Sewage systems, treatment plants, ‘blue–green solutions’: The role of professionals in the historical justifications and planning of urban wastewater infrastructures

The planning of the urban environment is an area sparking intense public discussions about issues concerning the urban population, the general common good, and the just way to plan the city. These issues range from citizens complaining about lack of parking spaces to public protests over new urban developments (Holden & Scerri, 2015). Local (and at times national) politicians sometimes act on these concerns raised by groups and individuals, potentially resulting in new or changed plans for the city. But more concretely, how do these public issues and concerns transform from discussions in the public realm into something material that can be built in the physical environment? Who transforms them, and in what form are they concretised? In this paper, I analyse the important role of professionals in transforming public concerns into material structures—for my purposes in particular, infrastructures. I analyse the case of urban wastewater management in Denmark to show how professionals working on urban issues (such as engineers, doctors, biologists, and landscape architects) via a particular art of composition (Thévenot, 2009) are specially equipped to turn public issues of justification and the common good into concrete plans and structures. Professions, via their public claims to jurisdictions (Abbott, 1988), translate public concerns into professional solutions, in this case, into infrastructures. As part of this process, professions lay claim to a jurisdiction by drawing on public justifications thereby claiming a certain kind of work task, and in the process transforming issues of justice and the common good into specific plans and manageable actions.

Drawing on the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006), as well as on Thévenot’s later and related work on regimes of engagement (see for instance 2001; 2007; 2009), I follow a small but growing number of social scientists who have approached issues of the city and urban planning using this conceptual architecture (Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Centemeri, 2014; Eranti, 2017; Fuller, 2012; Holden & Scerri, 2015; Holden, Scerri, & Esfahani, 2015; Luhtakallio, 2018; Meilvang, Carlsen, & Blok, 2018). These studies have shown how urban planning projects are subject to discussions on justifications and the common good (Fuller, 2012; Holden & Scerri, 2015), but also how conflicts and tensions can develop in another way, for instance, via citizens’ familiar engagement with the city (Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Eranti, 2017). I want to continue to build on the insights from these studies, which have mostly focused on citizens and politicians, and to extend the analysis to include the professional actors who play an important role in turning public discussions into concrete urban structures. Professionals, like all other actors, can engage both in public discussions and in negotiations and engagements not oriented towards the public. By combining pragmatic sociology with Andrew Abbott’s sociology of professions and his idea of a professional jurisdiction (1988) as the central site where professions compete over authority, I propose a new viewpoint: that the professional jurisdictional work of claiming a particular work task in public is a way of (applying the concepts of Thévenot) turning an engagement of justification into an engagement in plan.

In Danish contemporary discussions on urban wastewater, increased rainwater as a result of climate change is a growing concern. These discussions lead to new ways of designing and building wastewater infrastructures, namely by managing water in green structures on the surface of the city (Karvonen, 2011). Water in cities has long been an issue, going back to the 1800s when the original sewage systems were built. In Denmark and elsewhere, this was a time of intense public discussions and concerns relating to diseases and hygiene. Public concerns are understood here as concerns formulated and discussed in the public media, for instance in newspaper articles or letters from readers, in public protests, or in public assemblies. Empirically, I therefore historise urban wastewater (Carroll, 2012) to show the role of professionals in transforming public discussions and issues into concrete plans for infrastructure. From the 1800s to today, many changes have taken place both in the role of public and citizens’ participation in urban planning, as well as in the role of professions in society and internally, that is, within the professions themselves. Even though increased professional specialisation and more effective citizens’ involvement have influenced the field, wastewater professionals in all the situations I study have the ability to turn public issues of the common good into concrete plans and structures.

The paper will proceed with a section where I specify the theoretical concepts in Boltanski and Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology, and Abbott’s concept of jurisdiction in relation to public justifications. I sketch out how the two theories can contribute differently to our understanding of the role of professionals in urban wastewater management, and how they complement each other (even though there are great differences between them). Following this, I describe my data and my historical methodology, particularly how I have selected three historical moments, or ‘critical situations’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) for analysing developments in urban wastewater management. Accordingly, my analysis will be built around these three moments, when certain professionals play key roles in transforming public concerns into an infrastructural solution. Through the analysis, I want to show the important role that professionals play in connecting public concerns to specific material infrastructures. The work of professionals relates both to defining the issue at stake and to making plans for a concrete solution to the issue. My analysis shows how public justifications enables professional work on urban water infrastructures while at the same time constraining and complicating this work. It also shows a growing awareness of nature and the environment in urban wastewater management over the last 150 years, a tendency that can be characterised as a sign of an emerging importance of ‘green’ justifications.

