Composing Urban Orders from Rubbish Electronics: Cityness and the Site Multiple

Abstract

What do cities look like when rubbish electronics are the vehicle with which they are explored? This article is an experiment designed to offer a response to that question, and in doing so to productively intervene in the conversation about 'cityness ', 'metrocentricity' and 'subaltern urbanism'. We intervene by following flows of rubbish electronics and the action that enacts them as waste and value, drawing on fieldwork in Dhaka, Singapore, Accra and Canada's Greater Golden Horseshoe. Our intervention is an experiment in writ ing an urban geography of rubbish electronics as a site multiple. We show how follow ing the circulation of rubbish electronics offers a manyfolded synopsis of cities: urban enclaves of high finance and the information economy are also industrial waste producers. Peri urban industrial zones are also managers of brands, legal liability and corporate public relations. Cities off the map are also urban innovation systems, while waste is rekindled as value and accumulated as poison. Thereby we suggest how a sensitivity to the site multiple may be a helpful way of grappling with shifting ontology and the performativity of our research practices in urban studies.'to live in one city today means living in many, as any individual city folds in and stretches itself across urban experiences, information, and economies throughout the world. ' AbdouMaliq Simone (2010: xiii)

Urban Political Ecology Beyond Methodological Cityism

“…In this way, urban scholars have started to describe cities as places (or things) ‘in the making’ (Simone, : 3), rather than determinate, bounded units. For instance, to investigate more‐than‐urban geographies, Lepawsky and colleagues (: 187) have developed a methodological sensibility that they call ‘the site multiple’, which works with (rather than against) the critiques of the planetary urbanization literature. The site multiple originates from Annemarie Mol's () concept of the body multiple.…”

“…The methodological and conceptual focus on boundaries and edges is thus helpful in understanding how the travels of various materials composing the urban constitute processes of circulation and metabolism, and their urban political ecologies. As Lepawsky and colleagues (: 187) put it, the methodological sensibilities of the site multiple and boundaries and edges allow us to: ‘keep open the very question of what composes cityness'. ‘Cityness’ refers to Simone's () term, which recognizes that cities may be made up of something other or more than the urban.…”

“…As Lepawsky and colleagues () point out, while the site multiple is different from multi‐sited, the two are certainly interrelated. On one hand, multi‐sited implies a methodological approach to tracing one phenomenon through different related sites, while the site multiple, recognizes that phenomena (and the places in which they exist) are enacted through practices that are diffuse and scattered (often unevenly) across space.…”

“…Subsequently, I suggest the usefulness of the methodological approach of the ‘site multiple’ advocated by Lepawsky and colleagues (), in addition to related methodological sensibilities and tools that can be used for researching diverse urban phenomena and their multi‐scalar connections. The site multiple is influenced by poststructural thinking, which advocates a focus on the everyday practices and experiences that are constitutive of cities and their more‐than‐urban geographies.…”

Investigating 3E-materials at Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana

“…Agbogbloshie represents on the other end an urban territory on register with "Temporary Autonomous Zone" (T.A.Z.) [lO]-areas of alternate status, here proscribed by government and agreement as semi-legal, semi-permanent and semi-autonomous; but equally imbued with ingenuity and underground azaa [1l, 12,13,14,15]-a place where human hazards of 3E-materials are localized disproportionately to tangible benefits.…”