The bathroom is inevitably a space where we find ourselves spending time each day, and yet, say Laila Seewang and Chris Reed, its impact on urban space is often overlooked in terms of design. The studio Seewang and Reed are leading this semester, “FLUSH: Waste and Intimacy in Berlin’s Civic Realm,” explores issues around water supply and sewage systems and how intimate spaces—such as bathrooms, public pools, or showers—are connected with these larger urban systems. Seewang, visiting assistant professor of urban planning and design, and Reed, co-director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree program and professor in practice of landscape architecture, collaborated on the interdisciplinary course that brought students to Berlin to learn more about the history of resource landscapes, such as the “sewage farms” that filtered urban waste, and how they might respond to these leftover spaces today.
Rachel May: How did you create the FLUSH studio?
Laila Seewang: The city of Berlin had the first municipal water system that flushed out a whole city’s wastewater onto sewage farms, primarily because it’s not near the sea. It was a city-scaled experiment in water circularity. The work stems from my doctoral research that examined the history of that system.
The studio is about the legacies of public sanitation—for example, what it means when, as a public responsibility, a city decides to provide water to its citizens and take away sewage. It’s one of those things that we take for granted as a sign of modernity: in developed cities today, we expect clean, free, running water and someone taking away the waste. But, how we came to those decisions is not always clear.
We gave this history to the students as a prompt. It’s a way of asking them to think about issues such as: Who has rights to resources—and are they evenly distributed? How are they channeled? What do we give up in exchange? How do our bodies use that water? How does the community need to use it? What spaces does that create in an urban landscape?
Chris Reed: I was looking at some of the drawings developed at the time that the sewage and water systems were being designed, and the movement toward public toilets was underway. There’s very clear thinking about relationships between, say, the point of origin—whether that’s the point of waste removal or access to water, and the system across the city that’s required to put that in place—and how that then relates to groundwater, soil, slope, the earth, topography, landscape, environment. All those things are connected.
You may have a small expression for a pump house or a single toilet within a public square. The design of that structure has been considered very carefully in terms of the language of the design, the setting, the image. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, as you begin to trace the implications of that system.
Those issues of being able to jump scale, to address circularity in a contemporary condition with the climate challenges that we’re now facing, and overlaying that with the sensorial, intimate process and rituals around cleansing the body, waste removal, urination—those simple things that we do every day and take for granted. How do we think of those moments within the architectural or landscape or urban design project?
A piece that the students are reading right now, “In Praise of Shadows” (1933) by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, points toward the care and craft that goes into Japanese toilets, so as not to over-illuminate or over-expose. It allows for nuance. A shadow is something that, perhaps, we want to capture. It’s part of the human experience. It also hints at a sensibility about something other than purity or purification—something much richer.
This semester, you both introduced the GSD’s screening Perfect Days, the film by Wim Wenders about a Tokyo toilet cleaner. Japanese toilets sound much more sophisticated than ours.
Chris Reed: There are two especially good versions. One is the historic version, which is covered in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay. Some toilets of this type are meant to be places of respite and quiet, of thinking, often with a view toward a beautiful landscape. But there’s also the contemporary Tokyo Toilet project, for which a number of A-list architects were asked to design a public toilet in the city of Tokyo and to consider not just the design of the toilet—what is inside, what is outside, what is private, what is public—but also how that toilet sits within its urban context. What is its position within that environment? They are 20 of these toilets, and they’re all quite different and extraordinary in their own ways.
What do you want students to think about in terms of sustainability and design? What should we consider for a future shaped by climate change?
Laila Seewang: There are a number of values that were built into systems like the one in Berlin—values that we have inherited. People had to be taught to shower when it wasn’t common to bathe daily. They didn’t want to be taxed for clean, fresh water. They had plenty of water. There was no taboo about being dirty, necessarily. But the system that Berlin inherited to support these practices requires practically endless amounts of running water every day. That’s potable water that has been filtered, that is flushed down the toilet, or used for industrial purposes.
