Urban geographies of waste

ABSTRACT

Through this virtual collection, we examine how urban geographers have described, characterized, theorized, and mobilized waste in the pages of Urban Geography since 1990. The articles we have selected demonstrate the changing dimensions of waste geographies, but also reflect changing areas of interest and evolving epistemologies that have shaped urban geography, more broadly. The collection reveals how urban waste assemblages are transformed by global processes – such as urbanization, neoliberal capitalism, colonialism – and mediated through local politics, planning, and the everyday actions of waste workers and other city dwellers, both human and non-human. Importantly, the articles also demonstrate how these dynamic and always-evolving relationships, in turn, transform urban space.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• discard studies
• garbage
• rubbish
• sewage
• sanitation

This is an introduction to a virtual collection on the urban geographies of waste, which can be accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rurb20/collections/Urban_geographies_of_waste.

Trash. Garbage. Filth. Refuse. Rubbish. Sewage. Waste. These words are variations on a theme: that which humans discard. They conjure up mental images of detritus piled high, cast off, shat out, disposed of, littered about, tossed, thrown away. In the dustbin, the rubbish tip, the trash can, the garbage pile, the dumpster, the gutter, the street, the landfill, the sewer. We can imagine the stench. The flies, raccoons, the rats that nourish themselves from it, the goats, pigs, and cows left to freely graze upon it. We can imagine the sound of a garbage truck’s hydraulic jaws macerating plastic bags full of waste, the squawking of gulls circling a landfill, the squeaky wheels of a donkey cart plying dirt streets on a collection run. Indeed, waste is a fundamental – and truly visceral – component of urban space, if not by its presence, then by its orchestrated absence.

It’s been well over 50 years since anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) famously described dirt as “matter out of place” in a given society. What constitutes waste or is classified as such, she argued, is historically, geographically, and culturally dependent. But because waste has long been the domain of policy, planning, and engineering, observe Gregson and Crang (2010, p. 1026), “[t]he matter of waste becomes fixed and limited through management. Caught within a teleological fix, that which is managed as waste is waste, and that which is waste is what is managed”. Indeed, even three decades after the publication of Douglas’s canonical book, sociologist Martin O’Brien (1999) bemoaned what he saw as a persistent under-theorization of the social processes through which matter becomes “waste”.

Fortunately, scholars across the social sciences have since made considerable progress on this front, both unsettling the teleological fix Gregson and Crang identified and pushing theorization well beyond Douglas’s classic interpretation. From work on environmental justice, e-waste, recycling, food waste, and more-than-human encounters, critical theorizations of waste and wasting as a social and political process have helped to demystify the diverse actors involved in the production, management, movement, valorization, and consumption of waste at various scales. Waste is more than simply matter out of place, filth in need of removal, a by-product of production. It is also a site of capitalist accumulation, where new use and exchange values are negotiated, fixed, contested, where waste becomes a marketized commodity in its own right (Gidwani, 2013; Knapp, 2016; Knuth et al., 2019; Romero, 2021), and where power relations are established, strengthened, challenged, and dismantled.

In their foundational book on the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of “discard studies” (a field in which geographers are well represented), Liboiron and Lepawsky (2022) describe wasting as a technique of power where “some things are maintained, counted as good, become normal, and thus become uneventful while others struggle for recognition, are debated, or are discarded” (p. 62). Discarding, in this context, thus turns on “the ability to classify and eradicate” (p. 127); wasting and discarding are thus necessary to the maintenance of power. Understanding how waste is defined and valued, what these definitions are applied to, by whom and to what ends, as well as struggles over these definitions, is therefore crucial. Who stands to benefit from waste and how it is managed – and, crucially, who stands to lose – is also at stake. Indeed, the adage that “one person’s garbage is another’s gold”, hackneyed as it may be, illustrates an important conceit that cuts across waste scholarship: what constitutes waste is fundamentally tied to its valuation and its valorization (Gidwani, 2013; Moore, 2012). Moreover, waste’s value is relational, and therefore dynamic and often unstable. And it is contested (Fredericks, 2018; Millington & Lawhon, 2019).

