urban sewerage in the transition from early modern to modern cities

8/6/2019 Urban Sewerage in the Transition from Early Modern to Modern Cities

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/urban-sewerage-in-the-transition-from-early-modern-to-modern-cities 1/21

of 20

The Historiography of Urban Sewerage in the Transition from Early

Modern to Modern Cities

Steve Duncan

Prof. Randolph Head – HIST 202CJune 2010

The historical complexity of the concept of sewers and urban sewerage is

suggested by the etymology of the word itself. In its contemporary colloquial usage, a

sewer is a channel distinctly intended for or carrying sanitary sewage ―that is, human

feces. In technical terms, this is a “sanitary sewer,” as opposed to a “storm drain,” whichcarries only street runoff from rainwater, or a “combined sewer,” which carries both (and

which is the type of sewer system that many of the world’s great cities inherited from the

late-19th and early-20th century periods of sewer system construction.)

But the word sewer, of 15th-century origin, comes from the Anglo-French

“assewer,” to drain, which in turn comes from the latin roots ex and aqua – to drain

away water. 1 In its contemporary usage, the term sewer has more in common with the

older term “cloaca,” the Latin term (derived from cluere, to cleanse, or from the Greek

klyzein, to wash) that was used for Rome’s famous drainage-channel-cum-sewer, the

Cloaca Maxima. First appearing in English probably around the 16th century, a

secondary meaning for “cloaca” ― both for its historical usage and its contemporary

meaning ―is “cesspool,” showing the conceptual ambiguity that exists and has long

existed between the structurally distinct forms of a cesspool ―an unmoving, static

repository for human ordure ―and a sewer ―a water-cleansed system of pipes that

flushed human ordure waste to a disposal site. 2 Cloaca is also closely related, of course,

to the French “ cloaque ,” or a sewer containing human sanitary sewage, as distinct in

meaning from “ egout ,” or a drain

These distinctions are meaningful as much for the ways in which they have been

1 "sewer." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.2 "cloaca." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.



of 20

of all, a modern social habitus; and it implies the concomitant idea of distinct pre-modern

or early-modern habitus that contrasts with the modern, bourgeois habitus.

Scholars of scatology who draw on this “Eliasian scheme of civilization” have

also drawn deeply on the anthropological analysis of Mary Douglas, as articulated

especially in Purity and Danger, 1966, and Bernadette Bucher (Icon and Con quest,

1981). These works “posit a symbolic connection between ‘dirt’ and ‘danger’ as the

formative relationship of a given society’s cosmology.” 5

Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim, for example, editing an anthology of essays that

examine representations of scatological issues in early modern literature and art, outline

the derivation of their intellectual framework from the “Eliasian scheme of civilization”

and from this anthropological tradition. For Douglas, they explain, the “elimination of

both [dirt and danger] in the search for ‘purity’ constitut[es] then ‘a positive re-ordering

of our environment.’” 6 Similarly, they point out that:

For Bucher, as for Douglas, ‘impurity,’ and ‘disorder’ are synonymous.

From a social standpoint, Bucher claims that ‘what is decreed impure,

[and] thus execrated and condemned by a culture, is an object out of place,

a cause for disorder’ (Bucher 142) 7

This relates in two particular ways to the examination of urban sewerage

development. First, it is notable that modern sewerage systems ―such as Haussman’s

sewers in Paris ―were represented contemporaneously, and continue to be represented by

most historians, as bringing order to what had previously been chaotic and uncontrolled

systems. That is, they have been represented as both removing the “dirty” ordure which is

“execrated and condemned” as impure and unclean, and also ― by imposing rationality

and order ―reducing the danger to the social order that this impurity represents. Modern

sewers, by imposing rationality, simultaneously remove the dirt and also make it less

dirty. (In fact, this is implied already in Bucher’s formula, inasmuch as urban wastewithin a designated sewer channel is in fact where it belongs, and thus is no longer matter

“out of place.”)

