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- Convenors:
-
Paolo Grassi
(University of Milano Bicocca)
Ferdinando Fava (University of Padova/LAA-LAVUE UMR 7218 CNRS)
Kees Koonings (Utrecht University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B419
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The panel wants to analyse how urban wastes link space and justice, connecting flows of social actors that constitute arenas of power relations, conflicts, resistances, and stigmatization processes, among different areas and regions in an increasingly and paradoxically "pro-environmental" world.
Long Abstract:
Urban waste could be a peculiar medium to analyse the relation between justice and space. In fact, fractured places around the world show oppositions and connections between marginalized "dirty" spaces and "green" and "unpolluted" areas. Through wastes, spatial exclusion coalesces with symbolic and social isolation. Thus, waste is not only a culturally significant element usually related to notions of dirty, clean, and hygiene in the anthropological common discourse, but also a material product that has tangible effects on the world at several levels, included the juridical and spatial ones (its location, distribution and industry). As stated by Joshua Reno in a recent article: "As they circulate and deform, wastes mix with people and places, with which they mutually transform or become together" ("Waste and Waste Management", in Annual Review of Anthropology, 2015: 557-72). In this mutual transformation social actors interact in conflictive and/or cooperative ways. Localization of wastes (dumps, spaces for trash collection, formal and informal waste markets, etc.) let us think about social and spatial zonings in a original way. Tacking into account these considerations, this panel welcomes either ethnographic or anthropological papers interesting in analysing the connections between spatial justice and waste management; waste, social inequalities, and stigmatization processes (and resistance to them); waste trafficking and waste recycling.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper presents some results of my ethnographic research at the Mbeubeuss dump, set up in the 1960s in the outskirts of Dakar (Senegal). By analyzing the social stratification of boudioumane (waste-pikers) community, I will focus on the link between spatial justice and informal waste management.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents some results from an ethnographic research project I am conducting at the Mbeubeuss dump, set up in the 1960s in the outskirts of Dakar (Senegal). Mbeubeuss, over the years, has given rise to socio-economic relations which are (directly and indirectly) caught up with the treatment of waste. Thus, it is contributing significantly to the urbanization of neighboring municipalities and the consolidation of migratory inflows from the country's rural areas.
Moreover, since the Sixties a community of boudioumane (waste-pickers) lives and works inside the landfill. In public representations at the local and international levels, the Mbeubeuss dump is depicted as a closed world that unfolds parallel to the social context in which it is located; the informality of working practices at the dump are seen as corresponding to inevitable social, economic and political marginality. By analyzing the social stratification of waste-pickers community living and working in the landfill, I will focus on the link between spatial justice and informal waste management, and social stigmatization in contemporary Dakar. Mbeubeuss represents both the cause of a long-lasting environmental crisis and the opportunity for many workers to build a life for themselves, concealing its role in generating forms of vulnerability and normalizing the production of social inequalities.
From an anthropological point of view, the indifference characterizing public policies - that de-politicize the environment and its management - and the "bottom-up" efforts to reshape economic and social processes show and materialize the link between waste, people, and places.
Paper short abstract:
In the last few years, the public space of a popular neighbourhood of Milan has become more and more dirty. The members of two local Committees try to face this problem. Also through waste, the spatial and symbolic exclusion of that neighbourhood overlaps with its social isolation.
Paper long abstract:
Poor urban areas are often more exposed to environmental problems than the areas where urban elites live. A public neighbourhood of Milan called San Siro - where I am carrying out an ethnographic research since January 2017 - seems to confirm this statement. In fact, in the last few years, in contrast to the rich and renewed area in which the neighbourhood is located, the public space of San Siro is getting more and more polluted. Trash is abandoned in several corners, streets are dirty and unclean. AMSA, the company that manages the waste collection of Milan, regularly comes through the neighbourhood, but nothing really changes. My paper will describe how two local Committees try to face this issue through distinct strategies. The first one (Comitato Abitanti - Committee of the Residents) is connected to a Milanese social movement that openly fights for the "right to the city"; the second one (Comitato di Quartiere - Committee of the Neighbourhood) is formed by a group of elderly Italian residents and it only partially corresponds to one of the "Nimby" ("Not in my backyard") groups well studied by some Italian sociologists. Despite their different visions, the two Committees pursue a very similar objective when implementing actions aimed to set up an unpolluted public space: deconstructing the territorial stigma, i.e. demanding a spatial justice against the social isolation that affect their everyday life.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how waste (re)produces spatial hierarchies & social exclusion using contestations & negotiations around geographies of urban space and notions of environmentalism. It explores how certain materials, spaces & bodies are made disposable while some are rendered desirable or valuable
Paper long abstract:
This paper narrates a story of a city through its waste as it analyzes how metabolic-flows (re)produces urban space. The study is based on ethnographic research conducted at Deonar, Mumbai- a marshy dump-site surrounded by a slum (Shivaji Nagar) of resettled communities displaced due to infrastructural development in other parts of the city. Around 1,50,000 waste workers are estimated to be informally associated with waste recycling economy in Mumbai and roughly 2000 are dependent on this dump for their livelihood. These ragpickers suffer from toxicity and pollution due to their proximity to the site.
