Through this special collection, we examine how urban geographers have described, characterized, theorized, and mobilized waste in the pages of this journal since 1990.The articles we have selected demonstrate the changing dimensions of waste geographies, but also reflect changing areas of interest and evolving epistemologies that have shaped urban geography, more broadly, over the past few decades. As we are keen to demonstrate with these contributions to Urban Geography, waste is not just a material thingto be managed, flushed or carted away, rendered invisible by the “smoothing mechan-isms” of waste management infrastructure (Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022, p. 89), but also a space of urban politics that is at once discursive and material, a socio-technical assemblage whose various actors, objects, and interactions produce urban space.
A brief note on method is warranted here. We dove into the journal’s archives, using a dozen or so keywords to guide our search: waste, garbage, trash, sewage, sewer, toxics, landfill, incinerator, e-waste, recycling, compost, circular economy … and perhaps others that we’ve forgotten! Each keyword brought up a few more articles to add to our stockpile. On a first pass, we discarded those seemed only peripherally related to waste.We decided at this point to also exclude articles related to air, water, and soil pollution ifthere wasn’t explicit mention of waste or processes of wasting, or if the paper didn’t havea clearly urban dimension. This decision may rankle some readers, given that most wastein the world is industrial solid waste, in terms of weight, volume, and toxicity (Liboiron &Lepawsky, 2022, p. 9). And, as by-products of production and consumption, mine tail-ings, airborne particulates from a factory, heavy metals from vehicle exhaust, or geo-aqueous plumes from a chemical spill, can each be considered forms of waste.However, we ultimately made the decision to take a narrower view of waste simply to keep the collection down to a manageable size. After this initial triage, we ended upwith a total of 105 papers that we began sorting into several large groups. As is often the case with categorization, many articles could fit easily into multiple groups. Taking into consideration both the publication date and location of the study, we eventually settled on six broad themes and selected three to four articles that best seem to represent each:
1) Hazardous waste and environmental justice.
As exemplified by Lake and Johns (1990),early waste scholarship appearing in the journal investigated the impacts of hazardous and industrial waste facilities in American cities, including how siting decisions reflect and contribute to uneven exposure that is class-based and racialized. This scholarship arose in conversation with – and in solidarity with – the burgeoning US environmental justice (EJ) movement, which took form in the 1980s and 1990s at the confluence of civilrights and anti-toxics activism. We’ve also included two articles (Heiman, 1996; Pulidoet al., 1996) from a special issue of Urban Geography on environmental racism (Volume17, Issue 5). Complementing Lake and John’s contribution – and presaging the rise ofmore critical EJ work and recent work on racial capitalism (Pellow, 2017; Ranganathan& Bonds, 2022) – both reveal how environmental racism and class-based discrimination operate through seemingly neutral urban planning decisions.
2) Sanitation infrastructure and uneven urban development.
The central role that sanitation infrastructure plays in urban development is another central theme that our dive into the Urban Geography archives revealed (Marsh et al., 2010; Phinney, 2023; Plyushteva & Schwanen, 2023). Without adopting an explicit EJ framework, these articles describe the uneven development of urban sanitation infrastructure and the compounded inequalities (often racialized) both leading to and arising from such uneven access to municipal sanitation infrastructure, widely assumed to be fundamental to modern, urban life (albeit operating in the background). IfMarsh et al. expose the racism that prevents connecting to sanitation infrastructure,then Phinney focuses on the mechanisms leading to its disconnection, illustratinghow access to urban infrastructure is racialized under neoliberal capitalism. Sanitation infrastructure has long been an area of interest for geographers working inand on cities in the “global South”, as well (Arefin, 2019; McFarlane & Silver, 2017; Ranganathan, 2014). In this vein, Plyushteva and Schwanen reveals how for many living in cities like Manila, waste and risk are intertwined and disastrous events as normal, rather than exceptional, aspect of infrastructural functioning.
