26th April 2021. Work | Sewers
The future history of knowledge work; The end of the sewer
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: The future history of knowledge work
At the Sydney Review of Books Tom Lee has a piece written as from the future on the notion of “outdoor knowledge work”—that period in the 2010s and 2020s when knowledge workers were able to ply their trade from huts in the park.
This practice of remote or mobile working, particularly in the so-called knowledge economy, was viewed by some as a release from the shackles of a dominant earlier model of work, where vast numbers of city dwellers would rise at close to exactly the same time, drive or catch public transport at exactly the same time, and arrive at a place of work shared by everyone else employed by their organisation—spending much of their time on computers, also using the internet.
As is the way of such pieces, there’s a nod in the direction of the cultural history of the office in the early 21st century. The Office gets a namecheck, as does Rachel Cusk’s novel The Temporary. Of course, looking back from the future, this was changed by the pandemic. In a playful moment, he quotes an article from 2020 by Tom Lee—this is the sort of self-referential fun you can have when writing from the future:
Workers would bodge together an office using their portable computing technology, domestic accessories and outdoor facilities designed for leisure activities... Lee recalls how certain picnic huts, which were typically unoccupied during the weekdays in previous years, became popular places of work for OKWs. Whereas previously Lee could be certain there’d be space in the huts for him throughout the year, after 2020 he needed to ensure he was in the huts early in the morning to get a spot.
But these days, that all seems so 2020 or 2021.
(Picnic huts at Bronte beach. Source: Ozbeaches.)
And looking back, of course, Lee’s 2020 article was completely blind to the trend that actually transformed outdoor knowledge work: the meetup:
Some historians have compared the meetups to the influential local automobile and bicycle clubs that advocated for their respective means of transport and investment in associated infrastructure at various points in the twentieth century. Regional meetups networked with local councils and formed powerful lobby groups that influenced a number of important planning decisions concerning the use of public space, in particular the return of golf courses to public parkland with sheltered structures designed for OKWs. With the help of these groups, the picnic, the barbecue and the walk—activities that today are impossible to disassociate from work in some capacity—all started to become the deliberately designed genres of information sharing and knowledge creation with which are familiar today.
There’s a lot more to this piece, including te emergence of the “outdoor knowledge aesthetic” and it succeeds in making our strange present a little stranger. It’s an entertaining perspective on a future of work that isn’t dominated by automation.
#2: The end of the sewer
LitHub has an extract from a book on the history of sewers that may tell you more than you need to know.
But the author, Chelsea Wald, makes a sharp point in the piece: that although in the rich world we take the privileges of a sewer system for granted, it is possible that globally we’ve seen the last of new big underground sewer systems—we’ll need new solutions to this problem as urbanisation continues.
The data are striking:
Today, only about 62 percent of urban dwellers worldwide have access to sewers—a percentage that remained essentially flat between 2000 and 2017—and those people are mostly in highand upper-middle-income countries, where coverage is still increasing. In low-income countries, the sewer coverage dropped from about 24 percent to about 17 percent in the same period due to urban population growth.
It took financial innovation to open the way for sewage systems to be built. In England and Wales, and in the United States, municipalities took on debt to build sewerage systems. The prompt for this was a better understanding of the link between poor sanitation and public health risks, notably cholera.
(Bazalgette’s London sewer system. Source: The Museum of London)
Chicago, which I wrote about recently here, jacked up buildings to insert a sewerage system, but it still discharged the waste untreated into the Chicago River. Bazalgette’s system in London—improved since—basically shifted the waste downriver to the mouth of the Thames.
Even in the United States, sewage systems aren’t universal in towns: many people still rely on septic tanks in the garden that are now failing. This is more true in poor areas.
Wald’s LitHub extract starts with a trip in Cap-Haitien, in the north of Haiti, a city without sewers, with the non-profit SOIL. It runs a service that collects waste from doorsteps each day—a similar system to the “nightsoil men” that once serviced London before the city became too big for this to be a manageable solution.
The LitHub extract is bigger on problems than solutions, but a review of the book in Nature fills the gap. Whatever the solutions are, they need to squander “less water, nutrients and energy”.
In the Netherlands, a company has pioneered a vacuum system that uses less water, which has been deployed in places in Europe, but this is expensive and unlikely to be a universal solution. Better to turn South:
In Kenya, a social enterprise named Sanivation collects human faeces, treats it and presses it into “poop briquettes” for fuel, Wald writes. The company has sold 1,500 tonnes of the small spheres so far, saving 88 trees for every tonne. In Indonesia, where there are few sewers, Wald shadows “sanitation entrepreneur” Koen Irianto Uripan, who put thousands of fibreglass septic tanks in the yards of homes in the city of Surabaya... With jokes and a papier-mâché poop prop, Uripan markets a cheap, easily installed indoor toilet connected to one of these tanks, in which bacteria break down waste.
Where sewerage systems do exist, they are ageing and more likely these days to be overwhelmed by extreme weather events, or blocked by ‘fatbergs’—a lifestyle problem. Innovation may be a global necessity.
22/04/2021
j2t#084
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