforded comfort and safety in the knowledge that there is no danger of coming into contact with indecent substances. Surrounded by a cushion of air space, visitors can view the black turgid waters at our feet (qtd. in Reid 41) at a secure distance. The division between passive spectator and active participant sets up a theatrical relationship where the gouts become a means of displaying the
27 There is no foreign sovereign, no important figure who left Paris without having visited the main sewer lines. The Parisians themselves, usually so indifferent to what happens around them, want to visit these works, those who it seems that the name and the destination would have kept away

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revolutionary possibilities offered by new technology to the public (Messageries en soussol). Pneumatic tubes are not the only novel modes of communication, as telegraphic wires transcribed communication from the realm of the sensible to the realm of the invisible and intangible. The insensible becomes rife with potential for practical use, and air emerges from the background of everyday life to become a foregrounded resource. The primitive and undesirable miasma of foul air is transformed into a compressible force that is the main performer in the gouts. In the underground, technology is the predominant actor. rosalind williams observes the monopolizing role of technology in the subterranean: Subterranean surroundings, whether real or imaginary, furnish a model of an artificial environment from which nature has been effectively banished. human beings who live underground must use mechanical devices to provide the necessities of life: food, light, even air. Nature provides only space (4) While Williamss recognition of the artificiality of the underground environment is warranted, her claim that it does so by eliminating nature is problematic. If one is to define nature as all that is not of anthropogenic origin, there is many an example of nature that grows in the gouts. Parent-Duchtelet vividly describes the immense number of rats that inhabited the gouts of the Ancien Rgime (95), the mushrooms that sprouted all over the sewer walls (94), and the gas bubbles (98) that indicated microbial processes of myriad bacteria breaking down faecal matter.

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not only do non-human forms of life thrive in the sewers, the sewers are contiguous with larger natural systems. numerous sections of the gouts are submerged in the water table and alleviate water pressure on their concrete shells by permitting groundwater to infiltrate the sewage trough through perforations (see discussion of the Collecteur dAsnires in Belgrand 87). Groundwater coalesces with wastewater, blurring the distinction between natural and artificial systems. far from being a sterile space, the sewers teem with natures fecundity; nature and mechanization coexist in the gouts. rather than eliminating nature, the gouts limit human agency. They harbour spaces that are indifferent to human presence, and are home to processes that occur without any need for human intervention. human intervention is only necessary when movement is impeded, and is relegated to areas where substances stagnate. after the wagon-vannes and bateau-vannes finish their course downstream, humans have to pull them back up to their initial position (Reid 32). Depressions in the sewers accumulate sand brought in by storm water, and are manually removed by sewermen at night to avoid subjecting the public to the basinss putrid odour (reid 32). Solid materials from the siphon are manually stored in a 200-meter gallery upstream of the siphon (Belgrand 116). Humans are backstage labourers in the gouts, performing the most repugnant of tasks in subsidiary spaces, while automated processes take the front stage. manual action is confined to rear spaces with foul odours, while automated action is affiliated with sanitary spaces and cleanliness. Constant movement is what distinguishes Belgrands new sewers from the festering sewers of the ancien rgime. Parent-Duchtelets lurid accounts of hardened sludge in the old sewers spell out what Belgrands gouts aim to avoid in their preoccupation with sewage

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mobility. when sewage succumbs to torpor, solids sink to the bottom and a crust forms on top, which is toujours bossele et ingale, forme par une succession de zones, et est dsigne par les ouvriers sous le nom de peau de crapeau, comparaison grossire, mais de la plus grande exactitude [original italics] (Parent-Duchtelet 78)28. Parent-Duchtelets description resurfaces in Belgrands Les travaux souterrains, where the horror of semi-animate sewage compels the engineer to construct a system where the only animate objects are those designed by humans. Reid points out that the term gout connotes a place where the water and the refuse have an outflow, as opposed to cloaca, which indicates a place where the water is stagnant and putrid (35). Cloacae are associated with the anatomy (36), and alongside that the uncontrollable needs and urges of the human body. The gouts in turn reject the human anatomy by embracing automation, sanitation becoming synonymous with mechanization. The barbarism of the human body is replaced by propriety and tastefulness: reid describes the new sewer system as having celebrated mechanical elegance (35). Mechanized motion promises clarity and precision, eroding the fear generated by the obscurity of filth. Predictable and impassive, automated operations provide an antidote to the feral and repulsive cloacae that is superior to anthropogenic activity.
28 always bumpy and uneven, formed by a succession of zones, and is designated by the workers as toads skin, crass comparison, but one that is of the greatest accuracy

