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This book will explore scraps; bits and pieces re-used, chewed up, passed on to you the reader, to give a taste of my interest in waste. If time is brief, you may lack opportunity to savour what is here, so devour it quickly,take little bites. If not, you might sit down to digest this work fully, only to cast it aside if not to your taste. If you continue to read, you are digesting, internalising, my recipe. When you have eaten to the other side of this piece, what is left? Paper alone? What will be done with this? Are you lounging, ruminating, at a kitchen table? At a work desk, or standing, reading between train stops? On the outside, the dressing may have tempted you to indulge further. Inside, what are the ingredients present? What would you dispose of? Personal tastes affect how we interpret and edit our surroundings, which in turn can create, or diminish the junk in our world. Lifestyles influence patterns of purchasing, and rejecting items equally. Consumption leaves a local, and ultimately global residue that alters the spaces we inhabit.
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The idea for this essay came following a night observing Manhattan s trash collection system in full operation. Afterwards the questions came: What amount of waste is dispatched from one block alone in three hours? How many blocks in one street? How many streets in the district? How many districts? If all the city dwellers had to stay awake, twice a week, every week, to see this spectacle of waste collection, what would they wonder? Just how long can this throwaway spirit 1 be sustained? These are nearing the questions I want to ask here, but to be exact, my essay will consider if there are better ways for a city to manage its throwaway parts. Architects should be concerned to envision the city as a place that continues to breath, exchange with, and support its inhabitants. But the problem is: A city generates no significant amounts of raw materials for sustaining life or industry.It s transport system, its water supplies, its waste disposal arrangements all provide the vital means for the necessary exchanges of the alternative productions of the city for its nutrients. The sustainability of these exchanges depends upon events in the extra-urban environment. 2 A reformed relationship with waste could lead to a more symbiotic relationship of single citizen to shared city space and life. Thisessay divides into four chapters. The chapters will firstly consider waste and junk in relation to the domestic and suburban realm, secondly to the life of the street, thirdly highlight the role of refrigeration, and finally discuss future options for a reformation of waste management. This structured writing provides the backbone of the essay, and from this stem grows small fruit: ideas, notes, snippets, and a more free text on the life of the tomato.3 The tomato text exists in parallel to the structured stem, a more poetic and organic piece aiming to picture processes and environments from a different point of view.
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Man-made products of many descriptions are knitting people to places across the world. As the complex trade in resources grows, the city is losing sight of the importance of cycles . This essay will dwell on the importance of waste to the city and its spaces.
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U.K homes receive at least one wheeled bin each to take out their unwanted items to the street. The average household now generates over 600kg of waste per year4.Though ash from home fires has almost disappeared from domestic waste, today modern packaging materials consume 25% of the total5.Landfill sites are the conventional burial destinations for these bin-contents. City landfill sites are often, like the giant supermarkets, located on cheap peripheral ground. Many landfill sites utilise holes left by quarrying. In place of raw stone, earth and other home building materials, goes the muck those home-owners make. For the last twenty years the cities of Bath and Bristol have been sending waste to landfill by train (the Avon bin-liner ). Trains undertake a round trip of 150 miles6 on each journey. Per annum trains carry 50,000 tonnes7 of waste to disposal in the adjoining county of Buckinghamshire. A further 30,000 tonnes8 of waste is deployed by road to the counties of Somerset and Wi l tshire. Fresh kills in New York City is the world s largest landfill9, and another detached facility. Fresh Kills is literally an island of waste. NY city waste is barged to offshore Staten Island (New York sfifth borough) for disposal. The ground tries to conceal the waste here, but a hole is only so large. As populated areas discard more, waste runs out of room. Refuse has to be driven further and further afield to win a home. Exporting waste uses fuel, time, and yet more energy.
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Peripheral dumping grounds trade on the benefits of cheaper land, better road access, easy parking, and lighter planning controls. Conveniently for waste-makers, waste is out of sight, out of mind. Beyond the bin, waste is someone else s problem. We are used to feeling no repercussions of our throwaway instincts. The population chews on. Space destruction via materials consumption is booming. The burden of waste is growing. Domestic waste spills out from cities like bread from a Chorleywood Breadmaking Process machine. Waste from the West continues to rise, and places to put it diminish.
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In Manhattan, NYC, waste collection is twice weekly: Tuesdays and Fridays. Between dates, the dustbin-bag debris of the financial district shapes into blue and black walls of waste. Walking down any sidewalk, you would be channelled by streams of waste: ambles through the city accompanied by trash. To clear up this sidewalk debris Manhattan district employs a fleet of bruised, crumpled metal trucks. These off-white machines curb-crawl through the night, picking up the loitering plastic bags. Sitting on a rooftop between Fulton and Water Street in the early hours of morning, I can witness the waste collectors at work. By 1:30am the first dull thumps of the garbage trucks beat through the air. Mechanical movements are audibly orderly, continuous, coming closer. On its waste consuming tour, the truck s compressor creaks and squeals like a monstrous rat, ts i iron jaws swallowing the cities stained matter, block after block.
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Stopping, the trash cart takes in another messy meal from an inhabited tower. For three hours it will suck out the river of human cast-offs. This stop is just one more building in a line to be cleared. Countless more blocks, homes and offices in this district alone have refuse waiting to go. Urban spaces are becoming like giant vacuums-in-reverse, instead of eating dirt they consume raw, clean materials and return waste to the world. This situation is as far from any natural cycle as possible. Succumbing to personal desires for material objects, people are draining the pleasure and character from their city shelter.The life of the city is drowning in the by-products of consumption. Back in the urban home, excessive packaging and displeasing home buys form kind of domestic dirt to be wiped out. Items that disappoint or fail us are all too easy to discard: bad like bad apples, off like stale fillets of fish. The socially constructed value of the object has shifted over time from its finite lifespan of usefulness and meaning to a timeless and valueless state of socially sanctioned rubbish. The remarkable thing about many of these objects is that they were designed to end up on the garbage heap. They were designed to decrease in value 10 An automatic response to the first insufficiency of a product is to dump, not mend, patch, rework, or rethink .
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Tom Dixon, a contemporary product designer, called his first book Rethink .11 The book promotes the capacity of an object to move from one realm to another. Dixon s material both documents and encourages re-use. To Rethink , befriend an anonymous item and give it a new role. The beauty of a bland industrial workbench, hospital bin, or cardboard tube is ts i ability to be converted. The unloved workbench can gain regard as the perfect base for a flexible micro kitchen 12 an abandoned wooden cargo pallet wins affection as quirky bed-frame.13 Dixon perceives use beyond the manufacturer s intentions. Perhaps a manual like this could be developed and circulated to every citizen, offering advice for re-using commonly held items. There may be a time when every citizen receives a copy of such a book as standard. Classes in junk economics may run in schools, and manufacturers supply paperwork on re-application with new products. Incorporated in the troubleshooting section, helpful literature may recommend secondary uses. New purchases would be accompanied by a Resuscitation Manual where designers could promote alternative uses after the primary function has been fulfilled. Some thrify booklets have been produced in past times of shortage, like war, Dixon s book, however is not produced under austerity
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Even in affluent peacetime cities are getting shorter of resources to mine, whilst churning out ever more scraps into black bin-liner cul-de-sacs. Despite being urged by some to Buy quality products and keep them for a lifetime 14 objects seem ephemeral, and meet the waste bin after the initial function has been fulfilled. Coke drained; residue can. Chair unboxed; superfluous cardboard. Egg cracked; shell in bin. Ketchup emptied; bottle binned.