Several recent studies have shown the value of applying the work of Boltanski and Thévenot to issues of urban planning (Fuller, 2012; Holden & Scerri, 2015); these have been augmented by later developments in the theory proposed by Thévenot (Eranti, 2017; Luhtakallio, 2018). Starting from the seminal work On Justification (2006), where Boltanski and Thévenot construct six orders of worth to understand situations of justification, disputes, and critique, the theoretical framework has developed into a theory of three regimes of engagement, where the six orders of worth relate to one of these regimes (Thévenot, 2007; 2009). The three regimes intend to capture the different ways people engage with their surroundings. In the regime of justification, action is oriented towards the public through discussions and questions of the common good. In certain situations, where these issues are at stake, actors draw on the six different orders of worth to justify each situation. These orders are collective conventions used by actors in critical situations to ‘qualify’ objects and persons based on one or more of the orders. In urban planning, for instance, master plans, long-term planning, and technical expert knowledge are the objects most often qualified via the order of industrial worth, where efficiency and functionality are the highest principles for evaluating a situation. Discussing the market prize of certain areas of the city or building expensive condominiums to attract the upper class, on the other hand, are actions often justified by referring to a market worth, where situations are judged by the principles of competition and value. Justifications about the general interest of all citizens and decent living conditions for everyone are qualified by referring to a civic worth, where the highest principles are the collective and the general will. In the literature engaging with the theoretical framework, there is a general discussion about the status of the six orders of worth: are they comprehensive, are new orders of worth forming? (See, for instance, Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005 for a projective order of worth.) Relevant to this study is the literature developing a green order of worth (Blok, 2013; Thévenot, Moody, & Lafaye, 2000), where environmental friendliness and sustainability embody the highest common principles, and where wilderness, natural habitats, and the ecosystem are valued objects. Sometimes discussions over what just arrangement to aim at result in a compromise, where two or more orders of worth coexist, without clarifying the principle used in the agreement (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 277). In contemporary urban planning, market and industrial forms of worth dominate, but often are either sharply criticised or coexist in a compromise with civic, opinion, and green worth (Meilvang, Carlsen, & Blok, 2018).

Moving on from analysing urban planning as critical situations about the just arrangement of the city, the two other forms of engagement capture two other important ways of relating to the urban material and social arrangements. In the regime of planned action, people engage with their surroundings as means or instruments. Here, a person is an autonomous individual who can project herself into the future by setting goals, making plans, and carrying them out. In urban planning, for instance, this entails making a specific plan by deciding on the different resources necessary to put it into practice and then drawing on these resources to build the actual structures. This form of engagement is so much common sense that it may seem nearly invisible (Thévenot, 2007, p. 417), but grasping our surroundings in terms of their functionality is very different from grasping them as just or unjust arrangements. This form of engagement is also very different from the third and last form of engagement, the regime of familiarity, where people engage with their surroundings in a personalised and localised way.

Like all other persons, professionals have the capacity to engage with their surroundings in different regimes. When considering the case of care-giving in the medical sector, Thévenot and others have argued that this particular professional work requires an ‘art of composition’ among the different regimes (2009)–a specific way of constructing attachments to persons and things that arranges the different regimes in a certain manner. In this article, I want to propose that not only professional care workers but also urban planning professionals demonstrate this aptitude for an ‘art of composition’, and, moreover, that what is composed and arranged during certain key moments in urban wastewater planning signals a transformation from public justifications to manageable and functional plans as infrastructure. In this process, professionals not only solve a public problem, but also publicly lay claim to their jurisdiction, as proposed by Abbott (1988). A professional jurisdiction following Abbott is the link between professions and a particular task over which this profession claims control, for example, by putting forward public claims. In these claims, professionals ‘build images’ to pressure the legal system into legalising their claims (Abbott, 1988, p. 59). The concept of jurisdiction thus shows how professionals, when engaged in a strategic action, use the public sphere to gain control over an area of expertise and specific work tasks. My aim in combining Abbott’s approach with Thévenot’s is thus: to show that when professions undertake the operation of jurisdictionalising by publicly justifying a claim to a certain kind of work task, they are exhibiting a competence in composing different urban engagements in a specific way: namely, transforming public justifications into planned action. I depart from Abbott’s conceptualisation that professional claims to legitimacy made in public should be thought of merely as a way that professions jurisdictionalise; this would mean a way that they reinforce and strengthen the work-area under their control. Instead, I argue that the regimes of engagement suggest analysing public justifications and strategic actions as two different, but inter-related engagements. Conceptualising the professional operations of public claims-making as something more than strategic, planned action therefore enables an analysis of the developments in moral conceptions of the just city–in my case, for instance, an emerging ‘green’ city. This approach also shows how professional claims-making is closely related to public concerns. It allows for an analysis of these professional public claims as something that enables professional work (and thus can serve as a way of jurisdictionalising) while also in certain ways constraining it. In my last analytical section, in particular, it becomes clear how public justifications affect the way specific urban structures are planned. Here, if we analysed this process as nothing more than strategic action aimed at maintaining and expanding a jurisdiction, this would underplay the importance of these public justifications and how discussions over them significantly contribute to the material planning and design of the specific infrastructure.

