Local-to-Global Circulations, Space and Politics of Waste
Local-to-Global Circulations, Space and Politics of Waste
Monday, 7 July 2025: 13:00-14:45
Location: ASJE016 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
RC21 Regional and Urban Development (host committee) Language: English
As cities face the imperative of becoming more sustainable, tackling the flows of discards and waste that emerge from and circulate through them is a major priority in the global North and South. Yet, waste is mostly treated as a municipal governance issue, despite evidence from GIS-based tracking tools and global political economic analysis that waste flows are global in their origin, movement, and destination.
This panel connects the local and global dynamics of waste circulation and accretion in the Anthropocene, to explore what justice means in a wasted world. Assuming that disentangling North/South, center/peripheries and formal/informal dichotomies would contribute to socio-environmental justice in waste economies, we are interested in the following discussions:
- Knowledge and Justice: What sorts of knowledge, tools, scales and processes are mobilized to visualize, map and quantify waste flows? How do these tools render (in)visible informal practices and restrict comparison across the Global North and South?
- Recognition, Collective action and Justice: How to study the many actors dealing with waste? How does “vernacular circularity” connect to ascendant urban sustainability paradigms driven by the state and transnational capital? How to better acknowledge grassroots organizations, knowledge and resistance of waste pickers?
- Space and Justice: How does spatial planning contour local waste economies, access, and livelihoods? How do efforts at instituting more sustainable or circular waste economies interact with the social stigmatization and economic conditions of waste workers, and reshape global cores and peripheries?
Session Organizers:
Oral Presentations
Distributed Papers