Global Garbage

Urban imaginaries of waste, excess, and abandonment

Christoph Lindner, Miriam Meissner, Christoph Lindner, Miriam Meissner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138841390
• eBook ISBN: 9781317554424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Global Garbage examines the ways in which garbage, in its diverse forms, is being produced, managed, experienced, imagined, circulated, concealed, and aestheticized in contemporary urban environments and across different creative and cultural practices. The book explores the increasingly complex relationship between globalization and garbage in locations such as Beirut, Detroit, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Manchester, Naples, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Tehran. In particular, the book examines how, and under what conditions, contemporary imaginaries of excess, waste, and abandonment perpetuate – but also sometimes counter – the imbalances of power that are frequently associated with the global metropolitan condition. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to the fields of anthropology, architecture, film and media studies, geography, urban studies, sociology, and cultural analysis.

1
Globalization, garbage, and the urban environment

Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner

Global cities and garbage

Garbage is increasingly central to contemporary globalization debates. An online search for the phrase ‘global garbage’ produces results such as ‘global garbage crisis’, ‘global garbage detection’, ‘global garbage management’, ‘global garbage summit’, and many more. Garbage has become a global concern. It is implicated in the transnational flow of goods, people, capital, data, and images that thinkers like Arjun Appadurai (1996) consider constitutive of globalization. However, in contrast to these forms of flow, garbage can also circulate globally in other, less obvious ways. For instance, garbage can circulate involuntarily, as alarming ecological reports on the many tons of plastic debris drifting around the world’s oceans reveal (Derraik 2002). It can circulate for the sake of elimination, as in international garbage management and disposal programmes. Or it can even circulate as a commodity in its own right in a transnational ‘second order market’, where garbage is bought and sold for recycling or the extraction of raw materials.

Cities play a central role in this context. The average urban resident reportedly produces around four times as much solid waste as a person living in the countryside (Hoornweg et al. 2013: 616). Consequently, with more than half of the world’s population already living in cities (United Nations 2014), urban population growth is expected to outpace waste reduction efforts in the near future (Hoornweg et al. 2013). For this very practical and urgent reason, cities also form key sites for experimentation with new strategies of waste management – as in the case of San Francisco’s Zero Waste programme, which has the goal of sending ‘nothing to landfill or incineration’ by 2020 (San Francisco Environment, n.d.). Similarly, the concept of ‘urban metabolism’ has recently gained renewed attention in urban studies and planning. The urban metabolism approach seeks to apply a more holistic approach to urban garbage management, taking into account ‘the sum total of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy, and elimination of waste’ (C. Kennedy 2007).

At the same time, due to elaborate recycling systems, specific types of garbage become potentially valuable commodities, whose collection and processing is predominantly carried out in urban environments. In Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade, for instance, Adam Minter (2013) shows how the trade of specific waste materials constitutes a highly elaborate and extremely globalized market. In this worldwide market, waste materials are traded for the extraction of valuable scrap metals. Crucial points to make in this context are that contemporary global production and trading are coordinated via a network of what Saskia Sassen has termed ‘global cities’ (Sassen 1991), and that recycling has managerial urban nerve centres – such as the city of Shijiao, China, which processes around 20 million pounds of imported Christmas tree lights per year for the extraction of copper. This copper is then resold to neighbouring wire, power cord, and smartphone factories (Minter 2013: 1–2). Specific cities and regions are thus implicated in what happens before and after consumption.

Yet cities are more than just the main producers, managers, and marketplaces of waste materials. Garbage has also become prominent in urban social and artistic practices. Examples range from HA Schult’s haunting armies of ‘Trash People’ (Figures 1.1 and 1.2) placed in remote locations in nature, as well as on central squares of prominent European cities such as Brussels, Cologne, Moscow, and Rome, to London-based street artist Francisco de Pájaro’s ‘Art is Trash’ installations, made of urban detritus and assembled at different, seemingly random city sites.

Figure 1.1 ‘Roman People’, 2007, installation by HA Schult (photograph by T. Hoepker. Courtesy of the artist).

Similarly, contemporary films, such as Lucy Walker’s feature documentary Waste Land (2010), increasingly turn to the topic of urban garbage. Waste Land documents artist Vik Muniz’s collaboration with catadores (pickers of recyclable materials) at Jardim Gramacho, one of the world’s largest landfills near Rio de Janeiro. The documentary shows how Muniz and catadores assemble waste materials into artworks, which eventually get sold at a prestigious London-based auction house. Garbage is thus transformed into a commodity and circulates in the global art market. At the same time, Muniz’s intervention is presented not only as an artistic project but also as a transnational social project, raising questions about global inequality and environmental justice. In this respect, Waste Land belongs to a broader tendency in contemporary culture to associate garbage – in its diverse forms and articulations – with issues of global economics, politics, and what social geographer David Harvey has termed ‘uneven geographic development’ (Harvey 2006). As the global flow of garbage can serve both the accumulation of profits (as in the trading of garbage for the extraction of raw materials) and the redistribution of risks, questions about where, how, and for what purposes garbage ‘flows’ are critical.

