The Wretched of the Earth

Lunds Civila Ryttarforening, LCR, is one of Sweden’s largest equestrian clubs with its facilities located in between Norra Faladen to the north and LTH to the south. To the west of the horse facilities is “Smorlyckans Idrottsplats” with football pitches, tennis courts, a Jujutsu club and a Home Guard’s building. The club has approximately 500 weekly riders and offers a wide range of activities within the the riding school, as well as stalls for private horses. Discussions on whether the equestrian centre should be relocated or not have reached a standstill as it has been going on for about 50 years. I believe that if LCR is to stay on its current site it can not continue to be an island. Therefore this project is an investigation into how the centre could be developed meeting and integrating with its surroundings. As much as the horse is the centre of the stable and the equestrian sport it’s also the centre of this project. “When Species Meet” is a what-if scenario on what could happen if we plan for the horse and who else that could benefit from that. In addition to the architectural proposal, one major question with the project has been to develop my own method and investigate how it’s possible to keep a high rate of complexity when working with a project. This is something I have done by taking the position of the horse instead of the architect. This change of position has provided me with a possibility to see the site, with all its opportunities, from a perspective that I couldn’t have without the horse. Therefore, this project is also a try on how it could be possible to take on other projects by relocating my investigation to several other positions relevant for those projects. (Less)

When Species Meet

The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy

We've all had the experience at some time or other of walking through a department store and being amazed at the many different articles we see there. One counter after another filled with this, that, and the other thing-some useful, some of little or no use. Almost every day a new gadget is advertised, electric blankets, or hats that look like chimneys, or a special kind of vitamin tablets. A common reaction of people as they look in shop windows is, "What will they think of next?"This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Accumulation of Capital

/pdf/bibliography-of-urban-history-2020-dg74s36qmj.pdf

Bibliography of urban history 2020

Motorcycle taxis, dubbed boda bodas, constitute a vital aspect of Kampala’s transportation infrastructure, yet the industry is perpetually precarious, threatened with wholesale eviction. Moreover, ...

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Life (and limb) in the fast-lane: disposable people as infrastructure in Kampala’s boda boda industry

Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal by Rosalind Fredericks Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 200 pp.

Thousands of marabou storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city’s green spaces and eating up to 2 kilos of organic matter daily, mostly rotting garbage found in the city’s open dumps. Weedy birds, they flourish amid Kampala’s garbage crisis. Storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, and cast out from the imaginary of a clean, green, urban future. Theorizing animal and informal infrastructures together as “para-sites,” this paper follows marabou storks through Kampala’s ever-shifting waste frontier: the postconsumer equivalent to the extractive frontier that subtends the capitalist fantasy of endless growth. Kampala’s topography, hydrology, and class structure ensure that trash flows downhill, accumulating in slums where it leads to flooding and outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses as well as to endemic malaria. Waste with wings, marabou storks remake the urban waste landscape, undermining efforts to stabilize the city’s ultimate sinks in landfills, slums, and wetlands as they flourish in filth and defecate in the heart of greenness.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/702868

Filthy Flourishing: Para-Sites, Animal Infrastructure, and the Waste Frontier in Kampala

In the name of cleaning up Kampala’s political institutions and public space, a new municipal body, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), was established in 2010, replacing an elected city cou...

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Maintenance Space: The Political Authority of Garbage in Kampala, Uganda

Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

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Jacob Doherty

Papers

Life (and limb) in the fast-lane: disposable people as infrastructure in Kampala’s boda boda industry

Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal by Rosalind Fredericks Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 200 pp.

Filthy Flourishing: Para-Sites, Animal Infrastructure, and the Waste Frontier in Kampala

Maintenance Space: The Political Authority of Garbage in Kampala, Uganda

Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work