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In certain backyards and communal spaces the most unlikely oddments rise up again as treasures. Where there s trash there s life begins John Chase s essay A curmudgeon s guide to the wide world of trash 15. Chase is an American architect, and his an unusual tale of trash as good-for-something. Chase gives colourful, amusing accounts of neighbourhood waste and junk exciting life and passions in the community.The scraps in Chase s American neighbourhood are significant enough to start battles in the alleys. Chase describes the shared spaces fringing his Los Angeles home, where personal relationships with junk arise. In this setting, discarded objects gently interconnect neighbours; the web of their re-use, if mapped would draw a spidery, flight-path like map between houses and lives. The trash of Venice is a medium of exchange between income groups that acts as a privatised and informal form of welfare. Someone who has decided that the time has come to part ways with a garment will, more often than not lay it on top of a trash container, or perhaps even display it enticingly, clean, folded and pressed On other American streets and urban hinterlands, junk binds residents both native and immigrant in weekly sales17. Garages, lawns, and car-boots open their doors and gates temporarily. Even bleak, barren spaces as near as Hackney W ick, or New Covent Garden, both in London, revitalise in the presence of boot-sales . The alley might accommodate anonymous donations but these jumble sales provide tax-free cash and social interaction for vendors. A few steps from regulated in-door spaces, a jumble of unfitting failures nestle and jostle for attention. Exterior garden or parking spaces mould into one giant vending space, consuming all the unwanted things pushed out from nearby interiors. Lotsof ex-domestic objects which might have ended up sleeping rough on the pavement, find temporary footings on flea markets.
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To a creative eye, doorstep jetsam is a delicate and exotic spectacle of life, and artist Richard Wentworth celebrates it in his photographs of North London streets.18 W entworth pictures the concoction of items forced into others paths, which passers by pretend not to notice. Previously private taste is on public view. Waste ingredients fuse into exciting and inspiring new flavours as they fall apart being misread in inspiring ways. As junk steps outside it might found new worlds: This is a Corner of Uncertainty, a resting place for the unsure and the unwanted. It attracts a steady stream of offerings. At first I misread the dying ladder as a provisional fence, as if not yet fully grown 19 As this ladder retires from its first job, so it carries out another. Even included in this paragraph it finds a new role. In this case the broken ladder becomes a landmark, like the anti-monument 20 of landfills on Staten Island, NYC. Junk re-awakes space, provides refreshing variation, and a humanity in an otherwise generic looking urban plane. The street pools and landfill hills of junk are inspiring to many. On a more material level, they are so rich in resources, perhaps one day actually to truly become the secondary mines 21 they are sometimes billed as. Such peripheral resources could be re-opened in the future for communal scavenging or amusement, places no longer filled with loss but instead filled with possibility 22
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Junk is widely available, cheap, not precious Junk is the true take-away.
it is at the disposal of all.
In Jakarta, Indonesia for example, women work in the intense ninetydegree heat sorting through huge piles of liquid soap bottles, food wrappers, disposable diapers, and other plastic waste most with familiar Western logos to sell back to industrial recyclers. In Medellin, Colombia, workers pick through w hat they call the third mountain five hundred tons of refuse from which they retrieve thirty tons of things to sell. And the city dump of Cairo is home to over thirty thousand Christian migrants from Southern Egypt known as Zabbaleen, who collect, sort, and sell metal, glass, paper and plastic to local middle-men, who in turn re-sell these materials to industrial and individual re-cyclers. 23 In the West, why are potentials ignored, and landfills stuffed with hi-tech, short life products? Why the stigma of re-use? Does recycling need to happen on the street itself if it is to compete with the big stores and shopping malls for our time and attention?
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Everyday, on most Western city streets, briefly enticing wrappers, greasy food papers or spoke-less umbrellas are cast down on the ground but rarely picked up. The face and call of the rag and bone man has been replaced by silent, generic bin-frowns. Bins with council badges dot the pavement and struggle to absorb our mess. What the bin cannot get in its plastic mouth dribbles onto the street. Excess is quickly forgotten as we raise our eyes upwards and drool at yet another revolving billboard sign. In contrast to the Western high street is the Indian experience we might learn from. Those who have experienced the pace of life in Indian towns note how quick it seems24, but the reigning chaos is speed misinterpreted. Here there is more time to consider how waste plays a part in daily life. Delhi accommodates its share of tree-lined Colonial avenues and Imperial gated homes, threading them and Coca-Cola branding into its hectic traditional / modern life. Delhi provides a home for citizens, wandering cattle, and nesting eagles alike, squeezing them all in amongst its towering bank buildings and illegal, unsanitary habitations. Delhi has survived by adapting to whatever rolls up.
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Arriving in 1999 to participate in a government regeneration project to the north of Delhi, I was immediately shocked by the length and lack of structure of the working day. Slowly, various activities on the street illustrated how livelihoods and economies were supported by waste. As time passed the influence of the Hindu religion became clear: respect for all living creatures, particularly the sacred cow, was paramount. Cattle flowed and parked throughout the city unconscious of human time, following their whims and noses freely, undisturbed. The flow of bodies and vehicles criss-cross the street in multidirectional patterns, veering into courtyards, alleys and cul-de-sacs. The busiest streets, the main arteries of this spatial network are never merely machines for shopping but the site of numerous activities 25
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The Hindu belief in the cyclical nature of existence meant even materials lived polymorphous lives. A dropping of one form would be picked up and reincarnated to pursue another activity.The caste system further enforced the passing down of crumbs . Remnants from one tier trickled down the human hierarchy to another: the shack of a poor family leant against a wealthy house, sustained by its seconds. Traditional values dissuaded individuals from trying to better them-selves, greed meant another s loss26 . On the street, purchases from a vendor would be carried away in a paper bag re-made from children s schoolbook page or used office paper. Delhi has no bins, so having served its function, the bag would be gifted to the ground, where a fellow citizen might pick it up and tear away a side to write a note. W oven-leaf plates flavoured with dhal and curry, alongside re-formed schoolbook bags would be readily dropped knowing the much revered cow would soon be along to feast on them. Four stomachs later, the cow would donate back fibre-based fuel. Dried dung represents a small income for its collector when sold to provide fire, heat, and light against Delhi s nocturnal darkness. Finally, the remaining ash would return to the soil to provide plant nutrition. In 1998 the plastic bag was introduced to Delhi, praised constantly for its durability and functionality (particularly for carrying water). It blossomed on the street like a national flower, but licked up by the cattle it soon became an emblem of death. The engrained cast-down mentality hadn t considered the resilience of this container. Cows across the city died of stomach illnesses; their innards immobilised by branded plastic bags. The insertion of the multi-coloured plastic bag into the culture of Delhi broke the fluid circle that ancient tradition had created. Due to its catastrophic impact, Delhi government recently banned the plastic bag from its streets in 2000.