In tracing the different ways professionals have translated public concerns about urban wastewater, I found that three historical periods emerge as specifically important. In each period, urban wastewater poses new problems and threats for cities and is tied to specific concerns from citizens and politicians. There is uncertainty regarding the solutions, and these ‘critical situations’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) then open the field for new discussions of the common good, new professional claims to jurisdiction, and new infrastructures. The professions involved differ, even though engineers are central to all three phases. The three historical ‘situations’ are analytically relevant because they reveal significant and lasting changes to the infrastructures for managing urban wastewater. These infrastructures are as follows: the sewage system, the treatment plant, and something I will call ‘blue–green solutions’. Their selection is based on literature that has defined these structures as important developments in urban wastewater management (for instance, Buurman & Padawangi, 2018; Dobraszczyk, 2014; Gandy, 2006; Karvonen, 2011; Lindegaard, 2001; Van de Poel, 2008).

I have used literature from Danish historians to analyse the first two periods, which date from 1800 to 1900 and from 1950 to 1970. This literature describes the historical transformation of the sewage system in Copenhagen, along with the transformation of the Danish system for wastewater treatment (see, most importantly, Lindegaard (2001) and Henze, Sørensen, and Petersen (2014)). I draw upon these historical studies to contextualise the professional work and to explain the importance of the specific professional documents I analyse. These professional documents, which contain my main data for both periods, consist of two documents from the first period and thirteen documents from the second. The documents from the first period were chosen based on the historical literature mentioned earlier, which names these two specific documents as the most important for raising political and public awareness of the possibilities of a sewage system. The documents from the second period were chosen based both on the historical literature and also on a case study in which actors repeatedly pointed to a specific professional committee as important for the developments in the field.

The last period, which dates from around 2000 to the present, is based on data from a case study of climate adaptation and urban rainwater management. Here, I have followed three different urban rainwater management projects in three different cities in Denmark. By building new rainwater infrastructures, all three projects are trying to solve the problem of heavier rain as a consequence of climate change. At the beginning of the study, one project was two-thirds finished, one was still in the drawing and calculation phase, and one was just getting started and about to be developed in more detail. I interviewed key people from the municipality, utility company, and consultancy firms involved in the projects, as well as other actors in the field of urban rainwater management and climate adaptation, from universities and from central professional associations, who were not directly affiliated with the projects. I conducted 31 interviews with 33 people, which took from 1 to 2.5 hours. The interviews were semi-structured and focused on work practices and cooperation among the different professions. I also draw on observations made during a month of fieldwork in a consultancy firm working on climate-adaptation projects.

The data I use for analysing the three different periods are therefore not of the same kind. While all data is qualitative, I analyse documents for the two first periods but interview and fieldwork data for the third. Documents written by professionals present the translation of public concerns into material solutions in a coherent manner, favourable to the professions themselves. The documents I analyse were deemed important in later historical descriptions of a process, such as the formation of the sewage system, and are therefore ‘strong’ versions of these earlier processes (Asdal, 2014), meaning those that ended up being the most successful and important. The documents I study are, in the language of pragmatic sociology, ‘qualified’ objects (Meilvang, Carlsen, & Blok, 2018). Analysing interviews and field observations, on the other hand, is much closer to professional practice and the different negotiations, tensions, and conflicts over specific material designs and planning of infrastructures. This means that conflicts and tensions play a bigger role in my third analytical section than in the first two. That is not to say there were no conflicts in earlier periods, but tracing such conflicts and negotiations is much more difficult in documents than in interviews and fieldwork. The analysis of the two first periods is therefore not an exhaustive analysis of the professional situation at that time, but rather an analysis of specific, qualified professional documents important for the development of the infrastructure. Although much more could be said about the professional conflicts over the sewage system and the expanding of the treatment plants, it would be outside the scope of this paper. Instead, my aim is to look at three important historical periods to analyse how professionals translate public concerns into material solutions–in this case, infrastructures.

