Switching Managua on! Connecting forgotten wastescapes to the city Authors: María José Zapata Campos & Patrik Zapata Affiliations: Gothenburg Research Institute Sweden & School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Contact:
[email protected],
[email protected], GRI, Box 603 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden Presented to: Abstract submitted to NESS 2011, Stockholm. Workshop: Making the city: planning and managing the urban landscape Abstract 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.