Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied Urban Political Ecology of women informal recyclers’ work in the ‘clean city’

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways that ‘cleaning up’ Indian cities impacts those who rely on accessing waste on city streets for their livelihoods. I focus on low-income Dalit women recyclers in Ahmedabad, India as they navigate material and discursive shifts in urban waste management emanating from the national Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and 2016 Solid Waste Management Rules, and the municipal privatization and mechanization of solid waste management practice. The study is informed by 10 months of ethnographic research and a series of interviews and group discussions with women recyclers between 2016 and 2018. Using a feminist embodied Urban Political Ecology approach, I suggest the imagining and production of the ‘clean and green’ world-class city is affecting Dalit women recyclers’ work in two ways. First, I argue that emerging cleanliness governance mechanisms and solid waste management practices are re-spatializing and masculinizing waste labour in the city. I show how spatial, discursive and temporal shifts in solid waste management are producing new challenges for Dalit women recyclers in accessing waste, intensifying their physical and financial burdens and requiring more precarious adaptations to generate daily incomes. Second, I explore women recyclers’ own clean city aspirations, expressing a desire to experience the ‘clean and green’ city and a simultaneous sense of betrayal as their livelihoods, communities and bodies are excluded from its imagining and material production. I suggest that an embodied intersectional analysis of waste labour reveals how the imagining and production of clean and sustainable ‘modern’ cities can cause damage to socially marginalized and gendered bodies as they are displaced from work and denied the substantive experience of urban citizenship in the ‘world-class’ city. Attention to embodiment thus deepens an understanding of the complexities and contradictions invoked in urban environmental governance and infrastructural transformations, informing the imagining and production of more equitable and reparative urban futures.

‘Our faces change, but it's always the same story’: Crises of social reproduction among informal recyclers in Buenos Aires, Argentina

“…These interventions represent both the setting of a boundary regarding social reproduction (recyclers who work with children present in public spaces will not be sanctioned) and the optional downloading of responsibility for social reproduction activities (cooperatives can choose to privately offer childcare if they wish to take this on). The municipal push to semi‐formalize informal recyclers through the creation of cooperatives, the institution of uniforms, and the prohibition of working with children may be read as a neoliberal impulse to ‘modernize’ Buenos Aires and reduce the appearance of child labor on city streets (Parizeau, 2015; see Miraftab, 2005, Samson, 2010, Wittmer, 2022 for other accounts of neoliberal waste management interventions that have had gendered impacts). However, for some, cooperativization has involved the creation of daycare services that enable women to more fully participate in the workforce.…”

Learning from the past to plan for the future: An historical review of the evolution of waste and resource management 1970–2020 and reflections on priorities 2020–2030 – The perspective of an involved witness

“…As waste management is modernised, women are also mostly excluded from the more lucrative levels of employment, including higher levels of administration and better-paid jobs (Seager et al, 2020). The same is generally true in informal recycling: men often have traditional rights to valorise higher-value metals, and women are 'allowed' to accumulate and sell lower-value plastics and textiles (Beall, 1997;Dias and Ogando, 2015;Wittmer, 2022). Investment often replaces 'women's work' by 'men's work' (Practical Action, 2021).…”

“…Much work has focused on how best to include the informal sector alongside the formal MSWM system to form an integrated WaRM system. Academic papers include, for example, calls to re-conceptualise the system ( Gutberlet, 2010 ; Dias, 2016 ; Velis, 2017 ; Wittmer, 2022 ), and several reviews ( Ezeah et al, 2013 ), one focusing on barriers and success factors ( Aparcana, 2017 ), another on ‘formalisation’ efforts ( Morais et al, 2022 ). The grey literature includes syntheses from comparative case studies (e.g.…”

GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION: Reproducing Dispossession and Erasure within a Waste Picker Organization in Mumbai

“…Most of Deonar's Muslim population trace their roots as North Indian migrants who migrated to Shivaji Nagar in response to several instances of ethnic and political turmoil throughout the city's history (Hansen, 1999;Contractor, 2012;Shaban, 2012). Caste power is not only perpetuated in Mumbai but it has also become spatialized across the modern cityscape (Wittmer, 2022) by intersecting with religion, ethnicity and gender. Consequently, social groups bearing the burden of pollution are subjected to multiple forms of vulnerability.…”