5 Ibid xiv6 Ibid xiv7 Ibid xiv



of 20

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the anthropological or sociological

approach that comes from the Douglas/Bucher paradigm reminds us that the analytical

framework for deciding what is “impure” or “dirty” is in fact socially constructed, and

not absolute. A resident of 16th-century London or Paris would have had a different

sense of what was dangerously dirty than did a resident of the 20th-century resident of

the same cities. James Inglis points out that in the early modern period human feces, for

example, was sometimes used in medicinal preparations and was willingly consumed by

patients. While this does not necessarily imply that feces was seen as “clean,” it does

however imply that it was not perceived as “dirty” in the Douglas sense, in which

dirtiness has no inherently redeeming properties but is rather a source of infection,

pollution corruption. A distinctly early-modern sensibility toward bodily excretions ―at

least, as distinct from modern sensibilities ―is also represented not only in Rabalaisanliterary scatology, but also in Luther’s writing and the many ―likely apocryphal ―stories

connecting him to excretion and scatology. As Jeff Persels and Russel Ganim put it:

Traced anthropologically, sociologically, culturally and historically, the

Early Moderns arguably shat diff erently (not to mention ate, drank,

digested, pissed, farted, vomited and spat diff erently) as well as inherited

and cultivated a different understanding of those paradoxically both

natural and grotesque acts.8

However, the socially constructed and relativistic nature of ideas of what is

unclean or dirty also means that as conceptions of “impurity” change from one era to

another, historians often find themselves applying their own very strong biases about

“cleanliness” to eras in which different classificatory systems actually applied. The

history of sewerage, therefore, can be difficult territory, as there is a strong tendency to

see one’s own conception of impurity and danger as absolute. In the historiography of

sewage, therefore, it is important to note the vast difference between more basic histories

of technological progress or urban growth, as opposed to those with a richer

understanding of the changing mentalities. Historians in the former category, called

“technologists” for the purposes of this paper, fail to historically contextualize their

subject when they talk about “dirtiness” or inadequate sewerage in early-modern cities

8 Ibid xvii



of 20

In particular, some of the first people to remark on the spatial reorganization of

Paris under Haussman and Belgrande were, in fact, Haussman and Belgrande. They

lauded their system as rational, sanitary, and functional, and contrasted it with the

dangerous, dysfunctional, miasmic, chaotic and unknowable sewers that had preceded it.

The previous sewers of Paris, as represented in the late 19th century, had been nothing

but fetid stagnant breeding-grounds of putridity; the new sewers were constantly-flowing

streams of clean water, pure, healthy, electrically-lit, and even open for tours.

The sewers of Paris built under Haussman between 1848 and 1870 were indeed a

tremendous construction project that involved significant developments in terms of

sewerage and water technologies (among other things, higher slopes and far more

incoming water allowed more continuous flushing). However, the invidious contrasts

with the previous sewers were misleading, as was the implication that this had been thefirst or only significant construction period in forming the Parisian sewerage system.

Major sewer lines had indeed been built previously in the 18th and early 19th century,

and earlier flushing systems had been instituted as well. In the 1830s, for example,

enough new lines had been constructed to expand the system by one-third. Most

significantly, however, the new sewers constructed under Belgrande and Haussman were

not actually “sewers” in the contemporary sense of the word; they were egouts , and

Haussman strictly forbade any disposal of human waste into them. They were for water

and street runoff only. Cesspools, or vidanges , were still mandatory for Parisian

residences, and in creating the new, clean “sewers” and strictly enforcing the no-human-

waste rule, Haussman was actually imposing a functionally greater responsibility on

private individuals to find (private) means to deal with their waste than they had had

before. Private cesspool cleaners, therefore, still worked the streets at night, with all the

messiness that entailed. Not until the last two decades of the 19th century did the “tout a

l’egout” movement prevail, and in slow stages sewage was slowly allowed into the

sewers. London did not have quite the same disjuncture between drains and

sewers ―Londoners had always dumped their waste in any convenient stream or

waterway at hand, and that didn’t change when those waterways were put into tunnels in

the 1860s ― but there was the similar ―and similarly false ―sense that the new sewers

had been installed on what had been a tabula rasa , infrastructure-wise.



of 20

This was what David Harvey calls the “myth of modernity” ― the idea that the

modern era is a complete disjuncture from the past, and this idea of disjuncture is easily

seen in the historiography of modern urban sewerage. Harvey’s analysis, in his book

Paris: Capital of Modernity , of Haussman’s use of the “myth of modernity” is part of an

attempt to understand what, if any, paradigmatic shifts took place in the perception of the

city during the emergence of modernity, and in understanding both disjuncture and

continuity. First, of course, it is necessary to define the “emergence of modernity.”

