ancient cities

960 Waste
contaminating those near it. The disappearance of
waste may be said to lead to both a popular and
academic oversight of waste in urban studies as a
literally invisible issue. Wastes of various sorts
reflect the human, animal, industrial, and social
processes of urban life, and they have been intrinsic
to the economies, cultures and societies of all cities.
This entry will think through urban wastes in four
ways. It will examine its spatial, then symbolic,
then economic dimensions and conclude with a
look at current shifts in governance of waste. This
entry will focus on solid wastes rather than that
carried in sewer systems or wastes of energy or
intangible wastes of, say, time or talent.
Thinking about cities through waste is both necessary
and revealing. Waste is a commonsensical
term, but closer scrutiny reveals that it is freighted
with implications. Thus, it has general negative
connotations about a loss of resource or a loss of
opportunity. It has also implied a temporality and
spatiality about something leaving a bounded system—coming
to the end of its life or being moved
outside the system. In both cases, it is often connected
conceptually and materially to wastelands, as
environments laid waste or contaminated. Underneath
most of this, there is also the traditional
sense, then, that waste is whatever is left from a
given process to be disposed of later. However,
this linear narrative overlooks that what is a waste
from one process may be a resource to another.
Equally, there may be a fuzzy line between what is
a waste and a stock of material awaiting processing.
This entry thus uses conceptualizations from
different traditions to unpack waste.
Waste at the Margins
Waste is central to urban processes—while at the
same time being economically, symbolically, and
geographically marginalized. Thus, there have
been waste dumps and waste sites for as long as
there have been cities because a concentration of
people inevitably produces refuse and issues of
disposal. The biblical images of the fires of hell
were inspired by the burning of refuse at dumps in
Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom at the southwest of
ancient Jerusalem. This also became the site, ritually
contaminated by association with human sacrifice
and wastes, which was then used for the
disposal of bodies of animals and criminals—who
had been spatially and symbolically ejected from
the city.
The continued presence of peripheral waste
dumps as wastelands can found in many urban writings
such as Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend,
with his account of “a tract of suburban Sahara,
where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were
boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs
were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors.”
Wastes have typically been removed to the margins
of urban areas. Thus, medieval cities located
tanneries and dyeing works, with the obnoxious
wastes they produced, at the edge of urban areas.
Continuing that tradition, much urban policy has
organized the physical removal of waste and then
its containment. Much attention focuses on municipal
solid waste—what is conventionally thought
of as domestic garbage (although in the United
Kingdom, household waste makes up as little as 7
percent of the national total). Significant increases
in the amounts of household waste have gone
hand in hand with both increasing quantities but
also changing types of consumption (for instance,
falling amounts of ash from domestic heating but
rising amounts of packaging waste). Over time,
most countries have moved to systems where, if
solid waste is to be dumped, it is done in managed,
sealed waste dumps as opposed to open dumps.
Managed dumps are designed to contain wastes
and prevent contamination of groundwater through
sealing waste in cells that are progressively opened
and closed over the life of the landfill site.
Unsurprisingly, municipal politics often means
such sites are located on the boundaries of municipal
authority control—both away from most people
and where some of any adverse effects (smell,
noise, or loss of amenity) are borne by those outside
the municipality. Large conurbations have
often faced serious issues in finding sites in neighboring
jurisdictions for disposal of waste. Emissions
of air pollution and water-borne pollution have
also been subject to attempts to both marginalize
and distance wastes from urban life—with wealthy
areas traditionally located upwind, according to
prevailing currents, of aerial pollution sources, and
measures to increase chimney heights of sources,
including waste incinerators, to both disperse and
distance airborne wastes.
The spatial politics of waste, especially toxic
wastes, inspired the environmental justice movement