ABSTRACT. The need for a radical shift to more iterative and adaptive solutions in sewage management is increasingly recognized, but our ability to achieve such a shift is constrained by inertia to change. Here, we describe planning in two metropolitan areas that are upgrading their sewage systems, based on interviews with central actors and official documents. Using new institutionalism and concentrating on changes in normative, regulative, and cognitive patterns, we analyze if obstacles to the uptake of innovations can be understood in light of how these patterns counteract institutional change. Our aim is to understand obstacles to reformers implementing a wider vision of sewage management. Our study suggests that even though both Buenos Aires and Vancouver emphasize the need for integrated water management, it does not seem likely that either will implement a solution that challenges the end-of-pipe paradigm. We conclude that the main obstacle to change is the deeply rooted cognitive notion that sewage is waste. Framed as waste, sewage becomes something a community needs to get rid of, the faster the better. The notion of sewage being a worthless burden means that it is expected to generate costs, not revenues. When sewage is foremost framed as waste, the conventional linear end-of-pipe solution becomes the most logical way to manage it. We argue that this notion permeates the entire institutional structure and that its power is not recognized. We speculate on whether a shift toward iterative and adaptive solutions might be facilitated if sewage were redefined outside the water management umbrella and instead understood as resource management (for example, energy and nutrients), and if organizations responsible for delivering sewage services were reorganized accordingly.

This review examines the social and political roots and ongoing implications of centralized, waterborne sewerage. This system has served as a marker of class, a signal of wealth and political power, and a mechanism of social reform. As sewerage networks ballooned in the mid‐19th century throughout Europe and North America in response to a growing public health movement, their use and attendant hygiene practices served to intertwine physical and moral hygiene. The new infrastructure prioritized a felt distance between the user and their excreta, particularly signaled by the absence of odor, access to privacy, and the disassociation of users from any part of the management process beyond the flush of the toilet. Furthermore, the resource intensive system advertised affluence, and emphasized emerging notions of the networked urban space, which had the potential to tame and control Nature. This infrastructure model and its social and political underpinnings were exported to many cities under colonial influence throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, and were used to justify class differentiation and racialized agendas. Differential sewerage access in municipal centers of the Global South today continues to serve as a marker of class distinction, and many modern scholars explore how lack of sewerage renders the urban poor politically invisible. Ultimately, consideration of the social and political legacy of the linear sewerage system may offer new ways forward in addressing urban sanitation crises faced across the globe today, including problems posed by aging, unsustainable, and insufficient infrastructure. WIREs Water 2016, 3:63–73. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1108 This article is categorized under: Human Water > Value of Water

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