How do those pushed to the margins survive in contemporary cities? What role do they play in today’s increasingly complex urban ecosystems? Faced with stark disparities in human and environmental wellbeing, what form might more equitable cities take? Waste Matters argues that contemporary literature and film offer an insightful and timely response to these questions through their formal and thematic revaluation of urban waste. In their creation of a new urban imaginary which centres on discarded things, degraded places and devalued people, authors and artists such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Chris Abani, Dinaw Mengestu, Suketu Mehta and Vik Muniz suggest opportunities for an inclusive urban politics that demands systematic analysis. Waste Matters assesses the utopian promise and pragmatic limitations of their as yet under-examined work in light of today’s pressing urban challenges. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of English Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies, Environmental Humanities and Film Studies.

For thousands of years humans have experimented with various methods of waste disposal—from burning and burying to simply packing up and moving in search of an unscathed environment. Habits of disposal are deeply ingrained in our daily lives, so casual and continual that we rarely ever stop to ponder the big-picture effects on social, spatial and ecological orders. Rethinking the ways in which we produce, collect, discard and reuse our waste, whether it’s materials, spaces or places, is essential to ensure a more feasible future. Waste Matters: Adaptive Reuse for Productive Landscapes presents a series of historical and contemporary design ideas that reimagine a range of repurposed materials at diverse scales and in various contexts by exploring methods of hacking, disassembly, reassembly, recycling, adaptive reuse and preservation of the built environment. Waste Matters will inspire designers to sample and rearrange bits of artifacts from the past and present to produce culturally relevant and ecologically sensitive materials, objects, architecture and environments.

Previously perceived as a local, technical issue for governments, waste management is now also a global, socio-political process involving complex patterns of multi-level governance. Yet these geographical complexities have not previously been considered in any detail. This book examines the neglected geographies of waste management, in particular, the integral processes of trans-localization and politicization that are emerging in waste networks. Illustrated by in-depth case studies from New Zealand and Ireland, it critically analyzes the interaction between political scales of governing waste, from the local to the supra-national level. It also looks at the impact of wider systems of governance, civil society and the private sector on waste management policy and practices. In doing so, the book provides a better understanding of waste governance and recommendations for better management of the waste sector in the future.