Disappearance, emergence, and appearance

Garbage and the politics of placemaking in Cartagena, Colombia

Bibliographic Data

ID3978374
AuthorsLaura Neville (0000-0002-6909-168X, University of Lausanne, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume25
Issue10
Pages1554-1574
Publication date2024-11-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649365.2024.2347867
OpenAlexW4396691480
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited62

This paper examines the politics of placemaking in an expanding self-built settlement in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, under everyday conditions of disposability and waste toxicity. Based on 11 months of ethnographic research, the paper introduces the triptych of disappearance, emergence, and appearance to categorize residents’ everyday garbage-based practices. The paper argues that these three forms of garbage-based practices are racialized and forged through historical processes of urban displacement, shifting socio-political backgrounds, and legacies of violence. This paper highlights the intimate links between the material and social production of Black placemaking and embodied experiences of toxicities in Cartagena. It draws attention to the multiple ways in which Afro-Colombian residents endure and contest cumulative processes of embodied experiences of waste exposure through politics of placemaking. Garbage socio-material entanglements allow for the acknowledgement of the relationality of space, materials, people, and politics, which are constitutive of contentious relational politics of placemaking. As residents in urban contexts contend with ever-evolving waste challenges, this paper proposes novel ways of reading the inherent plurality of relational politics of placemaking, which can foreshadow alternative urban environmental futures

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Garbage · Placemaking · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Architecture

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