I am glad reading in space and culture (the new weblog by Anne Galloway and Rob Shields) that there is a course at London Consortium about shit and civilization: our ambivalent relationship to ordure in the city, culture and the psyche.

Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure. Ancient cities are now identified by the mounds raised above the surrounding terrain, called tells. Tells are heaps of rubble, garbage and ordure into which cities have crumbled. Cities have always left the poor to scavenge and to live from re-cycling garbage. In many contemporary third world cities slums have been built on and around the town dump.

Slums - favelas, barrios, shanties - have no sewers. Ordure is carried away in carts or by open drains. Yet we exhibit a fundamental ambivalence to shit, and see it as the opposite of civilization, rather than its inevitable accompaniment. It is repressed, literally driven underground by sewers, and driven into the unconscious by taboos and toilet training. Yet we cannot leave shit alone. We tire of aseptic modernist urban utopias, and seek the bustle and confusion, and the dirt of a 'real' city.

There is indeed, as the author mention, a "scatological urge", we cannot ban shit from culture. My point it not that I like to play with dirt or with my poo. Certainly not, but we should maybe reconsider the value of dirt and dishes. Using it for power supply ineach of our home is an option. Another one would be William Gibson's idea of Bay Bridge as a hobo/hipster community in Virtual Light.