Harvey is able to very convincingly define this as the period of Haussmanization from

1848-1870, showing evidence of quantitative changes so significant as to constitute

qualitative changes in hundreds of facets Parisian life in the period, and supporting his

argument that it was during this period that it developed from a pre-modern to a modern

city. These include things like a more than ten-fold increase in railroad and telegraphmileage; demographic shifts that showed increasing “serial homogeneity” of

neighborhoods; and changes in the location patterns for large factories and enterprises

that showed an increase in the special clustering of similar types of manufacturing within

an overall shift from center-city to peripheral locations. 11 Representations of the city

likewise underwent a significant shift, though over a slightly longer period; from

approximately 1830 to 1870. Though this period is perhaps later than what is normally

considered the end of the early modern period, it seems nonetheless that looking at thehistoriography of the transition has the potential to offer insight into both modern and

early modern urban sewerage, as well as the ways that cities and sewers work.

Inextricably linked with Haussman’s reconstruction of the Parisian sewers were

issues of social class and social control. The project was represented as an imposition of

order and rationality onto what had been (or was represented as) the chaotic, dirty, and

thus dangerous and threatening system of pre-Haussman “cloaques”. These earlier

cloacas, for example, were described in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables as “horrible,

unknown, frightening regions,” where “hidesoous, frightening sorts swarm in these

impure cloaca like reptiles in the swamp.” 12 Impurity, as used here, is metonymic for

11 Harvey 100-10112 Hugo, Ouvres Completes , Ed. Jean Massin. Paris, Club Francais du Livre, 1969; 11:622 and



of 20

Haussman’s rebuilt sewers, on the other hand, were represented as models of

rationality, order, transparency, and accountability, and in this way the danger presented

by the chaotic impurity or unhealthy dirtiness of both the city’s shit and its working-class

elements was effectively annulled. The oft-cited example of this new openness and

transparency is the sewer tours that were conducted in the latter half of the 19th century.

This representation was both contemporary to the building of the sewers, as seen through

the sewer tours themselves, as well as through Haussman’s representations of the projects

and other representations such as Felix Nadar’s famous electrically-lit photographs of the

tunnels; but it is also a representation that has been accepted in the historiography of

Parisian sewer construction since then. Benjamin, for example, rhapsodizes over Nadar’s

photographs and their use of lighting as a novel use of the camera’s lens to explore

otherwise unseen environments.

The issue of the public eye on sewers, and thus on sewage, is related to the issue

of the publicity or privacy of the excretory act itself. This is the core issue that James

Inglis addresses in his 2001 book A Sociological History of Excretory Experience:

Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies . Though the title includes “technology,”

he is certainly not a technologist in terms of his historical perspective; rather, building

explicitly on Elias, Bucher, and Douglas, he sees human excretory experience and

practice as being a product of a “social habitus,” rather than a product of technology or

biology.

...excreta and excretion, far from having the same characteristics in all

times and places are actually subject to socio-historical mediation, with

different characteristics being possible at different times and different

places. That is to say, excreta mean different things, and excretion is

carried out differently, in different societies (Bourke, 1968; Moore 1984:

56, 276; Stockman, 1989: 135)…the socio-historic mediation of these

phenomena requires us to analyse them in appropriate terms. Such terms

are specifically sociological , rather than purely ‘medical’ or ‘natural



of 20

scientific’. 17

It is worth noting, in relation to urban sewerage issues, that there are actually two

different elements addressed in this quote. Much of his book addresses the practice of

excretion and the social conventions surrounding it during the transition from the pre-

modern to the modern era, and one thing he is saying is that the social conventions

surrounding it change in different times and places, just as the social conventions around

nudity or sex might change. This has implications for spatial experience and division

particularly within the private and domestic spheres.