In all periods, engineers have been able to position themselves as professionals important to solving the problems relating to wastewater, and as such, they also make for the focus of my analysis. Especially in the first two sections, where the data were selected based on literature suggesting that these documents are important, engineers are the dominant profession. This does not mean that other experts and professions did not influence the field in some ways, but engineers play the dominant role in the historical justifications and planning of urban wastewater infrastructures.

Up through the 1800s, concerns about disease and hygiene related to urban wastewater were on the public agenda in Denmark, specifically in Copenhagen. The idea of a sewage system as an infrastructure to handle urban wastewater was suggested in different forms from 1844 through the latter half of the nineteenth century by engineers and doctors, until the first Danish sewage system was built in Copenhagen in 1901. The concerns of citizens and politicians about an unclean, unhealthy city were justified as a civic problem: The state of the city was harming all citizens, the whole collective both rich and poor. The pivotal moment, when the sewage system began developing as a professional solution in Denmark, was signalled by document, called a ‘writing’, from a young engineer named F.C. Kabell to the City Council in 1844 (Lindegaard, 2001). This writing and the response to it in 1847 from a doctor named Emil Hornemann set in motion the discussion about building a sewage system. To understand the role of professions in the processes of planning new infrastructure, I analyse these two professional writings.

The background to the two writings was the expansion of the city, which had led to crowding and unsanitary urban conditions. Before 1860 there was no sewage system in Copenhagen. Rain and wastewater from households (not from toilets) ran in open gutters or ditches through the city and directly into the canals, moat, or harbour (Lindegaard, 2001). In situations of heavy rain, rainwater mixed with wastewater from industry and formed big puddles in the streets (Knudsen, 1988). About 8 per cent of the population in Copenhagen lived in basement-apartments, which during heavy rain flooded regularly. In the early 1800s, several Copenhagen newspapers published critical articles and letters from readers who were concerned about the dirty streets and the outdated systems for handling water and waste (Knudsen, 1988). Homeowners complained about their basements being flooded. In the weekly magazine The Police Friend (‘Politivennen’), which was published intermittently from 1798 to 1845, the bourgeoisie of Copenhagen vented their complaints in anonymous letters. Typical complaints were related to the gutters and more generally to standing water, which was thought to cause diseases due to the terrible smell (Søndergård Larsen, 2008). Particular events intensified these concerns about water and non-sanitary water conditions. In the summer of 1853, a cholera epidemic killed 5000 people in Copenhagen (Lützen, 1995). One year later, in 1854, Copenhagen was hit by a major cloudburst and flooded several times, and a new outbreak of cholera was reported (Lindegaard, 2001). Public awareness was growing around water as an urban problem related to diseases and hygiene.

The engineering profession at that time was young and not very politically influential. Engineers professionalised from the 1850s with the formation of different associations, culminating in the foundation of the Danish Society of Engineers in 1892 (Harnow, 1995). But it was because of a civil engineer, F.C. Kabell, who in 1844 proposed to City Council the building of a sewage system in Copenhagen, that the City council was prompted (also in response to intense pressure from doctors) to hold an international competition on designing a sewage system for the city in 1847. Kabell was among the first to graduate with a degree from the Polytechnic School in Copenhagen (Lindegaard, 2001), the first engineering education in Denmark. He had visited Hamburg, Paris, and London, where he studied technical installations for water management. In the writing from 1844, Kabell describes the opportunity for Copenhagen to install the same types of infrastructures as in other European cities, among other things to direct the water underground in pipes. In his introduction to the document, Kabell justifies his effort and purpose, which is to attract the attention not only of the politicians at City Council, but also of the general public:

The infrastructure he proposes (a sewage system and a water supply system) will benefit future generations and all classes of society. This therefore is a way of justifying his proposal by referring to civic justifications: what is good and right for all people in society and also for future generations. Everyone will be able to recognise this general good and support the work on better water infrastructure. But Kabell also invokes industrial justifications when he states that people will be convinced of the common good of sewage and water supply systems when they are presented with results obtained in other places. The document’s description of these results is based on scientific methods (such as mortality rates), describes the infrastructures in detail (as in providing the length and slope of the gutters), and compares technical installations (such as which pipes work better). Scientific methods, which judge objects on the basis of their efficiency and functionality, are part of an industrial world.

