Metropolitics

Reconsidering Wasteways from Boston to Seattle

Lisa Jean Moore — 2022-02-01T06:00:00Z

Throughout the Covid‑19 pandemic, with disposable masks and endless testing, garbage proliferates. It is extremely difficult to resist our own participation in creating more single use trash. Fortunately, Lily Baum Pollans' book, Resisting Garbage: The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities, is an excellent analysis of our individual and collective consumptive habits that produce waste. Through her comparison of two different American cities, Pollans offers incisive commentary on the

- Reviews / waste, waste management, United States, Boston, Seattle, recycling

(Re)Constructing Inequality: Community Development in Public and Private

Claire Dunning — 2021-12-14T06:00:00Z

Claire Dunning reviews Jeremy R. Levine's new book, Constructing Community, an ethnographic study of community development projects in Boston.
For a book about urban poverty and redevelopment, Constructing Community recounts few protests or headline-grabbing incidents. Instead, the drama unfolds slowly over the course of a decade in poorly lit community rooms, downtown board rooms, and the backseats of cars. This is a book about the banalities of bureaucracy and governance—a fact that author

- Reviews / Boston, Massachusetts, United States, mass transit, rapid transit, transport, public transportation, community-based organizations, urban poverty, redevelopment, poverty, governance, local governance, urban governance, ethnography

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

Lily Baum Pollans — 2019-06-11T05:00:00Z

Recycling and composting are hot topics. Lily Baum Pollans argues that Boston's changing approach to waste management represents a more radical shift than some might think.
In 2018, the city of Boston banned plastic bags and launched a zero-waste initiative. In doing so, Boston joined a growing list of cities using solid-waste management to advance sustainability and climate goals by closing material loops and reducing consumption. Despite recent setbacks in the global recycling market, these

- Essays / United States, Boston, environment, waste, waste management, recycling, sanitation, hygienism