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The culture of the Indian street is near opposite the Western one. Both serve functions for their users, but one provides a human space, unpredictable, fired by its citizens, the other promotes a cooler, more robotic, selfcentred realm27. Both produce junk, but consider it very differently. The Western street is paved, spaced, and ordered to encourage smooth running, controlled crowds, and civilised behaviour.The Indian street offers a dustier, bumpier ride. In Delhi, contact with others and performance of backstage 28 activities confront the visitor. Indian streets merge public and private, work and leisure, and holy and profane activities 29 consequently waste is obvious. The Indian street is a crossroads where lives overlap and life cycles are sustained. But the degree of intimacy and openness Delhi breeds is often shocking to the West. As Gill Valentine, a points outs in her essay Food and the production of the civilised street 30 the same Victorian culture of modesty affronted by ankles, instated the taboo of undertaking bodily activities, such as eating, whilst on the street: In the Victorian era middle class anxieties about the working classes were expressed as a strong fear of spontaneity, disorder, un-cleanliness, and a desire for rationality, control and order.At this time roving food vendors were a common part of the streetscape. To the Victorian middle classes they represented all the dangers of the working class. They were disorderly, polluting and associated with mass-consumption which to the Victorians stood for destructiveness and waste 31 Elements such as roaming cattle, dung collection, and street cooking were not celebrated on the Victorian avenue. When Victorian colonisers moved to India, they took across their sacred private spaces32 to delete their more intimate rituals from view. With rituals like cooking and eating shielded, withheld too are their respective scraps; potential food chains are broken.
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Of course, the city street will not be improved by reverting back to medieval open sewer. Unsanitary toilet waste is not our topic. But if cities can consider waste as attraction and spectacle, it is informative. By managing waste in a visible way, like the safe but smelly sewer attraction Les Egouts de Paris 33, cities can educate us of the part we play in it. I am not implying litter filled streets would be good, but the impact of waste needs to be more prominent. Where Delhi succeeds, I feel, is in applying appropriate technology to the design of its waste. The plastic bag was bad because it disturbed a chain of re-use. The presence of the native cattle, which sustained the fruitful trade in waste, was totally ignored. The average Western street is cluttered with selfish materials which disrupt and disregard potential cycles. How we consume affects the continuation of city and inhabitants.
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The attitude to street eating on average U.K high streets has evolved since Victorian times. According to Valentine it is still fairly animal and doglike to some , but that brash re-fuelling is not as offensive in the contemporary city.The fork-free eating which take-away burgers, chips and sandwiches promote, rejects seat, table, and importantly, family cook. These ubiquitous products have no respect for supporting chains, other than of their own brand. They force variety from the high street, support global transport and pollution, and offer no community reward. They are inappropriate designs for our environment. I can witness packs of school children snacking on chips at lunch and after school, busy shoppers dash into sandwich outlets and coffee chains on Baker Street, office workers hurry down burgers. The remains of these lunches provide no further nutrition. The home kitchen misses the eater s warmth. Food scraps reach no further hands, hungry cows or urban trees.
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Across the waves, in Manhattan New York, other lives also rely on refuse. To consider Manhattan s waste chains it is necessary to focus on its homeless population, for they are its primary supporters. Similarly to Delhi, objects no longer of use to one party will be gifted to another via the street. The street is the common means to communicate waste. Like Delhi, the city street in Manhattan reveals a certain consideration of one citizen for another. Whilst living in Manhattan I observed how re-cycling and re-use varied. Typical UK cities keep recycling out of sight and without reward. Manhattan recycling facilities occur on street corners and provide immediate money back they are truly banks not bins . Offering a small monetary reward, recycling becomes an attractive pursuit for those who are homeless34. Many Manhattan homeless are ex-army personnel, highly skilled in surviving in the field. Many adapt military knowledge to withstand the urban jungle, extracting resources from tarmac terrains. Frequently Manhattan s homeless prefer to combat waste rather than civilian life. W ith supermarket trolleys seduced from car lots, vagrants collect waste bottles, cans and paper from the doorsteps of considerate businesses. Bar workers will offer up emptied bottles, and restaurants unwittingly supply food oil to burn. Collectors feed the recyclable scraps to the recycling banks for their wage, exchanging the earned cash for the pleasure of beer and cigarettes.
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W ith wheels rattling on the road, the homeless use their trolleys to boat up and down the cities wide avenues fishing for presents. Like miniature garbage vans, or mobile museums of waste these couples scan for treasure to add to their collections. Like Delhi s cows they Hoover the town for tasty and appetising waste. Like Delhi s cattle, have no sense of shame about nosing through droppings . Consequently lost crumbs find new friends, days are lit with surprise discoveries. The manoeuvrable supermarket car widens the search field for its owner, mobilising life and accessories. Owners can personalise the carts, defining the precious spaces by wrapping them in plastic, tucking the contents up in bed. Some carts are tethered to trees to stop them escaping.
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Home spaces germinate from waste, and cookery is fed by refuse materials. For one homeless person, Takahashi, the fish market by Brooklyn Bridge becomes his temporary nesting ground. Here he can sustain his typical Japanese fish-based diet (befriended port workers save him good remains) and local ferry trips for tourists offer him another site-specific bonus of left over meal trays full of food. Not only is diet catered for but shelter too. Silver metal transport containers are re-employed as basic bedrooms. Re-utilised as sleeping compartments, the shiny huts still smell of fish, but can be personalised. Close at hand too are wooden pallets and used oil from Chinatowns restaurants ingredients for fire to warm and cook. A seaport soup-kitchen and charity clothes handouts meet further needs. Nationality, background and culture create differing needs. Consequently, the homeless seek out waste hot-spots. Their pitch is their larder, and chosen in response to basic personal requirements and local resources. The factors at hand make a site more or less attractive. The homeless have a connection to the shape and characteristics of feeding places many homeowners have lost.
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When David Pearson turns to the kitchen space in his The Natural House Book , he notes a few homeowners re-embracing rustic style set-ups35, but observes in general The modern kitchen is still unhealthy and over-consuming; it is sometimes dangerous and it is always polluting. The modern kitchen is wasteful of energy and water and fails to re-cycle valuable waste materials he summarises the kitchen is the prime generator of waste in the home 36. Historically, kitchen scraps were mostly vegetable and organic, but today kitchens toss out far more concrete objects. Man-made machines and implements jam even basic contemporary kitchens, and as taste and times change, they can become rapidly as undesirable to their owners as mouldy tomatoes. The temperature at which perishable food is stored is crucial to hold its freshness and hygiene, upon which human health also relies37. In old-fashioned houses, the architectural way of listening to food was to build it a larder.A room with an external wall, larders had small windows or air vents to allow circulation38, keeping food cool enough by simple position. Other actions such as wrapping bottles in wet news-paper, or sheltering butter under a basin over water helped food survive39, and were sensitive, personal, rituals that have been dropped in a day of domestic fridge ownership.