In the course of the document, Kabell moves from these general justifications to describing, in the final pages, specific calculations for how to implement certain infrastructures in Copenhagen. These specific calculations are for concrete work tasks (such as ‘annual maintenances of filter apparatus’, ‘annual cleaning of pipes systems’). In the document, public justifications for keeping all present and future urban residents safe from diseases and floods using expert lessons and results, are transformed into a specific infrastructure (sewage and water-supply systems) that can be carried out via concrete work tasks. This last way of engaging with the issues is, in the language of Thévenot, an engagement in plan, that is, deciding on the specific resources and targets needed to put a plan into practice. This document, then, attempts not only to build a professional image that can be recognised by the legal system, but also to carefully compose different ways of engaging with the city; the latter ranges from moral justifications of how to plan the best city for everyone to the specificities of how to obtain this goal. In this process, engineers additionally build a jurisdiction by linking specific work tasks (maintaining the filter apparatus, cleaning the piping system) to their own profession.

In writing, Kabell references other engineering work, thus strengthening the claim to jurisdiction, but he mentions, too, doctors and medical documents. In the 1840s, a professional movement of concerned doctors was formed, their goal to promote the idea of better hygiene. One of them in particular, Emil Hornemann, achieved public renown for arguing in favour of sanitising the city. Hornemann was a member (and later chairman) of the Hygiene Committee under the Royal Medical Society. As a member, he published a document in 1847 commenting on Kabell’s text and criticising the unsanitary state of Copenhagen. The document from 1847 is written on behalf of the Hygiene Committee, which Hornemann justifies as an initiative that has made everyday life healthier and more comfortable, and produced benefits for ‘public health’.

Like Kabell, Hornemann believed something should be done about the ‘very filthy city’ (1847, p. 24) of Copenhagen in order to improve living conditions for residents and produce health benefits for the population. But in addition to the work tasks of building pipes and maintaining filters, Hornemann suggests increasing knowledge about mortality to measure the effects of the sewage system and other changes on public health. Here, then, he suggests work tasks in relation to the problems of the dirty city, but tasks that doctors (among others) should address. In general, Hornemann is positive when referencing Kabell’s work, yet he also clearly demarcates the jurisdiction of doctors by pointing to places where Kabell oversteps the boundaries of this jurisdiction, for instance, by criticising the specific way that Kabell draws on research and earlier knowledge. Thus, Hornemann reinforces that doctors are the most important profession in deciding what counts as evidence in relation to health.

Two professional groups served as important actors in establishing the link between public concerns around urban wastewater and infrastructural solutions in this period: doctors and engineers. Inspired by sewage systems being built all over Europe, these groups were the first to suggest similar systems in Copenhagen in response to the problems concerning urban wastewater. Pushing for a solution to take water away from the city underground, engineers and doctors debated the issue in professional magazines and at several conferences (including The Hygiene Congress in Copenhagen in 1848). In the two central documents written by an engineer and a doctor, the public issue of a dirty and unhealthy city is addressed. Tackling this problem is justified in relation to the good of every citizen (civic worth) and to expert knowledge (industrial worth). The documents thus specify a specific plan to solve this problem, namely a sewage system in Copenhagen, along with scientific information to document the changes. What these professionals do, then, is to publicly present claims to specific work tasks, which is a way of turning a public justification into an engagement in plan.

After the sewage system was fully built in 1901, urban wastewater did not emerge again as a public issue until around 1930; and then intensified as an issue through the 1960s and 1970s. What began slowly in the 1930s was a growing awareness of where urban wastewater was ending up when it was directed outside the city – and how it affected the environment there. These concerns were tied to both civic and green justifications: how is pollution harming us and hindering healthy community activities, but also how is it harming nature itself, such as individual species of fish and plants? The growing concern over polluted water and the environment led to the creation of the Ministry of Environment in 1971, the Environmental Protection Act in 1973, and the Water Protection Act in 1987 (Henze, Sørensen, & Petersen, 2014). Engineers and biologists played an important part in linking the public concerns around water pollution to a solution: treating wastewater before discharge. The Danish Society of Engineers, and particularly a specialised committee within the association–known as SVK, a Danish abbreviation of the Wastewater Committee–were central in establishing this link. First, they documented, together with biologists, changes in lakes and streams through the 1950s and 1960s, and, second, they wrote important documents about water pollution and wastewater treatment for the Pollution Council, which later became the Ministry of Environment. In this section, I analyse the documents from SVK and those from the Pollution Council, because in these the link between the public concerns over polluted waters and the solution to these concerns (more and better wastewater treatment) is established.