Part of the hope is that students will start to link bodily practices and values with enormous technical systems that magnify and support those acts, because I think a lot of those systems seem neutral and predetermined by very practical things. When you look back, historically, it’s easier to unpack because the systems were simpler than they are today. They were doing it for the first time. You could see that they had to go on a campaign to get people to shower, or that there were 40 years of debates as to where a woman’s toilet would be. You can see the thinking processes. It makes it very clear that all of these things have been designed. In other words, choices and values were translated into form.
Moving forward, I think there are some very practical options out there that many people—researchers, scientists—have looked at. For example, do we use dry toilets and stop using water, or do we use less industry, or do we recirculate the water? Does circularity have to be scaled down? All these things will come up for the students.
Groundwater pollution was already happening 100 years ago in Berlin, at a certain scale. In Berlin we met people who’ve worked on projects to capture human waste from toilets to recycle it, both as manure and the nitrogen content from urine. There are rather technical outcomes that we would expect. But, Chris and I are both interested in putting the body back into the scale of urban design, where it often gets lost. Many urban design projects are supposed to be for people, but we think of people as identities. Physical needs are still sensitive.
Chris Reed: We often reduce a typical situation and talk about it in a very technological, abstract way, which is why we have the bathrooms today that are so uniform, bright, sparkling white. How is it that recognizing the body? How does that assist with the physical and mental aspects of being able to take a moment to oneself to do something we need to do, and often within a public environment, where some level of shielding is very important?
What are those values today? How do we think about the impacts of today’s current systems, resources, points of origin. What’s the connection between the particular place you’re inhabiting and the bigger landscape or infrastructural system? Where does the water come from, and the waste go to? What does it take to get them there? Are there ways in which these systems might be rethought relative to the environment?
We’re also thinking about the middle scale of the river. Oftentimes, Berlin has combined sewer outlets, which will overflow raw sewage into rivers. So, the simple idea of bathing in the river—how does that conflict with reality? We saw that in Paris during the Olympics, as they tried to launch the swimming competition. How might we alter riverine environments, infrastructure, and even the ways we assess and communicate levels of toxicity, to truly innovate and allow for different relationships to water and waste?
How do we rethink some of the ways that those systems could work for the benefit of the environment, as well as people?
Laila Seewang: The course includes students from urban design, landscape, and architecture, so in Berlin, they can operate on three different sites, at three different scales. We designed the course so that they could work on the scale of public toilets and showers at commuter intersections in Berlin—a historical project they can revisit today—or on the river itself and the stormwater overflows that dump raw sewage into the river and thwart attempts to use it as a bathing space. Then there are these ex-sewage farms on the periphery of Berlin, where, because no one could build on them for some time, there’s now quite an enormous green resource. We could imagine everything from infrastructural solutions for keeping wastewater out of the river, to new public toilets, to something to do with other rituals involving water and human bodies.
Could you explain the legacy of the sewage farms, sites where waste had been channeled from the city to the surrounding landscape? Has that pollution been mitigated? Can these sites be used for recreation or food production or development?
Laila Seewang: Berlin is built on sand, and the original system relied upon this sand to filter pollutants. But, eventually, it became much more problematic for sand to filter out an increasing amount of sewage with antibiotics or heavy industrial toxins, for example, and return it to groundwater. Some of the sewage farms shut down by 1920, then a number of them shut down or were destroyed in the Second World War. Once the wall went up in Berlin, in 1961, they were basically an island inside of East Germany. Some of the sewage farms operated up until 1970.
In general, the students are confronting issues that muddy the binary between “clean” and “polluted”– the soil in these spaces are to some degree tainted, but not unusable. Mostly these lands are not used for housing, where soil may need to be replaced, but for recreational spaces like gardens, or low-grade, small-scale ecological farms. Since this is municipal land beyond the urban boundary of Berlin, the city can also work on alternative energy projects: there are now also wind farms and solar farms on these ex-sewage farms.
