This doctoral dissertation project investigates the ways in which rural migrants establish livelihoods and gain access to urban space via informal recycling and trash collecting. Although recycling contributes value by removing waste from cities and channeling materials back into commodity production, new rural-urban migrants in developing and emerging countries are often viewed as 'uncivilized' by established urban residents. Thus, migrant recyclers are paradoxically objectified as both paragons of entrepreneurial virtue and unsanitary urban interlopers. In some countries tensions arise as state entities seek to control flows of both urban waste and rural migrants within the city. Arguing that access to urban space and waste is a crucial determinant for the success of migrant recyclers, this project connects the shifting experiences and conceptions of mobility, citizenship and identity with the structures impacting their livelihoods. This project builds on the hypothesis that informal recycling's creation of social and economic value represents a strategy of urban citizenship, and reveals the contradictions underlying state and public visions of modern urban development. By considering the case of urban recycling in Shanghai, this research uses a mixed methodology of surveys, statistical and discourse analysis, interviews, focus groups, and mobile ethnography, uniting studies in urban development, migration, and the regional geography of China. There are two research questions the project hopes to answer are: (1) how is informal recycling structured in metropolitan Shanghai? (2) How is access to urban space and resources for newly urban residents engaged in recycling as a livelihood conditioned, limited, and enabled by these structures?
This research promotes cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research among China and US scientists and policy-makers by demonstrating the benefits and values of informal recycling networks and they in which these have the potential for stabilizing newly urban populations. It argues for positive recognition of the contributions of marginalized groups to sustainable urban development. The resulting dissertation will be published in Mandarin Chinese and English, and disseminated to local university departments and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS). Scholarly articles produced from this research will be submitted to US academic journals and presented at conferences of development, migration, and China studies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this project provides support to a promising student working towards establishing a social science research career.
This project was designed and carried out as a mobile ethnography of informal waste recycling networks and participants in Shanghai, China. The award was used during 2012 and 2013 to enable completion of the project. Funds were used in accordance with the project description. This included using funds for interviews, surveys, focus groups, and translation of Mandarin Chinese into English. Additionally, archival research, audio-visual recording, and statistics were obtained. The project considers how the transformation of waste is carried out in material and symbolic ways. Waste is conceptualized as a process, through which materials may be treated as a hazard, a commodity, or both. In the case of Shanghai, the municipal government has prioritized development of municipal waste services that primarily deal with waste as a hazard, removing it from the urban center to landfills and incinerators. This highly technical form of waste management is imperfect, however, as existing municipal systems are unable to manage or control the daily volumes of waste generated by Shanghai’s rapid growth in demolition, construction, manufacturing, and consumption. The informal recycling sector is massive, populated by hundreds of thousands of rural migrants. Treating many kinds of waste as a commodity via recycling, informal recyclers create social and economic value for themselves and their communities, via the collection, sorting, trade, and export of recyclable waste. In turn, this creates value for city residents, who are able to sell household waste directly to mobile collectors. It also creates value for the municipal government, which benefits from the informal sector’s ability to collect and process volumes of waste outside of formal waste management streams. In turn, the informal sector directs recyclable material directly back into flows of production, by selling it to factories, construction sites, and other types of industry engaged in export and development-driven national growth. Thus, the informal recycling sector is demonstrably linked with formal regimes of development and urban management. Additionally, using a conceptualizations of citizenship as both top down and bottom up processes of place-making and socio-economic inclusion, informal recycling in shown to be constitutive of new forms of urban identity for rural migrants, whose disadvantaged status is critiqued via the hukou housing registration system. In conclusion, it is shown that despite institutional inequalities for rural people, socio-economic opportunities like informal recycling are used as a form of bottom up resistance to institutional barriers. A neighborhood case study of Dongjiadu, Shanghai’s old town, is provided to ethnographically situate informal recycling in urban space at multiple scales, from street corners to municipal districts. This case study shows how working class enclaves function as nodes for informal recycling flows of material, participants, and ideas. In turn, informal recycling contributes directly to particular formations of space and landscape in Shanghai. In conclusion, I argue that the national and municipal governments must begin the challenging process of creating municipal waste recycling programs that are inclusive of the informal sector, which will in turn positively influence the efficiency and profitability of waste management, a significant challenge for Chinese cities at this critical moment of national development.
