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A New World Ordure? Thoughts on the

use of Humanure in Developed Cities
Anthony Richardson
Published online: 25 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Anthony Richardson (2012) A New World Ordure? Thoughts on the use of
Humanure in Developed Cities, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 16:6,
700-712, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2012.709368

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 CITY, VOL. 16, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2012

A new world ordure?

Thoughts on the use of humanure in
developed cities

Anthony Richardson

The implementation of urban farming through fertilisation with human excreta (huma-
Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 03:43 18 August 2013

nure) has been a recurring agricultural technique. This concept paper discusses the challenges
involved in using humanure for urban farming specifically in the developed world. It takes
a broadly actor-network approach to acknowledge these challenges and suggests possible
directions for addressing them. First providing a brief overview of attitudes towards
human excreta across cultures, particularly the dichotomous views of waste or resource, it
then outlines the crucial development of water-based sanitation in England in the 19th
century and the spread of this technology across the developed world. Next various tech-
niques of humanure (human excreta) use in agriculture are introduced before a particular
focus on the technique of urine diversion is proposed. Finally discussing the multi-scalar
technical, health, social and above all cultural challenges facing the use of ‘humanure’ for
urban agriculture in the context of developed cities, it then acknowledges the incremental
nature of successful technology uptake before proposing one possible modest approach for
addressing the difficulties implicit in this model through the use of ‘urine diversion’.

Key words: urine diversion, urban farming, humanure, human waste, sewerage systems, niche
(demonstration) technology

Introduction the developed world and although it has a

number of serious drawbacks, still exerts a

T
he physical by-products of human life
have, throughout history and across
cultures, been alternatively viewed as
either noxious wastes or wasted resources.
In a rapidly globalising world facing chal-
lenges in both resource and food security,
the latter is the only tenable approach. This
conceptual piece begins with a brief overview
of the contentious and shifting attitudes
towards human by-products, before addres-
sing the decisive shift to a water-based sani-
tation system during the Victorian era in
England. This development spread across
powerful normative influence globally. The
use of human by-products in agricultural
production is then introduced and the tech-
nique of urine diversion (itself one amongst
a broad range of ecological sanitation tech-
niques) is identified as a useful demon-
stration technique to drive the eventual
adoption of a comprehensive approach to
human waste. Finally, both the incremental
nature and contextual specificity of such
changes is acknowledged and a correspond-
ingly modest proposal for the Australian
context is suggested.

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/12/060700–13 # 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2012.709368