A massive fire at the dump in January 2016 led to the ban of ragpickers resulting from sudden outrage of the middle class, gated communities, politicians against environmental pollution. This resulted in 'criminalization' of ragpickers by the state and increased surveillance and security. Eventually, the ragpickers resisted overtly or covertly to access the dump while organizing protests to claim their rights on 'waste' for survival. This event is used as a defining moment to 1. assemble complex interactions of multiple actors involved at the site, 2. unpack the dynamic accretions of flows, materials, practices and discourses. This reveals the micro-politics and ongoing socio-spatial struggles of inhabiting the city mediated by various material flows by deploying Lefebvre's 'Right to the city' approach. I also explore the different meanings of waste, contingent upon its location (Mary Douglas) which is based on notions of purity & pollution, inside & outside, clean & dirty which are culturally embedded
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my ethnographic research in Auckland, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, I discuss urban processes of power, hierarchies and exclusions that emerge from the establishment of community recycling centers in a city that relies on an eco-friendly self-representation.
Paper long abstract:
Auckland is the biggest city of a country that is globally represented as "green and clean" and "100% pure". As part of the city development plan which promotes to make Auckland "the world's most liveable city", the council aims to reach a zero-waste-balance until 2040. The enormous landfill waste production is a highly debated topic in Auckland, that is conflicting with the ecofriendly image of the city.
In this regard, the council implemented a new type of "community" recycling centers, which I consider as closely entangled with urban power dynamics: I argue that the distribution and timeline of the newly opened centers reiterates common hierarchies in the urban matrix, reinforcing the demarcation line between the Southern suburbs which are medially represented as marginalised, criminalised and "dirty" on the one hand, and the Northern suburbs which are popular for their wealth, security and "cleanliness" on the other hand. Being referred to as a "good" and prestigious institution, the common rejection of waste management facilities gets reversed in this new project and rubbish gets transformed from an unwanted to a desirable, creative and visible item. At the same time, the clearly formulated community focus opens new ways of governance and intermingles different agents, positions and sites of power under the umbrella of "community".
Drawing on my ethnographic field research, I will discuss how the spatial and temporal dimensions of this zero waste approach interrelate with environmental (in-)justice in a city that identifies with ecofriendly ideals.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims at showing the results of a field research conducted in Casablanca (Morocco) in 2017. It focuses on the social life of waste, intended as event that produces exchange and sharing processes between people, places and objects, through formal and informal practices.
Paper long abstract:
After a 9 months field research period conducted in Morocco, this paper aims to set out the main points of the social life of urban waste studied in Casablanca. Waste is intended as an event that produces exchange and sharing processes between people, places and objects, through formal and informal practices, spatially and temporally defined. After a fundamental analysis of the administrative, political and legal aspects of waste management system in Morocco, we will focus on the main characteristics and the main social actors involved in the current waste-disposal system in Morocco and more specifically in Casablanca.
The ethnographic study will illustrate three main "phases" of the social life of waste, interpreted according to the perspective and practices of central social actors:
- the waste-recovery phase, realised by the so-called "bou'âra" or "chiffonniers" (informal waste-pickers);
- the storage of the materials collected in the "goulssa", collection and selection waste-storage centres, usually located in the suburbs and owned by wholesalers and semi-wholesalers;
- the pilot project of an NGO called Enda Maghreb, based in Rabat, aimed at the integration into the formal economic sphere of the waste management system of the "bou'âra".
