History/Theory II

October 4, 2024

Sanitation Reading Response

In her manifesto about maintenance as a form of art, Mierle Laderman Ukeles asserts that society privileges development systems – associated with progress and masculinity – over maintenance systems, which are associated with the domestic, often feminine-coded work of “preserv[ing] the new,” and how it “takes all the fucking time.” By drawing attention to the tension she sees between her life as a wife and mother and her life as an artist, she places value on this labor through the suggestion of performing it in the context of a museum. Within the sphere of the elite art world and the formality of this environment, she aims to elevate cleaning, sanitation, and laundry work, among other cited examples. By exposing the discomfort of the elite with the unsavory realities of this work to themselves, her proposed installation would highlight societal attitudes around uncleanliness.

These attitudes and their development are traced in the other two readings, which discuss the evolving perceptions of scent within the urban environment and how the issue of health has been used to shape racist and otherwise problematic urban planning policies. In lIlich’s essay on smell, it’s interesting to learn how humans appear not to have had the same aversion to the scents of death, excrement, and decay that contemporary society possesses. It was seen as a normal part of life, but over time, attitudes changed and the idea that dead bodies might pose a risk to human health began to influence burial practices and proximity to waste systems. As with urban renewal discussed in Sarah Carr’s work, all traces were aimed to be excluded from public life, literally buried under the ground in the form of sewers.

Carr goes into great detail about the way that whiteness became synonymous with health and cleanliness over time, with racist and xenophobic policies reinforcing these ideas through waves of displacement in the name of public health. By tracing the policies and paradigms related to dealing with cholera, cancer, and obesity, Carr shows how systematic disenfranchisement of vulnerable populations, the vast majority of which are communities of color, has led to cycles of poverty and poor health. Designers and urban planners have sought to distance themselves with these populations through slum clearing, mapmaking, and public housing projects. She exposes the history of “conscribing communities of color and immigrants to landscapes of risk – legislatively, socially, and economically – only to blame them for their bad choices and failure to thrive.” Through interrogating these dark chapters of our recent past, designers can better understand how decisions around the built environment can have stark, long-term impacts on communities and consider how these decisions can best mitigate the systems of injustice that remain in effect today.

I found some of the language around getting rid of the stagnant water and “useless” lands in order to improve sanitary conditions and keep the white, wealthy populations from having to endure the stench of the “wasted” land to have many parallels to what we’ve learned about the cove. I will be curious to learn more about the public health issues that specifically helped to create political momentum around the filling in of the cove. How much of that was rooted in reality and how much leaned more towards propaganda, hiding the economic incentives of gaining the cove space and the adjacent black community, Snowtown’s, land for commercial development?