A brief history of human by-products
There are two main paradigms through which
to view human digestive by-products: as a
waste to be managed and disposed of or as a
resource to be utilised. While in the Global
North it might seem that the former is the
most common or natural attitude towards
urine and faecal matter, this paradigm is
neither universal nor unchanging.
It is the case that human by-products
remain a taboo subject in many cultures and
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contexts (Douglas, 1966; Campkin and Cox,
2007), and scientific advances in hygiene
and related behavioural change campaigns
over hundreds of years have only reinforced
these attitudes. Yet even in the context of reli-
gion our attitude towards human waste
remains stubbornly ambivalent. So on the
one hand we have the faeces (a symbol of
spiritual corruption) Luther flung at the
Devil and the monastic carved stone urinals
of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, in which
scenes of worldly opulence and sensuality
were bathed in the contempt, represented
by the monks’ urine, that they deserved
(Strickland, 2011). Similarly, in Islam there
are powerful taboos against any physical
contact with human urine or faeces, which
are described as spiritual pollutants
(Duncker et al., 2007) and in the Hindu
caste system those who do so (by working
as toilet cleaners or dung collectors) are inevi-
tably cast as among the lowest of the low; lit-
erally the Untouchables. The conception of
human excreta as an essence of corruption
and filth has led to their conception as the
‘abject’, or taboo objects (Freud, 1960;
Kristeva, 1982). However, there are also
examples of opposing views, such as an accep-
tance of bodily excretions as planned by God
(Leithart, 2011, p. 95), or even the belief that
the stools of the holy retain an essence of
that holiness; one Irish king Aedh drank
from the stream into which a holy man
regularly defecated in order to ingest this
‘sacrament’ (Laporte, 2000, p. 109).
At the same time, there is also a long
tradition of utilitarian attitudes towards our
RICHARDSON: A NEW WORLD ORDURE? 701
own by-products. Human faeces and urine
have been utilised for a wide range of
purposes, including cleaning curtains and
clothes, as a health tonic (urine) and a skin
cosmetic (human faecal matter) (Laporte,
2000). In the latter case, young men of good
health were retained by certain people of
means to provide a regular supply of fresh
and unsullied faeces (op. cit.).
Similarly, there has long been a focus on
human excreta, or humanure, as a valuable
agricultural fertiliser. These attitudes are
themselves culturally determined, as the use
of humanure in countries such as China has
continued from the earliest recorded history
through to the present day when approxi-
mately 90% of agricultural produce is ferti-
lised through untreated human effluent
(Black and Fawcett, 2008). In Vietnam a pro-
gramme of toilet building by the government
in the 1950s led to the construction of thou-
sands of twin chamber concrete toilets to
dry-process human excrement for agricul-
tural fertiliser (with alternating use of each
chamber). In these cultural contexts, huma-
nure has always been to a large extent freed
from the negative connotations elsewhere
attached to it (Black and Fawcett, 2008;
Rockefeller, 1998; Duncker et al., 2007).
In the West, this utilitarian approach can be
traced back as far as Rome although attitudes
were noticeably more faecophobic than in
the Asian examples mentioned above (Black
and Fawcett, 2008; Rockefeller, 1998).
However, it was with the development of
the ‘Sanitary Revolution’ in the late 19th
century that this paradigm was promoted
most enthusiastically in modern settings by a
diverse range of Victorian reformers such as
Sir Joseph Bazalgette, Edwin Chadwick and
William Hope in England (Goddard, 1996;
Black and Fawcett, 2008) and the French
Romantic Socialist Pierre Leroux (Laporte,
2000). A range of proposals were put
forward, based on either water-based or
‘dry’ toilets and related methods of waste
treatment. For example, the 1860 ‘dry water
