This chapter thinks through the ubiquitous and dynamic life of plastic as it contributes to the imaginary and material landscapes of Australia’s largest city, Sydney. Using Mirror Sydney: An Atlas of Reflections, a book-length work of “creative cartography” by writer and artist Vanessa Berry, as our guidebook to Sydney, we theorize plastic as a symbolic and material actor whose dissonant temporal presence simultaneously supports and challenges subjective and objective visions of Sydney as progress-oriented and capitalist-efficient. Considered through new materialist terms, plastic brings realities into being by actively informing and shaping human practices and modes of inhabitation. Plastic is the ultimate agent of modernity. In this guise it appears as a “futural form” indexical to and bringing about the world to come. At the same time, plastic also enacts multiple and at times dissonant temporalities and realities that are coexistent rather than linear. It is a material constituent of many of today’s disposable commodities, which will inevitably be consumed or thrown away. As deferred trash, plastic is an anachronistic presence in its refusal to integrate into a forward-focused sense of time.

In a similar way, Berry’s encounters with tangible artifacts of an urban past that have been thrown away produces a counter-narrative to the hyper-modern story of Sydney as global city. Responding to what she sees as “Sydney’s drive towards reinvention,” Berry’s concern is to uncover and document the complexity and ephemerality, but also the dense histories, of urban places through practices of wandering, mapping, and narrating localized situations of inhabitation in contemporary Sydney. These situations and Berry’s “wandering” of sub/urban places belong to a performative methodology of “subversive mappings” of city space, where dominant or official narratives of place are disrupted through the unpredictable encounters that the urban context affords. Place stories are “found” and recollected through the embodied mobility of the writer moving through vernacular spaces and activating the unprogrammed aspects of place. Berry’s methodology evokes the flâneuse or the Situationist dérive as a tactic of intervention in urban imaginaries and speaks to her ultimately political project, which is to invest the matter of urban memory with questions of social and environmental justice.