He is also saying that the perception of excreta and feces ―that is,

sewage ―differs in different eras; building from Douglas and Bucher, this applies to early

modern cities inasmuch as human feces mixed with other ordure and running along the

street-gutters would not have been seen as dangerously dirty in 17th-century Paris, for

example; but it might very well have been seen as such in the late 19th-century in the

same city. This changing perception of the “dirtiness” of what we now call sewage is

actually more important in terms of the public sphere and municipal policy, and it is in

these arenas that municipal infrastructure development takes place.

The most interesting perspectives that Inglis provides comes from his examination

of the first of these elements, the changing practice of excretion. For him, excretory

experience and Elias’ concept of “social habitus” come together in the “faecal habitus.”The faecal habitus is imbricated with urban space to the extent that it occupies a unique,

private, or unseen space, and Inglis sees this as a definitive quality of the modern, as

opposed to the early modern city. Private space for excretion, he explains, “is the

outcome of a long historical process involving the progressive regulation of defecation

into delimited locales.” 18

Inglis structures his book as a way of answering the question “how did the

modern faecal habitus develop?” His answer to this question relies on both Douglas and

on a structural perception of class as the basis of society, based on Elias, in which the

bourgeois constantly sought to separate itself from the lower social orders through a

process of exclusion: “...the habits and attitudes characteristic of excreta and excretion in

17 Inglis 1418 Inglis 2



of 20

the modern West are explicable in terms of the development and operation of the

bourgeois faecal habitus. 19

Tracing the faecal habitus from ancient Rome on, Inglis tells us “not only Rome,

but other towns in Italy and Roman colonial cities, were very often planned around

relatively intricate systems both of drainage…” but that “the Roman sewer…was not the

receptacle for all, or even most, of the detrituses of the urban population.” 20 Rather,

disposal of excrement varied “depending on class position,” and by extension depending

on the physical location of the dwelling ―fronting a main street or not, or on an upper or

lower floor. Ordure, in short, was treated much like any other sort of refuse. Toiletry

experience, Inglis points out, was public experience; public latrines were group meeting-

places, and this reflected the fact that feces, while considered to be dirt in the purely

adjectival sense, was not considered impure or dangerous in the Douglas/Bucher sense. 21

This was even more the case in the medieval period, when “excreta were collected

in dungheaps, which lay open to the gaze of people in all classes.” 22 The “medieval

faecal habitus” began to break down in the early modern period, he explains, with the

advent of the “bourgeois faecal habitus” that included the theme that “the bourgeois body

does not have excretory capacities.” 23 This was connected with a new evaluation of feces

as being exceptionally dirty. By the 18th century, the bourgeois were increasingly “in

conflict with dirty urban environments,” and developed new modes of differentiation

relative to the aristocracy as well as the lower social classes, Inglis says, including the

early introduction of toilet technology and sewers. 24 This was in part because of the

changing nature of cities; in the 18th century, rising urban densites mean that the

accumulation of excrement, “both human and animal,” outpaced “older forms of urban

sanitation such as street cleaning, drainage and detritus disposal” and reached crisis

proportions. 25 This crisis stimulated the perception of “dirtiness,” and early sewerage

works developed in response to this allowed for the early development of toilet

19 Inglis 220 Inglis 7521 Inglis 7922 Inglis 10823 Inglis 11424 Inglis 625 Inglis 209.



of 20

technologies that whisked excrement away from the excreter.

The bourgeois faecal habitus was elaborated over the next century ―through the

mid-19th century ―and, aided by “medico-scientific” factors, eventually:

…all strata now entered into the symbolic and practical conditions of this

habitus. In such fashion, the bourgeois faecal habitus was transformed into

the modern faecal habitus…with all elements of society sharing the same

excretory disposition and means of disposal, the modern mode of

excretion was born. 26

Fundamental to the birth of the modern mode of excretion, however, were the

“large-scale water-based sewer systems” that had been constructed in the later 19th

century. In Inglis’ view, modern urban sewer systems developed over time, stimulated by

the increasing bourgeois demand, and eventually reached a point of saturation that

allowed all residences to be connected ―thus allowing universalization of what had been

the elite privilege of toilet technology.