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ahmeDaBaDS29 KhorIC DraInS Coasting through a network of intersecting stoneware tunnels (Mehta, Shah), ahmedabads sewage occupies a space that is anonymous and unpossessive. The interior of the pipes forms a continuous surface that is smooth, impervious, and staunchly uniform. The space of one pipe is indistinguishable from the next: experiencing one space is equivalent to experiencing all the others. Traveling through the drains30 is akin to staying in stasis, ones geographic displacement making an altogether imperceptible difference. The pipes themselves are indifferent to the occupation of substances, and lay no claim to that which passes through them. Defined by no distinguishable boundaries, the drains have no territorial ambitions. They are content to let a continuous stream of substances enter and leave without retaining so much as a mark of acknowledgement that there was once a moment of contact. ahmedabads drains constitute non-places. The drainss lack of individual identity and passivity blatantly contradict the key components of place as a site of both meaningful identity and immediate agency [original emphases] (Oakes 510). Their existence is pegged upon serving sewage, their material and form generated from the exigencies of consistent, expedient sewage
29 located in western India, ahmedabad is known for its entrepreneurship and business leadership, having accumulated significant wealth through trade and the textile industry (M. Bhatt 2). The largest city in the Gujarat state, the city has attracted a lot of attention for its innovative infrastructural funding mechanisms and slum infrastructure schemes over the past decade. 30 Sewerage and storm water drainage are both called drains in ahmedabad even though they are separate systems. Drains usually refers to sewers in this section, as storm water drainage will usually be referred to by its full name if the context does not make it clear which system is being denoted. The nominal conflation of the two is fairly indicative of the publics perception of them: oftentimes sewers are used to alleviate flooding during the monsoon, and sewage regularly ends up in the storm water pipes.

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flow. They borrow meaning from their temporary contents: the very name of sewerage signifies the carrying away of refuse (OED), an action that is other-directed rather than self-constituting. Refuse is the primary substance that is addressed in the term sewerage. The interior space of the drains remains unnamed, recalling Derridas attempted exegesis on the indefinable and elusive khra. The drains are khric in character they exhibit many of the characteristics that Derrida attributes to khra but they are decidedly not khra, which cannot be given any form, type, or name other than its own (Derrida 98). An untranslatable term from Platos Timaeus, khra is varyingly described as a receptacle, container, vessel, space, and site, without being encapsulated by any descriptor. Derrida paradoxically attempts to explain the avowedly inexplicable khra, acknowledging that his descriptions fall short of capturing khra but nevertheless generate a productive discourse. It is this approximated khra that illuminates the self-denying quality of ahmedabads drains. although the sewers are designed for sewage, their relationship with sewage is not one of a receptacle with its contents. Like khra, Ahmedabads drains do not give place by receiving or by conceiving [original emphasis] (Derrida 95). The act of reception entails interaction, as containers are altered through the acceptance of contents into them. receptacles integrate their contents into themselves in a process of self-transformation. In contrast, ahmedabads sewer spaces are unresponsive and unchanging, allowing themselves to be temporarily occupied by

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sewage without receiving sewage into them. nothing new is generated in the interface between sewer and sewage the drains do not conceive (95) anything. The flow of sewage is not induced by the sewers, nor is it altogether independent of the sewers. Escaping the active/passive dichotomy, the sewers posit a third alternative that is khric in character. As Derrida describes it, they are more situating than situated (92): they are a disposition rather than a state. They do not constitute an active space, but dispose substances within them to action. Sewage is disposed to move downwards through the pipes even though there is no active force originating from the pipes instigating that movement. The drains instead make sewage susceptible to the force of gravity through their shape, material, and gradient (inclination), thereby playing a role in the flow of sewage. Ahmedabads first sewers were built in 1890 at the behest of then-president of the ahmedabad municipal Corporation, rancchodlal Chhotalal, who hired British engineer Baldwin Latham for the task (J. Bhatt). Lathams detailed explanations of sewerage design aptly describe the material characteristics that establish the disposition towards action. The sectional form of the sewers is chosen to ensure the greatest velocity, when the smallest volume is flowing through them, for which the egg-shaped form will be found the best (Latham 20). This form is most conducive towards sewage velocity because the less the area of the wetted perimeter, in proportion to the sectional area, by so much will the velocity of flow be increased (20): the more full a sewer is, the quicker sewage flows through it. While the sectional profile of sewers is selected to encourage movement, material choices for sewers are made to reduce obstruction of

