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(Stills from a short 2006 National Geographic video about Mexico City’s sewer divers.)

Our Future Plural partner site, Edible Geography, has posted the transcript of the talk given by one of their invited speakers at Postopolis! DF: Julio Cou Cámara, a sewer diver for Mexico City.

Cámara might seem like a strange choice, but as Nichola Twilley succinctly explains, “the infrastructure of waste disposal is the (frequently invisible) corollary of consumption.” For every input, there's an output.

Here's an excerpt:

People are always wondering why there’s so much flooding in the city. I can tell you that the city floods because of all the rubbish that creates blockages in our drainage system. If we were maybe a bit more conscious about rubbish and we didn’t throw it on the street, we wouldn’t have this many flooding problems in the city. People complain—they say, “There’s almost a lake in the street.” Well, yeah—that lake is there because of your rubbish.

The drainage system is constantly being maintained—all year long, twenty-four hours a day, there are people working. They need a diver when they can’t stop the pumping plant, because if they stopped it, the city would be flooded. That’s when they ask for my help. We go there and we see what the problem is and we do the job.

We work blindly in the black water. It contains animal poo, human poo, hospital waste... any kind of pollution you can think of. All of that is in the sewage water. That’s where we work. Right now there are only two of us diving for Mexico City.

Go read the rest of Cámara's presentation, plus the Q&A afterwards.

In the Archives:
The Return of the Sewer Divers

(The object of interest in a typological study? Pictured above are the egg digesters at Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn with a lighting scheme designed by the French design firm L'Observatoire International. Photo by [               ].)

Here now is the fantasy table of contents for the fantasy second issue of Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.

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Examining The Waste Stream CLUI
“Garbage is the effluent of our consumption, and it flows backwards through the landscape of Los Angeles. Unlike liquid wastes, which drain downslope to the sea, the tiny tributaries of trash, from millions of homesteads, collected by a fleet of thousands of trucks circulating in constant motion, hauling to nodes of sorting, distribution, reuse, and, finally disposal, flow up the canyons and crevices to the edge of the basin.”

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(“Almost all of Nauru is missing, picked clean right down to the corral skeleton supporting the island.” Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program. Source.)

No Island is an Island This American Life
Mining and exporting its rich deposits of phosphates, formed from bird shit deposited over thousands of years, the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru had for a time the highest GDP per capita. But with the depletion of its major natural resource and the mismanagement of the trust fund set up to provide for its post-phosphate future, the country now has one of the lowest. It wasted away its island in return for not much.

To keep its economy afloat, it allowed the creation of secret offshore banks. Some of these banks' headquarters are no more than shacks, but through one of these shacks in 1998, “Russian criminals laundered about $70 billion, draining off precious hard currency and crippling the former superpower.”

In 2001 until 2007, Nauru agreed to settle Afghan and Iraqi refugees fleeing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and seeking asylum from Australia. With the millions of dollars in aid the government received in return, one would have expected decent accommodations for them, but living conditions were not much better than those at Guantanamo.

And then there was that deal it made with the United States to set up safe houses in China for North Korean defectors.

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(Illuminated urine containers by Luz Interruptus. See also astronaut urine lighting the nighttime sky aglow.)

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Growing Water UrbanLab
Runner-up in the Pamphlet Architecture #30 competition, and currently on view in the Burnam Plan Centennial exhibition Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century (where it's one of a very, very, very few handful of projects that actually fit those three modifiers) is UrbanLab's proposal for an alternative wastewater treatment system for Chicago.

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Frog's Dream Calvin Chiu
“[T]he Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of cities, into eco-water treatment machines, commercially known as Living Machines, in which a micro-ecosystem of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify the water. A micro-wetland ecosystem will be formed around these mansions to sustain larger wetland animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.”

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puRE Craig England
“The peri-urban Revitalization Element [puRE] is a catalyst for fostering sustainable development within existing suburban areas, by re-envisioning a classic suburban icon—the swimming pool—and transforming it into a productive, water-treating element within a community.”

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(A proposal by FAT for a public toilet.)

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Q&A with Rose George NYT
Rose George is the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. Last month in The New York Times, she answered questions sent in by readers about toilets, sewage and other topics about waste disposal in New York City. Here's a sample:

Q: Are there any ways to use the large amount of human waste generated by New York City for the common good, like turning it into drinking water or compost, for example, that would not require a huge financial commitment or a significant change in infrastructure?

