Kevin Lynch’s Wasting Away

Philosophy on “positive waste,” making the most out of an inevitable process:
Lynch, Kevin. "Wasting Away". Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, 1990

Decline, decay and wasting are a necessary part of life and growth; we must learn to value them and to do them well. This book represents a natural progression in his consideration of all aspects of urban life. He saw that we are headed in a self-destructive direction that has implications for virtually every profession, including environmental design and planning. Though the book is not a warning, but a plea that we should acknowledge most waste and the processes of wasting as valuable and necessary in the life of people, things, and places, and promote his philosophies on “positive wasting”.

He tried to expand readers’ thinking by reducing the notion to its most fundamental meaning and then exploring its many implications. Lynch examines waste from many perspectives and addresses cultural notions of waste and why we are so uncomfortable with waste and wasting. He then looks at waste in the context of other cultures and talks about class and waste, eating, cleaning, and death. As in many other ancient societies, buildings and even settlements were wasted deliberately as a symbol of royal prestige and purity, just as emperors were served more than they could eat and possessed more clothes than they can possibly wear. New cities and palaces were at one time built at every accession and abandoned at each royal death.

Wasting is a pervasive process in human society, just as it is elsewhere in the living system. It is a feature of the underlying flux that carries us along, the everlasting impermanence of things. If we look for continuity and not permanence, then wasting might be turned to account. Rarely, the accumulation of waste caused the abandonment of a settled place, unless it has served to hasten some natural evolution. Only occasionally has the environment been pushed to some truly irreversible dead end. Wasting has not usually caused fundamental social change, but it accelerates changes under way, and shifts the distribution of burdens. Its presence preoccupies us: it is an affair of the mind. Might there be pleasures in it and practical opportunities so we may be at ease with waste.