closet’ of Henry Moule (like the Vietnamese
toilets involving dry sifted earth laid over the
 702 CITY VOL. 16, NO. 6
deposited waste) was promoted as a method
for creating more concentrated and therefore
useful fertiliser that was also much less offen-
sive to the nostrils or eyes than untreated
sewage (Black and Fawcett, 2008). However,
over time it was the water-borne system of
sewage removal and transport that was to
become the dominant paradigm in England
and then the rest of the developed West.
The rise of ‘flush and forget’
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The developments of the sanitation revolu-
tion of the 19th century for the first time defi-
nitively conflated sanitation with water.
While streams, rivers and oceans have
always been seen as a natural infrastructure
to carry away human by-products, deposit-
ing (and possibly burying) excreta on the
margins of inhabited areas was also a tra-
ditional method. The possible range of
locations where people may engage in these
necessary acts is determined by a whole inter-
connected range of cultural, physiological,
economic (McFarlane, 2008; Black and
Fawcett, 2008), geographical and technologi-
cal considerations; examples include the cul-
tural expectations of female modesty with
regard to urination or defecation (Black and
Fawcett, 2008) and the criminalisation of uri-
nation in public (Eldridge, 2010).
Yet concerns with privacy in an increas-
ingly crowded urban environment led to
shifting of these acts into the private sphere
for those with the economic resources to do
so (Rockefeller, 1998; Laporte, 2000). First
chamber pots and then the creation of pit
toilets in small rooms meant increasing
amounts of faeces and urine were produced
within the confines of the home. Pit toilets
constructed underneath houses were malo-
dorous and needed to be emptied by hand
while chamber pots were illegally emptied
into the streets (thus promptly transferring
the problem from the private to the public
realm) to await removal by rainwater flows
or human scavengers. While Rome’s famous
Cloaca Maxima was indeed designed to be
flushed through by water, like the first
drains and sewers in medieval European
cities it was not designed for removing
human wastes. Indeed, this was expressly for-
bidden in many cases (Laporte, 2000).
However, in other places and times such as
the Harappan civilisation of India, or the
Minoan centres of Crete, water was used to
flush these indoor toilets into a city-wide
system of sewers and drains. This system
was ‘rediscovered’ in 1592 through Sir John
Harington’s water flush toilet (or water
closet) although the uptake was extremely
slow. It was not until the Victorian era that
the use of water to remove wastes from the
house really took off, made possible by
increasing scientific understanding of the
importance of hygiene, the removal of regu-
lations banning anything other than kitchen
waste water being released into London
sewers and the availability of new technol-
ogies (such as the provision of piped
running water and practical flushing toilets)
allowing for the use of water to remove
human wastes easily from the domestic
realm.
This further displacement of wastes from
the private environment, ironically driven
partly by concerns over hygiene, of course
immediately created new health problems.
The incremental implementation of the con-
nected technologies of piped water supplies
to houses, flushing toilets and open sewers
(Rockefeller, 1998) at first merely led to a
predictable pollution of the rivers into
which they emptied and epidemics of diseases
like cholera on a massive scale.
Yet the effects of this disjunction between
private production and public disposal was
not immediately obvious as long as the
boundaries between the two held; it took
the Great Stink of 1858 in London to demon-
strate the shortcomings of the simplistic
binary of private and public spheres. The
Thames was transformed into an open
sewer and the olfactory presence of human
excreta impressed itself forcefully on the
decision-makers of London (George, 2008;
Black and Fawcett, 2008). This radical

