Illich traces the evolution of an inherited dwelling into a residential commodity through the ideas of odour, aura, and the utopian city. What made places liveable were homes built and maintained by families and tribes, each with their own cultures, traditions, and auras. These “auras” are the inevitable by-products of life’s processes: nasal signals like cooking, residing, or defecating; aural signals like laughter, talk, or movement; and tactile signals like the materiality of the personal dwelling afforded by its residers. At this moment of civil society, there is an implicit sense of belonging in the existence of your dwelling in the physical city. It is precisely this idiosyncratic “common aura”  that became the target to “deodorize” and “clear” from which “clearly delineated individuals can circulate with unlimited freedom” in the new “utopian city space” (Illich 1986, 251). The poster child ideal for this movement became the targeting of odours.

As Illich states, the aversion to the traditional behaviours of the city was not spurred immediately by the saturation of odours, for these scents were pungent throughout urban life to a point of anonymity. Moreover, it was the “transformation in olfactory perception” that summoned the desire to sterilize and purify the living conditions around (250). This change coincided with medical advancements in germ theory and understanding the inner functions of human bodies. They were “beginning to be visualized as a machine whose elements were ‘prepared’ for inspection on the dissecting table;” thus, bodily health and hygiene was beginning to be understood as a mechanical process to maintain (251). What later would be summarized by Le Corbusier, the house became to be seen as a machine for living in; thus, housing was changed “from an activity into a commodity” that made “dwelling activities impossible, so  that persons become domesticated docile residents within shelters which they rent or buy” (251-2). This transformation outsources the responsibility of personal maintenance and hygiene to the professional and public sphere of life.

It is here that I place Ukeles’ manifesto for Maintenance Art as a declaration for a necessary process of life that has been sterilized out of personal dwellings and yet forgotten by the public body. She advocates for the necessity of maintenance by proclaiming it as an Art. I would argue that her rhetoric is not only a successful connection to Performance Art Movement of the 60s and 70s, but also the introduces a fascinating discussion of the difference in value inscribed to the same act of cleaning and maintaining when it is done by a public body of the White Wings versus unpaid gendered labour in private households. Ukeles writes of maintenance as “a drag” of which “culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay” (Ukeles 1969, 2). And yet, it is this maintenance that is a part of the “Life Instinct: unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium” (1). Unfortunately, this vital process of life is, at times, the impetus for prejudiced acts.

As Carr states, issues of public health, safety, and wellbeing are  leveraged for the “marginalization of immigrants, communities of color, and the poor that live within so-called unhealthy neighborhoods” and are used to “justif[y] the interest of halting the spread of illness, whether real or metaphorical, to elite and often largely white populations” (Carr 2023, 47). The advancements in germ theory began to be exploited for “white supremacy in the form of policy and administration” dictating who could occupy healthy landscapes or not (48). Carr summarizes the actions for public health into three responses and their case studies being “quarantine (cholera), eradication (cancer), and prescription (obesity)” (48) where the quarantine response is an appropriate lens to understand the history of development and opinion of the Great Salt Cove. As a public maintenance measure, quarantine served the a two-fold purpose of “protect[ing] the health of white American” and by isolating or even erasing “those seen as a threat to that wellness (54). In our case study of the Cove, it was the marginalized population of Snowtown and the unhygienic odours of the Cove that propelled the action to transform the area for the betterment of those who held the power in diplomacy and policy.

With a growing global population and an increasingly interconnected world, how might we, as landscape designers, begin to rethink the professionalization (Illich), maintenance (Ukeles), and segregation (Carr) of our necessary processes, auras, and odours in urban space?

Sources:

• Ivan Illich, “The Dirt of the Cities, The Aura of Cities, The Smell of the Dead, and Utopia of an Odorless City”, in H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, (London: Marion Boyars, 1986).
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, Proposal for an Exhibition,” (New York, 1969).
• Sara Jensen Carr, “Quarantine, Eradication, and Prescription: How Health Segregated the American Urban Landscape” in Segregation and Resistance in the Landscapes of the Americas, eds. Eric Avila and Thaisa Way, (Harvard University Press, 2023).