ABSTRACT

Urban infrastructures such as wastewater services are essential to the functioning of cities. Through waste work, sewage gets transformed and revalued. Non-humans are potentially unruly agents in the transformation of “dirty” sewage into biogas, a “clean” energy resource in environmental terms. But these values are not given or applied in any simple sense. What goes on under the surface, beneath the street or inside a pile of dirt is the invaluable work that constitutes a city’s multispecies waste management. The article argues that rats, worms and microbes perform labour in the urban wastewater economy, as they eat, digest and breed. This article investigates the role of these non-human waste workers and the cultural and economic values they produce in the intersections between the socio-technical infrastructures where the urban and the animal meet. The article makes use of “trash-tracing” as a method and follows the multiple steps taken in the chain of sewage management in the city of Gävle, Sweden. It contributes new knowledge on the waste ecologies of cities by paying close attention to shifting and paradoxical valuations of wastewater, as it is configured through nonhuman work.

摘要

废水服务等城市基础设施对于城市的运转至关重要。通过废物处理，污水得到了转化和重估。非人类是将“肮脏”污水转化为沼气（从环境角度而言是“清洁”能源）的潜在有害因素。但是，这些值并未以任何简单的意义给出或应用。在地下，街道下或一堆土里发生的事情是构成城市多物种废物管理的宝贵工作。该文章认为，老鼠，蠕虫和微生物在进食，消化和繁殖时会在城市废水经济中发挥作用。本文研究了这些非人类废物工人的角色，以及他们在城市和动物相遇的社会技术基础设施之间的交汇处产生的文化和经济价值。本文将“垃圾追踪”作为一种方法，并遵循瑞典盖夫勒市污水管理链中采取的多个步骤。它通过密切关注废水的变化和自相矛盾的评估来提供有关城市废物生态的新知识，因为废水是通过非人为因素配置的。