awareness of the inherent shortcomings of
the whole water-borne system of sewage
removal came only through the overwhelm-
ing of that system. The maintenance of
urban systems is a performative act; a con-
stant renegotiation and reaffirmation of the
ability to perform a task. It brings into exist-
ence the sort of ‘world’, as described by Hei-
degger, in which wastes are magically
whisked away from our houses—and such
worlds only become visible to us when they
are disrupted (Graham and Thrift, 2007;
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Harremoës, 1997; George, 2008).
However, the resulting solution was to
enclose the sewers in pipes and extend the
sewerage outflows to beyond the municipal
boundaries of cities which of course again
merely transferred these health concerns
further afield again, leading this time to
typhoid outbreaks in settlements down-
stream (Rockefeller, 1998). The sad truth is
that this ‘flush and forget’ model is in many
cases still the case today; London, for
instance, discharges sewage into the Thames
around 60 times a year, including 600,000
tonnes in August 2005 (George, 2008). The
story is not dissimilar in other developed
cities across the USA and Europe (Jewitt,
2011b; Rockefeller, 1998).
In the end, whilst there are myriad chal-
lenges around health (Black and Fawcett,
2008; Rockefeller, 1998), environmental
effects (Rockefeller, 1998; Cofie et al., 2010;
Esrey, 2000), resource availability (Sankaran
et al., 2010; Cofie et al., 2010; Esrey, 2000)
and logistics (Black and Fawcett, 2008; Rock-
efeller, 1998) that arise through using water
for sanitation, its ubiquity in developed
countries is inextricably linked to its one
great advantage; like the rivers and streams
of our pre-industrial and pre-urban pasts,
the sewer sweeps our bodily excretions ‘out
of sight’ (to some unknown ‘Elsewhere’),
and therefore out of mind. The theoretical
and practical assumptions (and associated
technical/professional skills and educational
systems through which to perpetuate them)
implicit in the construction of ‘water and
sanitation’ (‘watsan’) as a category of urban
RICHARDSON: A NEW WORLD ORDURE? 703
planning practice are now embedded in
both the fabric of these cities and the cultures
that inhabit them (Berndtsson, 2006; Marks
et al., 2006; Sankaran et al., 2010). It is no
accident of bureaucracy that in most urban
environments in the developed world the
same public or private utility companies are
responsible for providing both water and
sewerage services. The connections have
been made and the apparent success of this
model of urban sanitation in the developed
world (and the sunk costs behind it) has
created a deep path dependency.
The triumph of water-based sanitation
systems, based on the ease with which they
both transfer waste from the private to the
public and improve urban public health, has
had wide-ranging social and cultural effects.
The water toilet, particularly since the intro-
duction of the water-filled S-bend which
removed the ancient olfactory connection
between the depositor and the deposit, has
‘black boxed’ the removal and treatment of
human wastes, both allowing ablutions to
be a private occurrence within the private
sphere of the home whilst transferring them
to the public sphere without any need for
handling by the depositor. The furthest
development of this sundering of connections
is the concern with even the ‘auditory’ output
of the human digestive tract; exemplified
today by the public toilets in Japan which
provide recorded audio of waterfalls. This is
employed at the touch of a button during
bowel evacuations to mask their sound and
was introduced to address the water loss
occasioned by patrons regularly flushing the
toilet during their visit to mask any bodily
sounds associated with their exertions—a
cultural practice also prevalent in India
(Srinivas, 2002).
The flushing toilet is a symbol of cultural
development and civilisation as it separates
humanity as much as is possible in this
fallen world from our base physical natures.
Much as saints and the Risen in Heaven
have at times been envisioned as ascending
beyond the base need to defecate or urinate,
while Hell remains a cesspool (Biow, 2006,
 704 CITY VOL. 16, NO. 6
pp. 147 –148) so the flushing toilet, by remov-
ing any trace of the act and promoting a
vision of cleanliness (itself seen as ‘next to
godliness’) is a technology for the further
advancement of civilisation itself (Crook,
2007; Srinivas, 2002; Jewitt, 2011a). The
flushing toilet, elevating its user beyond the
reach of any contaminants within the toilet
space, is thus the seat of Western superiority,
and can be compared to the lowered status of
the squat toilet with its undignified position
and risk of physical contact with faeces or
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urine (Srinivas, 2002).
The related belief in water as a purifying
agent can further be seen in the opposing
image of the latrine, or dry pit toilet. Con-
nected to images of campers, soldiers or the
Boy Scouts, and related connotations of a
return to nature (Black and Fawcett, 2008),
the latrine is therefore a regression from the
apex of the water flushing toilet. When
further connected in the imagination of the
Global North to the image of the ‘squalid
malodorous squat toilet’ of the poor South,
these associations around water and cleanli-
ness also reinforce cultural notions of devel-
opment and social advancement (Jewitt,
2011a).
‘Just passing through’: the return of
humanure as a valued resource
These cultural paradigms around human by-
products and the role of water in sanitation
are however increasingly being challenged
by the growing reality of global population
pressures, rampant urbanisation and the
related challenges of providing clean water
and food security for people in the Global
South; water-based sanitation systems use
15,000 litres per person every year (Jewitt,
2011b) and this level of water use for every-
one is simply not possible. Since the estab-
lishment of the Western toilet’s porcelain
hegemony much of the practical and theoreti-
cal work around human waste has thus been
undertaken in the field of international devel-
opment, particularly through an increasing
focus on the concept of ‘closing the circle’
of nutrient use and disposal through
farming with humanure to address both
issues of water scarcity/food security and
waste recycling simultaneously (Bracken
et al., 2009; Sankaran et al., 2010; Cofie
et al., 2010; Esrey, 2000; Jewitt, 2011a,
2011b).
The most obvious reason for this focus on
sanitation and water, and the otherwise
unchallenged relationship between them, is
the often-unavoidable presence of human
excreta in both the private and public
spheres in developing contexts; it is simply
not ‘black boxed’ in the same way. At the
same time, there is often a shortage of
potable water (Bracken et al., 2009; Scheier-
ling et al., 2011; Esrey et al., 1998; Black
and Fawcett, 2008). For that reason, the con-
nection between water and sanitation simply
does not exist for countless millions of people
and there is little chance of any such model
being implemented. Quite apart from the
issues around water supplies in many devel-
oping cities, the European model of public
sanitation implemented in the metropolitan
centres and more sporadically in the colonial
periphery has always been extremely expens-
ive and time consuming (Black and Fawcett,
2008). While in developed cities these ‘sunk’
costs are themselves hidden from view by
both the passage of time and the subterranean
existence of much of the systems themselves
(at least until they fail), in urban environ-
ments across the developing world these
financial costs, along with the associated
social, political, technological and topogra-
phical challenges, represent formidable
obstacles to implementation (Black and
Fawcett, 2008; Esrey et al., 1998; Harremoës,
1997). The introduction of such complex and
comprehensive solutions is simply not
feasible.
However, one effect of the increasing
introduction of alternative ecological
sanitation systems in developing countries
to re-establish the circle of nutrient use and
replenishment has been a slow but conscious
paradigm shift away from the linear

