“It’s the Shit That Puts Bread on the Table”

Abstract

This article examines the changing circulation of human waste in Copenhagen between 1800 and 1950, tracing how the movement of faeces, urine, and latrine matter shaped the city’s sanitary transformation. Drawing on more than 500 digitized life histories from the Copenhagen City Archives together with contributions from the journal Politivennen, it follows human waste through streets, courtyards, and apartments to show how changing infrastructures reorganized relations between bodies, labour, agriculture, and the urban environment. Approaching sanitation from below, the article foregrounds how Copenhageners experienced and negotiated everyday waste practices. The memoirs reveal that sanitary modernization was not a linear process of eliminating waste but, rather, one of continually reorganization. As sanitary infrastructures expanded, human waste was progressively displaced from public view, redistributing responsibility and environmental burdens across space. Leaks, overflows, and material frictions repeatedly disrupted emerging sanitary orders, exposing modernization as patchy and incomplete. Bringing together perspectives on urban metabolism, sanitary ordering, ruination, and ferality, the article contributes to an understanding of how modern urban life was materially and socially constituted through the uneven circulation, concealment, and redistribution of its own residues.