Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social Movements Impacts on Urban Waste Systems

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The proposed study will investigate the social movements that are driving one major US city to address food recovery and composting initiatives. The study will identify what conditions are facilitating competing and diverse actors and strategies to work together in order to transform a large city waste system. The findings will be of interest to community organizers, policy makers, city urban designers and planners who are managing, updating and maintaining urban waste systems. This research will ask what happens to a huge, obdurate sociotechnical system when it is challenged by numerous alternative solutions. The research will examine how top-down and bottom-up designs are coordinated through the deployment of future projections by people developing alternative food waste systems. The study will use a mixed-methods, multi-sited design to understand how actors building alternative food waste systems in New York City imagine and coordinate projected futures as they create new infrastructures. Data collection will include: 1) participant observation of design, building and maintenance of alternative food waste infrastructures; 2) participant observation at planning and policy events; 3) semi-structured interviews with organizers, volunteers, and users of systems; and 4) daily use of, and interactions with, emerging food infrastructures. This study will demonstrate how informal urbanism can create decentralized solutions to the complex problem of waste. Insights about the effectiveness and pitfalls of this approach to sociotechnical transformation will help to inform policy makers and designers seeking effective ways to weave together centralized and situated approaches to green infrastructure. Findings will be reported in both scholarly and popular venues and shared with food recovery and composing practitioners.