Odds and Beginnings

A Speculative Waste Management Urbanism

Abstract

This project, comprising a paper and drawings, broadly examines the formation of urban waste distribution systems as a driving force in urban development in New York, seeking to historicise certain modernist assumptions about the invention of waste. In addition, the project will begin to test a speculative hypothesis about inverting the placement of waste processing/sanitation facilities not at the periphery, but at the center of the city.

Key to this speculation is the identification of “modernist” assumptions about waste management and corresponding alternatives provided by historical and contemporary cities, in particular,

1. An investigation of the “terminal limit” of infrastructure, and more specifically, scavenging and salvaging as a manifestation of the afterlife of neglected infrastructure

2. The civilian (non-expert) perception of waste as monomaterial, historicised as an invented division of labor in “Western” cities

3. The notion of waste as obscene, historicised as the regulation of productive scavenging a. Additionally, the subsequent criminalization of non-regulated and un-authorized salvaging for profit.

4. The notion of waste management as an activity deprived of enjoyment, historicised as an incomplete colonial process for which alternatives in Cairo, Taipei, and, ironically, Paris have emerged/continue to exist

5. The conflation of decentralised waste management systems with individualist non-infrastructure, contrasted with a 21st-century reevaluation of plastic versus food waste

Though the text of this project shall serve only as a broad review and makes no claims about its comprehensiveness to this ongoing topic, the historicization of these assumptions shall serve as a foundation for a speculative design. Due to the breadth of this discussion, some further assumptions of scope shall be made:

I. The types of waste produced in this speculative city follow those of New York City in 2025, but the project shall pay special attention to food waste and compost.

II. The waste disposal facility emerges in the 21st Century under some kind of executive action, meaning that the City in question has not developed for hundreds of years around it. Nonetheless, at the time of the writing and drawings, its existence is already assumed by all residents of the City.

III. Systems of class and production shall roughly follow those of New York City in 2024, meaning, in particular, there exists a specialised form of municipal labor like the DSNY that manages the waste disposal facility.