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Refrigeration is strongly bonded to food and kitchen waste. In a nice contradiction, fridge habitats stall decay and spoilage, but refrigeration is a process that means other wasteful food practices can exist that are fast destroying habitats and lives elsewhere. Global trade in food is supported by a cold chain where chilled lorry crates pass sleepy, cold-doped produce from growing country to eating country, with hundreds of road miles and air hours in-between40. Moreover, fridges, unlike larders, are energy-hungry white fangs with short shelf lives and very toxic parts, making for the other problem of their disposal. Back to Pearson, who prefers the larder as a more efficient cooler in his ideal eco-home. However, in the urban home it is seen as a wasted space roomy and physical, yet uninhabitable, often sited an inconvenient walk from the kitchen: It is no longer practicable for the larder and storage cupboards to be situated perhaps a hundred yards or more from the kitchen. The modern cook likes everything at hand. a refrigerator to take the place of the often distant larder.This will simplify the cook stask to a minimum. thus, considerable waste of time and unnecessary fatigue will be eliminated .41 No surprise city homeowners prefer the capsule-like, plug-in, kitchenbased ice-white refrigerator smile instead. It would be nice if Pearson s larder dreams found a place in urban homes now. When domestic urban food spaces are being sliced and pinched by commercial kitchens, supermarket aisles, and fast food factories, a home larder would provide a step-in, food experience to rival the anti-human casket of the fridge.
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Designer Ettore Sotsass, writing his Travel notes from a kitchen 42 fantasises about real kitchens. He confesses sneaking off to spy on the kitchen in homes where he was being entertained. Sotsass talks of these magical, lively spaces. From his stories we picture a kitchen like a backstage , a transforming space where the stages in secret food potions are revealed. By Ettore s words we imagine dinner like theatre, but the kitchen is behind the illusion; seductive because it is where the food is raw, unveiled, being prepared and dressed to meet the guests. Pearson too speaks romantically of spaces full of smells and flavours of home cooking.
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These sources describe traces of life and warmth which seem missing from today s domestic environment, where miniaturised appliances and slick packages multiply. Such changes have certain benefits but take daily sensations out of feeding and consumption. While foods are allowed evermore to hang around in refrigeration, cans, and by plump-up preservatives, they congest and finance ugly, oversized spaces in warehouses or lorries around the world. Plastic packages, synthetic fillers and cold vaults numb mass produced tomatoes for sale in the supermarket. The secret of manufacturers trickery is keep this out of consumers view. Shoppers don t see how ancient some fresh food is43, or how long fast-food ketchup has been in a sachet for. We are not allowed to use our senses to test who or what these goods really are. Time squeezed out of growth cycles is pumped into shelf lives instead. The average tomato holds its vines hand for only days44, a chicken seems to ripen in weeks. Best before dates stamp the shelf weeks permitted, sometimes revealing an egg s date of birth, but missing the age of other key ingredients. To the customer these wise markings give the false impression a vendor knows his foods like friends. The supermarket loves being stocked with far more food than they need 45, where worshippers with trolleys are flooded with visual sensations, and prefer eating shiny coated adverts and chewing on brightly coloured packet graphics than sniff and taste what s inside
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W riter Jonathan Glancey, surveys average supermarkets in his essay The lure of the aisles 46, he feels like me these borderland warehouses suck the character from our feed. Architecturally, these palaces of provisions seem inhuman and bizarre. Overall, Glancey describes such food-filling spaces selling unhealthy attitudes and carefully persuading customers to choose cost and decoration, above flavour. In supermarket land, wrappers seal scents and stop us using our noses. They provide foods in squeaky clean, no-odour avenues. Glancey considers supermarkets so surreal he even thinks God rests more than they do.47 From all the locations of never-ending production, there must be casualties and waste. Whether it is an ever-ready concentrated product like hamburger mayonnaise, a plastic tasting tomato, or a home fridge, labour saving usually means that energy-intensive processes are involved; convenience foods that are quick to cook and serve have consumed a vast amount of energy elsewhere the end-product of a series of elaborate steps including processing, packaging, storage and transportation 48. So we need reminding our thirsty kitchen appliances and cellophane skinned buys are just the tip of a waste item iceberg.
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Harvey Levenstein, in The Golden Age of Food Processing 49 agrees, charting manufacturers roads to revolutionising the American food market of the 1950 s. Advances in preservation such as packaging and freezing saved time spent changing food backstage in the home kitchen. Levenstein says When Mary Smith rushes home from work late in the afternoon she wants to buy food that will not only look pretty on the table but is something she can get ready in the half an hour before her husband comes home to dinner 50 he quotes. Manufacturers invented goods with built-in service 51 as smart choices to save housewives lengthy chores. Savings were not money but time and mental effort (priceless). Physical waste ballooned as domestic prep time was cu.
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The household, once a tiny manufacturing centre , where women made bread, butter, clothing, candles, medicines and other things essential to their families survival became, they believe, a domestic void 52.
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The lively kitchen backstage Sotsass evoked53 is perhaps more often a sterile waiting room, where food plastered in plastic and mouth-watering words collects. Rationing is a forgotten way of life. But when these heartless tins, bags and appliances run out of gas or appeal, they won t break down like old fashioned lettuce leaves. Many episodes in film or T.V commercials use the fridge space as a vending machine for wonders. Some characters extract childish delights from it while other adults seek out the fridge in the black of night opening the door to an artificial golden glow. Out of nightly dreams it draws midnight feasters like moths to a white moon. The inside of my refrigerator is always light, bright, and civilised. The sun never fades in this enamel food cave, with its factory daylight perpetually shining on its contents. How can this machine or the produce under its wing ever be unhappy?
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Yet sad, worn out fridges are dumped straight on the street. Many fallen appliances litter unloved urban spaces. A few make it to the cities sidelines to await treatment abroad. In Hackney, East London, one such place was established to collect rejected refrigerators. The site is amongst scrap merchants, mechanics, and 24-hour taxi firms: a country of metal hospitals. In 19 the E.U directed that fridges were too toxic to be thrown away with usual disregard, and handed the city councils the duty to save the environment from leaking chemical coolers. The East-end reservoir of deposited fridges consumes an incredible area of land, a visible mark of a collective quick turnover of domestic items. Across the pound, fridges wait upright like figures for the mythical Danish dismantling boat to come. Here is a whole empire of preservative machines now being eaten by rust. Stacked three-high, these off-white turrets are chopped-off, powerless to protect even themselves from mould. Each fridge has a story, but no-one listens. Being white, the left iceboxes look na ve, like innocent babies hoping for re-adoption, cords severed. The Hackney retirement home should supply short-term, secure monitoring for the hazardous waste refrigerators. This is not true; site workers handle the bodies with contempt, they kick, drop, and bash the shells. Safety regulations are ignored. Across the plot there are layers and layers of old machines with dirty mouths, food remains clog up the inner compartments like the rib cages of the dead plastic-bag cows in Delhi. Insides continue dribbling out.