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movement. rough materials and irregular surfaces are suppressed in order to promote smooth passage (7). Porous materials are avoided to prevent the absorption of liquid effluents, which are key to the transport of solid waste through the sewers (7). Materials dispose sewage towards movement by simply not being impediments. Sewer gradients are the primary means through which gravity is introduced as an active force into the system. Gradients become flatter as one progresses down through the sewer system, responding to the increased flow created by the sheer amount of sewage that enters along the way. Since there is a smaller quantity of sewage to deal with in upper portions, a greater fall is required to produce the necessary velocity (8). As more sewage enters the system, the speed increases and is offset by a flatter gradient in order to maintain consistent flow throughout the system. The double meaning of inclination as both slope and tendency points to the ability of slope to establish a disposition rather than action. By opening the door for external forces to enter and generate movement, the drains are not effectively passive, but indirectly induce movement. when the pipes reach a depth that becomes overly costly for further installation, they empty into a sealed well where they encounter a pair of submersible pumps: a main pump and a back-up trimmer pump (AMC Tender Documents 7-8). Sewage pumping stations are death wells of toxic gases and swarming pathogens, briefly harbouring excreta in the transition from one grade to another before launching them onto another leg of their gravity-fed journey down the drainage pipes. They are designed to bunt along faeces in a timely manner before bacteria can begin decomposing them. while they are permanently occupied, they are never occupied by

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the same thing and never for long enough to allow for growth. In their continuous churning of pathogens, sewage pumping stations prevent microbial reproduction. like black boxes whose internal workings are rendered inaccessible, sewage pumping stationss maintenance is facilitated externally with the clockwork precision of a blind surgeon. Pumps are drawn up along vertical tracks, repaired or replaced above ground, and then lowered down the well again. once properly positioned, their weight locks them in place in a seamless, automated choreography (Submersible Water Pump Association). Its a neat routine that no eye admires, but whose success is evaluated from afar. Verification of the systems functioning is relayed through recently installed electronic detectors that allow for sightless sight (Virilio 59)31. Temperature is scanned by an eight channel measuring system (AMC Tender documents 9), the level of sewage is measured by an ultrasonic transmitter (8), and sewage flow into the well is detected by an electromagnetic flow meter (9). The information acquired from these systems is gathered and processed by programmable logic controllers that automatically decide whether the pumps should start or stop, and which pump should be in use (9). Humans can only access the inner workings of sewage pumping stations through secondary knowledge, reading symptoms of their functioning without the visceral repulsiveness of direct interaction. The remote sensing system of sewage pumping stations perpetuates faecess mythic horror, allowing them to remain
31 In The Vision Machine, Virilio describes the automation of perception as a kind of artificial vision (59), producing optical images that are separate from mental or visual memory. automated perception is a series of coded impulses that constitute a kind of seeing that possesses none of the image feedback that we normally associate with vision (73).

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unknown while constructing a useable version of them that is sanitized into digital data. The pumping stations are Virilios prophecy of digital vision incarnate. for all their banishment from direct human contact, the sewage pumping stations do require manual cleaning. A coarse bar screen with 40 mm openings (AMC Tender documents 6) keeps large solids, rags and debris from blocking up the pump (EPA 2) and must be routinely lifted above ground and raked to avoid clogging (5). Similarly, although Ahmedabads drains are designed to be self-cleansing (Latham 7), they frequently become silted and can only be cleaned by manual manhole workers. Latham believed that the proper construction of sewers (7) would eliminate the necessity to send men into sewers to carry out such disgusting operations (7), but he did not anticipate that solid waste and industrial chemicals would be mixed in with faecal matter. From needles, glass, and plastic to sanitary pads, silver foil tobacco pouches (Pradeep), and liquor pouches (Darokar), the incursion of non-viscous substances into the pipes slows sewage progression to an eventual stop. Stalled sewage fills up manholes at the intersections of sewer lines, turning them into vertical receptacles of stagnant sludge. rising to the street level, sewage spews onto the roads and backwashes through private plumbing into homes (A. Parikh). Instead of sewage containment, Ahmedabads drains expurgate sewage before a shocked public. In an embarrassing breach of their designated place in the lower stratum of the city, the drains unleash their wayward charge into the aboveground. Sewage is expected to be invisible and its containment is the only way that excreta can be accepted as an inevitable part of the city. Drains are supposed to be the aboveground worlds