Particular attention will be devoted to the interpretation of the value that waste assumes from the points of view of different actors involved in the waste management chain in Casablanca. Finally, it will be essential to take into account the role of a fourth social actor, the institutions, which "behind the scenes" seem to indirectly pilot the presented scenario.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses waste prevention and recycling programs in the marketplace of Anderlecht, in Brussels. It does that by retracing the assemblages of discourses, actors, and artifacts which underpin waste prevention and recycling questioning their impact on the marketplace community and users.
Paper long abstract:
The governance of everyday waste handling practices is increasingly central to waste prevention and recycling programs. Yet, little attention is paid to the labor which does the work of waste selection, classification, and separate collection at the origin of these programs. The paper retraces the assemblages of waste discourses, actors, and artifacts which underpin waste prevention and recycling in the marketplace of Anderlecht, in Brussels. The case is of interest since it concerns the largest, multicultural, and popular city marketplace, located in a poor inner-city neighborhood and which represents a resource for part of the most socioeconomically precarious Brussels populations. Over a decade, under the banner of 'sustainability', the private company who manage the site has developed multiple initiatives to prevent litter and control the cost of the waste management by introducing new regulations (e.g. PAYT) and engaging with both waste recycling companies and 'zero waste' militants. Yet, it remains to better understand the impact of these initiatives on the community served by the market and the market vendors in particular to which the waste recycling scheme imposes a largest deal of labor. The paper presents the results of a series of fieldworks and interviews with key informants and local stakeholders conducted over the past year.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how residents of informal settlements engage with waste in the context of inadequate infrastructural provision. Here, local material experiences produce a politicized framework for everyday life, which is set against the city's stigmatizing waste-related public campaigns.
Paper long abstract:
Nearly one quarter of Cape Town's population lives in informal settlements, sites characterized by limited access to basic services such as water, sanitation, and electricity, and their related formal infrastructures. In the absence of sufficient infrastructural provision, residents meet needs through a constellation of self-made fixes, such as emptying waste water into wetlands and creating shared dumps. This paper examines how local experiences reinforce resident understandings of squatted sites as political and material landscapes, interpreting ubiquitous problems with waste as evidence of the structural and spatial foundations of persistent urban exclusion. Such everyday material experiences are closely linked to multiple forms of social movement activism and community politics. Overtly politicized local understandings of waste, however, are set against public narratives generated by the City of Cape Town that emphasize individual responsibility and position informal area residents as negligent in caring for existing infrastructure and in managing waste. This paper draws from 18 months of ethnographic research in informal settlements in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, to examine the intersections of these competing moral and political logics of waste. Within an increasingly privatized and commodified service landscape, I argue for the need to understand ideologies of governance by setting them against the politics of everyday life.
Paper short abstract:
Urban domestic waste in Palermo is related to different regimes of public visibility. From the rubbish on the streets to its media representations, these regimes work as a medium that legitimizes municipal urban policies. However, at the same time they create boundaries among marginal urban areas.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is analysing the micro social logics through which the urban domestic waste becomes the medium that creates symbolic and topographic boundaries of a marginal urban area: the ZEN neighbourhood of Palermo (Sicily, Italy). Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork and on the analysis of its past and contemporary media representations, as well as institutional discourses, my paper will illustrate how in a "dirty" city (how Palermo is generally considered) urban waste becomes a spatial "index" of the social distance of the residents of one of its neighbourhoods and an essentialising icon of their subjectivities. To use some Peircian categories, this process of semiosis incessantly transforms the visible urban waste disposal, in and around the neighbourhood, into icons of its residents. Otherwise, it conceals the multiple social processes that would differently account the actual location of the rubbish as an index. In Palermo, urban domestic waste is embedded in different regimes of visibility , from the sensory rubbish in the streets to its public media representations (for example, the company that manages waste collection in Palermo has recently invited citizens to photograph the rubbish to map it in an interactive website). Then, the disposal, the collection, and the treatment of urban waste in Palermo becomes the "analyseur" of larger multiple political and economic processes that need these different economies of visibility. In conclusion, these regimes legitimize the local waste management and its policies but, at the same time, they spatialize the social inequalities of the ZEN.