RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Repulsive Matter: Landscapes of Waste in the American Middle-Class Residential Domain
JF Landscape Journal
FD University of Wisconsin Press
SP 60
OP 79
DO 10.3368/lj.16.1.60
VO 16
IS 1
A1 Engler, Mira
YR 1997
UL http://lj.uwpress.org/content/16/1/60.abstract
AB This paper explores American residential spaces and objects that are associated with the production, storage, and processing of waste (i.e., kitchen, bathroom, yard, alley, water-closet, garbage can, and compost pile). Archaeologists base much of their findings about ancient cultures on the remains of garbage. Garbologists teach us that the content of our garbage can tell us much about modern culture (Rathje and Murphy 1992). Landscape scholars and designers, however, have shied away from any contact with this hideous, ubiquitous subject matter (with the exceptions of Grady Clay's “Sinks” in Close-Up, 1974, and Kevin Lynch's Wasting Away, 1990). This essay focuses on the evolution of landscapes of waste within the American house, lot, and street. It illuminates the historical links between the needs, technologies, and perceptions pertaining to waste and the ways in which we have ordered and shaped residential landscapes. The gradual elimination of waste places and functions from the middle-class residential domain—their domestication, on the one hand, and transfer to the public domain, on the other—a process which persisted through the 1980s, brought about the eradication of spatial boundaries, margins, diversity, and productivity and their replacement with an undifferentiated space, homogeneity, and sterility. Today, as waste itself is being redefined, designers are rethinking and shaping residential landscapes in ways that are conducive to the storage, processing, and reuse of waste. This article is concerned with the quality of residential landscapes. Its intent goes beyond a call to reduce/reuse waste and take private responsibility over waste. It suggests that waste and waste places constitute important components of rich and healthy landscapes and calls for their re-integration into our everyday environments.