Reconfiguring the Solid Waste Landscape

Abstract

The operations which form the base of urbanisation – such as agriculture, material extraction and waste disposal, often create landscapes with interwoven socio-ecological tensions. The waste management practices of solid waste landscapes have been a cause of environmental degradation globally. Among the disparate waste management practices which exist, landfilling, particularly open waste dumping, has reportedly caused situated and systemic impacts as it pollutes the air, the soil, groundwater, and surface water, while simultaneously impacting public health. These sites are observed in the urbanising cities of the Global South, and the particularly vulnerable regions globally are those of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, where waste growth, coupled with projected urbanisation, is expected to double by 2050 (World Bank, 2018).
Avoiding landfilling in these regions has been popularly approached with clearing and repurposing of the landfill sites, overlooking the extended system. The proposed transitions of the extended system of infrastructures and social agencies have continued to create systemic failures, where the externalities of the operational landscape remain polluting. Moreover, the existence of practices which are found to be ecologically inclusive has been challenged. Through research situated in Delhi, India, the project outlines that the transitioning landscape is composed of diverse and involutionary practices which continue to pollute the environment, while displacing autonomous livelihoods (Schindler, Demaria, 2015).
The thesis hypothesises that, in the context of urbanising cities with informal economic geographies, there is a need to build socio-ecological inclusivity in the solid waste landscape to address environmental pollution by systemically and spatially integrating agencies and practices which are ecologically inclusive. By identifying leverage points through the system’s agencies, infrastructures, materialities and systemic malfunctions, the project identifies the need to reorganise the food waste system with narrow food loops, regenerate the informal recycling chain, engage the waste generators, and treat legacy waste as the main design levers. Through research by design, the project seeks to develop context-sensitive urban design methods to operationalise the levers, which together compose a methodological toolkit for identified global contexts, building the discourse on the agency of urban design for approaching the environmental externalities of solid waste landscapes.