production and removal model represented
by the ‘flush and forget’ water toilet (Esrey,
2000; Sankaran et al., 2010; Cofie et al.,
2010; Harremoës, 1997). Eco-san demands a
realisation that there is no ‘Elsewhere’ to
which the waste is being swept; instead, it
remains in the place where it is produced
and demands the attention of the producer.
In that sense the very concept of humanure,
and the ‘closed nutrient loop’ system of agri-
culture, is in direct conflict with hegemonic
ideals of progress which the Western toilet
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represents.
Three possible models of humanure
agriculture
There are many possible models of utilising
humanure for food production; the oldest
and simplest in concept (although not necess-
arily in implementation as its history in
industrial Britain demonstrates) involves dis-
tributing raw/untreated sewage onto agricul-
tural land for fertilisation. The diversion of
untreated effluent onto fields in China and
Vietnam is a technique that goes back thou-
sands of years, while similar attempts have
been made in Europe, most particularly in
the 19th century with examples such as
Breton’s Farm near Romford, England
(Goddard, 1996, p. 281) and Gennevilliers
downstream from Paris (Reader, 2005,
pp. 214 – 216), and the technique continues
today on a large scale in the developing
world (Weldesilassie et al., 2011; Scheierling
et al., 2011). However, there are problems
with issues of hygiene (Goddard, 1996;
Scheierling et al., 2011) and the logistics of
delivering the correct amounts of sewage,
without it being diluted so much by the
water with which it is mixed for transmission
that there are no longer useful levels of nitrate
and other elements for agriculture (Goddard,
1996).
A second related technique involves using
treated wastewater from centralised indus-
trial-scale sewerage treatment plants for agri-
cultural irrigation. Based on the introduction
RICHARDSON: A NEW WORLD ORDURE? 705
of bacterial treatment of sewerage in the late
19th century it removes much of the patho-
gens from the resultant grey water before
releasing it for agricultural use (Goddard,
1996; Black and Fawcett, 2008). One
example of such a system is at the Werribee
treatment plant in Melbourne (Melbourne
Water, n.d.).
A third possibility is what is commonly
designated as eco-san or ecological sanitation.
This involves the removal of pathogens from
human by-products by a range of techniques
such as biogas or dry-composting (storing
them, together with soil, for a number of
months until the pathogens contained
within the faeces are destroyed) (Esrey
et al., 1998). The resultant material is com-
paratively innocuous and may be removed
either for disposal elsewhere (the less
favoured option) or utilised in agriculture as
a fertilising agent. Examples of such an
approach can be found in Vietnam (UNEP,
2010), the Philippines (Röd and v. Mönch,
2008), El Salvador (UNEP, 2010), South
Africa (Austin, 2006; UNEP, 2010; Röd
and v. Mönch, 2008; Jonah, 2007; Mnkeni
and Austin, 2009), Germany (Röd and
v. Mönch, 2008), Sweden (UNEP, 2010),
Australia (Sankaran et al., 2010; Mitchell
et al., 2011) and a range of other countries
(Esrey et al., 1998). In many cases, this
approach starts with the diversion of urine
from faeces at the point of production (the
toilet). Each is then treated separately with
the faeces treated as above and the urine
stored in tanks for collection and distribution
to agricultural producers.
A wee drop: urine diversion as a
demonstration model for ecological
sanitation
For a number of reasons (elucidated below)
this paper focuses on the technique of urine
diversion as a ‘niche’ (or demonstration)
technology to promote the changes necessary
for any broader implementation of an eco-san
approach in developed cities, including the
 706 CITY VOL. 16, NO. 6
ecological sanitation of faeces (Hodson and
Marvin, 2009). The technology is predicated
on a view of urine as a valuable agricultural
resource rather than a waste product;
human urine is an excellent source of nutri-
ents (phosphorous and nitrogen in particu-
lar), containing more than 80% of the total
nutrients excreted by the human body
(UNEP, 2010; Jönsson, 2001). While these
same nutrients are a serious source of pol-
lution of both fresh and seawater when
untreated sewage is discharged into rivers or
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the ocean they are also a valuable source of
fertiliser, particularly given the predicted
shortages of mined phosphorous in the near
future (Cofie et al., 2010; Sankaran et al.,
2010; Bracken et al., 2009). In this sense,
they represent the possibility of a closed
system of nutrient production, consumption
and reuse, reinforced by the serendipitous
fact that one human body ejects enough
nutrients through urine in one year to fertilise
enough food for one person for a year (Esrey
et al., 1998). While urine diversion is not the
most efficient system for recycling all the
useful nutrients, it uses less energy than
other systems of ecological sanitation
(Tidåker et al., 2007).
The urine diversion approach has been in
use in a number of countries, particularly in
the developing world, since the 1990s
although its implementation is always
informed by local histories and contexts
(Esrey et al., 1998; Duncker et al., 2007;
Bracken et al., 2009). Examples are also
underway in developed countries as well
(Berndtsson, 2006; Jönsson, 2001; Lienert
and Larsen, 2010), such as the system of
urine diversion for agricultural fertilisation
currently underway in Tanum Municipality
on the western coast of Sweden (north of
Gothenburg). In this system urine diversion
toilets, connected to individual holding
tanks, have been installed in a wide range of
private homes and a number of institutions
such as the public library and high school.
The urine is then collected by farmers who
spray it on their crops as a fertiliser (UNEP,
2010). The success of the project has led to
joint ventures with municipal authorities in
China to incorporate urine diversion toilets
and a range of other waste recycling facilities
into new dwellings as part of a broader
municipal-level strategy.
A similar project is being implemented by
Yarra Valley Water, the largest of Mel-
bourne’s three water retail suppliers, in the
rebuilding of Kinglake West, one of Mel-
bourne’s peri-urban communities destroyed
by the 2009 Victorian bushfires (Mitchell
et al., 2011). This project similarly involves
the provision of urine diversion toilets in
each new home, with a trial being conducted
with one local farmer to use this resultant
urine as agricultural fertiliser. In a demon-
stration of the small steps required by the
prevailing Australian cultural attitudes
towards the use of human by-products in
the food chain, the company has taken care
to state that this is a non-food crop1.
New alchemies: the challenge of
implementing eco-san approaches in the
developed world
Jewitt (2011a) provides a strong outline of the
challenges of changing socio-cultural atti-
tudes towards human waste in the Global
South, but similar issues also exist in enacting
such a paradigm shift in the developed
North. The alchemical dream of the Victorian
sanitation evangelists to turn shit into gold
faces the challenge of creating ‘a new political
economy surrounding human wastes’
(Black and Fawcett, 2008, p. 9) in which the
problem of excess waste is replaced by the
opportunity of further resources. The
examples outlined in the previous section
are valuable ‘niches’ for the demonstration
of new technological approaches and possibi-
lities (Hodson and Marvin, 2009), and this
hoped-for paradigm shift is both a goal of,
and a catalyst for the creation of, more such
niche projects leading to a broader implemen-
tation of a comprehensive eco-san approach.
Yet the creation of such a dynamic is no
simple matter given the difficulties of

