Governing Risks in Modern Britain by Tom Crook & Mike Esbester

Author:Tom Crook & Mike Esbester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Risk and Resistance

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the problem of urban waste disposal was a significant political question in everyday life.21 We still live with the consequences of the construction of complex networked technical apparatuses designed to ensure the continuous, repeated cleansing of our cities, a process that also ensures their reproduction as sites for the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of labour power.22 Without the regular and systematic disposal of refuse, urban life would quickly become untenable and the reproduction of urban capitalism impossible.23 Today this conundrum is often referred to as a problem of ‘sustainability’.24 In Marxist terms, the same problematic reflects the antinomies of social reproduction under the rule of capital.25 Capital accumulation occurs in urban spaces that are assemblages of material and biological flows that require constant management and maintenance in order to ensure their reproduction. Waste poses a key hazard to the temporal reproduction of urban space. Its disposal ensures the continuance of material flows through the ‘urban metabolism’ and the ongoing biological health and cultural well-being of city dwellers.26 It is therefore unsurprising that waste has become a key political and cultural question in urban life. Wherever waste disposal breaks down, the legitimacy (‘sustainability’) of the social and economic order comes into question. This is one reason, perhaps, why uncollected refuse became an enduring image of the industrial struggles of the 1970s and 1980s.27

A key conundrum of the modern system of waste disposal is what to do with the refuse collected. Whereas waste collection and removal is a continuous cyclical process, disposal is, or more accurately should be, final. Yet, in reality, such finality is a myth, for waste persists or lasts in its final place of disposal.28 Even incinerators produce a toxic ash that requires dumping. Different technologies of disposal produce different ecological consequences and different culturally contingent political effects. It can seem obvious that people would oppose the dumping or incineration of waste in their areas, the corollary of the selfish individualism—or ‘nimbyism’—that contemporary ideology expects to find everywhere.29 But as a number of analysts have shown, this fails to explain either why opposition to refuse disposal emerges or why it persists.30 Experts made efforts throughout the twentieth century to allay fears regarding the environmental and health risks of waste disposal sites—to prove that they could be managed and their biological and toxic risks eliminated.31 The transition from crude tipping and incineration to controlled tipping or sanitary landfill during the mid-twentieth century was part of a bid to allay public anxieties over the proximity of waste treatment sites to new housing estates through a technological fix.32

Yet such fixes commonly demanded the sacrifice of some spaces to the overall needs of the modern hygienic project. There is a long history of resistance to different types of refuse disposal that rendered certain spaces final ‘sinks’ for urban waste, a history which dates back to the late nineteenth century and the advent of refuse or dust ‘destruction’ (incineration). One telling example is the

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