Figure 1.2 ‘Arctic People’, 2011, installation by HA Schult (photograph by G. Battista. Courtesy of the artist).

Beyond that, contemporary social and artistic engagements with garbage raise questions that evoke the Lefebvrian notion of a ‘right to the city’ – the demand for a ‘transformed and renewed right to urban life’ (Lefebvre 1996 [1968]: 159), to be realized in both practical and material ways. Garbage in this context becomes an allegory, whose characteristics stand for much broader problems and dynamics linked to globalization and its impact on urban development, such as the proliferation of urban slums, the acceleration of urban sprawl, the rise of transnational urban migration, and the privatization of public urban space and housing.

Five discourses on garbage

Responding to these issues – as well as to the broader role that cities play in garbage production, trading, debate, and reflection – this book develops an interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational perspective on the relationship between garbage, globalization, and contemporary cities. In particular, it focuses on how that relationship is articulated in global media and urban culture. In so doing, the book engages and problematizes five critical discourses on garbage that tend to dominate existing scholarship.

The first of these comes from the urban planning and environmental studies perspective, which assesses environmental, social, and economic risks resulting from garbage proliferation, as well as the various possibilities of urban garbage management. A particular challenge that this perspective deals with is evaluating the global ecological impacts of garbage proliferation, while at the same time seeking to offer locally applicable solutions to garbage processing and reduction. Moreover, research on the environmental impacts of global garbage is confronted with the challenge of processing an extensive amount of largely unstructured data. As Zsuzsa Gille notes, ‘there are no statistics on overall waste volumes. Instead, data are published on seemingly distinct categories, such as municipal waste, manufacturing waste’ (Gille 2007: 15). International waste classification systems similarly vary and continuously change, which, according to Gille, ‘also has to do something with the fact that the complexity of materials we produce intentionally or unintentionally increases faster than the capability of our classificatory systems’ (Gille 2007: 17).

The second perspective on garbage and cities may be described as socio-anthropological. It analyses the socio-material practices as well as the attitudes that people – in particular urban inhabitants – develop in relation to different forms and sites of garbage. Socio-anthropological accounts of garbage practices and attitudes frequently work in the tradition of anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose assertion that dirt is ‘matter out of place’ – ‘the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter’ (Douglas 2002 [1966]: 44) – inspires a critical reflection on garbage as the product of cultural systems of structuring and signification. Another focus of this perspective is on the socio-cultural environments of garbage creation and processing. Much research has been devoted, for instance, to the practice of garbage picking, stretching from scavenging as a subsistence strategy to dumpster diving as an activist means of consumer critique and subversion. Finally, the socio-anthropological study of garbage also comprises research on the role of cultural values, symbols, and education in relation to wasting and recycling in everyday life.

The third dominant perspective in contemporary scholarship on garbage analyses artists’ use of waste material in works of assemblage and bricolage, as well as authors’ and filmmakers’ various engagements – both literal and symbolic – with trash. Crucial to such studies are the shifting cultural meanings that waste materials can acquire due to different artistic practices and art-historical paradigms. Gillian Whiteley has argued that ‘with “the nomadic gathering of precarious materials and products” using “recycling (a method) and chaotic arrangement (an aesthetic)”, the rag-picker and the bricoleur … present powerful models for recent and current artistic practice’ (Whiteley 2011: 8). The practice of garbage assemblage thus offers methods and aesthetics for contemporary artistic experimentation that have the potential to combine, restage, blur, or destabilize established cultural values and meanings.

In this way, artistic engagements with waste connect to a fourth perspective on garbage: the philosophical perspective. This fourth perspective engages the concept of garbage in relation to culture and ideology, including questions of metaphysics. The philosophical perspective both extends and problematizes the notion of garbage as ‘matter out of place’ by asking what qualifies garbage beyond the negative definition that it eludes established systems of classification and value. Beyond that, metaphysical questionings of garbage often prompt a critical questioning of the economic, symbolic, and epistemological systems that produce garbage in its various forms – such as trash, rubbish, residue, etc. Treating garbage as a lens through which Western culture and modernity are examined, John Scanlan argues that garbage ‘utterances refer to the excrement of meaning itself. For example, it is when something means nothing to you that it becomes “filth,” “shit,” “rubbish,” “garbage,” and so on’ (Scanlan 2005: 10). As the italicization of the words ‘to you’ indicates, the designation of something as garbage thus also reveals semiotic and epistemological limits of the designating subject. Moreover, what Scanlan’s focus on meaning (‘means nothing to you’) shows is that garbage may extend the sphere of material objects by referring to immaterial entities such as knowledge, language, and symbolism.

It is also in response to this last inflection that urban studies and geography have recently developed a fifth perspective on what may provisionally be termed ‘spatial garbage’. Spatial garbage can be associated with terms such as ‘badlands’, ‘blank spaces’, ‘derelict areas’, ‘No Man’s Land’, ‘spaces of indeterminacy’, ‘terrain vague’, ‘urban deserts’, ‘vacant land’, ‘wasteland’, and the list goes on. Critiquing contemporary discourses of urban planning, politics, and architecture concerned with these types of spaces, Gil M. Doron (2007a) has argued that these spaces are often integrated in some system of informal usage and valorization. Yet, in spite of the practical use of these spaces in everyday life, hegemonic discourses tend to devalue them.