negotiating the nexus of competing opinions
and priorities amongst the myriad stake-
holders that are involved:
‘To create such a shift requires mutually
reinforcing institutional and socio-cultural
transformations including new infrastructure
planning processes; sympathetic regulatory
and legal frameworks; altered user practices;
and re-cast cultural meanings in the water
industry, agricultural and horticultural
sectors and beyond. Enabling this change
therefore requires partnership and
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collaboration from stakeholders with a range
of disciplinary knowledge and a shared
commitment to sustainability and
transdisciplinary learning.’ (Sankaran et al.,
2010, p. 2)
In a sense, there is a need to focus on the ‘soft-
ware’ as much as the ‘hardware’ (Jewitt,
2011a, p. 609). This understanding informs
many of the urine diversion projects cur-
rently underway in both developed and
developing contexts; such as the work of
UNEP in establishing working partnerships
in China and Vietnam to implement the
Tanum Municipality urine diversion model
across a range of cultural, political and
environmental contexts (El Salvador,
Mexico, Bolivia, South Africa, Uganda,
Vietnam and China). Implementation of the
Tanum project was driven by a number of
environmental concerns, assisted by its res-
onance with broader environmental goals at
the national scale, and from the start envi-
saged as a demonstration niche to promote
the technologies on a broader scale (UNEP,
2010).
In the case of Victoria (and the Kinglake
West project), authority over sewerage and
wastewater systems and the implementation
of the regulatory framework resides with a
patchwork of State and local/municipal gov-
ernment authorities depending on the tech-
nologies employed and the scale of flow
under consideration (EPA, 2009). This raises
questions of scale and complexity; while
comprehensive concepts such as the Urbal
city (Bliss, 2011) are predicated on the town
RICHARDSON: A NEW WORLD ORDURE? 707
or city having the autonomy to undertake
social and infrastructural change itself, the
sewerage system in Victoria (as in other
states in Australia) involves overlapping
layers of stakeholder interest and legislative
control (EPA, 2009) which increase the diffi-
culty of implementing such a project and
there has been less of a national or even
state-level consensus over the importance of
even addressing such issues of sustainability.
This can be compared to the situation in
Sweden where the municipal policy reso-
nated with a number of national Environ-
mental Quality Objectives (EQO) and there
was therefore already some movement
towards the sort of new political economy
discussed above (Tidåker et al., 2007; Jewitt,
2011b). Yet even in such a generally suppor-
tive national environment such as Sweden,
the legislative and/or regulatory environment
was still not completely conducive to intro-
ducing such systems (Berndtsson, 2006).
The difficulties facing the diffusion of eco-
san technologies in the developed world are
just as likely to be economic as political or
legislative, however. Urine farming faces the
same challenges around the inefficiencies
and economic costs of transporting sewage
to the farm site with sufficient regularity or
enough nutrients to make the exercise worth-
while that undermined sewage farming in the
golden age of the 19th century in England
(Goddard, 1996). The logistical chains need
to be resilient for this model to work as any
disruption to the ability of the farmers (or
the intermediaries fulfilling this role) to
collect the urine from individual tanks will
result in the problem of overflow; harking
back to the era of the individual septic tank,
the nightsoil cart or the economic, practical
and aesthetic difficulties of storing tempor-
arily unneeded sewage (Goddard, 1996;
UNEP, 2010; Röd and v. Mönch, 2008).
One final economic issue facing the wider
uptake of these technologies in developed
contexts is the ‘tyranny of sunk costs’,
including comprehensive sewerage networks,
professional skills and training, and com-
ponent manufacturing, implicit in modern
 708 CITY VOL. 16, NO. 6
water-based sanitation infrastructure; with
