Cultural History of Waste Disposal

This book offers a historical analysis of landfill sites in New York City Greater Toronto and Greater Tel Aviv and uses them as case studies to emphasize the international and global scale of issues concerning waste disposal and park redevelopments.New York Toronto and Tel Aviv are currently redeveloping giant landfills into parks to much fanfare. The park redevelopments may be seen as an attempt to erase or assuage the decades of problematic waste-disposal policy that led to the creation of such large landfills. Booster rhetoric underscores this point such as promoting how the parks will be a “green lung” for the city. This book contextualizes these redevelopments by offering a historical analysis providing a greater understanding of the past current and future potential issues. It goes on to analyze the language and media coverage surrounding former waste sites becoming park redevelopments including how cities use art to promote their image and gain cultural relevance. By engaging with both the works of waste historians and literature on waste and discard studies the book provides theoretical models for analyzing the role of power in municipal systems as well as human and ecological impacts on waste. It concludes with an analysis of the features necessary for landfill parks to be successful.This book will be useful for scholars researchers and academics studying waste studies the environment cities and sustainable development as well as for policymakers and environmental/eco artists.Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at taylorfrancis under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.