Chris Reed: You might not be able to do normative urban development per se, but thinking about these things as a resource, not just a waste space, might, given some good design thinking, create a different kind of proposition. We’re building on a couple decades now of many people, landscape architects included, looking at sites of waste and disposal—a Staten Island landfill, for instance—being remade as public spaces and ecological sites that are very much embraced as part of the city, not cordoned off and thought of as a waste of land. How can we bring new or different kinds of values to a site like that?
Are there comparable cities or systems to this history of Berlin’s sewage treatment? Are there other cities dealing with similar challenges now?
Laila Seewang: The Berlin sewer engineer traveled to England and Scotland to look at sewage farms, and went on to design systems in Cairo, Moscow, and other places, so Berlin wasn’t unique. Paris was also experimenting quite a lot. They didn’t build sewage farms for the whole city, but put some farms in place, and were experimenting with urine recycling. The nitrogen was an early fertilizer, as well.
However, the scale of the Berlin system was not matched anywhere in the world. And, uniquely, the Berlin farms were all purchased from old feudal estates—some had been in one family for 600 years—so it represented a complete change of rural way of life. The farms tripled the area of Berlin. That’s how much land they needed to recycle the sewage.
As industrialization scaled up, cities grew and needed to rethink how agriculture was produced. So, the management of sewage was a big question in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as they looked for ways to magnify output. As long as a city was near the ocean, the common practice at the time was to just flush raw sewage out to the sea. Sewage systems had an even greater impact on landscapes around inland cities in that period.
Chris Reed: Thinking about the river as part of that disposal system in a de facto way, we’ll also be asking students to look at the river itself not being able to deal with the large quantities of waste that are often dumped into it—in part because many urban rivers have been quite constrained. Their floodplains have been taken away. They’ve been channelized. So, the slow-moving areas that often have shallower water, where vegetation can absorb pollutants and nutrients, have been all taken away as well.
What we’ve seen again in the last couple decades is a movement to re-naturalize rivers. It’s not a restoration process, because oftentimes the space is not available to bring the river back. But this idea that we might take back some of the floodplain for the river, install plant communities, wetland systems that themselves are highly engineered and designed, but that can help deal with some of the pollutants, elevate the river water quality—this is something we’ve seen in a number of different places and that we’ll be looking at with case studies, for example in Zarazoga, Spain.
I’m interested to know a little bit more about how you invite students to reconsider the human body and think about the designing the space around the body. How does that happen within a class?
Laila Seewang: We divided the course into three episodes. The first one is about asking them to draw an intimate urban space including the scale of the body in relation to the scale of the system. We’ve asked them to identify a space of bodily intimacy that they are familiar with, where the body comes into contact with water, to analyze that and understand what it is contingent upon. Where is the body located and what does it need physically in a space? We’re developing a vocabulary. There’s a spatial to sensory relationship that students are starting to articulate. Once you identify what is an intimate space, you then have to say, well, these are the things that define it as intimate and make it work, and these are the things that would make it not work, specifically in an urban condition.
Chris Reed: The range of spaces students chose to explore was quite remarkable. One person was looking at the washing station for the human body before a Muslim goes into prayer, and the ritual associated with that, the spatial conditions. Somebody else was looking at a place underneath a building in a wildlife park where there was a footwash station for people who had ventured off the path into muddy terrain. One student had spent the summer in Berlin, interestingly enough, and went to a recreational lake that’s known as a queer retreat, and was describing various moments and spaces for intimacy and enclosure—one that occurs on a floating raft in the middle of the lake, where the enclosure is actually defined by the mass of human bodies that are in close proximity to one another—a completely temporal and fleeting thing defined by bodies.
Someone else was in southern China, and was part of a community that would swim off of a heavily industrialized dock during gaps between cargo ships coming in and out of the port. So, the appropriation of a place not intended for swimming, that’s quite industrial, quite rough, has a big tidal flux—the qualities and conditions of the space change.
When you raise questions of intimacy within a design studio, the question is always: What will come of that? We’re being quite deliberate about the conversations that we’re having, and we’re seeing a wonderful effort on behalf of the students to find those moments and dig in and to explore it in the ways that are meaningful to them.