Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how urban territories can be understood as phenomenological landscapes of affordances to people seeking things and materials to appropriate, use, share or circulate.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how urban territories can be understood as phenomenological landscapes of affordances (Ingold) to people seeking things and materials to appropriate, use, share or circulate. It places practices of rummaging, scavenging, gathering, collecting and salvaging in the urban landscape within the context of the emerging society of reuse, circulation and sharing. Things and materials that have been disposed, discarded or forgotten are conventionally understood to clutter the urban landscape. As useless and valueless things and materials they are categorized as dirt, waste and junk, constituting a cultural "rewilding" (DeSilvey) of the urban landscape or a neglected lingering of the past in the present (Appelgren). However, new regimes of value are emerging with alternative economies aiming at making use of pre-used and second-hand things, rather than consuming newly produced items. This paper analyses how certain sites and areas of the city constitute particularly fertile localities for harvesting abandoned things and cast off materials, and how these geographical sites interrelate with larger socio-economic transformations of the urban landscape.