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unsung hero, conquering the monstrous by packaging it into a tidy system with a designated geographic location. The failure of the drains to contain sewage brings about a profound sense of public shame that extends from the shame associated with excrement (greenblatt attributes this to Thomas More 12). Scatalogical shame is reconfined to the drains by inserting a human body into the drains, a body that will be contaminated by the drainss shame32. a person who enters the drains becomes a part of the drains, adopting their khric character of openness to faecal occupation. manual manhole workers submerge their entire bodies into sewage, diving to the very bottom of 12-foot deep manholes to locate waste that is obstructing the flow (Pradeep). As they do so, sewage enters their bodies through the orifices: eyes, nose, and ears become conduits for sewage infiltration into the body (Anand). Over the course of their two-hour immersion, sewage seeps into the manual workerss bodies through their skin, which is covered by no additional membrane except for a porous loincloth (Pradeep). Workerss bodies become khric vessels for sewage, acquiring a feminine quality in being occupied by something alien (Derrida 98). Before
32 manual manhole work has been nationally banned following the 1993 employment of manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, but remains the primary means of sewerage maintenance in Ahmedabad (Pradeep). In 2006, the Gujarat High Court issued an order to cease manual maintenance but has had its authority flouted due to the vagueness of the term manual maintenance, which is undergoing amendment as of 25 April 2011. Manual workers are all Dalits - castes that suffer from untouchability and other caste-based atrocities (see Deepa S. Reddys The Ethnicity of Caste. Anthropological Quarterly 78.3 (Summer 2005): 543-584). Barred from most forms of employment because of their perceived impurity, Dalits are subcontracted to clean sewers at salaries below minimum wage with no job security, safety equipment, or life insurance (Mishra). They typically live up to 35 or 40 years of age, and suffer from leptospirosis, viral hepatitis and typhoid (Anand, Pradeep).

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entering the sewers, workerss bodies are typically male, but upon joining the sewers, they become emasculated. moreover, bodies that enter the sewer system are subjected to physical transformation: ahmedabad manholes range from one foot to one and a half feet in diameter, forcing workers to contract their bodies in order to fit themselves and their buckets into them. Their bodies curl into the circular cross-section of the manhole with the intimacy of Bachelards organism fitting into its snug shell. exposed and pliable, the human body gains a hardened exterior in entering the sewers a prosthetic shell that serves as a temporary habitat. however, rather than protection, the sewers hold their inhabitants in a deathly embrace. manhole workers regularly perish in these close abodes from a mixture of hazardous gases including methane, hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide (Anand). The sewers are constrictive and restrictive spaces, asphyxiating the life they hold within them and preventing those who survive from any growth. Unlike shells, they do not grow with the body that inhabits them, but compel the body to conform to their fixed dimensions. Like Bachelards description of the struggle between the active creature and its lifeless shell, manhole workers must exert a lot of energy to counter the concrete torpor that surrounds them. Having become half stone, half man (Bachelard 109), workerss movements are no longer their own but must take into consideration the weight of the sewer system. It is a solitary experience for the worker who crawls into a manhole. as Bachelard points out, We know perfectly well that to inhabit a shell we must be alone. By living this image, one

old manhole in the walled City, ahmedabad. Its diameter is barely one foot. Photo by S. Tam.

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knows that one has accepted solitude (123). The worker faces the sewage alone, disconnected from everything and everyone else. his visual scope is limited by the walls of the manhole and most of the time he can see nothing, his vision impaired by the sludge he is immersed in and the darkness of night that shrouds his shameful bodily convergence with the sewers (Pradeep). Inhabiting the sewer, he cannot see it as something separate from him, the shell being an entity that is felt along the length of the body rather than displayed before the eyes. from the visual perspective of the manhole worker, his body has merged with the sewer. The fusion of the human body and the sewer bears out in the very term manhole, which depends upon the human body to come into being. without an inhabitant, it remains a regular hole, or even a sewage receptacle. manholes are built with the expectation of a human inhabitant even though they do not attend to their inhabitantss needs. They can only fulfill their name and function when a human enters them. Manholes are khric in their lack of independent signification: they derive their meaning from that which inhabits them. recognizing that manholes are the exclusive domain of humans, a separate set of scraper holes has been built to facilitate machine access to the pipes (Mehta, Shah). Manholes cannot accommodate super suckers, jetting and suction machines, high flow jetting machines, and power rodding machines (amC 2009 Data from SLB Results Workshop Presentation). Instead, scraper holes of a rectangular form and larger dimensions are needed. however, even with their own customized points of access, sewer-cleaning machines fail to restore the sewers to their proper working order. aside from the super suckers, the rest of the machines are either unable
a scraper manhole in the walled City, ahmedabad. Photo by S. Tam.

