Waste Is Information: Infrastructure Legibility and Governance

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Dietmar Offenhuber (Assistant Professor, Northeastern University) Carlo Ratti (Director, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Waste Is Information

Infrastructure Legibility and Governance

Dietmar Offenhuber (Assistant Professor, Northeastern University), Carlo Ratti (Director, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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English

MIT Press
05 December 2023

Archaeological methodology & techniques; Impact of science & technology on society; Waste management; Nuclear issues; Urban & municipal planning

Series: Infrastructures

The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects.

The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects.

Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visualizations shape infrastructure governance. He does so by looking at three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects in Seattle, S o Paulo, and Boston.

Offenhuber expands the notion of urban legibility-the idea that the city can be read like a text-to introduce the concept of infrastructure legibility. He argues that infrastructure governance is enacted through representations of the infrastructural system, and that these representations stem from the different stakeholders' interests, which drive their efforts to make the system legible. The Trash Track project in Seattle used sensor technology to map discarded items through the waste and recycling systems; the Forager project looked at the informal organization processes of waste pickers working for Brazilian recycling cooperatives; and mobile systems designed by the city of Boston allowed residents to report such infrastructure failures as potholes and garbage spills. Through these case studies, Offenhuber outlines an emerging paradigm of infrastructure governance based on a complex negotiation among users, technology, and the city.

By: Dietmar Offenhuber (Assistant Professor Northeastern University)
Foreword by: Carlo Ratti (Director Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262549967
ISBN 10: 0262549964
Series: Infrastructures
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 05 December 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Foreword vii Preface: The Paper Police ix Introduction: Waste Is Information 1 I Legibility 21 Prologue to Part I: Tracing Waste Geographies 23 1 Visibility 27 2 Reading Structure in Waste 53 Epilogue to Part I: Waste Forensics 87 II Informality 93 Prologue to Part II: Making Informal Waste Systems Legible 95 3 Local Legibility 101 4 Tacit Arrangements: Reading Presence and Practices 117 Addendum: Structures of Brazilian Cooperatives 141 III Participation 151 Prologue to Part III: Crowdsourcing Infrastructure 153 5 Who Is Infrastructure? Participation in Urban Services 157 6 The Urban Problem at the Interface: Reading Governance 177 Epilogue to Part III: Tool or Therapy? Critiques of Civic Technologies 201 Conclusion: A Case for Accountability-Oriented Design 207 Notes 227 References 231 Acknowledgments 259 Index 261

Dietmar Offenhuber is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. He is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard metaLAB and was recently a fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. He is the author of the award-winning Waste Is Information (MIT Press).