Switching Managua on! Connecting forgotten wastescapes to the city

• Wastescapes such as clandestine dumps, garbage slums and other kind of spontaneous settlements constitute part of the normality in the cities of the global south. Although quotidian, wastescapes are often forgotten or abandoned by the formal city, disconnected from most public services as roads, pavements, water, sewage, standard housing, municipal waste collection or street cleaning. Invisible people such as child workers, poor people, gangs, unemployed, exploited, persecuted, or maltreated women, inhabit the wastescapes (a variety of black holes, to speak with Manuel Castells, 1998). The question we address in this paper is: how are cities in the global south organizing and connecting hidden and forgotten sites, as wastescapes, to the formal city? Or, differently put, how does the informal city assemblage with the formal city and vice versa? To answer the research question we focus on the household solid waste management service in the city of Managua, Nicaragua. During December 2009 to February 2010 and January to February 2011 we have conducted a case study in Managua. Our material consists of around 70 interviews, documents, media material and observations gathered and performed during this time. During the last decades the waste management municipal service has been confined to the collection of waste in the formal city. The modern municipal waste trucks, donated by different international aid organisations, are not appropriate to enter into the informal city, the spontaneous settlements, due to their narrow alleys and multitude of hanging cables and other hinders. The waste management municipal service has also been limited to the disposal of waste at La Chureca, Managua’s municipal garbage dump, where no kind of transformation has been made. Instead, 2000 people and 600 children have been working daily in the dump to recover the valuable materials from the garbage. The result is that an important part of the city is out of waste collecting service and, accordingly, much of the city’s waste ends up in clandestine dumps where it causes sickness, smell and harbours vermin, or in open water canals where it provokes flooding during the rain season. Similarly, La Chureca has caused serious problems of air, soil and water contamination during the last four decades. The city of Managua has recently involved itself in a number of urban development projects related to the city’s waste management, all funded by aid development organisations. These projects deal with the sealing of La Chureca’s dump and the regeneration of its slum; the construction of a new sanitary landfill and a waste transformation station; the construction of a number of waste transference stations in the city districts as a process of decentralization of the waste management municipal service; campaigns to rouse the awareness of the local population; eradication of child-labour related to waste collection; elimination of illegal dumping and the improvement of public health; and the establishment of micro-enterprises and cooperatives for collecting, recycling and transforming household solid waste in neighbourhoods out of the reach of the formal municipal service. In the paper we explore how the implementation of these urban development projects connects Managua’s wastescapes to the formal waste management service. We take theoretical stance on city management studies where organization and urban studies merge (e.g. Czarniawska, 2002; Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Kornberger and Carter, 2010; Vaara, Sorsa and Pälli). We simultaneously make use of Actor-Network Theory (e.g. Law and Hassard, 1999; Callon, 2001; Latour, 2005) and the related concept of action-net (Czarniawska 2004); urban infrastructures connecting on and off cities through maintenance and repair (e.g. Graham and Drift, 2007); and the processes of hybridity elaborated from culture studies (e.g. Pieterse, 1995). The preliminary findings show how Managua city’s waste management system is being transformed into a hybrid of formal and informal services, modern and traditional technologies. In the paper we argue that the formal-modern and the informal-traditional waste collection services are assemblaged through new waste transference stations situated in the city districts, where the informal and traditional waste collection services switch on the disconnected parts of the city, the spontaneous and forgotten settlements (the wastescapes), to the formal city. The case study also shows different translations of the technologies, management ideas and knowledge promoted by global organisations such as the donors and the international aid organisations involved in these projects, and their implications for the sustainability of the city management.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Studier av offentlig förvaltning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Public Administration Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

crossing points

maintenance and repair

wastescape

white field

Managua

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)