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Making Waste Public

This thesis questions the boundaries that define waste as a public or private
dilemma, investigating these boundaries as productive sites for the imagination
of social life. Learning from methods of processing, conveyance and disposal, I
investigate a number of possible sites where the architectural mediates the life of
a wasted object and the social life that is produced around an engagement with
that object. Waste has largely been disappeared from the city and the senses by
mechanisms of modern sanitation and architecture, moved to the urban periphery
and concealed inside increasingly refined membranes of storage and movement.
Though ruptures or discrepancies in the waste stream are often read as signposts
of failure of a certain project of the modern city, I read these ruptures or
excesses as productive irritants for working and reworking how we conceptualize
public space. It is within the friction of overlapping claims made to an issue such
as waste that public life emerges.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:RICE/oai:scholarship.rice.edu:1911/21954
Date January 2009
CreatorsGambetta, Curt
Contributorsel-Dahdah, Farès
Source SetsRice University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis, Text
Formatapplication/pdf

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