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Most of the time my home refrigerator holds a few oddments and scraps of food, barely enough to content its energy guzzling existence. Round the clock it consumes power so, for example, a pack of seven vine tomatoes can be kept a little longer while we I find time to eat them. A recent health and beauty column reported mini bathroom fridges were about to hit the market. A miniaturised chilled cabinet simply to protect fragile cosmetics and face creams. It seems appropriate to conclude that fridges are a superficial solution to spoilage, wrinkles and damage. But one we are lost without.
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W e lay in thousands, survivors in a barren landscape Coated in plastic to endure The crisp dry soil beneath, blazing sun above Planted in Darkness all around before we knew we could see. W ater and heat drew us above the surface in days Hurrying to begin Emerging through the plastic Our roots still in their sheets afraid of the deadly day heat Moving up in the world Silence with Only memories of caterpillar trails around our core At first at peace No fear as I hang, no temptations to break our fresh green skins. W aiting, stretching minute after minute Stomachs bloated but Green digestions still thirsting for water The occasional drips of condensation bleed from the surface of this plastic home. The divine moment of the twice a day shower is moving closer. Then the heavenly shower arrives without warning we scream with joy as we receive its cooling juice Happy to be pausing from our 10-hour growth, as water spots fill our plastic nest Drinking done, the cries of joy die out and swelling silence returns once again broken only by lonely water drops like tears making their way down our bodies to the ground.
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Days pass, each the same, our Green stomachs swelling by the seconds Dotting the air by the thousand Two nurses are present all day working from end to end treating us one by one. We stare on, blankly. I await help as my stomach pulls me down to the floor Back to the ground My turn approaches to be nursed, quickly Picked-up and straightened for another day. The nurse s grooming hand clears away the dirt and residues on my skin and props me up against the bamboo standing stick. It has been a hard twelve weeks, and my stomach aches Stale, hollow, and unflavoured. I have no perfume. But luckily, none have been lost yet, Surviving, but constantly wondering whether our sore stomachs W ill ever touch the ground again. As night falls, the night-light is switched on for vision W e hear scuffles of pleasure as nurses swarm and picking commences. W e rejoice! Change is in the air, waiting our turn but also fearing the unexpected. Sounds in the nest are magnify, the scuffles grow. Cries replace excitement and fear fills the plastic room. W e cry, broken by the nurses from our mothers Our stomachs break away and we are independent, I cannot fight back or resist W eak, sad and still green
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To a new home: Box After box Stacked as high as nurses I no longer any light as Continuing to mount boxes and boxes Under hills of boxes, a darkness falls over our fleet Elevated Sitting four boxes high amongst thousands of green others I lay in fear of being sloshed as The company are thrown upon me I try to make space for those others, but no time They pour on in their hundreds. Outside Beyond our nests we see plastic Flooding the landscape down, left, right, everywhere The blankets of Our once-home reflecting the white torch in the sky as the world and the sea bleed into one In my tallstack moved time and time again Feeling vibrations for hours, hearing the ground speed and grumble beneath. W e lay dizzy and hot one upon the other gasping for a drop of light. W e pray for arrival in health. For three days we have been awaiting arrival, I witness the constant rage And scratches of travel making their mark on my friends.
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Finally the plastic skin of our moving home is removed and we scream in joy, slowly quietening down as we Are lowered one by one down to the ground. The cold wet air sticks to our skin as we are swiftly wheeled indoors. As we enter the warehouse rapidly numbed by the glow of the night light that appears from the ceiling. W e lay in discomfort and dust awaiting the next move. Stacked high and sticky we absorb the sound of water and clucking metal In silence, we lay gasping. For the fourth day missing light and the second day missing heat. Our green guts feel tricked and our playtime has been stolen Suddenly we are rolled over and we flow into water W e awake in a line following metal walls. As we roll our bodies greet this new surprise. Rolling over and over. Then at once I am rolled over to the edge of the water by the force of the other behind me. I find my self apart Separation time: W e are split up by size and rolled once again into buckets. The plastic boxes have gone, replaced with cardboard ones. In a new home momentarily before we embark once again. Plastic curtains ahead are raised, we step through spaces where the temperature drops and our skins rapidly tightens My eyes and thoughts start to drift I feel sleep ahead.
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6 weeks later: Bright light glare I am woken by the shock of glaring light the first for 3 days But are we ourselves? Our baby green skin turned to red Stuffy air replaced with clean air Unpacked once again as we are being woken Unpacked W ashed Separated Boxed Labelled Refrigerated Packed again Collecting amongst others Fridge, then On the move Down we come Unpacked Ready to be shelved Fridges Shelves W aiting Our new home Day: wait Next day: wait Next day: wait Next day: wait
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Collected Selected In a trolley, slide around Over lasers Back in plastics Carried off to home (I hear the word) Home to be unpacked Packed into fridge once again As we wait W ait to discover the end Time ticks by as no answers are found by some And are for others. W ill it be landfill or meal? As the Spanish speaking tomato is laid in the chilling cold of our modern day fridge, or laid to rest in the belly of the English earth, unappreciated.
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Introducing his chapter on the eco-kitchen David Pearson proposes What we need now is a new type of kitchen, a new focus for our daily lives that is not intended for surface show but stands for the sounder principles of personal health and universal ecology.A kitchen where we can enjoy the pleasures healthy food without it costing, literally, the earth. 54 If the city has to be our kitchen, then it will be a great kitchen if it causes us to stop55. The Slow Food movement seems to realise this. Cities celebrate speed, but the interest in slow spaces for the city is steadily growing. Hardly the London of the yesteryear, when cowsheds and cattle dwelt in Golden Square56, but food fairs and weekly markets are taking root. These events hold open space to experience what we consume, and t is debris, directly.The distance between grower and eater narrows, fitting humanity back into consumption and the city. The city body feeds on speedy exchanges. Quicker is crucial; time lunching is earning potential lost. The free space of the lunch break is being up eaten by work; out with the siesta and the family food reunion, in with the cold-blooded five-minute food pit-stop. Hurried city workers can obtain prepared or fast food on the high street the time saving option to re-fuel. The drive-thru meal and the road merge into a Carmac . The taboo of consuming on the move is soon forgotten, and on the hoof there is no time think about the implications of supporting such strange food markets. Manhattan s homeless have time free to undertake recycling, but most city employees blur into the packets and cartons of their pre-packed lunches. Meals compete by wearing more ever exotic dressings, concealing their rushed ingredients. With little time to grow, a watery tomato slice delivers colour but no flavour.
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W ith subsidised fuel ingredients are flown back and forth across the globe. From cheap foreign production sites come all manner of food wonders. Eating points are out of touch with growing points. Growers, transporters, and consumers all lead separate lives but even the most inconsequential food item sees all of them. All the production stages of even the humble tomato are too long-winded and heavy to contemplate over our working lunch . Layers and layers of marketing and work priorities, phone-calls, and computer-driven adverts cloud over the reality of consumption. The average tomato passes through countless bored hands across the globe, just to provide an ephemeral dot of colour in a soggy conveyor belt beef-burger. InItalo Calvino s fictional work Invisible cities 57, the city of Leonia is described. Leonia is a wonder city,its contents entirely refreshed as each new day dawns.