In the 1930s, the first descriptions of and complaints about wastewater in Øresund (the sea close to Copenhagen) were published, and the pollution of different lakes and ponds is problematised in newspaper articles, letters from readers, and citizens meetings around Copenhagen (Lindegaard, 2001). These public concerns about wastewater were initially tied to health issues, but gradually merged with concerns about the environment (Jensen, 1996). Urban wastewater once again was developing as an issue of public concern, not in the city, but outside it in the natural environment. The public discussion around pollution and the environment intensified through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. These environmental concerns were institutionalised in the 1970s with the creation of the Ministry of Environment, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Environmental Protection Act (Henze et al., 2014; Lindegaard, 2001). The public discussions were paralleled by a range of different reports from these new political institutions and also from professional organisations. The professional solution to these concerns was treating water before discharge. At the beginning of the 1970s, most wastewater from industry and households was led to recipients (lakes, rivers, oceans) either untreated or treated only by directing it through a sewer grate or a sand filter (Henze et al., 2014). With the Environmental Protection Act of 1973, the municipalities were required to prepare wastewater plans to develop and optimise the sewage systems and the cleaning of wastewater (Henze et al., 2014). This caused a growth in treatment capacity, which was further strengthened by the Water Protection Act of 1987. The initiatives followed developments in other European countries, where the period from 1960 to 1980 was characterised by a rapid growth in treatment capacity (Van de Poel, 2008).

SVK under The Danish Society of Engineers began publishing reports from around 1949 onwards measuring the water environment and documenting water pollution in different Danish lakes and ponds. Engineers and biologists did bacteriological testing, oxygen sampling, and fauna counts documenting pollution as a result of more wastewater being discharged into the lake. In the various documents, the pollution is not linked very explicitly to an infrastructural solution, although one of the documents points out that some improvements to water treatment that were already planned would reduce the pollution of the specific lake in question, in the years ahead.

In 1971 the governmental Pollution Council published various reports on the pollution of Danish nature, among them reports on the water environment. These reports were a contributing factor in the establishment of the Ministry for Pollution Control (later the Ministry of Environment). Seven of them are related to water (one main report summing up the recommendations and six specialised reports on for instance water resources, water quality standards, water treatment, and research in water). The various members contributing to the reports on water represent a range of professions: biologists, doctors, veterinarians, geologists, and engineers. However, engineers alone wrote the report on water treatment.

In the main report with recommendations, the committee presents its overall approach to water and pollution:

The first and most basic justification here is civic; that is, water and nature are not ends in themselves, but secondary to society and society’s needs and wants. The living conditions of the population are what justifies actions aimed at water and pollution. Later in the document, the different needs in relation to water are prioritised. In relation to wastewater (but not drinking water or water supply, which has the highest priority), two different needs should be weighed: (1) society’s need for wastewater recipients, and (2) the need for wetlands of aesthetic and recreational quality. Two other needs can only be secured in places where the natural prerequisites are present: (3) the scientific community’s need for wetlands that are as pristine as possible, and (4) society’s need for the preservation of pristine wetlands from a nature conservation point of view. In this prioritisation, we see that the environment (green worth) is valued but rated very low in relation to other issues. Civic justifications (‘recreational quality’, ‘society’s need for wastewater recipients’) are valued more, and industrial justifications (‘the scientific community’s need for wetlands’) are valued as equally important.

After the general justification of how society should deal with water, the document goes on to specify the different actions that should be taken in relation to water pollution. These specifications build on the specialised reports. It is stated clearly that the existing water treatment is not adequate. To solve the problem, the reports establish different priority levels for water cleanliness corresponding to the specific wastewater recipient, and a considerable investment in treatment capacity is recommended. The reports then link public concerns about water pollution to better and more treatment, which means expanding and upgrading the treatment plants in Denmark planned in a manageable and functional way, with different priority levels for different recipients. Addressing public concern about water pollution by expanding the treatment facilities links the engineering profession to this particular work task. Poul Harremöes, the engineer, who headed up the specialised report on water treatment and served on the main committee, was at the time chairman of SVK. That a person so closely related to the professional association was involved in writing the recommendations points to this linking as a strategic way of jurisdictionalising: maintaining and expanding the role of engineers in wastewater management.

