Trash and Urban Informality: A Study on Spatial Segregation in Bogotá, Colombia

Keywords: landfills, urban informality, peripheral urbanization, toxic landscapes, bogotá
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

Waste has been concealed and misallocated as a consequence of urban growth. While many residents of cities rarely think about refuse beyond a quotidian scale, the spatial consequences of waste management systems are disproportionately dire for the neighbors of landfills, the most ubiquitous type of waste management facility. Placing and operating landfills represents the allocation of multiple burdens on the environmental and social infrastructure of a city, as well as on the urban poor. In Latin American cities, the entanglement of waste and urban informality is a driving force behind peripheral urbanization, a process in which the margins of cities are contested and appropriated by those who have nowhere else to go. This paper will explore the consequences of centralizing waste in Bogotá, Colombia. The Doña Juana landfill, the only facility serving the city, has operated since 1988 and has radically changed the social dynamics and the landscape of its environment. As the landfill has devoured more land to bury trash, contamination and informality have spread at a similar pace, and Doña Juana’s presence, as an expression of the “formal city,” has resulted in increased peripheral, informal development. The landfill blurs the lines between formal and informal urbanization, yet reinforces patterns of segregation, discarding pieces of cities and marking them as disposable. At the same time, the communities dwelling around Doña Juana has been forced to device strategies to live in proximity to a toxic landscape and to resist a process of dispossession by contamination.