3) Global waste flows and their governance
While toxic waste played a central role in earlier, EJ-inspired waste geographies, it has also served as empirical fodder for work on global waste flows (Gille, 2012; O’Neill, 2019), a third key area of scholarship we identified in our review. In attending to waste’s movement through value chains within a global political economy of waste, this work elucidates not only the scalar dimensions of waste, but also how “waste regimes” (Gille, 2012) emerge in a particular time and place as the result of a convergence of technologies, values, preferences, choices, governance structures, and politics, and, as Gustafson (2021) illustrates, by the materiality of the waste itself. Electronic waste, or e-waste, has come to epitomizethese global waste flows and is the object of several studies published in Urban Geography, three of which we include here (Grant & Oteng-Ababio, 2012; Reddy,2016; Wang et al., 2023). Such work reveals how informal urban economies are intertwined with the formal economies of production and waste in other countries. Also highlighted are the various ways that the state frames e-waste to justify its integration into local economies, illustrating the discursive power of waste, which we highlight as another central theme emerging from our exploration of the archives.
4) The discursive power of waste.
Geographers have delved deeply into the diversity ofways that waste discourses intersect with the construction of social hierarchies andthus structure inclusion and exclusion (Dillon, 2014; Goldstein, 2013; McClintock, 2021). We include four such articles from the Urban Geography archives here. Articles by Unnikrishnan et al. (2021) and Wideman (2020) both examine how modernist, hygienist discourse structured the colonial and settler-colonial organization of space in India and Canada, respectively, while Speer (2016) focuses on the persistence of such discourse via the exclusion of homeless people from sanitation infrastructure in California. Finally, as Narayanan (2023) demonstrates, waste’s discursive role alsoextends to more-than-human relationships; some species, particularly those that scavenge what we humans have cast off or excreted, are deemed waste species, reinforcing social status at times mobilized to incite and justify violence against both human and animal waste workers. This leads us to another important theme emerging from the journal’s vaults: the labor of waste.
5) Waste labor and livelihoods.
Articulating with geography’s growing engagement with “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004) and everyday governance (Corneaet al., 2017), waste scholars have begun to pay more attention to how everyday, informal, and mundane waste management practices together mediate waste flows. As scholarship on waste handlers in the global South has demonstrated, waste often serves as a site of contestation, negotiation, and transformation within wider struggles for justice, where the most disenfranchized can exert their agency and power (Arefin,2019; Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Millar, 2018; Yates & Gutberlet, 2011), an insight scholars are beginning to address in the North, as well (Parizeau, 2017; Vinegar et al.,2014). The materiality of waste, too, plays an important role therein. Indeed, it is the materiality of rotting waste that makes the laboring body of the waste picker a vital technology of infrastructure (Fredericks, 2018). In keeping with these wider trends in waste geographies and discard studies, several articles in this collection have emphasized the important and undervalued – and often informal role of waste workers, while highlighting waste labor as a space of resistance to neoliberalization (McTague & Jansen, 2013; Tripathy & Carrière, 2020; Zapata Campos et al., 2023).
These articles reveal the impact of neoliberal restructuring and deregulation of waste management on informal waste labor, and thus on the metabolic functioning and esthetic value of the city. Only when waste workers strike (and thus disrupt these metabolic flows and esthetics) do they become visible.
6) Rethinking waste.
Finally, if most of the articles on waste published in Urban Geography have clearly documented the ways that waste flows render urban space uneven and inequitable, many authors also invite us to rethink how we understand waste, and how such retheorization may ultimately lead to the reconfiguration of waste management (and of cities, more broadly) in ways that are ultimately more just and ecologically sound. The three papers we’ve selected to represent this theme (Bassens et al., 2020; Clement & Bunce, 2023; Sseviiri et al., 2022) appearto have little in common at first blush but are unified in their promotion of newanalytical perspectives and the potential transformations that may follow. In their friendly critique of “circular economy” approaches, Bassens et al. argue urban geographers can contribute by critiquing dominant narratives and imagining transformative alternatives for urban waste management, a perspective that Sseviri and colleagues share. Attention to the heterogeneity of waste infrastructures not only challenges modernist imaginaries of infrastructural (under)development, it allows for a clearer understanding of the exclusions emerging from existing municipal waste policy. As the contribution from Clement and Bunce illustrate, such a consideration should extend to the more-than-human relationships intrinsic to waste management, as well.