Through this special collection, we examine how urban geographers have described, characterized, theorized, and mobilized waste in the pages of this journal since 1990. The articles we have selected demonstrate the changing dimensions of waste geographies, but also reflect changing areas of interest and evolving epistemologies that have shaped urban geography, more broadly, over the past few decades. As we are keen to demonstrate with these contributions to Urban Geography, waste is not just a material thing to be managed, flushed or carted away, rendered invisible by the “smoothing mechanisms” of waste management infrastructure (Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022, p. 89), but also a space of urban politics that is at once discursive and material, a socio-technical assemblage whose various actors, objects, and interactions produce urban space.

A brief note on method is warranted here. We dove into the journal’s archives, using a dozen or so keywords to guide our search: waste, garbage, trash, sewage, sewer, toxics, landfill, incinerator, e-waste, recycling, compost, circular economy … and perhaps others that we’ve forgotten! Each keyword brought up a few more articles to add to our stockpile. On a first pass, we discarded those seemed only peripherally related to waste. We decided at this point to also exclude articles related to air, water, and soil pollution if there wasn’t explicit mention of waste or processes of wasting, or if the paper didn’t have a clearly urban dimension. This decision may rankle some readers, given that most waste in the world is industrial solid waste, in terms of weight, volume, and toxicity (Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022, p. 9). And, as by-products of production and consumption, mine tailings, airborne particulates from a factory, heavy metals from vehicle exhaust, or geo-aqueous plumes from a chemical spill, can each be considered forms of waste. However, we ultimately made the decision to take a narrower view of waste simply to keep the collection down to a manageable size. After this initial triage, we ended up with a total of 105 papers that we began sorting into several large groups. As is often the case with categorization, many articles could fit easily into multiple groups. Taking into consideration both the publication date and location of the study, we eventually settled on six broad themes and selected three to four articles that best seem to represent each:

1. Hazardous waste and environmental justice. As exemplified by Lake and Johns (1990), early waste scholarship appearing in the journal investigated the impacts of hazardous and industrial waste facilities in American cities, including how siting decisions reflect and contribute to uneven exposure that is class-based and racialized. This scholarship arose in conversation with – and in solidarity with – the burgeoning US environmental justice (EJ) movement, which took form in the 1980s and 1990s at the confluence of civil rights and anti-toxics activism. We’ve also included two articles (Heiman, 1996; Pulido et al., 1996) from a special issue of Urban Geography on environmental racism (Volume 17, Issue 5). Complementing Lake and John’s contribution – and presaging the rise of more critical EJ work and recent work on racial capitalism (Pellow, 2017; Ranganathan & Bonds, 2022) – both reveal how environmental racism and class-based discrimination operate through seemingly neutral urban planning decisions.

2. Sanitation infrastructure and uneven urban development. The central role that sanitation infrastructure plays in urban development is another central theme that our dive into the Urban Geography archives revealed (Marsh et al., 2010; Phinney, 2023; Plyushteva & Schwanen, 2023). Without adopting an explicit EJ framework, these articles describe the uneven development of urban sanitation infrastructure and the compounded inequalities (often racialized) both leading to and arising from such uneven access to municipal sanitation infrastructure, widely assumed to be fundamental to modern, urban life (albeit operating in the background). If Marsh et al. expose the racism that prevents connecting to sanitation infrastructure, then Phinney focuses on the mechanisms leading to its disconnection, illustrating how access to urban infrastructure is racialized under neoliberal capitalism. Sanitation infrastructure has long been an area of interest for geographers working in and on cities in the “global South”, as well (Arefin, 2019; McFarlane & Silver, 2017; Ranganathan, 2014). In this vein, Plyushteva and Schwanen reveals how for many living in cities like Manila, waste and risk are intertwined and disastrous events a normal, rather than exceptional, aspect of infrastructural functioning.