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The tale neglects to outline the waste consequence of this daily city.As the spent old cities mount up, the reader wonders where there room is left to grow.The Cornucopia City in Vance Packard s The Waste Makers is another fictional place of super-consumption. Excess is encouraged to support the economy, but the spatial impact of the waste is ignored. Why do these scenarios seem plausible? Should we not fear the same future? Questioning if this excessive energy is justified or necessary, we might dream of crazy solutions. But as products of global monocultures are pumped with resources only to go down the landfill, is not time to fantasise about slowing down?
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The Slow Food movement was born in Italy in 1986. The movement for the protection of the right to taste 58 was the child of a food writer, Carlo Petrini. Like other continentals, Carlo was beginning to witness Global fast food taking root on his doorstep, spelling death for his traditional cuisine. Challenging the wasteful cultures of global food, Carlo began Slow Food . Slow Foods protect and support foods with individual identity and character. From their small nest in Bra, Northern Italy, meetings, shows, publications, charity events, and a newsletter keep 65,00059 Slow subscribers informed that investing time and consideration in food creates greater pleasure for grower and eater alike. In short, taste and pace and are intertwined. For Carlo s society, slow is the future. Slow finances old-fashioned ways of producing foods, and wants the word slow reclaimed from its bad connotations60: to be slow is not to be stupid, unproductive, or backward . As Viewpoint magazine wrote, taste is about waiting 61, slow is cultured. Eating a burger, rushing along on the street is not slow . A slow believer would not buy from a fast food outlet, not skip lunch to meet office deadlines, nor work in an office that believed in such deadlines anyway. Giant supermarkets have no place in the Slow world. In some Spanish mountain villages, white vans perform the service of travelling market. Paying brief visits, these vehicles give purchasing a sense of occasion and exchange. This is the antithesis of the supermarket where standardised formats create a superficial identification, and familiarity reduces the effort that has to be made because it enables us to find what we want to buy more quickly 62 This van-vending could be re-named Slow shopping : customers find surprises because stock changes, and must seize the moment if they like what they see. Ventures like this promote seasonal goods and what the slow movement would term hospitality : goods are sold and traded with humanity between consumer and supplier.This operation provides the soul that supermarkets have lost. Here is a real eatertainment and shopertainment 63 event.
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Many of the farmer / growers selling at Borough market in South London support the Slow movement because they promote the ritual of mealtimes, the consumption of seasonal foods and regional products 64, which go some way to saving the kitchen, the larder, the market space, the lunch hour from wasting away. Throughout the market s day of trade, boxes are emptied and scraps build in the wake of sales. The edges of the site gather residue. This residue is not wasted because it presents the stories of foods as they pass from hand-to-hand; it is educational and visually stimulating; visible traces of a products life and journey.These are the beautiful obstacles supermarkets clear from its shopper s paths. W aste is not discussed in Slow movement literature, but logically, reconsidering production values will affect consumption too. Standing against homogenised, globalised, unnaturally cheap foods, it will surely be antiwaste as well. Local sourcing, seasonal foods, and an emphasis on flavour promise to revitalise smaller, more bodily food spaces. By discussing a change in eating habits, waste would also change in shape, quantity, and form. As the organic market grows, a new delicacy is biodynamic food65: food sewn and harvested considering moon phases. The Biodynamic Food Association believes this natural timing increases taste . Biodynamic farms also try to be self-sufficient, supporting cycles of life with left-overs and byproducts from their own fields.
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In 1999 four small Italian towns took the Slow philosophy one step further and proclaimed themselves Slow Cities . Promising to foster all slow conditions and promote awareness among all citizens, and not only among inside operators, that they live in a Slow City with special attention to the young people and schools through the systematic introduction of taste education 66. Primarily the Slow City exists to implement an environmental policy designed to maintain and develop the characteristics of their surrounding area and urban fabric, placing the onus on recovery and reuse techniques 67.Above all, locations celebrate specific-ness ; unique places with an intense flavour all of their own. Across the globe access to Slow City exists via the web. Other cities can look online for how to earn a Slow title too. Around 30 slow cities are now in operation, most in Italy. How long before lives, products or even countries try to earn a Slow badge too?
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W ill the world soon be fabricating Slow buildings, driving Slow vehicles on newly surfaced Slow motorways, patenting Slow products, and giving medals to people leading Slow lives? Is this the way to answer the hyperactive consumption in the city? W ill Slow overturn fast ? At the moment Slow seems like another an excuse for indulgence, catering to a niche market. Higher price tags and obscure points of sale make Slow less accessible than globally traded supermarket goods. In this country Slow , like organic food is promoted as a luxury food for the privileged. Few working people seem rich in the time or income to pursue it. But for the general good of cities and people, slow approaches must be encouraged. That whole relationship we are going to have when objects become smart will change how we relate to them. Would you throw away something that you are having a relationship with? 68 Slow products offer personality and friendship. Can other product manufacturers reconsider the growing physical and mental distances between consumer and object in order to accomplish this? In the fantasy city, how might this happen?
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Grow Direct (ready processed foods): to release spaces from unnecessary usage, wastage, and clutter. Why not forego natural form altogether? In the book Trespassers 69 the FCFT (the Food Chain Fitting Taskforce) suggest that NOVEL PROTEIN FOODS based on fungi and bacteria can take any shape texture and taste will mean less waste 70. Foods constructed of mould sound unappetising, but promise to cut the amount of land, space, energy, and transport devoted to fleeting products. In my own dream scenario meals grow straight into their finished state to eliminate the middle stages ingredients normally pass through. The product will need no change of dressing, re-packaging or re-processing. A ketchup seed grows directly into a labelled bottle of tomato sauce. Products are bought as seeds , accompanied by chemical bags with perfect growing medium. This innovation would conserve labour and raw materials. For example: to make ketchup , pop a tiny seed in the special plastic envelope, then heat in a Grow-a-wave (like a microwave) to germinate . The seed will develop into finished food, with no need for shipment, farmer, packages, and transport. Seeing the goods growing before the eyes should foster a sympathy between our lives and its. To decrease waste it is important to undermine the senseless waste of energy on food transportation. Dutch shrimps are sent to Poland for peeling and then returned. The Portuguese drink Dutch milk. Dutch pigs are processed into Parma Ham in Italy and then re-imported 71. In the future growth should be visible.
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Supermarkets / real markets: would promote the entertainment value offered by active food. Rather than to witness the cycle of novelty and excessive styling 72 In the future, would-be consumers holiday to the source of food life (a pilgrimage) to seek the products they desire (food is souvenir or relic). Establishments might lure customers with in-stores wildlife. Buyers would go to witness a rare cow being milked; visit a handsome chicken laying an egg. When foods have significance, the crumbs will also feel more meaningful and precious. Such an idea need not be limited to animals Tom Dixon was once installed in the window of Selfridges, London with a recycling machine, creating products for immediately re-sale in store.73 New vendors might sell boxed cows, for home garden suspension. Housed on-site by the home-owner, these digestion packages would return fertiliser and milk in gratitude for domestic waste. Live silent chickens might be the new home-enhancing take-away product a ready-to-go, branded and packed chicken, with full instructions, that lays eggs too.
