Since the American Association of Geographers (AAG) held a unprecedented number of sessions on waste in February of this year, the Discard Studies blog has invited participants from the AAG to post their work. This post is by Jordan Howell, a PhD student in the Department of Geography at Michigan State University. One of the […]
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By Max Liboiron One topic we rarely post about on Discard Studies is the connection between power and forced acts of waste. Robert Moses’s aggressive eviction-based freeways in the 1960s, landlord sponsored arson in Harlem and the Bronx in the 1970s, and, as of Monday, the forcible eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park […]
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Wednesday, May 11 • 12:00 to 2:00 • 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor • New York City Samantha MacBride has written eloquently and in-depth about the networks and relationships that keep an international flow of materials moving across the globe, particularly as these pertain to waste. In this talk, she focuses on the connection between […]
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This is a quick post to share two remarkable photo essays. One looks at North Brother Island, while the second considers Admiral’s Row. Both are long-abandoned spaces in New York City. The images bring to mind Tim Edensor‘s work about how meanings are imagined, inscribed, forgotten, rewritten, and reclaimed in such haunted places. (Edensor’s themes […]
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Tuesday, March 22, marked the tenth anniversary of the closing of Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island (this piece from the New York Times describes the day the landfill closed). Its transformation into a park is well under way, but the scale of the project — 2200 acres across four massive hills — means that […]
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What happened to Journal Square? Once known as a lively hub of cultural and political activity in the heart of Jersey City, NJ, Journal Square experienced what Hutchison (1992) once called the ““the almost incomprehensible…process of spatial restructuring” that effectively decentralized many central cities’ populations and economic activities to the suburbs during the second half of the twentieth […]
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Picking up discarded items from the curb can be tricky, even in a city as practiced as New York. Who wants to risk hauling a TV down three blocks and up four flights of stairs to find out it doesn’t work? Or what if that nice side table has bedbugs? Luckily, artist Sarah Nicole Phillips […]
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The Wellcome Collection in London, part of the Wellcome Trust, opens an exhibit this Thursday, March 24, that explores changing attitudes toward dirt and cleanliness from the seventeenth century to the mid-21st. The show is built around specific examples in six different places — Delft, London, Glasgow, Dresden, New Delhi, and New York. It runs […]
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We’ve mentioned Lisa Dowda and Liz Ligon before; they are the creative force behind Chasing Sanitation, a website about the lives and labors of New York City’s sanitation workers. This weekend they move beyond the web, into an exhibition opening Saturday in New York. Their work deserves a wide audience. Ligon’s photographs are lush and […]
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For the past several years, a consortium of city agencies, community groups, not-for-profit arts and planning organizations, artists, and landscape architects have been working together to create the bright and verdant future of a geography that, not too long ago, was deeply despised. Because of their efforts, Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, once the […]
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