Unhuman Entities that Shaped a Century: Non- Anthropocentric Analysis of the Case of Great Stink and Pandemic, Victorian London

Abstract

The history of architectural and urban design has expanded its scope and started adopting new philosophical approaches from other disciplines to explore the built environment. Theorist discusses whether we still live in a humanist world where a human being has more priority over the unhuman things or not to answer that; should we design architecture and urban within an anthropocentric approach. As a recent pandemic show, things that are not human, like animals or viruses, could control and navigate a new style of living. This research will introduce Bruno Latour's ANT and Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as a new constructive method to analyse how human and unhuman bodies are equally the affective actors of daily practices in the urban realm. 19th-century Great Stink and epidemic in Victorian London will be a case study to picture urban dwellers of London that shaped determined the destiny of health and hygiene of London in 1858.