Seeing Waste Like a City: Towards Just and Sustainable Urban Circular Economies
Name of applicant
Charlotte Cator
Title
Research Assistant, PhD
Institution
Copenhagen Business School
Amount
DKK 900,000
Year
2024
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
The project investigates waste as an urban phenomenon by analysing urban policies and practices around waste and circular economy. It studies how urban communities handle and potentially avoid waste in urban collective life, as well as how these local practices are implicated in the global political economy of waste, in which continuing international waste trade and dumping create inequalities.
Why?
Urbanisation and increasing consumption have generated a waste crisis, which local governments aim to tackle through the circular economy. Yet, the latter has an overly technocratic and industrial orientation. Related policies insufficiently consider the role of citizens and communities that generate, handle and avoid waste differently depending on their geographical, cultural and social context.
How?
The project conducts a global-comparative study of Glasgow and Mexico City. It employs qualitative methods and analyses local policies, flows of waste and the actors who mediate these flows. By comparing findings in these two urban contexts, it traces similarities and differences between the policies and practices with attention to their geographical, social and political-economic differences.