• Time, Waste, and the City: The Rise of the Environmental Industry

    Author(s):
    Key MacFarlane (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Environmental Humanities, Place Studies, Science Studies and the History of Science, Urban Studies
    Subject(s):
    Capitalism, History, Labor, Urban geography
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    capital, Time, urban, waste, Environment, History of capitalism, Labour, Space
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/16y7-g983
    Abstract:
    In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial past, cleaning up the waste left over from long-departed manufacturing sectors. Returning to David Harvey’s earlier work on the urban process, this paper develops a theory of waste switching that situates EGS within a larger renegotiation of space and time across city landscapes. This theory is fleshed out in case studies of the EGS industry in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee, where new cycles of accumulation have been built on refuse, toxins, and dead labour. These “toxi-cities” and their cleanup challenge traditional conceptions of urbanisation as spatially—but also temporally—bounded.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1111/anti.12427
    Publisher:
    Wiley
    Pub. Date:
    2018-9-10
    Journal:
    Antipode
    Volume:
    51
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    225 - 247
    ISSN:
    0066-4812
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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