Boundary Making: Re-imagining the Architecture of Waste Management

Published in: Circular Living: Reimagining waste as commons and future cultural assets, edited by Saverio Massaro (Rome: D Editore, 2023), 99-103.

Architecture has an important, if often unacknowledged, role to play in mediating how society understands the sources of waste making and their consequences. As Joshua Lepawsky has recently written, how we frame waste structures how we address it as a problem, locally and globally (Lepawsky 2018, 6). Though a growing body of architectural design and research seeks to intervene into normative material life cycles of consumption and disposal, my concern is with how architecture mediates what is “thinkable and actionable” in terms of responsibility over waste creation and disposal (Lepawsky 2018, 6; O’Donnell and Pranger 2021). All too often, architectural designs and research projects reinforce commonly held assumptions about who or what is responsible for the consequences of waste making, concentrating on consumer behavior and awareness rather than the root causes of waste production (Liboiron 2018). How, then, might architecture reframe how we think and talk about waste?