Introduction

This chapter uses the notion of heterotopia (Foucault, 1986) to rethink the functions and meanings of waste urban infrastructures, based on narratives of waste from the cities of Managua in Nicaragua and Gothenburg in Sweden. A heterotopia is a physical representation of a utopia, or a parallel space that contains undesirable bodies to make a real utopian space possible, such as a prison or a cemetery. Foucault divides all spaces into ordinary and extraordinary. The extraordinary are divided into utopias, or unreal places, and heterotopias, which are real:

Although Foucault did not mention them as such, waste urban infrastructures such as landfill sites or incinerators are heterotopic places. Waste urban infrastructures constitute ‘the other city’ where citizens cast out their wasted things. Waste urban infrastructures hold as heterotopias relevant roles and functions, which vary between different societies: ‘A society, as its history unfolds can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another’ (Foucault 1986: 25).

The analysis of the functions of waste urban infrastructures presented in this chapter is based on the narratives collected from two ordinary cities: Managua in Nicaragua and Gothenburg in Sweden (Amin and Graham, 1997; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Robinson, 2006, 2011). To compare a wealthy city in the global North such as Gothenburg, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, the second poorest country of the Americas, might appear methodologically and ontologically inappropriate. However, cities are best understood as ordinary rather than labelling them as Western, third world, developed, developing or global (Robinson, 2006: 1).