Waste Infrastructure, Urban Citizenship, and the Process of Urban Planning

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Globalizing cities around the world face a myriad of challenges surrounding economic development, infrastructural upgrades, and the management of public space. Urban planners often confront competing interests of different constituent groups in their efforts to balance the need to modernize infrastructures with fostering of employment for the urban poor. Conversions of garbage dumps to modern sanitary landfills, for example, may reduce hazards to public health at the same time they threaten the livelihoods of thousands of people who rely on waste picking and recycling for survival. The contestations that take place over the right to the dump cut to the heart of urban citizenship and the poor's rights to the city and public space. This project will investigate how various stakeholder groups differently understand and value waste infrastructures and evaluate the labor implications of upgrades to sanitation facilities. In so doing, it will advance understanding of the infrastructure planning process, urban citizenship, and the means through which the urban poor contest projects that threaten their livelihoods. Research results will have valuable implications for planners, policymakers, and social justice advocates addressing the challenges posed by infrastructure modernization in cities of the Global South. This project focuses on a case study of a planned sanitation upgrade that has spawned an organized protest movement by waste pickers in Dakar, Senegal. Dakar is an ideal setting for this research because of its long history of peaceful, multi-party democracy, its long tradition of urban citizenship movements, and recent trends to "clean up" undesirable places and informal laborers. Dakar's sprawling dump, Mbeubeuss, is one of the oldest and largest landfills in Africa. Though the government plan to upgrade the infrastructure has been frustrated over the last few years by protests, under pressure from its funder the World Bank, efforts are underway to push the upgrade forward in the next two years. Through ethnographic research with key stakeholders, including government planners and waste pickers, the research will examine the planning process during this time as a window into material struggles around urban citizenship and the rights of the city's poorest. Extensive interviews, participant observation, and participatory mapping will be conducted in order to reveal the different spatial and material relations represented by the two infrastructures, how actors' contested visions for the dump are embedded in their material practices (e.g. recycling processes versus office work), and the forms of expert and vernacular knowledge marshaled by each group. Special attention will be paid to the way that picker activists contest the authoritative knowledge of planning through their alternative development discourses and practices of civic science. Contributing to debates in political infrastructures, geographies of waste, urban political ecology, and the politics of environmental knowledge, the research will show the material basis of urban citizenship and lend insight into strategies for more pro-poor infrastructure planning.