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twelve - Conclusions: framing the organising of waste in the city
- Edited by María José Zapata, Göteborgs universitet, Sweden, Michael Hall, University of Canterbury
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- Book:
- Organising Waste in the City
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 May 2013, pp 223-236
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Summary
Introduction
This concluding chapter now returns to the goal of the book to frame the following synthesis of the main findings from across all the chapters, noting the similarities and dissimilarities between cities, societies and cultures confronted in the book. We conclude with an exploration of the implications drawn for future waste policy governance.
The aim of the book was to emphasise the ways in which the notion of waste, and the narratives and discourses associated with it, are socially constructed with corresponding implications for the governance of waste and the local wasting practices in cities. Below are some tentative responses to this aim in the form of four sets of critical findings.
Global narratives of waste translated into local practices
This book has shown that despite the existence of powerful global narratives of waste, their local translation into household solid waste governance and wasting practices varies over space and time. The existing governmental and institutional arrangements in which the household solid waste governance and practices are embedded play a fundamental role in the local translation of global ideas of waste, as shown in the analysis of waste policies in New Zealand and Ireland (see Chapters Four and Ten). Different waste narratives are also often translated from one jurisdiction to another as part of the processes of policy learning and transfer. Waste governance and waste narratives are part of broader meta-narratives (Lyotard, 1979) such as ideas of consumption, sustainable development, resource scarcity, good governance and competitiveness, all of which might even be more influential in shaping waste management practice than global waste narratives, given that waste policies are often embedded in broad institutional and policy contexts (see Chapter Four). Furthermore, despite waste narratives being relevant, the techno-institutional order in which waste governance occurs also matters. In Ireland, waste governance has to be framed in the context of a society in a rapid transit from an agrarian into an urbanised modern economy, where industrialisation and the production of waste went hand-in-hand. In Cairo, the Zabaleen's waste collectors narrative is an unfinished story (see Chapter Nine). It is framed in a context of radical policy action and contemporary major political events that might change the techno-institutional, as well as more directly the political, order in Egypt in which waste governance is embedded.
one - Introduction: narratives of organising waste in the city
- Edited by María José Zapata, Göteborgs universitet, Sweden, Michael Hall, University of Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Organising Waste in the City
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 May 2013, pp 1-18
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Summary
The challenges of climate and environmental change and the contribution of cities to global warming and natural resource depletion make the issue of sustainable urban waste governance crucial for contemporary urban spaces and for their wider ecological footprint. However, while some of the issues surrounding the governance of waste have been identified in the contemporary literature, relatively little attention has been given to the various, often highly contested, ways in which waste and its governance are framed. This book offers a critical social sciences perspective on the issue of organising waste in cities. Often positioned in terms of relatively narrow engineering, economic and/or physical scientific discourses (see, for example, Barton et al, 1996; Morrissey and Browne, 2004; Skordilis, 2004; Hung et al, 2007), the book aims to emphasise the ways in which the notion of waste, and the narratives and discourses associated with it, are socially constructed with corresponding implications for the governance of waste and local waste handling practices (see, for example, Cooper, 2009; Tuler and Webler, 2010; Fried and Eyles, 2011; Corvellec and Hultman, 2012; Foote and Mazzolini, 2012). Therefore, the contributions contained in this book position the governance of waste not from a specific managerial perspective but from a range of different understandings of how the waste problem is defined, interpreted and governed. The focus of the book is on urban and municipal household solid waste, but concerns over waste are linked to such issues as globalisation, governance, biodiversity and social, economic and environmental justice.
The popular saying, ‘Your rubbish is someone else's treasure,’ is not just an indication of the marketisation of waste, but also the way in which waste is socially constructed (see, for example, Douglas, 1966; MacKillop, 2009). The meanings of waste, and therefore the values attached to it, varies between places, societies, cultures, economies, markets, spaces and times. The waste infrastructures created to store waste become a mirror, making it possible to understand how society resembles it by providing its reflection (see Chapter Three, this volume). In other words, waste becomes a narrative/narrator of the society in which it is embedded. However, waste is much more than a social construct: ‘Waste is intrinsically, profoundly, a matter of materiality’ (Gregson and Crang, 2010: 1026).
three - The function of waste urban infrastructures as heterotopias of the city: narratives from Gothenburg and Managua
- Edited by María José Zapata, Göteborgs universitet, Sweden, Michael Hall, University of Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Organising Waste in the City
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 May 2013, pp 41-60
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter uses the notion of heterotopia (Foucault, 1986) to rethink the functions and meanings of waste urban infrastructures, based on narratives of waste from the cities of Managua in Nicaragua and Gothenburg in Sweden. A heterotopia is a physical representation of a utopia, or a parallel space that contains undesirable bodies to make a real utopian space possible, such as a prison or a cemetery. Foucault divides all spaces into ordinary and extraordinary. The extraordinary are divided into utopias, or unreal places, and heterotopias, which are real:
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. (Foucault 1986: 24)
Although Foucault did not mention them as such, waste urban infrastructures such as landfill sites or incinerators are heterotopic places. Waste urban infrastructures constitute ‘the other city’ where citizens cast out their wasted things. Waste urban infrastructures hold as heterotopias relevant roles and functions, which vary between different societies: ‘A society, as its history unfolds can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another’ (Foucault 1986: 25).
The analysis of the functions of waste urban infrastructures presented in this chapter is based on the narratives collected from two ordinary cities: Managua in Nicaragua and Gothenburg in Sweden (Amin and Graham, 1997; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Robinson, 2006, 2011). To compare a wealthy city in the global North such as Gothenburg, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, the second poorest country of the Americas, might appear methodologically and ontologically inappropriate. However, cities are best understood as ordinary rather than labelling them as Western, third world, developed, developing or global (Robinson, 2006: 1).
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