The Dirt of Cities(Ivan Illich)

'The Aura of Cities‘ , 'The Smell of Dead' and 'Utopia of an Odorless City .

The Dirt of Cities.

•Complaints that cities can become dirty places go back to antiquity.

•The genesis of Bathroom started in Greece.

•Most homes, except the for the wealthy, has no designated place for bodily reliefs.

•The streets was assumed to be the proper place for such disposals.

•Pigs were used to clean Medieval cities.

•In1660, lay-stalls, were placed in London for the disposal of wastes. Men & women were willing to pay to sweep the streets so they could sell the waste for profits.

•In1885, houses in London contained one privy, night soil was removed several times a week.

•It felt to interfere with rush hours, in 1981, bathroom cleaning was restricted to only summer time from 4am to 10 am

The Aura of Cities.

•The city became a place that constantly needed to be washed.

•Not because it ‘visually offensive’ or the residues made people slip on streets, but because of the bad odours.

•Robert Mandrou (1961) focused on the evolution of smell.

•It was hard for the Historians to make statements about the perception of smell, because odours don’t leave a trace .

•“Sensitivity to an Aura and tolerance to it are requisites to enjoy being a guest”.

•Many people today have lost the ability to imagine geographic variety that could once be perceive through the nose.

•That’s because the whole world smell alike (gasoline, detergents, plumbing  and junk food).

The Smell of Dead .

•In churches, the smell of graves was evidence that the dead was present with in the walls.

•Universal olfactory nonchalance came to an end when a small numbers of citizens lost their tolerance for the smell of corpse, at first the smell did not seemed to be a problem.

•In 1737, the presence of the dead was suddenly percieved as a physical danger to the living.

•Charles Gabriel argues that the death has a right to be rest outside the walls.

•There were several instances of mass death among member of the church that occurred during a funeral ceremony. Miasma escaped from an open graved.

•In 1780, cemetery parties come to an end.

•It requires almost two centuries to educate the lower classes to feel nausea from the odor of shit.

Utopia of an Odorless Society .

•“Both living and dead bodies have an Aura”.

•New burial methods removed death from the cities, their existence became fiction.

•After exiling the dead, the next obstacle was to deodorize the living.

•For the nose of a city, without Aura literally a “Nowhere” a “Utopia”.

•Aura and stench were seen as the same.

•Architects designed for lack of smell, designing new ways to remove cause of odors and create open space.

Central Argument.

•Ivan Illich documents how throughout time, we as Humans, have made the collective effort to remove smells from cities.

•First by removing public waste then by removing dead and lastly deodorizing the livings, and the result was. . .

•1. people have lost the aura that allowed their whereabouts to be sniffed out in the old days”.

•This Article Argues the low status of smell to shed light on how smell has been perceived historically, across time.

Relation to Theme .

•The good life is reflected in the design and construction of public spaces.

•The efforts put into trying the revitalize our cities and eradicate the dirt and smell of the dead,

•We are trying to work our way up to construct  a better life and a utopia of an odorless city.

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