the exception of Tanum Municipality in
Sweden all the examples mentioned above
have been implemented on an urban tabula
rasa. While radical disruptions to the net-
works of urban life such as the Great Stink
of London or the effect of the Victorian bush-
fires on Kinglake West can thus represent an
opportunity for ‘learning, adaptation and
improvisation’ (Graham and Thrift, 2007,
p. 4) in the provision of infrastructure, it is
more likely that shifts in the uptake of new
Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 03:43 18 August 2013
technologies are, as demonstrated by the Vic-
torian ‘Sewage Question’, much more incre-
mental in nature as the accumulation of
demonstration niches leads to broader accep-
tance of new approaches (Hodson and
Marvin, 2009). The defeat of the ‘soil closet’
by the ‘water closet’ is an example of this
complex transition of technologies through
a constant renegotiation between all the
elements of the network; human, technologi-
cal, social and environmental, in a ‘continu-
ous feedback loop of experimentation
which, through many small increments in
practical knowledge, can produce large
changes’ (Graham and Thrift, 2007, p. 5).
However, given the contradictory, and
often extremely negative, social conceptions
of human by-products across different times
and cultural contexts, these concerns remain
one of the primary factors affecting the
uptake of new sanitation technologies in
the Global North. In such models, human
effluent is no longer invisible, and even the
need for physical removal is a challenge to
culturally sanctioned mindlessness as every
arrival of the truck to pump out the urine
is an extrusion of that urine from its cus-
tomary black box. In that sense, it can be
seen to represent a regression from the pro-
gress represented by the invisibility of our
own by-products and may therefore be
resisted, whatever the economic costs or
benefits. Goddard’s account (1996) of the
promotion of, and then disenchantment
with, sewage farming in Victorian England
outlines the shift from general conceptions
of the ‘Sewage Question’ as being primarily
economic in nature to being an issue primar-
ily of public health (and attendant risk). The
economic value of human by-products was
largely discredited by the failure of sewerage
farms in this period to demonstrate their
economic value (largely due to the costs of
transporting sewage, whether in liquid
form or the dry manure produced by
Moule’s system) and the resulting domi-
nance of the ‘health’ (and waste problem)
paradigm is still largely unchallenged in
many developed countries. Given the diffi-
culties involved in getting Australians to
even accept purified water (Marks et al.,
2006; Clausen, 2006), the strength of such
a paradigm cannot be underestimated; even
in Sweden the use of sewage sludge for
human food production is not widespread
given resistance both from the agricultural
industry and consumers (Tidåker et al.,
2007). On the other hand, long-standing tra-
ditions in Asia of using humanure for crop
fertilisation are both underpinned by and
reinforce the normative conception of
human by-products as an agricultural
resource to be exploited.
However, research has shown that the
technique of urine diversion (quite apart
from any of the other approaches discussed
earlier) can be accepted in a developed Euro-
pean context (Lienert and Larsen, 2010;
Berndtsson, 2006; Jönsson, 2001; Röd and
v. Mönch, 2008), provided a number of
issues are addressed. One of particular
concern with regard to changing cultural atti-
tudes and practices is the design of the toilets
themselves, which generally (especially in the
environment of the private home) require the
user to be seated during urination (Lienert
and Larsen, 2010), need regular cleaning
(Röd and v. Mönch, 2008; Berndtsson, 2006;
Hanæus et al., 1997), involve different
buttons for flushing depending on what it
being deposited, do not necessarily fit neatly
into the spaces designed originally for stan-
dard toilets (Berndtsson, 2006) and may
result in a noticeable odour (Hanæus et al.,
1997; Röd and v. Mönch, 2008; Berndtsson,
2006). This last point in particular directly

