If Bill Gates can drink sewage water purified by the Janicki Omni Processor, perhaps Torontonians are ready for a public bath at their local wastewater treatment plant. University of Waterloo student Liyang Zhang proposes just that in her thesis exploring the cultural understanding of cleanliness, class and citizens’ relationships to human waste in urban spaces. Concretely, her theoretical approach identifies the North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant in Canada’s biggest city as a central location between three disconnected neighbourhoods with varying socio-economic profiles. Zhang has drawn a design proposal for a public bath at the sewage treatment plant that would challenge the various social tensions created by intermingling these different groups of users and by bringing the facility’s input and output so close together.

Project Geographies of Urban Filth School University of Waterloo, Canada Team Liyang Zhang with thesis supervisor Rick Andrighetti