In conceptualising urban wastewater as a source of nature pollution, engineers play a central role in translating these pollution concerns, although doctors, biologists, and geologists also now make for important professional actors. The professionals justify the problem of water pollution according to a civic, industrial, and green order of worth. Even though this is a compromise, the professionals clearly state that the civic justifications are the most important. Expanding the treatment facilities as a professional solution to the problem involves two steps: first, documenting water pollution in specific lakes and streams via the professional committee, and second, suggesting expanding the treatment facilities to reach specific priority levels for how clean the released water should be. The second step is undertaken in a planned engagement, where specific actions are suggested and resources allocated.

From around 2000, urban wastewater has emerged as a new issue of public concern in Denmark, this time in relation to climate change. In Denmark, weather and climate change are almost inseparable from concerns about heavy rain and cloudburst. Three cloudbursts that flooded the city of Copenhagen in 2007, 2010, and 2011 contributed to the emergence of the idea that we can anticipate experiencing more, and heavier, rain, which will be especially problematic in cities (since the water cannot percolate or evaporate in the built environment). The public issues of heavier rain and flooding exists alongside the issue of ‘greening’ the city, and questions of green wildlife, vegetation habitats, and biodiversity. Professionals (engineers once again, but this time in cooperation or sometimes in conflict with landscape architects), suggest ‘blue–green solutions’ as a way to design and plan infrastructure that solves these urban public concerns. The solutions become particularly important in Denmark from 2000 onwards but can be traced further back in other countries, for instance, in the U.S. (Karvonen, 2011). In the public discussions over urban wastewater planning, a compromise emerges among industrial, civic, and green worth. This compromise is new, unstable, and therefore very fragile, which leads to discussions on and critiques of concrete planning for the infrastructural solutions suggested by professionals. In this analytical section, I draw on interviews and documents gathered in the course of research into current professional climate adaptation practices in Denmark.

As previously noted, public concern about rain and climate change was prompted by specific cloudbursts. Professionals in the field of urban wastewater management explain how the cloudburst of 2011 is seen as a ‘game changer’ and ‘eye-opener’. This 2011-incident counts as a ‘critical situation’, where uncertainty prevails as to how to respond in a just way: in other words, what should be considered important when dealing with cloudbursts and flooding? An engineer relates how citizen concerns feed directly into the planning of rainwater management by prompting the municipality to think: ‘We have to address this, and see if there’s something we can do, and how we can answer those citizens’. There is thus public concern about flooding as a result of more rain (as a result of climate change).

Relating to the public concerns, engineers and landscape architects suggest a new type of infrastructure for managing rainwater in cities: ‘blue–green solutions’, which are green and blue spaces on the surface of the city; these serve either to delay the flow of rainwater, or lead it quickly away from the city into the harbour or a river. This way of managing rainwater not only addresses the concern about being flooded, but also relates to two other, different public concerns: first, the problem of declining biodiversity and, second, the lack of recreational green spaces in the city. This new way of managing rainwater is also termed ‘climate adaptation with added value’. The point is then that different problems (public concerns) are addressed and solved at the same time: the problem of flooding (in a cheaper and easier way than the traditional manner) along with the problem of ‘greening’ the city more generally, thereby benefitting both biodiversity and recreational value. When these infrastructures are described, both in public and political documents, and also in my interviews with professionals, they are identified as having three values: economic, recreational, and for nature. In the language of Boltanski and Thévenot, this could be seen as a compromise among civic (recreational), industrial (functionally easier and cheaper), and green (nature and biodiversity) worth. Through the network Water in Cities, which has worked on climate adaptation and rainwater management ‘with added value’ since 2010, different professions and organisations have created this strong consensus that investment in rainwater management should both have economic, recreational, and environmental values. On the general level, then, everyone agrees on this compromise: ‘The vision is great and shared’, an engineering professor says.

Compromises are fragile and need constant stabilising, as Boltanski and Thévenot point out (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). This is also true for these new blue–green solutions. Even though everyone agrees on the different values of the solutions, when planning specific projects, they continually invoke these justifications, and the precise way of planning this ‘added value’ is debated. There are many examples in my interviews and fieldwork of professional discussions over how the specific blue–green infrastructures should be planned. One example is the professional critique of how some engineers plan blue–green solutions: they are just ‘pipes on the surface’, meaning that they merely perform the function of sewage systems (to lead water away) without making use of their potential for greening the city. Here, industrial worth (leading water away effectively) is criticised for not incorporating green and civic worth. Another example is the discussion around two specific tools used for measuring the added value of the projects: the European concept of ‘ecosystem services’ or the Danish, governmental tool known as PLASK. An engineer, using the ecosystem services in his projects says:

