Do flush toilets have politics?

Abstract

According to the United Nations, by 2025, 1.9 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under water stress conditions. In this paper, I argue that one of the best ways to capture the making of contemporary water shortage anxieties is to look at the global history of the modern flush toilet and the wider waterborne system of waste disposal supporting its operation. Without really thinking about it, we have come to assume that this system of waste disposal is one of the basic requirements of an urban setting and one of the symbols of an advanced society. Yet, it is not clear that dumping excreta into any convenient body of water is the best way to handle local and global sanitation problems. Drawing on ethnographic research focusing on the spread of flush toilet in rural China, this paper calls for the need to consider alternatives to the dominant flushing hydraulic system locked-in to our built environments.