Bibliographic record
Abstract
Filth is a material and a semiotic category that has long been used to classify and govern the human and the nonhuman world. Undesired social groups and forms of life are elided with disgusting elements of the environment to justify their suppression or eradication. The science and the management of filth have been central to modernity and have profoundly shaped urban life. The rise of microbiology revealed the microbial origins of some diseases, empowering visions of the sanitary city in both the metropole and the colony. This drove substantial investments in sanitation, hygiene, and the removal of animals and agriculture. However, recent research on the human microbiome has demonstrated the salutary role of some microbes for human well-being. It highlights the value of forms of material previously categorized as filth and calls for a recalibration of modern, antibiotic hygiene practices and modes of architecture and urban planning. This new microbiology is driving a nascent, probiotic turn in urban theory that overlaps with a wider appreciation of the beneficial role of nature in the urban environment, and the development of more affirmative models of urban hospitality premised on living with social difference. This review and perspective examines these connected developments, explores their implications for urban political ecology, and outlines a new research agenda. It starts with a chronology of the shifting material and semiotic relationships with filth in science and society, before identifying six key research questions to guide an interrogation of this new chapter in the storied history of filth and the city.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".