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to clear out the sewers, or unable to reach the scraper holes in the first place because their width exceeds that of Ahmedabads narrow, winding streets (Mishra). Meanwhile, super suckers, though effective, prove to be too strong for the sewerss corroded pipes and end up causing more damage than reinstating sewage flow (Mishra). Ahmedabads sewerage is a system beyond means of rectification. losing faith in the sewerss competence, connector pipes are clandestinely inserted by anonymous persons, connecting sewerage with the storm water pipes to divert sewage away from the sewers (Mehta, A. Parikh, Shah). Violated by these irregular punctures, Ahmedabads drains become altogether dysfunctional: they no longer convey sewage to the treatment plants south of the city, but lose their charge to a whole other system. rather than being salvaged, they are renounced as obsolete. Various drainage lines are altogether cut off from their peers and abandoned: a massive reinforced concrete duct intercepts secondary sewer lines along the periphery of the city and renders the original peripheral sewer mains redundant (Mehta, Shah), just as relief lines laid in the heart of the city make the original lines superfluous. These dead drains lie void and forgotten, emptied of significance in their khric reliance upon their contents for meaning. The importance of contents in imparting significance to various parts of the drainage system is likewise seen in the systems ventilation shafts 8-meter tall poles that are supposed to be installed at an interval of every four manholes (Mehta, Shah). The invisibility of the
one of the remaining ventilation shafts in navrangpura, ahmedabad. Photo by S. Tam.

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ventilation shaftss contents reduces the significance of the shafts in the eyes of construction crews, who often remove them during road reparations (Mehta, Shah). Relying upon the temperature difference between sewer air and ambient air, ventilation shafts release hazardous sewer gases from their baffled crowns, diluting the gases in the air several stories above the street grade (Latham 40). Although they play an important role in reducing sewer odours, preventing pressure build-up, and keeping the pipes dry to reduce corrosion (Pomeroy 203204), there is little visible proof of their operations. Resembling lampposts but without their immediately apprehensible use value, ventilation shafts bear little resemblance to their nether cohorts in material, orientation, and form. There is no visible joint between the metal shafts and the stoneware pipes below, and the vertical orientation of the shafts breaks abruptly with the horizontality of the sewers. Ornamented with a cap, multiple cornices and patterned baffles, the shafts tower over neighboring buildings like gangly, one-off curiosities from ahmedabads colonial past. It is only in the historically preserved walled City33 that they are conserved and lent value, serving as indices of Ahmedabads first sewers for tourists.
33 The walled City is the historic center of ahmedabad, and in some parts remains encircled by an old parapet. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation runs a daily Heritage Walk for tourists, and has expended significant effort in documenting the site in its bid for status as a UneSCo world heritage City.

an early ventilation shaft in the walled City, ahmedabad. Photo by S. Tam.

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In residential areas, surface manifestations of the sewer system are regarded with a high degree of suspicion. Indeed, given sewerages reputation for dysfunction and brokenness, reminders of its presence amount to threats of sewage overflow. In Ahmedabads upgraded slums34, homeowners spend hours negotiating with ngo35 engineers and fellow homeowners to locate sewer inspection chambers as far away from their homes as possible (Bhonsale). although inspection chambers inspire revulsion and fear from residents, they are less terrifying than manholes. They eliminate the need for bodily immersion in sewage while offering access to the drains for maintenance and repair. Because of their shallow depth, workers examine the pipes from without, keeping their bodies in a space separate from that of the drains. Inspection chambers relate to the surface rather than to the underground, providing means for observing the underground from a safe distance. The drainage system is reduced to an object of spectacle, and the visibility of the system serves to allay fear of the inapprehensible. The eradication of faecal fear is further perpetuated in the nature of the visual relationship that the inspection chambers engender: inspection is an act of critical examination that serves to structure the
34 ahmedabads Slum networking Project is a slum upgrading scheme that received international attention for its innovative public-private partnership, and its focus on infrastructural upgrading instead of low-income housing. The project was originally a transplantation of himanshu Parikhs agan Khan award-winning Slum networking Project in Indore, but was adapted and renamed Parivartan after its trial run. as of December 2009, Parivartan has been abandoned. funding has been diverted to low-income housing, although infrastructural upgrading continues on through the 500 NOC (No Objection Certificate) scheme (Bhonsale). 35 The Slum networking Project was implemented through four local non-governmental organizations, the most significant being SEWA (Self-Employed Womens Association) and SAATH. These local organizations were responsible for initiating interest in slums for upgrading, gaining each slum communitys trust, designing infrastructural systems for the slums, constructing the systems, and ensuring that a monitoring body is put in place post-installation.

