Ud af røret? - Dansk Center for Byhistorie

English Summary
This dissertation deals with Copenhagen’s sewage technology. A centuryold
service installation, which for many years has remained an invisible,
stable and taken-for-granted infrastructure tending to the city’s daily needs,
neither particularly debated nor problematized. In being taken to be a complete
solution to a wide range of urban problems, the sewerage system has
been difficult to perceive otherwise.
The study provides a detailed account of the discussions, concrete sewage
plans, as well as the scientific studies which were on the agenda in the city
of Copenhagen in the 1800’s, where outbreaks of cholera, sanitary improvements,
an expanding city, and anticipation toward progress, came to
be discussed. Medical and engineering professionals collaborated on finding
concrete solutions to problems addressed, and on securing support for
their realization. On the basis of a wide range of empirical sources as archival
material, newspapers, publications of physicians and engineers, the
study depicts the political, scientific as well as technical proposals and negotiations
that were involved, providing a thorough analysis of the arguments
of the advocates as well as sceptics. The study shows concrete
processes through which new scientific disciplines, forms of argument, and
problematizations take shape.
The dissertation title ‘Down the Drain’ refers not only to the initial hygienic
endeavours of the 1800’s, where the Tout-à-l’égout (all in the sewer) model
mixed all rainwater, wastewater and night soil out into the Sound of Öresund;
it points, at the same time, to a more contemporary issue of Tout-àl’égout,
where the urban ecology strategy has entailed efforts to redirect
night soil and rainwater ‘out of the drains’ again for recycling. In this light,
the existing sewerage system, are considered to be an incomplete solution,
where the night soil, rather than being waste, is taken to be a valuable resource
as fertilizer.
From a theoretical and methodological standpoint, the dissertation work has
been inspired by the STS (Science, Technology and Society) field, and in
part by Foucault and Hegel. It is within this context that the study explores
the concrete, specific processes and maintains a focus on that which ‘is
generated and formed in associations through networks, resistances and
relations.’ The technologies, institutions and scientific practices that are
taken for granted in a given period of time are problematized, and through
empirically detailed study, the dissertation shows how these elements come
13