Here, the industrial justification (cost-benefit/spreadsheet) is critiqued on the basis of green and civic justifications, which should be given more value. There are then discussions, critiques, and justifications about how exactly this compromise should be reached, and which orders of worth should be most important. Everyone agrees that there should be ‘added value’ to the infrastructure, but the importance of the different kinds of added value is (still) up for debate. These discussions also form part of attempts to jurisdictionalise, for instance, when landscape architects try to carve out a niche for their own expertise in this area by pointing out that engineers can only do ‘pipes on the surface’. The engineers, of course, fight back, claiming that the landscape architects do not understand the scale of the challenge, and that no amount of landscaping can solve the cloudburst problem: ‘If you want it [the water] out in the harbour, and there’s a hill, then you need a tunnel or a big pump. Otherwise it’s impossible’, an engineer says. A tunnel or a big pump is of course something only engineers can make.

These debates have very material consequences for how exactly the planned structures are designed. In planning a specific rain garden, a landscape architect experiments with choosing the right plants and building the garden so that it can absorb enough water:

Choosing the right plants is important for the efficiency and cost of the operation in future, for biodiversity, and for its effect on people in the community. Here, the planning for the particular rain garden aims to balance these different values. In another example, the same landscape architect relates her experience of how an engineer moved the drain channel because the relocation was cheaper and more convenient:

The moving of the drain channel has put the green system under pressure. In this concrete example, the industrial (and market) qualifications were deemed more important than the green, resulting in a different kind of rain garden. In other examples, the opposite happens: biodiversity or the value of the green system is deemed worthier than the easier and more efficient way of planning.

 Blue–green solutions are being developed by engineers and landscape architects in Denmark based on public concern over the flooding of cities and climate change. The infrastructures (which tellingly are termed ‘solutions’) are solving these problems, and they originate in a compromise among industrial worth (getting water away quickly and efficiently), civic worth (creating recreational spaces for urban citizens), and green worth (preserving and improving biodiversity by creating living spaces for vegetation and wildlife). Translating this compromise into specific plans makes for a difficult task because the compromise itself is fragile. This means that even though most professionals agree on a shared vision, when they are planning concrete structures, there is much justificatory tension, critique, and debate. In contrast with traditional projects, where the plans and processes are highly standardised, planning these projects risks the ongoing possibility of questions erupting about the just arrangement of the infrastructure. These questions influence the material design and planning of the infrastructure.

Through three important moments in the Danish history of managing urban wastewater, the analysis here shows how professionals have the competence to translate public concerns into professional solutions. This process is in some ways similar to the observation made by Abbott that professions must justify their claims to a jurisdiction in the public sphere. The concept of jurisdiction is valuable for the analysis of professional work because, as my analysis has shown, it explains part of the work professionals have undertaken historically. In Abbott’s conceptualisation, though, public justifications serve only as a way of strengthening the professional jurisdiction, meaning that they are used strategically to position a specific profession in the landscape of professions and work tasks. In the theory of engagements, conversely, these public justifications support a sense of justice that is common to all people and relates to moral considerations over finding legitimate solutions to public concerns and conflicts over what is just and fair. It is thus not a legitimisation of underlying forces or interests (as in the professional interest in Abbott’s work), but a test of whether the arrangement of a given thing (here, the city) is just. Still drawing on Thévenot, I propose that professionals transform these issues of justice and the common good into specific plans and manageable actions–into an engagement in plan. In such an engagement, the discussions of the just and fair are abandoned in favour of concerns over the functionality of a plan. The city is grasped not as a just or unjust arrangement, but as something to be planned with the right means and instruments to make it functional. Instead of seeing the public justification and strategic jurisdictionalising as two sides of the same professional strategies, in line with Abbott, the regimes of engagement shows us that they are two different but related operations involving different moral competences.

This approach to analysis allows us to notice two important features in the historical development of urban wastewater planning. First, we see how the justifications have transitioned from civic and industrial worth to a more fragile compromise involving various degrees of green worth. Green worth began entering into urban wastewater planning in the 1960s, via concerns about water pollution and nature pollution in general, but has assumed a more prominent place in the current compromise of urban wastewater planning. Second, the analysis shows how translating a justification into a manageable plan is difficult, especially if the justification takes the form of an unstable and fragile compromise. This is suggested by the analysis of the professional discussions and critiques around the concrete planning of blue–green solutions. The analysis also shows how public justifications both enable professional work on urban water infrastructure while at the same time possibly constraining and complicating it, and how these critiques and disputes have material consequences for the infrastructure that is designed and planned.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).