3. Global waste flows and their governance. While toxic waste played a central role in earlier, EJ-inspired waste geographies, it has also served as empirical fodder for work on global waste flows (Gille, 2012; O’Neill, 2019), a third key area of scholarship we identified in our review. In attending to waste’s movement through value chains within a global political economy of waste, this work elucidates not only the scalar dimensions of waste, but also how “waste regimes” (Gille, 2012) emerge in a particular time and place as the result of a convergence of technologies, values, preferences, choices, governance structures, and politics, and, as Gustafson (2021) illustrates, by the materiality of the waste itself. Electronic waste, or e-waste, has come to epitomize these global waste flows and is the object of several studies published in Urban Geography, three of which we include here (Grant & Oteng-Ababio, 2012; Reddy, 2016; Wang et al., 2023). Such work reveals how informal urban economies are intertwined with the formal economies of production and waste in other countries. Also highlighted are the various ways that the state frames e-waste to justify its integration into local economies, illustrating the discursive power of waste, which we highlight as another central theme emerging from our exploration of the archives.

4. The discursive power of waste. Geographers have delved deeply into the diversity of ways that waste discourses intersect with the construction of social hierarchies and thus structure inclusion and exclusion (Dillon, 2014; Goldstein, 2013; McClintock, 2021). We include four such articles from the Urban Geography archives here. Articles by Unnikrishnan et al. (2021) and Wideman (2020) both examine how modernist, hygienist discourse structured the colonial and settler-colonial organization of space in India and Canada, respectively, while Speer (2016) focuses on the persistence of such discourse via the exclusion of homeless people from sanitation infrastructure in California. Finally, as Narayanan (2023) demonstrates, waste’s discursive role also extends to more-than-human relationships; some species, particularly those that scavenge what we humans have cast off or excreted, are deemed waste species, reinforcing social status at times mobilized to incite and justify violence against both human and animal waste workers. This leads us to another important theme emerging from the journal’s vaults: the labor of waste.

5. Waste labor and livelihoods. Articulating with geography’s growing engagement with “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) and everyday governance (Cornea et al., 2017), waste scholars have begun to pay more attention to how everyday, informal, and mundane waste management practices together mediate waste flows. As scholarship on waste handlers in the global South has demonstrated, waste often serves as a site of contestation, negotiation, and transformation within wider struggles for justice, where the most disenfranchized can exert their agency and power (Arefin, 2019; Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Millar, 2018; Yates & Gutberlet, 2011), an insight scholars are beginning to address in the North, as well (Parizeau, 2017; Vinegar et al., 2014). The materiality of waste, too, plays an important role therein. Indeed, it is the materiality of rotting waste that makes the laboring body of the waste picker a vital technology of infrastructure (Fredericks, 2018). In keeping with these wider trends in waste geographies and discard studies, several articles in this collection have emphasized the important and undervalued – and often informal – role of waste workers, while highlighting waste labor as a space of resistance to neoliberalization (McTague & Jansen, 2013; Tripathy & Carrière, 2020; Zapata Campos et al., 2023). These articles reveal the impact of neoliberal restructuring and deregulation of waste management on informal waste labor, and thus on the metabolic functioning and esthetic value of the city. Only when waste workers strike (and thus disrupt these metabolic flows and esthetics) do they become visible.

6. Rethinking waste. Finally, if most of the articles on waste published in Urban Geography have clearly documented the ways that waste flows render urban space uneven and inequitable, many authors also invite us to rethink how we understand waste, and how such retheorization may ultimately lead to the reconfiguration of waste management (and of cities, more broadly) in ways that are ultimately more just and ecologically sound. The three papers we’ve selected to represent this theme (Bassens et al., 2020; Clement & Bunce, 2023; Sseviiri et al., 2022) appear to have little in common at first blush but are unified in their promotion of new analytical perspectives and the potential transformations that may follow. In their friendly critique of “circular economy” approaches, Bassens et al. argue urban geographers can contribute by critiquing dominant narratives and imagining transformative alternatives for urban waste management, a perspective that Sseviri and colleagues share. Attention to the heterogeneity of waste infrastructures not only challenges modernist imaginaries of infrastructural (under)development, it allows for a clearer understanding of the exclusions emerging from existing municipal waste policy. As the contribution from Clement and Bunce illustrate, such a consideration should extend to the more-than-human relationships intrinsic to waste management, as well.

New frontiers of urban waste geographies?

