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Paper short abstract:

I present the preliminary findings of my ethnographic research and show how technocratic and bourgeois imaginations of urban ecologies are dispossessing informal waste workers and denying them access to waste and waste work(spaces), and how they are navigating these precarious urban ecologies.

Paper long abstract:

Indian cities are transitioning towards more modernist, techno-managerial and capital-intensive approaches to urban environmentalism. While these transitions are deemed normative pathways to address the ‘polycrisis’, these depoliticised and technocratic imaginaries and practices primarily cater to the normative imaginations of the urban bourgeoisie, and, at times, become violent and exclusionary for the urban labouring poor. Despite informal waste workers’ crucial, effective and efficient contributions to reproducing the desired city(scapes), their knowledge, labour and socio-spatial practices are delegitimised, their questions, claims and contestations are rendered invisible from urban ecological imaginations, and they scarcely get featured in urban environmental scholarship. This paper draws on a multi-sited ethnographic study of waste infrastructures that I employed in Patna as part of my PhD research. I present my preliminary findings, arguing how informal waste workers are subject to elitist and casted urban sensibilities, imaginaries, infrastructures and practices, which, although fetishise and benefit from their cheap, dirty, exploitative, and precarious labour, continue to dispossess them of their labour and livelihoods and deny their claims to city-zenship. Foregrounding their everyday labour and lives, my research critically examines how informal waste workers embody, contest and navigate the changing waste infrastructures, drawing on their intersectional identities, social relations and subjectivities, and using the precarious temporality of the waste infrastructures to their advantage. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of 'informality' as a critical analytic site to better understand how in this ‘polycrisis’, informal workers contest and navigate uneven, unjust, uncertain, and unfree urban ecologies in their everyday lives.