Strengthening Consumer and Retailer Responsibility for Textile Reuse and Donation in Cambridge and Boston

According to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (Mass DEP), Massachusetts residents dispose of approximately 230,000 tons of textiles each year. In Boston and Cambridge, almost all household trash is incinerated due to at-capacity landfills. This presents a critical need to divert textile waste towards secondary uses, avoiding the release of greenhouse gases and toxins from the incinerated clothes. Following the 2022 Mass DEP ban on disposing mattresses and textiles in municipal trash, there has been an increased emphasis on textile recycling in the two cities. However, existing strategies for textile reuse focus on the actions of individuals and municipalities which is at great odds with the global scale of textile waste generation.

Through data collection, stakeholder interviews, and policy analysis, this work examines relations and roles of the existing textile landscape’s donation, collection, and resale actors spanning both public and private sectors. Drawing from this investigation, I propose a bundle of recommendations to improve the textile recovery space in three key categories: responsibility and stewardship, educational messaging and outreach, and potential policy actions. To effectively address and reduce the issue of textile waste, this work concludes that clothing manufacturers and retailers must take greater responsibility for end-of-life disposal of textiles. At the same time, individual consumers, residents, and cities must be mindful of consumption, continue to participate in existing textile recovery programing, and advocate for longer term change in material waste culture.

Babak Manouchehrifar

Dissertation Advisors: Bish Sanyal, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, John Forester

Urban Planning and Religious Practice: Three Challenges

Religion in urban planning is conventionally viewed as a non-spatial, pre-theoretical, or extra- legal phenomenon. This view has been questioned recently by research in religious and pluralism studies and by the increasing religious diversity and activism in Western and non-Western cities. Yet, the challenge remains that urban planners usually don’t understand how to address religious concerns and practices of urban communities without compromising their statutory and political responsibilities. In this dissertation, I take up three aspects of this challenge.

First, I analyze the conceptual and practical connections between religion, secularism, and urban planning in liberal democracies to argue that understanding religion in urban planning entails understanding religion’s constitutive other: secularism. This paper questions the assumption of religious indifference as an adopted disciplinary ethos in planning, arguing that this assumption has made it more difficult for planners to confront the ways that the spatial structures of cities are getting reshaped by religious and deep cultural differences. It has also prevented planners from addressing the consequences of a secular process of power for the organization of social life in urban communities.

Second, I evaluate the conception of “religion” incorporated in past international development initiatives. I analyze developmental efforts led by the United States in the Philippines (1898), Albania (2003), and Iraq (2003) to argue that Protestantism has been viewed as the normative template or the “gold standard” against which other religious practices are measured as free, modern, and civil. This view has dragged North American planners working on international development into the age-old missionary conceit of “good vs bad religion” and drifted their attention away from working with local communities to address developmental challenges.

Third, I recognize that religion and urban planning intersect with each other on firm ground, rather than in thin air. I thus propose a theory – i.e., a “weak theory” – of how urban planners can approach religion as lived and experienced in the dynamic interplay of everyday practices, i.e., as “lived religion,” rather than as mere belief, pathology, or ideology. This approach, I argue, invites planners to employ ethnography and examine the actual lived situations (in courtrooms, planning offices, or public meetings) wherein competing conceptions of “lived religion” surround specific substantive planning issues, e.g., zoning or public health deliberations.

Idélcia Mapure

Thesis Advisor: Gabriella Carolini