1st Edition
A Cultural History of Waste Disposal Environmental Policy and Park Redevelopments
This book offers a historical analysis of landfill sites in New York City, Greater Toronto, and Greater Tel Aviv, and uses them as case studies to emphasize the international and global scale of issues concerning waste disposal and park redevelopments.
New York, Toronto, and Tel Aviv are currently redeveloping giant landfills into parks to much fanfare. The park redevelopments may be seen as an attempt to erase or assuage the decades of problematic waste-disposal policy that led to the creation of such large landfills. Booster rhetoric underscores this point, such as promoting how the parks will be a “green lung” for the city. This book contextualizes these redevelopments by offering a historical analysis, providing a greater understanding of the past, current, and future potential issues. It goes on to analyze the language and media coverage surrounding former waste sites becoming park redevelopments, including how cities use art to promote their image and gain cultural relevance. By engaging with both the works of waste historians and literature on waste and discard studies, the book provides theoretical models for analyzing the role of power in municipal systems, as well as human and ecological impacts on waste. It concludes with an analysis of the features necessary for landfill parks to be successful.
This book will be useful for scholars, researchers, and academics studying waste studies, the environment, cities, and sustainable development, as well as for policymakers and environmental/eco artists.
Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Chapter One: A Cultural History of Waste
Chapter Two: Waste Disposal before Environmental Regulation
Chapter Three: Environmental Regulation and Constraints
Chapter Four: Waste Crisis and Sustainable Development
Chapter Five: Representing Redevelopment
Conclusion
Biography
Benjamin A. Lawson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith, where he has a research and teaching focus on urban-environmental history, science and technology, and teacher licensure.
