sanitation

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• SOURCE: Capital B News
  5/16/2023
  

  Feds Confirm Alabama Discriminated Against Rural Black Residents, Leading to Sewage Crisis

  The state failed to connect rural Black residents in Lowndes County to subsidized septic system upgrades, leading many into debt to private contractors or to neglect updates leading to a wastewater crisis. A new agreement will upgrade the infrastructure. 

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• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  11/5/2021
  

  Where Did the Public Toilets Go?

  Peter Baldwin offers context for how American cities haltingly adopted and quickly abandoned public toilets, a story that encompasses the racial, gender and class politics of how people interact in urban space. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/14/2020
  

  How the World’s Largest Garbage Dump Evolved Into a Green Oasis

  Freshkills is possibly the least likely poster child for urban ecological restoration in the world, and it is radical not just for the way it works — by encouraging flora and fauna do as they please — but for its sheer size. It is almost unbelievable that New York City would set aside a parcel of land as big as Lower Manhattan south of 23rd Street — and just let it go to seed.

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  5/22/2020
  

  Coronavirus Will Reshape Our Cities – We Just Don't Know How Yet

  Disease has been a catalyst for significant changes in urban infrastructure; history suggests COVID-19 will be no different, though what those changes might be is uncertain.

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• SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
  4/8/2020
  

  In 19th-Century America, Fighting Disease Meant Battling Bad Smells

  Melanie Kiechle, a history professor at Virginia Tech, foul smells or "miasmas" were considered to indicate risk of disease before the germ theory of disease developed.

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• SOURCE: Fast Company
  3/24/2020
  

  The Untold Origin Story of the N95 Mask

  The most important design object of our time was more than a century in the making.