waste

From the Field

Closing the Loop or Looping Close By?

Marine Frantz & Gabriel Renault - 7 February 2023
Marine Frantz and Gabriel Renault explore the spatial dimension of the circular economy, particularly in regard to...
Debates

The Slow Violence of Planned Obsolescence

Elise Mason - 20 September 2022
Elise Mason critiques planned obsolescence as a form of slow violence. She argues for an ethic of care, rooted in...
From the Field

Power in the Periphery: Waste Conflict and Resistance in Periurban Kerala

Ashish Prabhakar - 6 September 2022
Ashish Prabhakar analyzes one Indian village’s fight against a city waste processing plant in 2011–2012, illustrating...
Reviews

Disposability in the City: A Review of Waste Worlds

Lily Baum Pollans - 5 July 2022
Lily Pollans reviews Jacob Doherty’s Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability, which shows...
From the Field

Starve the Beast: Community-Owned and Community-Controlled Composting as an Alternative to Incineration in Baltimore

Nicole Fabricant - 31 May 2022
Nicole Fabricant documents organizing efforts in Baltimore, led by youth of color, against a trash-to-energy...
From the Field

The Spectacle of Reuse: Recirculating Urban Salvage at Pittsburgh’s Construction Junction

Susan M. Ross - 29 April 2022
Susan M. Ross examines a building-materials reuse center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, arguing that it is an...
Series

Urban Wastes, Present and Future

Lily Baum Pollans - 29 April 2022
Lily Pollans guest-edits this series for Metropolitics that focuses on the various ways in which waste is part of...
Reviews

Reconsidering Wasteways from Boston to Seattle

Lisa Jean Moore - 1 February 2022
Throughout the Covid‑19 pandemic, with disposable masks and endless testing, garbage proliferates. It is extremely...
From the Field

Who Cleans Paris? Garbage Collectors in Their Own Words

Coline Ferrant & Marie Mourad & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 June 2019
Who are Paris’s garbage collectors? Coline Ferrant and Marie Mourad highlight the diverse working conditions covered...
Essays

From non-planning to cutting-edge policy: the transformation of waste management in Boston since the 1980s

Lily Baum Pollans - 11 June 2019
Recycling and composting are hot topics. Lily Baum Pollans argues that Boston’s changing approach to waste...
Reviews

Recyclable City or Disposable City? A Century of Urban Waste in Naples

Sabine Bognon & translated by Oliver Waine - 9 November 2018
Inspired by the study of living ecosystems, research into the notion of urban metabolism seeks to break with the...
Reviews

Cities transformed by hygienism: 100 years of local innovation

Sabine Barles & translated by Oliver Waine - 27 March 2015
Hygiene is a “battle”, and the “hygienist revolution” of the 19th and early 20th centuries transformed our urban...
Debates

Water, sanitation, energy, waste: the dawn of the network-free city?

Sylvain Petitet & translated by Oliver Waine - 18 April 2012
Negative externalities, changes in society and technological innovation all call into question the industrial model...

Series

Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces
Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Partners