Discourses and practices of development consistently have held that urbanization is the key to progress. But urbanization also brings a set of problems, two of which are an informal sector that perpetually escapes the purview of the state and mounting piles of unmanaged and oft-times unmanageable garbage. At the intersection of these two problems are waste-pickers, individuals who informally manage the city's garbage. In the city of Delhi, India, the waste-pickers livelihoods are threatened as the city of Delhi privatizes its waste management services in its aspirations to be become a "world-class" and "global" city. This doctoral dissertation research project seeks answers to the following broad question: How can the problem of dealing with garbage tell us about relations within and between classes, the state and private capital in the process of urbanization in Delhi? More specifically, the doctoral student will pursue the following questions: (1) How has the state treated garbage and waste-pickers as objects of urban planning? (2) What information about the urbanizing process is provided from an examination of the tactics and strategies of private waste firms? (3) How have middle- and upper-class desires for a particular kind of urban modernity been enacted through the management of garbage? (4) How are informal sector waste-pickers organizing and contesting the discourses and practices of city-making? Drawing upon existing work in urban metabolism, the role of class relations in shaping urban spaces, the place of the informal sector in the urban economy, urban infrastructure privatization, and the growth of the waste management industry, the student will seek connections among these research areas by examining the different facets of the urban waste management problem in developing countries. The student will use semi-structured interviews with government officials, non-governmental organization, and development agency personnel and waste-firm managers; participant observation at six Resident Welfare Association (RWA) meetings, a waste picker organization (Safai Sena), and a waste firm; and household surveys in six neighborhoods where participant observation at RWA meetings will be conducted.
This project will provide alternatives and guidance for municipal managers to develop policy solutions that are more just and inclusive for some of the city's most vulnerable populations by pointing out the distributional impacts of waste management program implementations. From a theoretical perspective, the project will contribute to the growing literature in urban political ecology; draw attention to garbage as a unique form of a common pool resource; contribute to the debates on the relationship between waste and value from a political economy perspective; and pose new questions for studying agglomeration economies and diseconomies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
Cities hold a promise of modernity even as their underbellies constantly expose the ideological and material contradictions therein. I use garbage as a lens for examining urbanization processes because it can reveal the interlinked material and symbolic underpinnings of the urban landscape as a mosaic of competing interests. Symbolically, garbage has always posed a threat to a particular vision of capitalist modernity, where ideas of hygiene and progress come together to fashion new kinds of urban spaces through the disciplining of social behaviors. Yet, the material reality of garbage does something else. As much as garbage is a problem, as material, it offers an opportunity: the promise of profit for private capital steadily expanding into this space, or a meager means of livelihoods for thousands working in the informal economy of waste in urban centers across the world. Beyond reading waste management as a technology of rule/government, or waste as a material agent of history, this dissertation will provide insights into how and why garbage is framed as a problem, who is involved in establishing this frame, and why certain solutions are privileged over others. This research asks the following broad question: What can the problem of garbage reveal about relations within and between classes, the state and private capital in the process of urbanization in Delhi? Methods To answer this question, over a period of one year of fieldwork funded in part by the NSF, this research employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques that include: Participant observation at two organizations of informal sector actors in Delhi and its suburbs; Semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus group discussions, and online forum discussions with activists, NGOs, government officials, private waste firms, and informal sector waste workers; Participant observation at conferences, seminars, workshops, and working group meetings held by NGOs, bilateral funding agencies, government, and the waste industry; and Survey of 3,000 households on attitudes towards waste management in Delhi. Outcomes and significance Using the concepts of capital, labor, value and ideology as focal points, this dissertation will show how material struggles over waste in urban India expose why and in whose interests certain conceptual binaries—public/private, formal/informal, modern/pre-modern, waste/wealth, property/commons—are produced and maintained. My research engages with theories, methods, and their applications in geography, anthropology and economics and will have the following important implications. First, within geography and anthropology, there is growing interest in the subject of waste, dovetailing with a flourishing engagement with "new materialism" that pays close attention to the non-human as an agent. In response to this emerging literature, my research will demonstrate the usefulness of the poltico-economic concepts of value, labor and capital in understanding the contemporary struggles over waste in urban India. Second, within economic geography, although the impacts of agglomeration diseconomies are known, they are not well explored beyond problems of congestion in cities. Within this literature, agglomeration diseconomies tend to be treated as "things" that have a cost. My research will show that how people engage with these diseconomies actually alters them and their meaning in the city. Third, the problem of garbage in popular imagination is seen as a problem of individual and collective societal practices that can therefore only be resolved through individual and collective behavioral changes, cultural changes, in other words. Relying on a critical understanding of how and in whose interests garbage is framed as a problem, my research will reveal how cultural notions of waste/value are be rooted in the political economy of waste. Fourth, although the relationship between states and markets has long been known, this research will demonstrate how a neoliberal logic (enforced through public-private partnerships in waste management) contradicts itself by destroying well-functioning markets. On a practical level, my research will benefit those struggling against injustice in the re-organization of waste management systems through new advocacy and community mobilization strategies and tactics.