A particularly interesting component of Inglis’ rigidly class-based sociological

analysis is his assertion that that public health and sanitation concerns of the 19th century

were fundamentally a result of “the classificatory scheme of the bourgeoisie’s generic

habitus” rather than a result of any biologically determined facts (such as germs). 27 That

is, in the perception of the bourgeois, “in the hygienic sense, the proletariat was a ripesource first of miasmas, and then later of germ-based contagion. In the moral sense, the

proletariat was filthy in that it was seen to be…disorderly, unruly…” 28

Fundamentally, Inglis’ perspective on the “faecal habitus” is insightful and

fascinatingly thorough in its examination of the individual urban excretory experience as

it has changed over time. It does not, however, adequately address the issue of modern

and early modern urban sewerage. The faecal habitus, while socially constructed and thuscommunal, is developed in his book around the excretory experience, which is individual.

Urban sewerage, on the other hand, inherently involves the urban entity; it is municipal

26 Inglis 927 inglis 21628 Inglis 216-217



of 20

and not individual. Waste disposal can be an individual activity, just as excretion is.

(“Individual” in this sense merely means “done by one person,” and has no connotations

of “done in private” versus “done in public”). However, urban attitudes toward waste

once it is on the street, or policies about what can be put into the public street, or

perceptions of what waste is the city’s responsibility to remove and what is the

individual’s ―these all take place at the larger scale of the city. Moreover, a central

component of urban sewerage is a simultaneous division and connection between what is

“private” and what is “public,” which does not seem to be addressed well in the concept

of the faecal habitus.

However, the connection between the social habitus ―as presented by Persels &

Ganim, Reid, and Inglis ―and the broader urban reality can be found in historians of

urban space and culture. It is the changing experience and perception of urban space, incombination with changing perceptions of purity and hygeiene as described above by

theorists of the social habitus, that underlie the changing ideas of urban sewerage over

time. Specifically, as the following authors show, perceptions of urban space in the early

modern period were different in two particular ways. First, in the early modern city,

“private” and “public” space were neither as clearly demarcated nor as conceptually

coherent as they would later become. Second, in regard to how the early modern city was

perceived as an entirety, it was conceptualized as an enclosed entity, or an organic body,

in which wastes could be expelled to the outside. By contrast, the modern city is

conceptually integrated with its hinterlands with what Rosalind Williams calls an

“environmental consciousness;” dirt and impurity can no longer simply be relegated to

the outside, but must be hidden in sewers, flushed away, and processed.

Historians of urban space in recent years generally use the conceptual foundation

developed by Henri Lefebvre, as articulated in The Production of Space (1994). For

Lefebvre, space is relational; it is produced through social experience, and rather than

serving as a pre-existing container, “space is not a thing but rather a set of relationships

between things.” 29 Corollary to this is the awareness that all social relations and

practices are necessarily and intrinsically spatial: “there is no unspatialized social

29 Quoted in Soja 47



of 20

reality.” 30 Lefebvre also suggests that there are three types of space: perceived,

conceived, and lived. (This formulation has particular relevance to the urban underworld,

inasmuch as a conceived representation of space ―such as the threatening underworld of

filth and danger ―and the lived experience of that same space ―such as a functioning

sewer system ―can often co-exist with no apparent conflict in the urban imagination.)

