Waste is information : infrastructure legibility and governance / Dietmar Offenhuber ; foreword by Carlo Ratti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Offenhuber, Dietmar, author.

Ratti, Carlo, author of foreword.

Series:

Infrastructures series

Infrastructures Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Refuse and refuse disposal--Planning.

Refuse and refuse disposal.

Refuse and refuse disposal--Citizen participation.

Municipal services--Planning--Case studies.

Municipal services.

Refuse and refuse disposal--Philosophy.

City planning.

Municipal services--Planning.

Philosophy.

Genre:

Case studies.

Physical Description:

x, 270 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017]

Summary:

The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects.Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visualizations shape infrastructure governance. He does so by looking at three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects in Seattle, Sao Paulo, and Boston.Offenhuber expands the notion of urban legibility -- the idea that the city can be read like a text -- to introduce the concept of infrastructure legibility. He argues that infrastructure governance is enacted through representations of the infrastructural system, and that these representations stem from the different stakeholders' interests, which drive their efforts to make the system legible. The Trash Track project in Seattle used sensor technology to map discarded items through the waste and recycling systems; the Forager project looked at the informal organization processes of waste pickers working for Brazilian recycling cooperatives; and mobile systems designed by the city of Boston allowed residents to report such infrastructure failures as potholes and garbage spills.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: I.Legibility

Prologue to Part I Tracing Waste Geographies

1.Visibility

2.Reading Structure in Waste

Epilogue to Part I Waste Forensics

II.Informality

Prologue to Part II Making Informal Waste Systems Legible

3.Local Legibility

4.Tacit Arrangements: Reading Presence and Practices

Addendum: Structures of Brazilian Cooperatives

III.Participation

Prologue to Part III Crowdsourcing Infrastructure

5.Who Is Infrastructure? Participation in Urban Services

6.The Urban Problem at the Interface: Reading Governance

Epilogue to Part III Tool or Therapy? Critiques of Civic Technologies.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780262036733

0262036738

OCLC:

971893149

Publisher Number:

99979106939