CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Schwab, Eva Carina |
|---|---|
| Title | Civilizing Waste: Work, Non-Work, And Urban Citizenship In The Making Of Belgrade (1965-2018) |
| Summary | This thesis examines processes of city-making through the shifting moral economy of the collection of valuable wastes in Belgrade from 1965 to 2018. I explore the question of “who may benefit” from the collection of valuable waste in relation to changing forms of urban governance and policing of “hygiene” and “pollution”. I show how the distinction between forms of handling waste that are “appropriate” and those that need to be disciplined and “tamed” intersects with the ways in which the urban is politicized, most notably, deciding over who belongs and who does not. My thesis starts with the entrenchment of the Yugoslav model of market socialism through the 1965 economic reforms, which I argue brought a shift from a largely administrative to an entrepreneurial style of urban governance. In the following 30 years, the collection of valuable wastes shifted from an activity to itinerant populations, people “without employment and without a place of residency”, as well as the poorest strata of workers in working collectives, to a realm to make up for dwindling sources of state funding for the Belgradian public institutions such as the sanitation services and schools. Waste collection became organized as “volunteer” activity, tied to ideas of “good citizenship”. In the 1990s, the collection of valuable wastes became identified with so-called “unhygienic settlements” that had existed before but became more prominent in the urban structure as they grew with populations displaced by the Yugoslav wars. At the same time, massive land privatization and a regime of temporary building permits enabled the emergence of investor-led urbanization. Bringing these two developments together, the General Urban Plan of Belgrade until 2021, adopted in 2003, suggested to target “unhygienic settlements” as brownfields. In my two ethnographic chapters, I show how the “unhygienic settlements” are implicated in investor-led urbanization in two ways: they offer a source of cheap labor for international companies (chapter 8) and by engaging in the collection of valuable wastes in a construction site, they create a system of valuation that enables construction companies to dodge the landfill tax (chapter 9). The collection of valuable wastes opens a vista to multiple and partially conflicting projects of city-making. The boundary between an ideological representation of the urbanization process (as rationalization and the formation of subjects with a capacity for self-regulation) and the actual political economy of urbanization depends on the reproduction of internal Others and internal as well as external margins. The collection of valuable wastes offers an entry point into studying the way in which this frontier is being policed. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar; Caglar, Ayse |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/schwab_eva.pdf |
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