Vanessa Harding, in her article “Space, Property, and Propriety in Urban

England” (2002), begins with Lefebvre’s ideas of space as being socially produced, and

then goes on to specifically addresse changing perceptions of public and private space in

the early modern period. She explains that from the late medieval period onward,

European cities:

…were honeycombed with a multiplicity of private spaces that confronted

the public…[Private spaces] overlooked, appropriated, and flowed into

adjacent public spaces. The interface between public and private was by

no means a decisive cleavage: There was a continuum from one to the

other, and an area of interaction between the two. 31

The split between early-modern and modern is not absolute, of course; to some

extent one could say the same thing about modern cities as well. Harding says that in the

early modern city “private uses invaded the public space, and the public interest

restrained private owners’ freedom to act on, and modify, the space that they consideredtheir own;” this could equally well apply, for example, to private automobile use on

public city streets in the modern city, or the zoning restriction on building heights

today. 32

However, there was a fundamental difference in terms to the extent that the pre-

modern or early-modern city Harding describes is not divided into a simple public/private

binary, nor can space be delineated into anything as simple as domestic, private, and

public spheres. Rather, myriad intersecting and overlapping jurisdictional claims makethe city in England, by the 14th and 15th century, into a “three-dimensional jumble of

30 Soja 4631 Harding 55032 Ibid 550



of 20

intermixed properties and flying freeholds.” 33

Harding’s analysis corresponds with other historians of space in the early modern

city in terms of its dismissal of the simple public/private dichotomy; Christopher

Friedrichs, for example, in The Early Modern City 1450–1750 , notes that “for many

inhabitants… the most important form of spatial differentiation was not functional but

jurisdictional.” 34 Friedrichs notes as well the many enclaves and “liberties” under control

of churches, convents, or hospitals, that were simultaneously inside cities but outside of

its control. He notes as well that modern conceptions of zoning could not be applied to

early modern cities; the prevalence of domestic workshops meant that productive and

residential zones were one and the same.

In this context of imbricated public and private, residential and productive, the

foundational paradigm of modern urban sewerage systems was lacking: that is, the idea

of a framework of “public space” within which the “private space” of individual residents

is located. There could have been no conception of a universal public infrastructure

network that consistently interfaced with all properties within the city, as Harding and

others describe a built environment in which many of the private spaces or separate

jurisdictions might have no direct connection to any clearly public space. Likewise,

public space might be entirely surrounded by private space, in which case it would

become a de facto shared property among those who had access to use it.Harding points out that there were controls in the public interest; by the 13th

century, for example, a private property owner “could not let his eaves or gutters drip

onto his neighbor’s land nor build a cesspit, even a lined one, too close to the

boundary.” 35 Likewise, although “spilling rainwater onto the street from spouts and

gutters was permissible,” in the 14th and 15th centuries municipal polices forbade the

direct disposal of ordure and human waste onto the street. 36 However, encroachments

onto private land, she indicates, were protected against more carefully than encroachmentor onto or use of public space, and even the ordinances that theoretically protected streets

did not protect the “public” alleys that connected to them. Disposal of waste, in short,

33 Ibid 56034 Friedrich 3135 Harding 56036 Harding 561



of 20

was left as a private problem but was often carried out in the amorphously public arena of

the early modern city.

This corresponds in general with the timeline given by scatological historians of

other European cities; Reid, for example, describes in Paris a 1533 a royal decree that

mandated cesspools for each residence, but says that “the new cesspools often

leaked ―they need to be emptied less often that way.” 37 This leakage, of course, voided

their contents ― perhaps somewhat filtered ―into public space, and eventually into the

gutters of roadways. Reid goes on to note that human waste was not, at the time, seen as

dangerously dirt in the Douglas/Bucher sense: “However, cesspools were not the main

recipients of the city’s organic waste. Paris produced enormous quantities of mud

impregnated with rotting organic material…” 38 This mud included all sorts of organic

material, such as horse manure, and “only in 1674 had an ordinance required that fecal

matter be kept separate from other types of wastes at these sites" 39

While few historians or theorists of urban space focus directly on sewers, David

Pike (in Subterranean Cities , 2005) and Rosalind Williams ( Notes on the Underground ,

2008) together provide insight into changing perceptions of the urban underground which

has been linked with perceptions of urban sewerage.