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Lorries: if these must be used for goods, why not mobilise live goods? Taking initiative from the Spanish food van, foods could be showcased as a visiting spectacle, like a circus coming to town. Live goods events would cultivate appetite to rival the continuous snack consumption many cities and citizens have adopted. Citizens would feel positive excitement, thirst, and hunger as rare food specialities near them. Live events would reinforce the beauty and vitality in unpredictability. Surprise foods made mobile (maybe, like Delhi s cows, by its own legs?). Food and communal spaces: would provide places to witness and partake in a daily chain of growth and renewal. Waste ground would accommodate goat or cattle farms as opposed to recycling bins. How about regenerating derelict urban spaces with crops, plotting inner city farms, portable greenhouses, and vertical allotments. It would be efficient to re-commissioning unused spaces, small gaps, lost, discarded, or disregarded land as growing plots. A future law would de-mark new common ground where growing capsules or vegetable walls can be sited. Rooftops and pavements should support crops. Cows could be seduced back into London to disrupt the regulated, predictable city space. Public squares would breed cattle to eat paper waste and offer by-products free in return. Communal spaces would be re-designed for citizens to observe the natural cycles on which life depends.
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W aste theme parks: arrange waste as it is created. Landfill sites are ordered and tidied as refuse is dumped. Rather than covering lost sites in new guises, structure the waste as it happens into avenues, walls, roads and arcades. In some of Edward Burtynsky s photographs, waste tyres outline networks of site access, but why not make these waste parks open to all? Like the Catacombs attraction in Paris where old bones stack into passages and make pictures, waste could form patterns, trends, and exotic designs. The visual attraction of collections will draw visitors to spot discarded objects as they do trains.
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Smart Kitchen: lots of Intelligent products have been proposed in books, for instance the Intelligent garbage can , Intelligent sink , the automated Expert Chef , an integrated Data Wall that keeps track of food freshness. However, why not try actually watching food showcased in beautiful housing. In the future will we see there is enough excitement in daily growth of foodstuffs for it to be the real T.V dinner? In the early part of this century, one of the first small refrigerators was a suitably deluxe model made of mahogany with glass sides, within, food was preserved to be observed. Food and technology were taken as seriously as delicate museum exhibits. Spanish product designer, Marti Guixe has suggested ready branded food. The brand logo appears on the surfaces of the food itself, printed in something equally edible. This food is given for free, and if consumers can eat the advert, what need is there for wrapping, store placards, billboards, seasonal promotional stands that paper our urban environments.
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High street restaurants will sell gourmet medicinal meals. Tailored to meet individual needs, doctors will recommend Friendly food to their ailing patients. Intelligent Friendly Food caters to every health requirement. IFF works in conjunction with your unique personal medical record, synchronising individual meals to personal ailments. Imbedded doses of vitamins and nutrients prevent every ailment including heart disease, and harness the potential of preservatives to extend the life of human genetic makeup. IFF will be developed and masterminded by bio-technologists that believe we are what we eat. The true innovation of IFF is to provide the perfect prescription for long living that will also taste great. W ith products as ridiculous and implausible as cheese strings (Dairylea), marshmallows masquerading as pre-packed sandwiches (Europa, Baker Street), who is to say that waste cannot be re-dressed by the methods above?
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So, are you still lounging, ruminating, at a kitchen table? Did you walk to the kettle to make a cup of tea? While you read, did the sun rise or set behind your work desk? As the time the train neared the final destination, did a seat become free for you to sit down? Now you have eaten to the other side of this piece, what are the remains? a pile of spent paper? I wanted to provide a flavour of the places in our lives often cut to save waste space and only wasted again by being filled with waste. Unlike a discarded sandwich wrapper, I will re-use this essay by reading and absorbing it again. This essay has considered aspects of waste around the urban environment. I have encountered many writers who speak of waste with lots of harsh facts and figures, and make dense, unfriendly chapters full of data. I wanted to see scraps and junk as exciting elements and stimulating life around them. I like bits that may be re-used, chewed up, and passed on in order to protect the hospitality in city spaces. In cities I have discussed, cycles of re-use are already present. Manhattan passes its recyclable waste to its homeless, but could learn from Delhi. London has Borough market but could learn from Rome by ejecting bland fast-food chains. London can learn from its own history and seduce cows back to its streets for a daily spectacle and on-site dairy.The stigma attached to touching sources must be addressed, so it helps us to handle our cities future reality.
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Researching this essay, I have seen local and peculiar sites and spaces are a much healthier attractions to visitors and international tourists, and environmentally than generic chains. Sanitized food spaces, either inhumanely cramped or chillingly large offer no lasting eatertainment and brief pleasure creates displeasure and monotony for someone else involved in their complex network. Cities can slow down and reduce their reliance on raw materials, as Bra shows. Slow lifestyles influence different and more harmonious relationships between public (say a field, a market square) and private (say a kitchen) space, and public and producer. Slow food is more time consuming, but the time invested in it has more quality. Slow food is more expensive, but more rewarding to eat.
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In the search for pleasure, the answer lies within, not from without. The temporary joy of opening a shiny crisp packet with a synthesised, out-ofthis-world flavour, is wasted, unless we have a way of taking the residue back into our lives rather than making someone else s life more depressing from its presence. Out of the points I covered here, I could easily focus on one and explore it further, but my work as an architect will be to consider in greater depth if there are better ways for the city I dream of to manage its throwaway parts. I definitely believe living closer to junk can create cities that support their activities more humanely than those that don t. As I said in my introduction, man-made products of many descriptions are knitting people to places across the world. The complex trade in resources grows, but this need not kill our cities, if we work to re-adopt its by-products in exciting and responsible ways.
