The history of garbage in the past two centuries has been the history of urbanism: the rise of cities necessitated efficient collection of trash and excreta. Our modern-day equivalents are the aluminum can foragers, who open bags left out on trash night and search for redeemables. Their fortunes rose as those of the field scavengers fell. Prior to the 1970s, when cities and states first put a price on tossing them, cans were just trash among more trash, going to landfills. Forty years earlier, cans hadn’t yet been invented, and a few years before that, in the early 20th century, garbage itself was virtually nonexistent in big American cities.
Mira Engler’s Designing America’s Waste Landscapes covers the whole dirty history of excrement, offal, leavings, and scraps as they eventually evolved into sewage, compost, recyclables, and toxic sludge. Designing America’s Waste Landscapes is not a social history of how households and municipalities came to produce tons and tons of this stuff daily, instead, it brings together in one place many far-flung conversations about trash in disciplines as varied as art history, architecture, engineering, anthropology, and political science, with references to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. She focuses on the idea of trash transparency—that we should look our waste straight in the gut, so to speak, and not shy away from the noxious smells, industrial apparatus, or toxic byproducts that are the results of being consumers.
Engler’s overarching concern is the application of this principle to the reclamation of polluted landscapes and the planning of future waste disposal sites and looks to the work of a group of artists and landscape architects who have argued that, instead of recoiling from the waste we produce, we should integrate it into our everyday landscape. Many of the artistic projects Engler discusses have provoked policy makers and local bureaucrats to come up with more interesting solutions for our waste landscapes. Some works, such as Mel Chin’s experiment-as-conceptual-art piece Revival Field, have even advanced scientific understanding of what’s possible in remediating and recovering wasted landscapes. As a landscape architect who has submitted her own projects for re-envisioned dumps and former industrial sites, Engler is heavily invested in the idea that artists can make a measurable difference and to produce work that embraces waste, rather than hides it from public knowledge. Her ideal of trash transparency emphasizes that nature and culture are interdependent and that remediated landscapes should incorporate a record of human effects.
For Brief By Carly Berwick see:
http://americancity.org/
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