It is partly in response to this dynamic that some branches of urban studies, as well as contemporary visual culture, have shown renewed interest in urban ruins. Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor, for example, have called attention to the way that ‘we seem to be in the midst of a contemporary Ruinenlust [ruin obsession], which carries strange echoes of earlier obsessions with ruination and decay’ (2013: 1). This Ruinenlust shifts between the celebration/romanticization of ruins as spaces of experimentation, subversion, and/or embodied spatial practices on the one hand, and dystopian portrayals of ruins as manifestations of crisis, decline, and destruction on the other. Yet, as DeSilvey and Edensor (2013: 15) conclude, ‘the contemporary hunger for ruins transcends a simple romantic/dystopic dichotomy, and speaks also to urgent desires to experience and conceive of space otherwise’. Both in urban theory and in the cultural imagination, ‘spatial garbage’ is thus treated ambiguously. This ambiguity is further complicated by the ways in which the notion of garbage is not only associated with spaces of ruination and abandonment, but also with the excesses of urban construction and development – such as the excesses of postmodern urbanism that architect Rem Koolhaas has conceptualized as ‘junkspace’ (Koolhaas 2002).

Of course, these various perspectives on garbage and cities overlap and inform each other. Yet they are also marked by considerable disconnections and paradoxes, which merit a more nuanced, interdisciplinary consideration. In Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash (2011), for example, Whiteley notes that, ‘paradoxically, whilst the social outcasts and destitute children of India process lethal cyberjunk, in other parts of the world it is fashionable to work with trash’ (Whiteley 2011: 6). In order to examine this paradox, it is important to go beyond its moral scolding (over Western escapism and a lack of global thinking) to develop a strong interdisciplinary critique of the various yet interconnected forms and meanings that garbage takes on in different global contexts.

In principle, this demand echoes Gille’s observation that:

Scholars studying waste in one form or another have been speaking at cross-purposes because they operate with different implicit definitions of waste. Especially unfortunate has been economists’ assumption that waste is merely an attribute of efficiency, but public discourse has also been hampered by an environmentalist impulse to reduce the problem of waste to a problem of pollution.

(Gille 2007: 14)

Gille’s argument holds that cross-disciplinary perspectives can enrich the study of global garbage and help develop more productive approaches to dealing with garbage in its differentiated forms and localities. In this book, we seek to make a contribution to such a project by exploring how garbage is used, conceptualized, and imagined in relation to different urban contexts and cultures around the globe. To that end, in the next section we will take the concepts of ‘global garbage’ and ‘urban imaginaries’ as starting points for critical reflection, tracing how the chapters in this volume engage different aspects of the interrelation of globalization, garbage, and the urban environment.

Global garbage, urban imaginaries

In the tradition of Henri Lefebvre’s (2009 [1974]) theory of the social production of space, critical urban studies have developed the concept of urban imaginary to refer to symbolic, cognitive, and discursive constructions of urban space and living. The idea is that such constructions determine not only the ways in which cities are conceived in, and structured through, urban planning and architecture, but also the ways in which people relate to, engage with, behave in, and interpret cities. Urban imaginaries are, for instance, constructed by means of artistic practice – such as literature, film, photography, and other forms of visual/textual culture – but also through everyday practices of language, communication, and street culture, as well as through top-down practices of urban design, development, policy, and place-making.

Crucially, the ways in which cities deal with garbage also contributes to the formation of urban imaginaries. The city of Guiyu in Southern China, for instance, has received much critical attention internationally because of its function as a global centre of electronic waste processing, and because of the dramatic health risks to which workers in Guiyu are exposed. Guiyu forms an extreme example, in that its global image is almost inseparable from its role in the global processing of e-waste.

Naples is another example of a city whose portrayal in the global news media often revolves around garbage and the alleged failures of urban waste management. Yet, as Nick Dines shows in ‘Writing rubbish about Naples’ (Chapter 8), which analyses the mediatization of Naples’ urban refuse crisis in 2007, this image is often misconstrued, foreclosing a systemic political understanding of the city and its garbage problems. Central to Dines’ argument is the insight that the way the city’s problems are perceived and handled is shaped not only by its extended history of garbage crises, but also by its exceptionalist image as an ‘extraordinary city’.

The role of city-specific local conditions in the politics of garbage is also the topic of Anne Berg’s chapter on ‘Waste streams and garbage publics in Los Angeles and Detroit’ (Chapter 6). Comparing the garbage crises that hit Los Angeles and Detroit in the 1980s, Berg shows how the urban transformation of garbage processing practices and technologies is not just the result of global patterns but also reproduces local histories of public debate, citizenship, and social-racial inequality. Garbage, Berg argues, reproduces the systems that generate it.

From this analytical perspective, a first interdisciplinary conceptualization of global garbage takes shape. If garbage reflects societal structures and politics, it may be treated a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Globalization, garbage, and the urban environment
• PART I Waste
• PART II Excess
• PART III Abandonment
• References
• Index