Microbiopolitical Scatology: Urban Wastewater Milieus and Microbial Futures

Wastewater systems are apparatuses that regulate the circulatory conditions of collective life in the flows of water, waste, and pathogens. They occupy a central if concealed place in urban circulation. Wastewater is increasingly monitored, sequenced, modelled, datafied, and interpreted as a source of microbiological intelligence. The sewer has become an epidemiological sensor, a scatological cipher for population health and a site for the expansion of capital in the externalizing commodification of waste as data. Wastewater surveillance is a form of microbiopolitics, governance that operates through the monitoring and modulation of microbial circulation in environmental infrastructures.