Together, the articles in this special collection reveal how urban waste assemblages are transformed by global processes – such as urbanization, neoliberal capitalism, colonialism – and mediated through local politics, planning, and the everyday actions of waste workers and other city dwellers, both human and non-human. Importantly, they also demonstrate how these dynamic and always-evolving relationships, in turn, transform urban space, more broadly. Our foray into the Urban Geography archives not only allows for a retrospective view of where we’ve been, but also provides fodder for thinking through what might come next for urban geography’s engagement with waste.

Just as we were wrapping up this review, an article entitled “Befouling the final frontier” appeared in the New York Times Magazine, accompanied by a clever illustration of a garbage can-shaped rocket flying into outer space (Green, 2023). The article’s focus on the expansion of capitalist markets into space and related questions of governance of the detritus orbiting Earth articulates well with recent interest by critical geographers in questions of governance, geopolitics, extraction (Dunnett et al., 2019; Klinger, 2021), and yes, waste (Hunter & Nelson, 2021), in outer space. While the “urban” aspect is perhaps not yet fully developed, exploring this waste frontier resonates both with calls for urban political ecologists to move beyond “methodological cityism” (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2014) and planetary urbanization arguments that extend beyond the earth’s atmosphere (Brenner, 2013). More generally, however, the example of space detritus underscores the need to continue thinking through the social, political, and ecological relations between waste/wasting and the production urban space, particularly where the frontiers of wasting and waste-based accumulation are located far from urban centres. How might we examine mining or industrial agriculture, for example, through a dual lens of waste and the urban?

The growing engagement between discard studies and geographic scholarship on racial capitalism and settler colonialism presents another potential waypoint for future work in urban waste geography. Indeed, the dialectic relation between the “racialization of space” and “the spatialization of race” (Lipsitz, 2007) is often apparent in spaces of wasting. Waste thus offers an excellent lens through which to examine racial capitalism and its role in the production of urban space and in processes of racialization and territorial dispossession, especially given the centrality of discourse to such processes, both historic and contemporary (Goldstein, 2013; Hird & Zahara, 2017). How do waste and wasting lay the groundwork for or shore up racial regimes of property (Bhandar, 2018) or other foundational logics of settler-colonial urbanism (Dorries et al., 2022; McClintock & Guimont Marceau, 2023; Simpson & Hugill, 2022), both discursively and materially? How do colonial “ruins” and “debris” (Stoler, 2013) enter into new constellations of power through waste and wasting?

Growing calls in urban studies to think from and with the South (Lawhon, 2020; Myers, 2020; Roy, 2009; Silver, 2021) suggest another fruitful direction for urban waste geographies. Millington and Lawhon (2019, p. 1044) describe how work on waste in the South has tended to focus on informality, creating a dichotomy between the North as “formal, (increasingly) sustainable, and a successful model to emulate” and the South as “informal, crisis-ridden and failing” (p. 1046). Moving beyond such binaries is key to a fundamental rethinking of waste, both on epistemological and ontological terms. The excellent work on waste labor and the everyday governance of waste in Southern cities offers excellent insights into how we might better understand the heterogeneous configurations of waste infrastructure in Northern cities and the multiple forms of labor that are central to them. What might we learn from Lagos about waste and wasting in Los Angeles? And what might thinking of waste in London as a “vital infrastructure” (Fredericks, 2018) reveal about other infrastructural configurations in that city and others?

Bassens et al. (2020) emphasize the tremendous role that urban geographers can play in questioning hegemonic narratives of waste and wasting. The twenty articles we’ve included in this virtual collection are testament to what the geographic imagination can bring to discard studies. But they represent only a tiny sampling of what has become a vibrant and evolving area of study, and the questions we raise here point to only a few of the many paths of inquiry we might follow. How these questions and others end up shedding new light on the urban is another key question to consider – and one that Urban Geography’s editors tend to repeat ad nauseum during the review process! But as the articles in this collection make quite clear, waste is much more than a material flow to be measured and modeled. It is relational, dynamic, negotiated and contested, and a vital site of politics, a space of human and non-human interaction central the production of urban space. What more could a geographer ask for?!

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Development Grant number 430-2021-00836).