A: Human waste is such a misnomer. It is an extremely useful product. As you point out, it can make biogas, for a start. In China, 18 million or so households get their cooking fuel by linking their latrine to a biogas digester (an airtight underground tank), tapping off the methane and cooking with it. It cuts down on deforestation and is cheap and infinite. There is really interesting stuff going on in Europe, too, where Lille in France, Stockholm in Sweden and a few other cities are running buses and taxis on biogas produced from sewage and household garbage.

In fact, the only waste about human waste is that it goes to waste; even in the 19th century, Karl Marx calculated that London was losing a fortune by throwing all that potential fertilizer away into its water system.

But back to biodiesel: Yes, there are companies working on that, including one in Canada which you can find if you search online for “biodiesel” and “human waste.” The trouble with sewage as an energy source is that the technology for now — even though it’s ancient (Marco Polo reported seeing biogas tanks in China in the 13th century) — it’s not yet cost-effective. Some wastewater treatment plants get gas or electricity from the process, but by no means all. It is often seen as prohibitively expensive, especially when the plants are struggling to run and meet all sorts of regulations.

Money is going into the wastewater infrastructure from the federal stimulus bill, which is great, but I would like to see more of it dedicated to exploiting this chronically and acutely undertapped source of energy. It will cost money, but so did putting in the infrastructure in the first place, and it will probably pay its own way eventually. It’s definitely a chronically and acutely underexploited source of energy.

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(Human waste. Photograph by James Ricalton.)

Dying in the Dying-field James Ricalton
“Dying-places are ordinarily in homes or in hospitals, but this poor fellow has neither a home nor a hospital in which to die. We are here in a vacant space near the river—a sort of common littered with refuse and scavenged by starving dogs. It has been named the Dying-place, because poor, starving, miserable outcasts and homeless sick, homeless poor, homeless misery of every form come here to die. The world scarcely can present a more sad and depressing spectacle than this field of suicides; I say suicides, because many that come here come to voluntarily give up the struggle for existence and to die by sheer will force through a slow starvation. They may be enfeebled by lingering disease; they may be unable to find employment; they may be professional vagrants; they come from different parts of the city and sometimes from the country round about. They are friendless; they are passed unnoticed by a poor and inadequate hospital service; they become utterly discouraged and hopeless and choose to die. Their fellow natives pass and repass without noticing them or thought of bestowing aid or alms, and here it is not expected; they have passed beyond the pale of charity; it is the last ditch; they are here to die, not to receive alms.”

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Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.

In the Archives:
Buttology 1
BUTT: A Proposal for a Zine

(Perhaps the next time the space toilet needs fixing, like what had to be done last week, astronauts may be required to take a spacewalk. Image courtesy of NASA.)

A fantasy table of contents for the fantasy first issue of BUTT, now renamed Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.

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The Rise of Public Composting Toilet  Freshkills Park Blog
“Installation of composting toilets in public facilities is catching on. In New York City, The Bronx Zoo and Queens Botanical Garden have been operating restrooms with composting toilets, with no need for sewer lines, for the last few years. The technology in both facilities is made by Clivus Multrum and resembles a conventional toilet, except that it uses only 3-6 ounces of water, in combination with a bio-compostable foam, for flushing.”

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Montreal’s Wastewater Treatment: A History of Problems  Spacing Montreal
“While it’s an impressive system in terms of its scope and capacity, the treatment process itself leaves much to be desired. In fact, it’s actually one of the worst in Canada. A national ‘report card’ issued by the Sierra Club in 2004 gave the city’s treatment process a grade of F-. The only other city to receive a grade worse than Montreal was Victoria, a place which doesn’t even have a treatment process in place yet.”

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Nomadic Spaces: The Afghan Sewer Kids of Rome  BBC
“Italian police have found more than 100 immigrants, including 24 Afghan children, living in the sewer system beneath railway stations in Rome.”

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(Image courtesy of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory.)

Trash Track  MIT
“Trash Track relies on the development of smart tags, which will be attached to different types of garbage in order to track in real time each piece of waste as it traverses the city's sanitation system. The goal of the project is to reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects and waste, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today's recycling and sanitation systems. The project will be exhibited at the Architectural League in New York City and in Seattle starting September 2009.”

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LooWatt  Virginia Gardiner
“Today, 40% of the global population lives without toilets. In most places, scarcity of water renders sewer systems impossible, while ad hoc human waste disposal spreads waterborne illnesses that prey upon millions, and cripple developing economies. It is crucial to address the global sanitation crisis with creative solutions. While many NGOs are hard at work installing composting eco-toilets for those in need, a continual challenge is to motivate communities to look after their new toilets. By turning human waste into a high-value commodity, energy, the Gardiner CH4 offers plenty of incentive to sustain itself.”

