Waste's translations

Abstract

Mumbai's dumping grounds, located on the city's estuarine edge, are sites where garbage and marsh are turned into salable land. This process of translating waste into land depends on keeping matter, beings, and landscapes separate and on limiting their interactions. Yet waste and the marsh interact and transform in ways that escape managerial discourse, revealing a haze of category and control errors that complicate knowledge, agency, and responsibility. While developers translate waste to land in relation to developmental goals, fishing communities, scientists, and activists translate it differently: scientists translate it in relation to chemical properties, interactions, and timelines; marine-life activists draw attention to its coastal ecologies; and fisher communities look for productive possibilities on a polluted shore. These translations attend to the inseparability of waste substances from the coast and its futures. They articulate a politics that acknowledges waste's sociopolitics, material agency, temporalities, and multispecies ethics. [coast, waste, development, pollution, marine life, ecology, chemistry, Mumbai]

Anthroposea: Planning future ecologies in Mumbai’s wetscapes

“…Intensified rainfall, rising seas, “garbage tides”, coastal sewage and mudslides are now regular events in which matter, resources and waters are ever more frequently crossing the boundaries drawn for and set by different urban authorities. In so doing, they dissemble the normative assumptions of modern planning (such as categorical separations of matter, space and time) upon which these projects depend (Venkataramani, 2021; Zeiderman, 2019). 3 They also draw attention to the communities of more-than-human life that now inhabit the anthroposea, in and amidst the detritus of urban life.…”

“…The sea, she seemed to suggest in contrast, was limitless and enduring; a world that was nevertheless beyond the finitudes of urban planning. Thus, today, planners continue to design infrastructure projects that make the sea the constitutive outside of the city; a passive "backdrop" that is actively made with reclamation and waste, landfill and infrastructure (Venkataramani, 2021).…”

“…3. As Chitra Venkataramani (2021) has also pointed out, the distinctions between food, waste and resource are untenable to maintain in the city's urban seas -a sea that is made with the pollution of sewage and garbage as they are ejected from the city. 4.…”

“…Like other coastal cities that were rapidly expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this is a city that is made in and on water (Ghosh, 2017;Prakash, 2010;Seasholes, 2003). It is made by cartographic and infrastructural acts that fabricate dry ground by separating it from the city's subterranean and extra-terranean wetness (Venkataramani, 2021;Mathur and Da Cunha, 2009). 1 Its infrastructural dreams and plans -like those of the coastal road I began this article with -have long been oriented towards generating a stable, solid, dry future.…”

Navigating Crises of Scale in the Anthropocene

“…Dumping grounds in the city are overflowing. The lightweight plastic packaging disposed of there is prone to transport by winds and rain to locations outside the grounds, and leachate from the dumping grounds, undoubtedly teeming with micro-and nano-plastics, seeps into the soil and ground water (Chitra 2021).…”