Modern municipal waste disposal is not limited to removal of garbage, but often involves a strategic churning out of unwanted people, and extreme events such as dump fires reflect the social precariousness of marginalised communities like those of waste-pickers.
Gulls. Pigeons. Rats. Lice. These ‘trash animals’ live alongside waste, filth, ruination and decay. Attitudes, behaviour and infrastructure aimed at dealing with ‘trash animals’ tell us a lot about systems of discarding. The following is a bibliography of ‘trash animals’ research.
Australian discard studies scholars Catherine Phillips, David Boarder Giles, and Gay Hawkins discuss intellectual traditions, settler colonialism, and the future of the field.
By Susan Ross Building deconstruction refers to the careful taking apart of a building to salvage its reusable materials and components. These are either stored on site for short-term integration in a new design, or removed to a salvage yard for use at a later date. Whereas prevailing mechanical demolition creates mounds of unsorted debris […]
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Neighborhoods with median annual incomes below US$25,000 were nearly 2 decibels louder than neighborhoods with incomes above $100,000 per year. And nationwide, communities with 75 percent black residents had median nighttime noise levels of 46.3 decibels – 4 decibels louder than communities with no black residents. A 10-decibel increase represents a doubling in loudness of a sound, so these are big differences.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has confirmed that 92% of the world’s urban population now live in cities where the air is toxic.
This bibliography is designed for professors who want to “teach Flint” in their classrooms. The Flint, Michigan water crisis is an extreme but quintessential case study that shows the intersections of environmental health, governance, the built environment, systemic racism, and social inequity.
Over the past few decades, we have met with much success in curbing some of Americans’ exposure to lead. Yet they have struggled to contain this continuing danger precisely because it is literally built into our water systems.
Putting 20,000 black plastic balls in water after people have been warned against throwing plastic into waterways has sparked a number of questions. Our plastic expert talks about what happens when water meets plastic:
How do you study cityness through waste? Cityness has been used to describe both “how urban citizens give meaning to the city they live in and how this creation of meaning alters the way the city is represented” and as “an instrument to capture something that otherwise might easily get lost: types of urbanity that are non-Western.”
