Urban sanitation reforms were framed as reclaiming lost fertilizer value from excrement.

Evidence

With such urgent medical and political reasons in favour of open towns, there happened to coincide economic and financial arguments. Open, well-lit streets were a benefit not only to health but to commerce, for they embodied the principles of visibility and inspection whose commercial usefulness was demonstrated at world exhibitions. The dark ‘interior’ of the city, cleared of its human agglomerations, would become easier to police, and artificial lighting would enable the new shops and places of entertainment to do business into the night. Financially, the need for cleanliness in the streets reflected the newly envisaged relationship between the city as a place of consumption and the countryside as a place of production. By organising a system of sewage disposal, it was said, the government would realise the value per capita of human excrement. ‘The towns must restore to the countryside in the form of fertiliser the equivalent of what they receive in the form of items of consumption.’ In these exchanges of a new consumer economy, everything became the representation of a certain value; even the odours of the city were drawn into the economy of meanings. ‘Every rotten smell in the house, in the street, in the town’, it was said, ‘signifies … a loss of fertiliser in the countryside.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 219

Categorization

• XREF: The logic of urban waste as lost fertilizer echoes the circular economy arguments in ‘Grafting & Growth’ about closed-loop infrastructure, and the rendering of everything (even smells) as ‘a representation of a certain value’ connects to Mitchell’s own broader thesis about representation/commodification.
• CANDY: The line ‘Every rotten smell in the house, in the street, in the town signifies a loss of fertiliser in the countryside’ is a delightfully absurd-sounding but real historical argument that could open a dinner conversation.