The ecology of a slum: Part 3, work flows
[Continued from last week’s Part 2 and Part 1.]
[Editorial justification for the tour: If we want to improve slums, we have to see them as ecosystems – spontaneous self-generated communities, self-organized, economically rational, economically efficient, adaptive and robust. We may not like the slums (like Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi, or Sao Paulo's favelas) we may wish them away or wave our hands (or our bulldozers) to disappear them. Yet they will return, resisting our efforts almost as if conscious, unless we see them as organic and dynamic, and come to understand how a slum dies. – Ed.]
As we continue our tour of the ecology of a Victorian slum, using as our text Steven Johnson’s excellent story of defeating cholera, The Ghost Map, we’ve hit the problem of recycling, and professions that seem universal in cities: ragpickers and night-soil men.
4. Work and low-skilled labor: ragpickers
Ragpicking is a profession both modern and ancient.
Manet, The Ragpicker, circa 1869
It requires meticulous and patient labor:
[From an 1854 article] “It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be lucky enough to have found any).”
As I write this, a lyric has popped into my child from my childhood almost half a century ago: “Any rags, any bottles, any bones?” I never knew what it meant until just now, when I Googled and found a 1931 Irving Berlin song:
“You know the man who once used to say
Any rags, any bones, any bottles today?”
Ragpickers’ Row,
[Same 1854 article] “He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he has picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the rag shop or the marine-store dealer and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.” Page 3
Ragpickers carts, Porte d’Ivry,
Informal professions have a few advantages:
They require little formal education.
They need no permits.
They reward initiative, enterprise, and a strong work ethic.
The law tends not to enforce against them, since they are peaceable and provide a useful service no one else wants to do.
One of 15 members of a ragpickers’ co-op,
“Doing the jobs Americans won’t” has become a rallying cry for the immigration debate, and whatever one thinks about immigration, it’s certainly true that throughout history, some professions have been done only by those who could find no other:
Waste recycling is a crucial attribute of the earth’s most diverse ecosystems. We value tropical rain forests because they squander so little of the energy supplied by the sun, thanks to their vast, interlocked system of organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. The cherished diversity of the rain forest ecosystem is not just a quaint case of biological multiculturalism. The diversity of the system is precisely why rain forests do such a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through them: one organism captures a certain amount of energy, but in processing that energy, it generates waste.
In economic terms, everybody’s trash becomes somebody else’s job:
In an efficient system, that waste becomes a new resource of energy for another creature in the chain. Pages 5-6
We all hand off to somebody else
Although in urban
Night-soil man in
Waste recycling is usually assumed to be an invention of the environmental movement, as modern as the blue plastic bags we now fill with detergent bottles and soda cans. But it is an ancient art. Composting pits were used by the citizens of
The seats of ease: Roman toilets,
Waste recycling—in the form of composting and manure spreading—played a crucial role in the explosive growth of medieval European towns.
Waste recycling turns out to be a hallmark of almost all complex systems, whether the man-made ecosystems of urban life, or the microscopic economies of the cell. Our bones are themselves the result of a recycling scheme pioneered by natural selection of billions of years ago. All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them into good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to revolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste. Pages 5-6
An ancient and honorable profession, removing night rubbish
5. Work and low-skilled labor: the night-soil men
Enter the ragpickers, led by the night-soil men:
City landlords hired men to remove the “night soil” from the overflowing cesspools of their buildings. The collecting of human excrement was a venerable occupation; in medieval times they were called “rakers” and gong-fermors,” and they played an indispensable role in the waste-recycling system that helped
Not as pleasant as drowning in a butt of malmsey, but just as dead
Like any other profession, it developed a complicated and interdependent value chain:
By the nineteenth century, the night-soil men had evolved a precise choreography for their labors. They worked the graveyard shift, between midnight and five a.m., in teams of four: a “ropeman,” a “holeman,” and two “tubmen.”
As specialized as an artillery crew
The team would affix lanterns at the edge of the cesspit, then remove the floorboards or stone covering it, sometimes with a pickax. If the waste had accumulated high enough, the ropeman and holeman would begin by scooping it out with the tub. Eventually, as more night soil was removed, the men would lower a ladder down and the holeman would descend into the pit and scoop waste into his tub. The ropeman would help pull up each full tub, and pass it along to the tubmen who emptied the waste into their carts.
Aside from being filthy, the work was foul, and to keep themselves motivated, the workers turned to civilization’s standby, alcohol:
It was standard practice for the night-soil men to be offered a bottle of gin for their labors. As one reported to Mayhew: “I should say there’s been a bottle of gin drunk at the clearing of every two, ay, and more than every two, out of three cesspools emptied in London; and now that I come to think of it, I should say that’s been the case with three out of every four.” Pages 8-11
Because the work was hazardous and difficult, it was lucrative:
Today scavenging is universal in cities.
Indian ragpicker
In my neighborhood, the night before trash pickup we can hear the rattling clank of a shopping cart being hauled down the street, full of returnable bottles and cans
Scavenging dumpsters,
The work was foul, but the pay was good. Too good, as it turned out.
As with modern society, as the rich demand a better quality of life, the cost of sanitation rises.
Thanks to its geographic protection from invasion,
For the night-soil men, the sprawl meant longer transport times—open farmland was now often ten miles away— which drove the price of their removing waste upward. By the Victorian era, the night-soil men were charging a shilling a cesspool, wages that were at least twice that of the average skilled laborer.
I’ve previously speculated that cities incorporate their informal peri-urbs and slums when the cost of ignoring them – because of their negative externalities, like traffic, pollution, and crime – becomes greater than the cost of bringing them into the formal universe. In Victorian London, as with modern society, as the rich demanded a better quality of life, the cost of sanitation rose – and the cost-benefit balance tilted:
Which is it to be?
First it went backwards:
For many Londoners, the financial cost of removing waste exceeded the environmental cost of just letting it accumulate—particularly for landlords, who often didn’t live on top of these overflowing cesspools.
From Punch, a
Sights like this one, reported by a civil engineer hired to survey two houses under repair in the 1840s, became commonplace: “I found whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of night soil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflowing of the privy to the depth of nearly six inches and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dry-shod.”
Another account describes a dust heap in Spitalfields, in the heart of the
From defection to desiccation – and of course, this flowed back into the water supply.
Mayhew described this grotesque scene in an article published in the London Morning Chronicle in 1849 that surveyed the ground zero of that year’s cholera outbreak:
We then journeyed on to London-street …. In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity.
As we passed along the reeking banks of the sewer, the sun shone upon a narrow slip of the water. In the bright light it appeared the colour of strong green tea, and positively looked as solid as black marble in the shadow—indeed, it was more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink.
Don’t look too closely at it
As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women, built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it; and the limbs of vagrant boys bathing in it seemed by pure force of contrast, white as Parian marble.
Collecting dirty water to sell as clean: Mavoko,
And yet, as we stood doubting the fearful statement, we saw a little child, from one of the galleries opposite, lower a tin can with a rope to fill a large bucket that stood beside her.
When it’s the only water you can afford, you drink it
In each of the balconies that hung over the stream the self-same tub was to be seem in which inhabitants put the mucky liquid to stand, so that they may, after it has rested for a day or two, skim the fluid from the solid particles of filth, pollution, and disease. As the little thing dangled her tin cup as gently as possible into the stream, bucket of night soil was poured down from the next gallery.
Victorian London had its postcards wonders, to be sure—the
We imagined a shining antiseptic future
But it also had wonders of a different order, no less remarkable: artificial ponds of raw sewage, dung heaps the size of houses. Pages 8-11
Wonder what’ll happen to all that dump?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 4.]
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