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1. biting the dust 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Murray Gray Geography Review , September 1995, p.2 Ibid Bath & North East Somerset website, www.bathnes.gov.uk, 17/09/03 Ibid Ibid Breathing Cities Christina Hardyment From Mangle to Microwave , p.viii Tom Dixon, Rethink Ibid, p.78 Ibid, p.55 The Consumer Recycling Guide www.obviously.com/recycle, 1996 2002 Obviously Enterprises. Southwark Life free newspaper John Chase A curmudgeon s guide to the wide world of trash , in Everyday Urbanism , p.52 Ibid, p.58 Margaret Crawford Blurring the boundaries: public and private space , in Everyday Urbanism , p.29 30 Breathing Cities Ibid Recycled, Re-seen , p.16 Edward Burtynsky Manufactured Landscapes, p. Margaret Crawford Blurring the boundaries: public and private space , in Everyday Urbanism , p.35 Recycled, Re-seen , p.17
22 2. urban grazing 23 24 Tim Edensor The culture of the Indian street p.205 in Images of the street Ibid, p.206 This bears some similarity to the idea of limited good in the peasant world (many) see their world as one in which the good things in life are available in a limited and fixed quantity a correlation of this view is the belief that because the total amount of good is set, personal gain is 25 made at the expense of others. When one gets ahead, the amount available for others diminis26 hes in The Cultural Feast , p.210 211 27 Tim Edensor The Culture of the Indian street p.205 in Images of the Street 28 Ibid, p.207 29 Ibid, p.206 30 Gill Valentine Food and the production of the civilised street p.197 in Images of the Street 31 Ibid, p. 32 Ibid, p.209 33 Time Out Guide to Paris, 2002, p.132: Perhaps the smelliest museum in the world Gill Valentine Food and the production of the civilised street p.193 194 in Images of the Street
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3. crunch time 34 David Pearson The Natural House Book , p.206 35 Ibid, p.217 36 Daily Express Publications The Home of Today , p.104: By means of refrigeration food is kept at a temperature below that which allows bacterial action to take place 37 David Pearson The Natural House Book , p212 38 How to survive in the kitchen 39 Joanna Blythman Future food , p.80 in Food: Design and Culture 40 Daily Express Publications The Home of Today , p.23 41 Ettore Sotsass Travel notes from a kitchen p.130 140 in Food: Design and Culture 42 David Pearson The Natural House Book , p.206: The kitchen of childhood dreams is a place full of appetizing and tantalizing smells.. 43 Observer Food Monthly The Observer newspaper,.. 2003 44 Ibid, 45 Jonathan Glancy Lure of the aisles p.100, in Food: design and culture 46 Ibid 47 Ibid, p.100 48 David Pearson The Natural House Book , p.213 49 Harvey Levenstein The Golden Age of Food Processing , p.105, in Paradox of Plenty 50 Ibid, p.101 51 Hardiment Mangle to Microwave , p.180 52 Ibid, p.180 53 Ettore Sotsass Travel notes from a kitchen in Food: design and culture
4. future unwrapped 54 David Pearson The Natural house Book , p.206 55 Breathing Cities , p.15: Cities demand that we move through them arrival is only the beginning but great cities also make us stop 56 The Englishman s food , p.300 Ialo Calvino Invisible Cities , p. 57 t 58 W ebsite: www.slowfood.com, 20 September 2003 59 Viewpoint magazine: #11, p.120 60 Ibid, p.119 61 Ibid, p.118 62 Stanton P. Newman & Susan Lonsdale Shopping , p.116 in Human Jungle 63 Fantasy City 64 W ebsite: www.slowfood.com, 20 September 2003 65 Amanda Ursell Down to Earth , p.39 in Sunday Times Style 66 w w w.slowfood.com 67 Ibid 68 Viewpoint Magazine #11, p.119, Summer 2002 69 Trespassers, p.72, 70 Ibid, p.72 71 Trespassers, p.70 72 Viewpoint Magazine #11, p.103, Summer 2002 73 ? Viewpoint 74 Trespassers, p.75
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1:1 MARTI GUIXE Marti Guixe, Inga Knolke, Ed van Hinte Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002 100 YEARS OF IDIOCY Corporate author: Think the Earth Japan: Think the Earth Project, 2003 THE ATLAS OF FOOD Erik Millstone and Tim Lang London: Earthscan, 2003 B R E ATHING CITIES Edited by Nick Barley Boston: Mass Birkhauser, 2000 THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT Barbera K. Schreiner Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1973 CONSUMPTION AND EVERY D AY LIFE Editor: Hugh Mackay London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1997 Chapter 1: Consumption and its consequences Daniel Miller, p 14 63 THE CULTURAL FEAST Bryant, Courtney, Mewksbery, DeWalt Minnesota: West Publishing Co, 1985 E ATING OUT Alan Warde and Lydia Martens Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 FA N TA S Y CITY John Hannigan London: Routledge, 1998 (Chapter 5 Shopertainment, Eatertainment, Edutainment p.80 100) FOOD AND CULT U R E Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik London: Routledge, 1997 FOOD: DESIGN AND CULT U R E Claire Catterall London: Lawrence King, 1999 FROM MANGLE TO MICROWAV E Christina Hardyment Cambridge:Polity Press, 1988 THE HOME OF TO D AY Edited by The Daily Express London: Daily Express, no date (circa 1930 s?)
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H O W TO SURVIVE IN THE KITCHEN Katherine Whitehorn London: Methuen, 1983 IMAGES OF THE STREET Editor: Nicholas R. Fyfe London: Routledge, 1998 INVISIBLE CITIES t Ialo Calvino London: Pan Books, 1979 M A N U FACTURED LANDSCAPE THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD BURTYNSKY Lori Pauli Iowa: Yale University Press, 2003 THE NATURAL HOUSE BOOK David Pearson London: Conran Octopus, 1989 NOSE TO TAIL E ATING Fergus Henderson London: Pan Books, 2000 PLANTS IN THE SERVICE OF MAN Edward Hyams London: Dent, 1971 RECYCLED. RE-SEEN FOLK A RT FROM THE GLOBAL SCRAPHEAP Charlene Cerny and Suzanne Serif New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996 RETHINK Tom Dixon London: Conran Octopus, 2000 TIMEOUT GUIDE TO PARIS 2002 London: Penguin, 2002 TREAT YOURSELF Exhibition catalogue 26 May 14 Sept 2003 London: Science Museum, 2003 TRESSPASSERS Ed van Hinte Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999 THE URBAN CONDITION Ghent Urban Studies Team [GUST] Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999
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THE VALUE OF THINGS Neil Cummings Birkhauser: Verlag, 2000 VISION OF THE FUTURE Philips Design Netherlands: Eindhoven, 1996 THE WASTE MAKERS Vance Packard London: Longmans, 1961
PERIODICALS: Towards a Geography of Waste Murray Gray, p.2 6 in GEOGRAPHY REVIEW, September 1995 New moves for a greener Southwark p.12 13 in SOUTHWARK LIFE, August/September 2003 VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE #11, Summer 2002 Flawless Fruit Andrew Purvis, p.52 57 in OBSERVER FOOD MONTHLY MAGAZINE, July 2003 ADBUSTERS #49. Vol.II No.5, September/October 2003 The Stuff of Life Peter Menzel, p.10 16 in GUARDIAN WEEKEND MAGAZINE, 4 January 03 BOROUGH MARKET NEWS, Summer/Autumn 2003 Down to Earth Amanda Ursell, p.39 in SUNDAY TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE, 5 October 2003 Nick Barley Farming London , p.31 33 in SUNDAY TIMES THE KNOWLEDGE SUPPLEMENT, 9 15 August 2003
WEBSITES: W aste services, www.bathnes.gov.uk/wasteservices, 17 October 2003 Greenhouse Tomato Seminar , www.Isuggcenter.com/news, 16 June 2003 Consumer Recycling Guide , www.obviously.com/recycle, 6 May 2003 Slow Food and Slow Cities, www.slowfood.com, 10 September 2003 California Tomatoes , www.tomato.org/news, 17 September 2003
MISCELLANEOUS GREAT Newsletter, July/Sept 2003 Photographers Gallery,
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