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object that is being seen, submitting it to evaluation criteria and categorizing it according to preestablished standards. Inspection chambers are a new means of conquering the underground, promising to replace the inept drains of the colonial past. Inspection chambers form part of a sequence of innocuous sewer spaces invented over the past few decades to mediate between private, domestic plumbing and public, erratic sewer mains. located between inspection chambers and homes, gully traps are miniature versions of inspection chambers that service each household, preventing solid waste from entering the pipes. They are half the size of inspection chambers and are inserted merely a foot deep in the ground (H. Parikh 6), providing a safe setting for human-sewer interactions. Maintenance can occur without surrendering the body to the drains, and is reduced from a high-risk activity to a household chore. gully traps require regular maintenance by homeowners, familiarizing and demystifying sewerage by staging repeated encounters between humans and drains. Inspection chambers and gully traps only exist in certain pockets throughout the interior of ahmedabad, where slums have replaced previously unsewered textile factories. Populated by migrants who have no roots in the city (M. Bhatt 6), these pockets are serviced by drainage that reflects the precarious circumstances of their occupants. Contemporary drainage technology furnishes slums with light, shallow systems in contrast to the arcane system that stalks the depths of the rest of Ahmedabad. Known as simplified sewerage36, these new systems
36 Also known as condominial sewerage, this low-cost sewerage was first developed in Brazil in the early 1980s and has since been used successfully in other Latin American countries and some Asian countries (Mara 231). These sewers revolutionized hydraulic design by focusing on tractive tension (boundary shear stress) rather than just pipe size and slope. Tractive tension refers to the stress that keeps solids in suspension, preventing them from depositing and creating blockage (Mara 231). The smaller the diameter of the pipe, the more tractive tension there is, and the less likely the sewers will be clogged.

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are aptly named for their ease of installation and low maintenance. They are accessible and comprehensible to the layman: slum women are able to monitor the systems installation (Bhonsale). Although the women are trained by NGOs to identify poor quality materials and shoddy workmanship, they are not endowed with the aura of technical authority. The drains are installed under the auspices of unprofessional monitors, and their simplicity indicates a lack of sophistication. although the more elaborate, older drainage serving the rest of ahmedabad is dysfunctional and does not operate as well as the new drains, its complexity lends it a certain value. It is a system that requires expertise to apprehend, a system that is so complex that even engineers are unable to get it to function. with hidden sewage pumps and ventilation shafts of dubious function, the old drains are difficult for the public to fully perceive, let alone comprehend. how the many disparate components work together is quite mysterious, and there is no comprehensive documentation of the drains37 (Mehta, A. Parikh, Shah). The enigmatic gives free rein to a wide range of interpretations, speculations, and fantasies, some of which may result in horror while others result in wonder. The opacity of ahmedabads old drains gives them a khric quality: they themselves are unintelligible to the public, but are a repository for multiple possible meanings.
37 The drainage departments working maps are faulty and mislocate many sewage pumping stations. There is no document that accurately describes the history of Ahmedabads drainage, as documents tend to reflect proposed projects, many of which were not fully executed.

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In contrast, simplified sewerage strips drains to a bare minimum: pipes and maintenance access points are their only components. The whereabouts of these newly laid pipes are well known to the slum community and to ngos, and the purpose of each part is clear to the community who is responsible for maintaining the system. Simplified sewers are straightforward, understandable, and thereby closed to interpretation because they are bereft of ambiguity. They allow themselves to be claimed as something known in contrast to the khric elusiveness of the old drains. Laid at depths as shallow as five feet, simplified sewers have a proximity to the aboveground that minimizes the investment of time and labour needed for installation. This lowers trench-digging costs and obviates dangerous maintenance practices such as manhole diving, making drainage affordable and humane. However, it is also through monetary commitment and the sacrifice of health (and even of life) that drainage announces its worth. The old drains demand a significant human investment, which in turn gives the drains value. The old sewers are not simply objects, but the reification of a considerable amount of time, effort and energy. In consuming minimal resources, simplified sewers acquire minimal value. Sewerage that entails a significant investment of resources is endowed with a sense of permanence: it is less vulnerable to removal because to do so would be to discard all the money and time that was committed to it. Components of ahmedabads old drainage may be obsolete and the overall system may be dysfunctional, but there are no government plans to remove any