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The Geopolitics of Space Toilets  The Guardian
“[Veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka] told Novaya Gazeta newspaper that officials had rejected his request to work out on the American exercise bike during their pre-training mission. Worse than that, they had also ruled that American and Russian crew members should use their own ‘national toilets’, with Russian crew banned from using the luxurious American astro-loo.” The situation may have improved since reading this.

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Religious Freedom vs. Sanitation Rules  NYT
“For the last two and a half years, Mr. Crislip, a planning supervisor for the state’s Environmental Protection Department, and local sewage authorities have had more than 30 meetings in a futile effort to persuade members of the sect here in Cambria County, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, to upgrade outhouses next to a schoolhouse so they comply with state sanitation codes.”

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(Image courtesy of Bureau E.A.S.T.)

Fez River Project  Bureau E.A.S.T.
“The City of Fez Department of Water and Power (RADEEF) is currently implementing a new system which will channel the city’s water sewage towards two treatment plants. Thereby, the Fez river will soon stop receiving backwater and regain its potential as a public amenity. If rehabilitated, its impact will be inordinately salient to the unique urban context of Fez. Indeed, the medina’s intra-mural population not only lacks public open spaces, but is also experiencing a rapid deterioration of its environment due to over-densification and aging public infrastructure.”

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Soft Disaster  NYT
“The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm. But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.”

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Poo Power to the People  The Guardian
“Lünen, north of Dortmund, will use cow and horse manure as well as other organic material from local farms to provide cheap and sustainable electricity for its 90,000 residents.”

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(Community urinalysis, one of NYT Magazine's ideas of the year in 2007.)

Mapping Urban Drug Use  OSU College of Agricultural Sciences
“A team of researchers has mapped patterns of illicit drug use across the state of Oregon using a method of sampling municipal wastewater before it is treated. Their findings provide a one-day snapshot of drug excretion that can be used to better understand patterns of drug use in multiple municipalities over time. Municipal water treatment facilities across Oregon volunteered for the study to help further the development of this methodology as a proactive tool for health officials.”

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Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.

(Because the world marches on an empty stomach.)

No one wants to think about shit and the act of shitting. When we go, we want it out of sight and out mind as fast as we can quickly flush, for to linger longer than is socially acceptable could be a sign of an atavistic pathology. However, should an alien happen to drop by and see how much energy, time and resources we spend just on our sewers, it might think we are absolutely obsessed with our excrement. It would be right, of course.

We propose, then, a zine about this all too important biological process. Provisionally titled BUTT, it will collect any and all investigations into the myriad ways scatology is spatialized. Many will keep on regurgitating promotional materials like those automatically archived on dezeen but not BUTT. Everyone will talk about Daniel Libeskind but not BUTT. It's the contrarian preposition.

Coverage, then, will likely include ancient Roman sewers, Victorian public loos, modern pay toilets, the zero gravity toilet of the International Space Station, boutique pissoirs, big event porta-potties, battlefield latrines, methane farms, Appalachian heritage outhouses, Mexican sewer divers, and public transportation powered by poo.

Any proposal that sets out to rethink urban sewer systems, regardless of quality, will always be a featured content, and realized projects that address the sanitation needs of the other 90% will be automatically accepted for publication.

Published as well would be field reports from guided tours of municipal wastewater treatment plants, for instance, the world's largest located right on the periphery of Chicago, and also from illegal urban explorations of subterranean drainscapes.

A lucky freelancer would be sent off to Dubai to see if the beaches around the fourty-three-star Burj Al Arab hotel are still noxious with illegally dumped human waste. He'll probably write that it's actually clean but only because there aren't much sewage around to be spilt, as everyone has left. If the miniscule budget allows, another freelancer would be assigned to get an update on Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic and the Gaza Sewage Flood of 2007.

Interspersed throughout each issue would be engineering illustrations of sewer tunnels that immediately call to mind certain anatomical drawings by Jean-Jacques Lequeu.

How about self-portraits, preferably of architecture students, taken inside the bathrooms of post-Bilbao museums?

Shit. From Every Angle.

It'll be the infrastructural porn rag for the hipster design crowd, always mistakenly shelved in the fetish section, along with the German scheiße bestsellers, of your nearest independent bookstore.

In the Archives:
Slice

(This is the real BUTT.)