ABSTRACT
Over the course of the twentieth century, dumping sites turned into key landmarks of the urban periphery and of urbanized regions. City planners and waste engineers constructed dumping sites for sanitary reasons, and they also saw them as a means to urbanize nature and to naturalize both urban space and the cities’ material output: Dumping was used for landscaping purposes and for reclaiming building ground or green leisure spaces; the waste itself—so went the assumption—would gradually metabolize into organic matter. As the material and spatial flipside of mass consumer culture, however, landfills expanded in quite haphazard and unforeseen ways. Their inner bio-chemical degradation processes proved uncontrollable, even unknowable and sometimes toxic, leading to site-specific conditions and ecologies. In the long run, dumping grounds formed what I will term ‘wastescapes’: scars in the late twentieth century urbanized topography which were formed by an ongoing antagonism between technological control over city and nature and the irreducible materiality of waste that endowed landfills with their own agency. As such, these wastescapes question our common understanding of city, nature, technology and environment. The chapter focuses on landfilling in twentieth-century (West) Germany. It follows urban planners, sanitation professionals, as well as urbanites and consumers as key actors, but also describes the agency of material streams and of social and spatial arrangements around municipal waste.
