Waste

Urban settlements produce waste of multifarious kinds through their very functioning. The management of and failure to manage such wastes have often been taken as indexes of civilization— that is the spirit of civitas, and urban citizenship. Modern technologies have emphasized the hiding of waste and its removal far from the city as speedily and unobtrusively as possible. This distancing reflects the moral coding of waste—as both wasteful, shameful even, and thus symbolically [Page 960]contaminating those near it. The disappearance of waste may be said to lead to both a popular and academic oversight of waste in urban studies as a literally invisible issue. Wastes of various sorts reflect the human, animal, industrial, and social processes of urban life, and they have been intrinsic to the economies, cultures and societies of all cities. This entry will think through urban wastes in four ways. It will examine its spatial, then symbolic, then economic dimensions and conclude with a look at current shifts in governance of waste. This entry will focus on solid wastes rather than that carried in sewer systems or wastes of energy or intangible wastes of, say, time or talent.

Thinking about cities through waste is both necessary and revealing. Waste is a commonsensical term, but closer scrutiny reveals that it is freighted with implications. Thus, it has general negative connotations about a loss of resource or a loss of opportunity. It has also implied a temporality and spatiality about something leaving a bounded system—coming to the end of its life or being moved outside the system. In both cases, it is often connected conceptually and materially to wastelands, as environments laid waste or contaminated. Underneath most of this, there is also the traditional sense, then, that waste is whatever is left from a given process to be disposed of later. However, this linear narrative overlooks that what is a waste from one process may be a resource to another. Equally, there may be a fuzzy line between what is a waste and a stock of material awaiting processing. This entry thus uses conceptualizations from different traditions to unpack waste.