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part of the sewers or to replace the system. Instead, hefty funds are continually committed to patch up the system (AMC East Ahmedabad 8-16). Simplified sewers, on the other hand, have a temporary quality. easy to install, they are likewise easy to uninstall, especially since the land they occupy is illegal and only promised protection for the next ten years (Nohn 1). Their shallow installation entails little physical commitment to the ground, and their miniscule dimensions minimize overall disturbance to their environment. ahmedabads old drains, which range from 12 to over 78 inches in diameter, tunnel through the underground, giving ground porosity, and claiming territory for inhabitation. In contrast, simplified sewers have diameters ranging from four to nine inches (Bhonsale), and are more like objects inserted into the ground than a transformation of the ground. They do not entail significant removal of earth, preserving the ground as a solid mass into which small pipes slip unobtrusively. moreover, their access points are too small for subterranean inhabitation, expelling the human body from the underground and asserting the underground as an impermeable mass. Simplified sewers entail a loss of underground space, transforming perceptions of the ground from that of a khric vessel into a hermetic object.

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CONCLUSION
PerCeIVIng ConTemPorary Sewerage globally, sanitation is not on track to meet the United nationss millennium Development Goals (WHO 8). In 2000, world leaders established the goal of halving the proportion of people without basic sanitation by 2015. Sanitation is one aspect of eight major goals that leaders agreed upon to provide concrete, numerical benchmarks for tackling extreme poverty in its many dimensions and to establish common goals for the entire international development community (UNDP). Since their enactment, the goals have had a significant impact on development discourse and practice, and have increased the sense of urgency to solve poverty. However, it is far from clear what a solution to poverty consists of: Amartya Sen has argued strongly against using the usefulness of goods (utility) to measure poverty because the information that it takes into account is too reductive to adequately describe poverty38. Poverty is multidimensional and complex, possessing an inherent imprecision that needs to be embraced rather than ignored. Economists strive to describe povertys ambiguity by using fuzzy measures that reflect the probability of peoples choices and desires, asserting that [h]uman perceptions in making value judgments are often nebulous (Basu 275). In order to address poverty as a relative value that is dependent upon individual circumstances, Sen redefined poverty as deprivation of the potential to do something that is viewed as valuable to a particular person (capability). In opening up the definition of poverty to encompass subjective values, he takes into account perception and experience.
38 for a more general overview of his argument, see amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: harvard University Press, 2009. for a more detailed economic analysis repudiating utilitarianism, see amartya Sen, On Economic Inequality. oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

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Although the Millennium Development Goals give specificity to poverty alleviation goals, they remain limited to utilitarian assessments. To have basic sanitation only takes into account having access to a sanitation facility. a persons inclination to use that facility and the quality of that facility, which are major factors in the actual effect of sanitation, are altogether ignored. fieldwork in one agra community found that men in families with private toilets do not use their toilets but prefer to openly defecate39, while poor maintenance has rendered community toilets in Ahmedabad slums unusable (Bhonsale). The World Health Organization has attempted to consider the quality of sanitation facilities by establishing a sanitation ladder that roughly categorizes types of facilities as improved and unimproved (6). However, the ladders categories remain too vague: the existence of a certain kind of sanitation facility (ventilation improved pit latrine, flush toilet, composting toilet) says little about whether a facility is frequented or well maintained. Field visits have revealed that facilities considered improved were in fact broken (Murcott) the improved/unimproved designations are inaccurate representations of peoples actual sanitary conditions. In order to be more comprehensive, sanitation needs to take into account qualitative factors. Appropriate technology begins to address some of these qualitative factors by focusing attention on cultural habits, the resources required to construct and maintain a design, and the long-term consequences of a design. To satisfy each aspect of such expansive criteria is difficult, but it is the consideration of unquantifiable factors that is most significant in the concept of
39 fieldwork performed in an agra slum by adam Talsma, aditya Pant and arundati muralidharan in 2011.

