Waste Infrastructure, Urban Citizenship, and the Process of Urban Planning

世界各地的全球化城市面临着经济发展、基础设施升级和公共空间管理方面的无数挑战。城市规划者在努力平衡基础设施现代化的需要与促进城市贫民就业之间的关系时，往往面临不同组成群体的利益冲突。例如，将垃圾场改为现代卫生填埋场，可能会减少对公众健康的危害，但同时也威胁到成千上万依靠捡垃圾和回收生存的人的生计。对垃圾场权利的抗议触及了城市公民权和穷人对城市和公共空间的权利的核心。该项目将调查不同利益相关者群体如何不同地理解和重视废物基础设施，并评估卫生设施升级对劳动力的影响。在这样做的过程中，它将促进对基础设施规划过程、城市公民身份以及城市穷人对威胁其生计的项目进行竞争的手段的理解。研究结果将对规划者、政策制定者和社会正义倡导者应对全球南方城市基础设施现代化带来的挑战产生宝贵的影响。 该项目的重点是对塞内加尔达喀尔的一项计划中的卫生设施升级进行案例研究，该升级引发了拾荒者有组织的抗议运动。达喀尔是这项研究的理想场所，因为它有着悠久的和平、多党民主的历史，有着悠久的城市公民运动传统，最近有“清理”不受欢迎的地方和非正式劳动力的趋势。达喀尔庞大的垃圾场Mbeubeuss是非洲最古老、最大的垃圾填埋场之一。 尽管政府升级基础设施的计划在过去几年中因抗议活动而受挫，但在其资助者世界银行的压力下，政府正在努力在未来两年推动升级。 通过与关键利益相关者（包括政府规划者和废物捡拾者）的人种学研究，该研究将审查这段时间的规划过程，作为了解围绕城市公民身份和城市最贫困者权利的物质斗争的窗口。将进行广泛的访谈，参与者观察和参与性绘图，以揭示不同的空间和材料的关系所代表的两个基础设施，如何演员的有争议的愿景转储嵌入到他们的物质实践（例如，回收过程与办公室工作），以及专家和方言知识的形式编组每个组。 将特别注意的方式，采摘积极分子通过他们的替代发展的话语和公民科学的做法竞争的权威知识的规划。 有助于政治基础设施，废物的地理，城市政治生态和环境知识的政治辩论，研究将显示城市公民身份的物质基础，并深入了解更有利于穷人的基础设施规划战略。

Globalizing cities around the world face a myriad of challenges surrounding economic development, infrastructural upgrades, and the management of public space. Urban planners often confront competing interests of different constituent groups in their efforts to balance the need to modernize infrastructures with fostering of employment for the urban poor. Conversions of garbage dumps to modern sanitary landfills, for example, may reduce hazards to public health at the same time they threaten the livelihoods of thousands of people who rely on waste picking and recycling for survival. The contestations that take place over the right to the dump cut to the heart of urban citizenship and the poor's rights to the city and public space. This project will investigate how various stakeholder groups differently understand and value waste infrastructures and evaluate the labor implications of upgrades to sanitation facilities. In so doing, it will advance understanding of the infrastructure planning process, urban citizenship, and the means through which the urban poor contest projects that threaten their livelihoods. Research results will have valuable implications for planners, policymakers, and social justice advocates addressing the challenges posed by infrastructure modernization in cities of the Global South. This project focuses on a case study of a planned sanitation upgrade that has spawned an organized protest movement by waste pickers in Dakar, Senegal. Dakar is an ideal setting for this research because of its long history of peaceful, multi-party democracy, its long tradition of urban citizenship movements, and recent trends to "clean up" undesirable places and informal laborers. Dakar's sprawling dump, Mbeubeuss, is one of the oldest and largest landfills in Africa. Though the government plan to upgrade the infrastructure has been frustrated over the last few years by protests, under pressure from its funder the World Bank, efforts are underway to push the upgrade forward in the next two years. Through ethnographic research with key stakeholders, including government planners and waste pickers, the research will examine the planning process during this time as a window into material struggles around urban citizenship and the rights of the city's poorest. Extensive interviews, participant observation, and participatory mapping will be conducted in order to reveal the different spatial and material relations represented by the two infrastructures, how actors' contested visions for the dump are embedded in their material practices (e.g. recycling processes versus office work), and the forms of expert and vernacular knowledge marshaled by each group. Special attention will be paid to the way that picker activists contest the authoritative knowledge of planning through their alternative development discourses and practices of civic science. Contributing to debates in political infrastructures, geographies of waste, urban political ecology, and the politics of environmental knowledge, the research will show the material basis of urban citizenship and lend insight into strategies for more pro-poor infrastructure planning.