The Great Stink in the 21st century? Problematizing the sewage scandal in England and envisioning a new infrastructure ideal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Great Stink of 1858 saw politicians in the Houses of Parliament commission a new sewer system for London at an unprecedented scale and cost. Political consensus was driven by the stench emanating from the river Thames, filled with faeces. Today, England is experiencing parallels to the first Great Stink, with untreated sewage discharging into the country’s watercourses for a total duration of 3.6 million hours in 2024. The scale of sewer discharges has heightened tensions between the public and the water industry, with activists leading civic action that includes social media campaigns, bill boycotts, and street protests. We carried out an ethnographic study in the Yorkshire region with the aim of analyzing and exploring emerging tensions between stakeholders. We found that the root causes of the sewage problem were deeply contested, creating an uneven foundation for sanitary reform. Stakeholder groups understood the sewage crisis differently and were often found to be calling for competing solutions. To theorize these divergent problematizations, we draw from sanitation imaginaries literature that considers collective assumptions about waste infrastructures. Sanitary developments in England have long aspired to the modern sanitation ideal, seeking to discretely remove household waste waters, transporting and treating elsewhere, eliminating public health risk alongside minimal environmental impact. The contemporary sanitation crisis, or “Great Stink of the 21st century,” has shattered this modern infrastructure ideal and social imaginary, causing rifts between stakeholders about how and what progress can be made. Overall, historical parallels serve to remind that political consensus and a shared vision among stakeholders are necessary conditions for sanitary revolution in England.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
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".