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appropriate technology. The most efficient design that is tested in a laboratory is not necessarily the most efficient design when it is tested in the field. Designed objects and spaces produce complex effects when they are built, used and experienced by those whom they serve, and to achieve any of the salutary aims of a design, the intended users subjective perception needs to be considered. The network of effects generated by sanitation infrastructure in slums extends beyond the simple removal of faecal matter. Sewerage has immense political consequences upon land tenure, as it legalizes illegal housing, and gentrifies communities to the advantage of some and the detriment of others. Ananya Roy has pointed out how upgraded slum plots lead to inflated resale prices, displacing the poorest of the poor who can no longer afford slum rents (302). rental prices in one ahmedabad slum that was expected to undergo upgrading through the Slum Networking Project rose by 43% (Nohn 5). The solution to sanitation needs to broaden its considerations beyond engineered efficiency. Sewerage is a signifying entity: it has meaning for its users, governments, and the international community, and such meanings can lead to drastic changes in opportunity and well-being. It is because sewerage is perceived to legitimatize housing that rental prices increase so dramatically. Sewerage design needs to be mindful of how the system is perceived, and what kinds of choices and desires such perceptions engender.

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The perception of built form and the formation of meaning are kinds of knowledge that lie beyond the ken of sewerage engineers. Rather than figuring out how something works, one is asked to consider the effect wrought by an object or space upon a perceiver. It is in this realm of perception and experience that designers do their work, tracing out relationships spawned by spatial configurations and studying the meanings coproduced by people and objects. Most importantly, designers deploy these sensibilities to project new kinds of perceptual experience, and to envision new ways of coexisting and interacting with the environment. with the millennium Development goal deadline looming near, there is increasing pressure on sewerage projects, and an increased opportunity to imagine alternative sewer realities. In fact, the role that designers have traditionally been allotted in poverty alleviation projects is increasingly converging with the role of engineers. low-income housing has given way to site-and-service projects that focus on providing infrastructure rather than building homes that often do not suit the individual needs of the poor (Goethert). On-site slum upgrading focuses exclusively on the insertion of infrastructure, positing that slum homes are already appropriate to the needs of their owners and are only lacking in services. himanshu Parikhs Slum networking Project prides itself on understanding and preserving patterns of settlement in slums, inserting sewerage in such a way that no houses have to be removed (H. Parikh). Sewerage design is the latest low-income housing project, and designers need to actively engage with sewers as opportunities to reconfigure the environment of poverty, rather than consigning them to sewerage engineers.

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The participatory processes that are a staple in low-income housing projects should likewise become pivotal in sewerage projects. In ahmedabads Parivartan scheme, community participation is limited to providing ngo engineers with information on topography and existing sewers. Design decisions such as material choice, the type of sewer system, and the dimensions of the sewers are made independently by the engineers with the understanding that the communitys opinions are uninformed and detrimental to the technical performance of the system. Slum dwellers tend to ask for the largest industrial pipes available, which engineers dismiss since larger pipes increase the risk of clogging (Bhonsale). However, larger pipes do not simply have functional value they say something about how much slum homes and their inhabitants are worth, how permanent the slums are, and how legitimate they are. Sewers that are different from that of the rest of the city undermine the rhetoric of slum integration that pervades himanshu Parikhs Slum networking Project, even if the slum sewers plug into the citys sewer mains. Designers have a finely tuned sensibility to the way that material and space speak, and to subtleties such as how a slight dimensional or proportional change can create the appearance of stability or undermine it. moreover, designers are bent upon reconciling perceptual impact with functional demands, and to imagine new ways of accomplishing both. Sewers have perceptual power. although the general public may not regularly occupy them, they are inhabited daily by sewer workers and, in certain cases, adventurous tourists. They may seem invisible, but the city is marked by their presence whether it is manholes, ventilation shafts, or the standard width of roads that accommodates pipe diameters. They ground the

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city: they construct a foundational stratum for aboveground development, define a zone of exception to the rules that regulate city behaviour, and take on the role of the urban outsider so that insiders can exist. our bodies are in contact with them every day, even though we are not aware of it. faeces made up mostly by our own dead cells travel through the pipes daily and are combined with the cast-off cells of others. The pipes are a space for the reconciliation of disparate and dismembered bodies. They can also be indifferent to us, and make us reconsider the centrality of our existence to that of the environment. They can function without us, contain all our faecal fears, and allow us to forget that we harbour filth inside of us. They can be spaces of punishment for people we want to exclude from society, and spaces of isolation and death. Designers can be instrumental in reconceiving sewer spaces so that they have a regenerative effect on the way that people relate to themselves, to others, and to the environment. It is in considering the way infrastructure is perceived in addition to ensuring that it operates, that sewerage can become the foremost means of improving the conditions of the underserved.

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