David Pike examines this perception of the urban underworld in the transition

between early modern and modern cities more closely in his book Subterreanean Cities:

The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (2005). Like Reid and Inglis, he uses

the paradigm expressed by Mary Douglas as the foundation of his theories of the urban

underground: “Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be

maintained.” 40 For Pike, however, it is important that this happens specifically in the

underground environment.

Other historians of sewers or scatology, such as Inglis (discussed above) examinethe metaphorical implications of ordure as if it would have the same impact even in

surface-level pipes. Pike argues that this is not the case; rather, he argues, there is a long

37 reid 1038 reid 1039 Reid 1140 Quoted in Pike 5



of 20

tradition of conceiving and representing underground space as a locus of danger,

disorder, and dirt, derived from representations of hell and from vertically segmented

representations of morality. In this argument, he combines both the Douglas/Bucher

paradigm as well as Lefebvre’s idea that “There are no aspatial social processes” and that

“even in the realm of pure abstraction, ideology, and representation, there is a pervasive

and pertinent…spatial dimension.” 41 This representational exclusion of danger and dirt

to the underworld, he argues, has helped to develop our modern conceptions of sewers:

In practice, this has made the underground the physical and conceptual

trash heap of the modern world above, the place to which everyone and

everything posing a problem or no longer useful to it is relegated.” 42

In this argument, he provides a fascinating possible insight into why, for example,

there has been such consistent and long-term elision of the fundamental functional

difference between the rationalized égouts of the Second Empire Haussmanization of

Paris, and the earlier cloaques to which they have so often been compared. The modern

city, perhaps, in some degree needed the idea of sewers: “The world above ―the world of

law, order, economy, conformity ―is given structure and order by what it excludes

beneath it as unfit.” 43 The very rationalization and cleanliness of the sewers in the later

19th century in Paris perhaps indicated a hyper-rationalization of the above-ground

city―even though both conceptions still rested on the ability of private citizens to

dispose of their own ordure, which often meant a high degree of spillover into the public

domain.

Like Pike, Rosalind Williams, in her book Notes on the Underground: An Essay

on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, is concerned with conceptualization of

underground urban space more than with the historical realities of it; the focus of her

work is literary representations. Also like Pike, she is most concerned with what is

uniquely modern in modern conceptualizations of the urban underground. However, inexamining this, she also illuminates additional facets of the spatial character of early

modern cities in relation to the development of sewer systems.

41 Soja 4642 Pike 543 Pike 7



of 20

concerned with population and urban functions.” 46 Like Williams, he sees the

development of paradigms of circulation rather than simple intake and disposal, and the

development of a sense of the city as an ecological system. From the 17th century on, he

points out, “from being a symbolic object, the urban space was becoming an administered

object.” 47 In each of these ways, the conceptual foundations were laid for modern urban

sewerage.

46 Lepetit xvii47 Lepetit 64



of 20

WORKS CITED

"sewer." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010. Merriam-Webster Online. 24 June

2010. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sewer>

"cloaca." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010. Merriam-Webster Online. 24 June

2010. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cloaca>

Friedrichs, Christopher. The Early Modern City, 1450–1750. London; New York:

Longman, 1995.

Gandy, Matthew. “The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space.”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1999, vol. 24, no. 1, p. 23-44

George, Rose. The Big Necessity: the unmentionable world of human waste and why it

matters. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.

Harding, Vanessa. “Space, Property, and Propriety in Urban England.” Journal of

Interdisciplinary History, Spring, 2002, vol. 32, no. 4, p. 549-569

Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity . New York City: Routledge, 2003.

Inglis, David. A Sociological History of Excretory Experience : defecatory manners and

toiletry technologies . Lewiston, N.Y. : Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.

Lepetit, Bernard. The Pre-industrial Urban System: France 1740-1840 . Cambridge

[England]; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la

Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1994.

Persels, Jeff, and Russell Ganim, Eds. Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art:

Studies in scatology . Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT : 2004.



of 20

Pike, David L. Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 .

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Reid, Donald. Paris Sewers and Sewermen: realities and representations . Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-imagined

Places . Cambridge, MA. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, p 46

Williams, Rosalind H. Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and

the Imagination . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990.

urban sewerage in the transition from early modern to modern cities

Documents