challenges particular cultural ideas around
progress and civilisation addressed earlier.
Taking the piss: the challenges and
opportunities of the Australian cultural
context
Much research on sanitation systems has out-
lined the need for place-specific approaches
that take into account local specificities,
whether cultural, socio-economic, political or
physical (Jewitt, 2011a; Röd and v. Mönch,
Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 03:43 18 August 2013
2008; Berndtsson, 2006; Esrey et al., 1998;
Hodson and Marvin, 2009; Sankaran et al.,
2010). Any niche projects for urine diversion
in the Australian urban context therefore
provide particular challenges and opportu-
nities (Mitchell et al., 2011).
The biggest difficulty facing any project
attempting to change Australian cultural atti-
tudes towards human waste are the strong
taboos against any conflation of food pro-
duction and human waste (Marks et al.,
2006), as demonstrated by Toowoomba’s
rejection of a pilot programme to recycle
sewage as drinking water in 2006 (Clausen,
2006). While direct comparisons with gener-
ally supportive European attitudes (Lienert
and Larsen, 2010) are not available, such atti-
tudes are deeply entrenched and informed the
need for the demonstration project under-
taken at Kinglake West to use diverted
urine for non-food fertilisation, for example.2
However, there are also elements of the
environmental, cultural and socio-economic
contexts in Australia that do offer possible
advantages for both the implementation and
success (in terms of attitudinal change) that
could be achieved by urine diversion. Above
all, there is the heightened sense of water as
a scarce resource in the arid southern states
(Roseth, 2006). A decade of severe drought
and resultant public awareness campaigns
against watering gardens, washing cars or
having long showers has opened the ‘black
box’ of the household water supply. Such
awareness, whilst not at a level to drive
radical cultural or behavioural change regard-
ing water use (Roseth, 2006), informs the
RICHARDSON: A NEW WORLD ORDURE? 709
increasing use of waterless urinals in public
buildings (City West Water, 2009, p. 6) and
private business throughout Australia
(although it has not changed attitudes
towards drinking recycled water).
The final cultural component in favour of a
broad eco-san approach in Australia is the
peculiar place of the outdoor dry toilet (or
‘dunny’) in Australian mythology. The icon
of the ‘dunny’ is connected both to an
earlier urban technology of bucket toilets col-
lected by the ‘nightsoil man’ with his horse
and cart and to the working-class beach or
bush holiday houses of the 1950s and 1960s:
‘The humble outhouse could stand as a social
leveler—an indicator of the resentment of
rank and privilege that grew out of the lowly
convict origins of many of the European
colonisers.’ (Newton, 2007, p. 87)
The dunny is also a signifier of a particular
strand of rough Rabelaisian humour exempli-
fied by the modern figure of ‘Kenny’ the Por-
taloo man.3 This comic Everyman was the lead
character in a highly successful 2006 Austra-
lian film of the same name in which he
opened the sanitation ‘black box’ for audi-
ences, exposing the technologies of human
waste management and the socio-economic
realities behind it (Collins, 2007; Milner, 2009).
A modest proposal
The use of urine diversion for agricultural
fertilisation in Australia could be promoted
through pilot schemes that use male public
urinals to (re)introduce the idea of urine as
a resource, rather than a waste product.
Given that in such facilities urine is diverted
as a matter of physiological difference
(through the use of standing urinals for
men rather than the seated toilets employed
in private houses), the necessity of behav-
ioural change implied in dual-use urine
diverting toilets is much reduced. At the
same time the increasing use of waterless
public urinals for men across Australia sets
a precedent, although in most cases the
 710 CITY VOL. 16, NO. 6
urine is not utilised as a resource (these
models remain within the ‘urine as waste’
paradigm). However, the placement of such
urinals at facilities in botanic gardens or
municipal parks and the use of the resultant
urine for fertilisation of those same gardens
would mean the resource paradigm is pro-
moted within the area of use (gardens and
parks) most acceptable to the Australian
public (Marks et al., 2006) while the most
contentious issue of food fertilisation by
human by-products is avoided.
Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 03:43 18 August 2013
Such a model would involve regulatory
arrangements through which the resultant
urine is ‘owned’ by the statutory body
responsible for the particular gardens or
park and would provide information to
users about the system and its advantages
(preferably using humour) whilst they were
‘in the act’. Such an approach would further
remove any costs for transporting urine to
distant farms and thus reduce the financial
and logistical challenges involved. Finally,
the limited nature of such a project makes it
perfect as a demonstration niche for a new
technology which is nonetheless used both
in a limited way (not for food production
thus removing one possible basis for
public rejection) and on a small scale (in
which the results can be immediately seen
and promoted).
However, in no way should this modest
proposal be seen as replacing the need for a
comprehensive eco-san approach to the use
of nutrients from ‘humanure’ (both faecal
and urine) in agriculture. The implementation
of such an approach, as demonstrated by the
Victorian era experiments, will involve great
political, technical, economic, legislative and
cultural changes—this will not be possible
without changing current orthodoxies
around human waste.
Final thoughts
In the end, the incremental progress of infra-
structural adoption suggests the value of the
urine diversion model of crop fertilisation in
developed contexts. Even allowing for ‘no
food crop’ provisions such as those in the King-
ston East scheme this technique is valuable for
one particular reason: it challenges ‘the domi-
nance of normative visions’ (Hodson and
Marvin, 2009), shifting the conceptual frame-
work around human by-products from a
waste product that is best hidden and therefore
ignored as much as possible to a resource which
should not be wilfully wasted. In that sense, it is
reopening the Victorian debate around human
attitudes towards our own by-products, and in
the environment of neo-liberal capitalism, this
shift towards an economically rational para-
digm around sewage would be a valuable first
step towards reimagining the broader technol-
ogies and infrastructures through which we
treat this issue.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Associate
Professor David Mercer and the two anon-
ymous reviewers for their assistance and
comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Notes
1 http://theage.domain.com.au/green/changes-
in-the-pipeline-20101129-18cxs.html (accessed
15 August 2012).
2 http://www.yvw.com.au/Home/Aboutus/
Ourprojects/Currentprojects/KinglakeWest/index.
htm (accessed 23 October 2011).
3 http://www.kennythemovie.com/ (accessed
5 December 2011).
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son@rmit.edu.au