CityReads│What Dakar Can Teach Us About Garbage and Citizenship?

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What Dakar Can Teach Us About Garbage and Citizenship?

African cities like Dakar are key sources of theory for urban and infrastructure studies of ordinary cities around the world. 

Rosalind Fredericks, 2018. Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

McArthur, J. (2019). Book review: Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal. Urban Studies.doi:10.1177/0042098019847432 

Sources:https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/resources/resource/book-review-garbage-citizenship-vital-infrastructures-of-labor-in-dakar-senegal/

https://www.dukeupress.edu/garbage-citizenship

Garbage has taken on symbolic importance in cities, as a visceral part of everyday urban life that signifies modernity or crisis, cleanliness or disorder, by its presence or absence. Garbage often stands in as the quintessential symbol of what’s wrong in African cities: the material expression of the failures of development and the chaos taking over the African continent. The challenge of managing trash, in other words, acts as a potent metaphor for the African “crisis” writ large. Describing African cities through discourses of waste and disorder profoundly ignores the “gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes” inherited through sedimented layers of imperial debris.

In the dilapidated, salvaged garbage trucks that arrive into Dakar from distant European shores we can trace ruins of empire and their role in producing and upholding violent environments. Dakar’s trash collectors, like e-waste workers, pickers, recyclers, ship dismantlers, and so forth all over the world, signify geographies of dispossession, past and present. They are potent symbols of “thecolonial logic of (neo)liberal modernity”.  Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructuresof Labor in Dakar, Senegal  presents an in-depth analysis of the ways that garbage, and waste infrastructures, played a central role in the politics ofurban change in Dakar. This book examines contestation surrounding Dakar’s household waste infrastructure as a lens into questions of urban citizenship. Dakar’s city streets have oscillated between remarkably tidy and dangerously insalubriousas the city’s garbage infrastructure has become the stage for struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor in Senegal’s neoliberal era.

Senegalis of key significance to the reflection of structural adjustment for global southern cities, especially African cities. It was one of the first countries influenced by neoliberalism and has undergone drastic political changes and institutional reforms in the past decades, among which, waste disposal and infrastructures are more suffered from capricious institutional changes. This book focus on the debates and crisises surrounding waste infrastructures. Everyday garbage cleaning is extremely important for the tourist city of Dakar. Given that most visitors and tourists fly into Dakar, the garbage crises overthe last decades have been a key challenge to aspirations of modernity. Garbage crises take on larger-than-life significance in this small country; the trashing of Dakar represents the trashing of the nation. Given that most visitors and tourists fly into Dakar, the garbage crises over the last decades have beena key challenge to aspirations of modernity. Garbage crises take onlarger-than-life significance in this small country; the trashing of Dakar represents the trashing of the nation. With the structural adjustment, national welfare budget is reduced, one of whose outcomes is the emergence of garbage crisis and urban dysfunction or even political collapse.

Therefore, following the dynamic historical perspective and at local context, the author takes garbage and infrastructures as the lens to see the changing politics of Dakar city through important political moments. He believes that infrastructures include not only physical forms, but also human lives, whose speciality lies invital life and body. But, physical materials and vital infrastructures can beconnected. For example, human bodies and labor itself have actually been regarded as alternative infrastructures in the waste management reforms in Dakar. Here, infrastructure is multi-dimensional. This book hope to fully showits material, affective and political dimensions, and clarify the complex relationships between materials, politics, culture, gender, morality and post-colonialism.

The book mainly organizes in four chapters, including ‘Governing disposability’, ‘Vital infrastructures of labor’, ‘Technologies of community’ and ‘Piety of refusal’.

Chapter1, “Governing Disposability,” intervenes in debates on infrastructure politics, Senegalese democracy, and neoliberal development through the lens of Dakar’s garbage politics over the last twenty-five years. Institutional volatility inthe garbage sector is the outcome of intensified competition between the national and municipal state over controlling Dakar’s infrastructural order inthe wake of economic and political liberalization. These forces accelerated amode of governing-through-disposability premised upon performative, fragmented infrastructure investments and strategies to flexibilize the urban workforce.

Chapter2, “Vital Infrastructures of Labor,” takes a closer look at what the institutional transformations in the garbage sector have meant for the workers caught in their sway, through a materialist reading of the cultural politics of trash infrastructure. Tracing the sector’s history from the Set/Setal youth movement, which was a typical example of this participatory regime. Young people took to the streets, and solved the practical problem of cleaning up the city. But like its back-and-forth and wobbly institutional reforms, participatory citizenship does not accomplish in an action. The inequalities, colonial legacies, poverty and gender issues that emerge or re-emerge in the process foregrounds another rubbish crisis in Dakar in 2007. This chapter illuminate show new formulas for garbage management reconfigured everyday lives and embodied materialities of labor and, along the way, communities, political subjectivities, and relationships to the city.

Chapter3, “Technologies of Community,” links the highly contested battle to flexibilize the sphere of (“formal”) municipal trash labor and the turn to (“informal”) participatory garbage collection, through examining acommunity-based trash project in a peripheral neighborhood centered on voluntary women’s labor and horse-drawn carts. When municipal waste management failed, women’s traditional role in intra-household labor division is extended to the public space for the purpose of community development, appropriate technologies and environmentalism. The final results of the project are marginalizing neighborhood women and reinforcing customary authority in local autonomous development. Asfor waste removal, it has not been effective. The chapter further examines the social and material components of fragmented infrastructure devolved on to labor, while contributing to critiques in development studies unpacking notions of community, participation, and empowerment in community-based development.

Chapter4, “The Piety of Refusal,” explores how people feel waste and infrastructures from the aspects of values and local ethics. Trash workers and ordinary Dakarois both refuse conditions of precarity and resist the failed governancetrial in collective movement. In the movement, trash workers openly insist that their labor is in keeping with Islamic piety of cleanliness. It details the trash workers union movement and the waves of public dumping through which workers and ordinary Dakarois have refused conditions of precarity since the mid-2000s.They refuse of disposability and engage in purification activities, in which they successfully remove the stigma of waste collection and trash  workers and the public gain emotional connection through this religious value bond. Through examining workers’ identities and strategies as a union, the chapter shows how the particular resonance of their labor as cleaning and their refusal to clean through striking have validated garbage work, earned them widespread public support, and, in turn, allowed them to stem the tide of labor flexibilization. The chapter engages with debates considering the relationship between citizenship and spiritual identity and highlights the intimate communities of affect that forgein frastructures, through examining the architectures of faith under girding the workers’ movement.

The conclusion, “Garbage Citizenship,” brings together the key arguments of the book and draws insight for understanding urban infrastructural citizenship inthe wake of neoliberal development. Drawing on Dakar’s trash politics, it argues for bridging new and old materialist debates through considering the material labors of infrastructure. Values are coded in urban infrastructuresbut especially in the vital, living parts of the urban landscape. The provocations of Dakar’s garbage citizens are used to reflect on the possibilities for building more just urban infrastructures.

This book challenges the notion that Southern cities, especially African cities, represent exceptions to urban theories, and draws insight from Dakar’s everyday urbanism toward recalibrating how we think of infrastructure, labor, and citizenship in cities anywhere urban public services have been crucibles of struggle surrounding structural adjustment and other neoliberal logics. African cities like Dakar are key sources of theory for urban and infrastructure studies of ordinary cities around the world.

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