Wastescapes and the Building of Modern New York City: A Discard Studies Approach to Urban HistoryPresenters: Carl A. Zimring, Professor of Sustainability Studies, Pratt Institute; and Steven H. Corey, Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Columbia College Chicago What does a discard studies approach to urban history look like? Building on a pair of roundtable discussions at the American Society for Environmental History in 2016 and 2017, and work as the editors of Coastal Metropolis: Environmental Histories of Modern New York City (Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming), we propose a framework that centers the story on New York City’s relationship, since its consolidation in 1898, with sewage, garbage, compost, recyclables, and other detritus. Contemporary notions of waste and urbanization obscure the city’s locus as an estuary. We focus on ways New York established infrastructure involving water. Aqueducts, sewers, and wastewater treatment facilities were seen as vital for the development of the modern metropolis into a world capital. The natural contours of waterways, swamps, and other low-lying areas produced opportunities to sink, transport, and transform the wastes of industrial society through landfill and the construction of transfer and reclamation stations, incinerators, and dumps. These infrastructure choices proved attractive to political and economic regimes that prioritized the transition of coastline and wetlands into terra firma for commercial and residential development. At the same time, they created spatial and social inequalities through land and waterscapes of waste that reinforced sensory repulsion to unwanted materials, fears of epidemic disease, and questions about the value of discarded materials and those who handled them. Telling the history of the creation and maintenance of these infrastructures allows us to consider the extent to which discards shape the present city and inform visions of its future. Keywords: urban history, infrastructure, landfill, wastewater, maintenance |
Racial Capitalism, Discarded Spaces, and Surplus Beings in West BaltimorePresenters: Dawn Biehler, Associate Professor and John-Henry Pitas, Ph.D. candidate, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Department of Geography and Environmental Systems This essay examines how multiple generations of racial-capitalist policies in Baltimore, Maryland, USA have contributed to up to one-third of residential properties being classified as vacant or abandoned, and how these conditions are experienced by residents and represented by outsiders. It draws from a larger study that initially focused on mosquito ecology but expanded its perspective, based on findings and community concerns, to encompass abandoned buildings, uneven trash disposal infrastructure, and illegal dumping. Abandoned buildings appear to play the leading role in breeding mosquitoes, and may serve a similar function in rat ecologies as well. We frame widespread property abandonment as a discard practice rooted in some of the tools of racial capitalism at the urban scale (see Pulido, 2016), namely redlining, urban renewal, and other forms of racialized disinvestment. Despite the structural causes of inequality, references to rat infestation and other environmental conditions in West Baltimore frequently attempt to blame and dehumanize majority-Black residents through a focus on their supposedly faulty household waste management practices. The essay brings together three perspectives through which to rethink and re-present the ecologies of racial capitalism in West Baltimore: first, histories of racialized disinvestment in West Baltimore; second, residents’ own stories and questions about processes of discarding in the neighborhood; third, ecologies of abandoned buildings and their surrounding areas. We argue that redlining and related practices must be understood as systems of discard that both reorder ecologies and also create conditions for obscuring themselves behind racist representations of municipal waste. Keywords: Racial capitalism, redlining, abandoned buildings, surplus animals, Baltimore |
Waste Lands and the Disposable City: The Afterlife of Three Distressed Neighborhoods in DetroitPresenters: Martin Murray, Professor, Urban and Regional Planning, Taubman College University of Michigan; and Maria Arquero de Alarcon,Associate Professor, Architecture and Urbanism, Taubman College University of Michigan; and Olaia Chivite Amigo, Research Collaborator, Architecture, Taubman College University of Michigan What happens to leftover spaces after abandonment in distressed neighborhoods of Detroit? Are the nascent traces of reappropriation and reuse signs of recuperation, care, and belonging? Or is the uneven extent of recovery signaling yet another manifestation of increasing inequality? Our research examines three neighborhoods in Detroit largely characterized by the surplus of vacant land, the withdrawal of municipal services, ongoing population shrinkage, and commercial business bankruptcies. Despite what might look like similarly neglected urban landscapes, the leftover spaces after abandonment in these neighborhoods have not suffered the same fate, and what is happening in these distressed spaces has in fact diverged along alternative pathways. Our research addresses three interrelated questions: first, how can we account for the historical specificity that has characterized the patterns of sustained decline in these neighborhoods, second, how can we explain the quite dissimilar responses to the resulting processes of abandonment, and third, how can we give visibility to the emergent traces of reuse and their constructed narratives of recovery, their agents of change and their dissimilar temporalities. The investigation constructs layered profiles of three distressed neighborhoods to counteract the processes of urban erasure put in motion by disinvestment, job loss, and population shrinkage. Likewise, these neighborhood profiles aim to render visible the alternate imaginary futures associated with embryonic signs of recovery and grassroots stability. |
“All that is Solid Melts into Air”: Burning Suburban Trash, ‘INCITE’-ing Black Power, and Embedding ‘Risk Capital’ in the Wastelanding of South Baltimore, 1961-1985Presenter: Daniel Cumming, Ph.D. Candidate, History, New York University Whether living in the trash dumped illegally in low-income neighborhoods, burrowing into dilapidated rowhouses managed by absentee landlords, or feasting on waste left smoldering from municipal incinerators, “colonies of rats” in Baltimore “plague the residents” a local noted acerbically in 1962. The plague of vermin, however, thrived under government policies that had overdeveloped the suburbs at the expense of the urban core. One material outcome of metropolitan expansion in the post-WWII era was a garbage crisis that overwhelmed the city’s outdated waste incinerators. The problem became so acute by the mid-1960s that city officials proposed several plans for expanding existing capacity before contracting with Monsanto Corporation to pioneer an experimental waste-to-energy incinerator, a bond-financed project that after several years failed to generate energy and left the city millions of dollars in debt. Faced with the ongoing garbage crisis and ineffective municipal solutions, African American residents in South Baltimore organized anti-incinerator campaigns that embraced Black Power and environmental justice. This paper examines the decades-long struggle that ensued, as well as a final resolution that produced a massive incinerator in predominately Black South Baltimore, one capable of burning 2,250 tons of trash per day, much of it trucked to the city from suburban counties. Featuring Black women’s political work as activists and community leaders, this paper reveals how neighborhood organizers challenged the neoliberal logics of an eco-technological solution to uneven metropolitan growth, and it traces the racial capital underwriting modern waste infrastructure. A historical accounting of the origins and financing of incinerator infrastructure, as well as its fervent opposition, will prove important for re-imagining the politics of waste disposal in the fight for environmental justice and in the construction of reparative futures. Keywords: metropolitan, waste, racism, technology, activism |
Governing Discards by Discarding Governance? Expanding the Role of Informal Waste Pickers in Municipal Garbage Management in Vancouver and ParisPresenter: Raul Pacheco-Vega,Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO) Sede México |