Living with waste: minor infracultures of sanitation in Shanghai, China

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two inner-city Shanghai neighbourhoods (a shikumen community and a penghu settlement), this article examines how sanitation persists under cramped living conditions and partial infrastructural provision. Working with weak theory and the minor, the empirical account stays close to infrastructure-in-use – night pots and xiaodaokou, gutters doing the work of pipes, tolerated in-home fixtures – and to the routines that hold them together (emptying-cleaning-drying-storing; off-peak use; odour management; handwashing). The label of minor infracultures is employed as a sensitising one for the repeatable, non-scaling practices that subtly rearrange infrastructural logics from within while remaining immanent to dominant networks. Rather than adjudicating adequacy or prescribing alternatives, the article foregrounds sociomaterial cohabitation as a mode of endurance in which cleanliness is achieved through sequencing and care, not erasure. The contribution is empirical, analytical, and conceptual, offering an ethnographic angle that stays with the ordinary operations by which urban life is kept going amid infrastructural incompleteness.