Rethinking the Spaces of Waste Management Infrastructure: towards integrated urban strategies to avoid urban solid waste in contemporary city

Abstract

This paper examines the issue of solid waste management in urban contexts, by an architectural perspective. In light of the emerging waste crisis, this paper proposes to redesign and gradually reintroduce waste management facilities in the urban tissue. The capacity to learn from trash can help to design a new generation of facilities, aiming to recover suburban areas and to re-establish a lost ecological balance.
The paper underlines the need to radically reconsider the spatial articulation and the organizational structure of the current waste management infrastructure, through an integrateed approach aiming to define a decentralized and distributed urban model. Finally the paper explores heuristic potentials for architectural design, identifying hybrid figures and finding key actions to intervene in the contemporary city, inspired by the notion of ‘unblackboxing’.