ABSTRACT
Reading about garbage and social inequalities, one could expect to find economic considerations together with environmental concerns. However, this is only part of what the present chapter proposes to do. In the context of global discussions of garbage as reshaping urban communities, this essay proposes to analyse, at the intersection of urbanism and garbage, the way that architect Le Corbusier conceptualized excess and waste in Radiant City. Establishing the fact that garbage in cities inscribes itself in a long tradition of reactions of disgust and counter-planning can help us redefine the ways in which we imagine garbage today. The chapter also looks at the language of garbage, identifying surprising paradoxes and an ambivalent fascination for the latter in the works of Le Corbusier, but also in those of Georges Bataille. The chapter then continues to deepen the understanding of garbage by considering ecological endeavours that strive to eradicate garbage altogether, thus contrasting Le Corbusier’s vision with more contemporary tendencies in global cities. The American poet A.R. Ammons begins his poetry collection Garbage with the line ‘garbage has to be the poem of our time’ (Ammons 2002 [1993]: 13). Beyond the ironic stance there is in pretending that any product of creativity could be garbage, beyond the consideration that art or literature were originally – or at least with and after Plato – considered to represent beautiful things only, what the line really means is that garbage is a poem, or, rather, that there exists a correlation between trash and language. One has to admit that, if our time needs a representative poem, garbage fits perfectly. Since a poem is made of metaphors, Ammons is surely implying that garbage is the metaphor, or even the image, of our time. And in fact, visions of garbage represent for the media the long-term disaster footage that can be used when there is no environmental catastrophe to cover. Garbage is the constant environmental catastrophe, playing a leading role in pollution, climate change, and spatial limitations, and yet it does so in different ways once we look at it globally. But from impoverished neighbourhoods to affluent ones, cities always stage the frustration of garbage and consumption. Even more, garbage is a poem because it has to do with language, it does something to language. It is the dark place where words go when they want to signify something extreme
and wrong: hence the title of this chapter, ‘Dirt poor/filthy rich’. Both of these are idioms that would strike anybody as particularly telling of the economic dimension of garbage: moreover, it is undeniably paradoxical that two opposites on the scale of wealth are qualified by a very similar derogatory notion. If one takes a look at the words themselves, ‘dirt’ seems to imply that poor people are closer to the ground, that they tend to live in areas of the world that are not as clean and as covered in protective asphalt or as punctuated by green spaces as what is considered to be normal in ‘developed’ countries. Furthermore, the distinction between both extremes does not necessarily correspond to the distinction between developed and underdeveloped countries, since dirt poor and filthy rich often co-reside in urban spaces that have had or still have an accelerated economic growth, regardless of their position in the North and South divide. This juxtaposition is visible in various cities on the global scale, from New Orleans to Paris, from Nairobi to Rio. The image that expresses this contrast most significantly, in a visual oxymoron, is a photograph of two adjacent neighbourhoods of São Paolo, the favela of Paraisópolis and the upper middle-class high standing buildings of Morumbi, with private swimming pools on each balcony, taken by Tuca Vieira. The picture, first exhibited at the Tate Modern in London in 2007 for the ‘Global Cities’ exhibit, represents exactly the urban and economic inequalities caused by globalization, as they differ from one neighbourhood to the other. Such disparities are often studied in works on environmental justice and sustainability, as in Brian J. Godfrey’s 2013 chapter on Rio de Janeiro, ‘Urban Renewal, Favelas and Guanabara Bay’, which also emphasizes the position of trash in the rapid urbanization common to developing countries as they strive to catch up with the global economy. Globalization, understood as the internationalization of trade and economic exchanges, can be said to cause in equal part the affluence of certain neighbourhoods and the increased poverty of others. In countries like Brazil, which are simultaneously ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, international investments remain limited to one section of the population: that of skilled, educated workers. In the process, local production struggles result in even lower wages, while the benefits of the developing export markets are concentrated in the same areas of the population, and thus of the city. Yet Tuca Vieira’s picture also shows the repartition of waste in global cities: it is invisible in rich neighbourhoods, where the colour white is predominant, and where water and cleanliness are obvious and taken for granted as a right, but it is extremely evident and scattered in favelas, where houses are built out of recuperated material, where the dominant colours are earthy like dirt. On the other side, ‘filthy rich’ is a difficult idiom to uncover: well-off individuals obviously have access to soap, live in proper neighbourhoods, with all the necessary amenities to hide away the garbage, or even to systematically get rid of it. So why would ‘filthy’ end up qualifying extremely rich people? It seems that the origin of the phrase comes from another stereotype, claiming that money, in particular coins, are dirty. The origin of the association can be found in Tyndale’s translation of the Greek Bible, where the greedy is guilty of ‘filthy
lucre’ (Timothy 3:3). While at the time it implied that the wealth is ill-gotten, the more recent phrase ‘filthy rich’ takes perverse undertones with the evolution of ‘filthy’. Yet in the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2008, one could say that ‘filthy rich’ has come to mean literally filthy: the visions of dog excrement and messiness in the documentary The Queen of Versailles (Greenfield 2012) speak for themselves. Visually, they associate the gigantic home, in fact the largest private residence in the United States of America, of Florida billionaire entrepreneur David Siegel – the queen of Versailles from the title is his wife, beauty-queen and former IBM engineer Jackie Siegel, who insisted that her house should look like Versailles – to reality television series like, the Hoarding: Buried Alive, where every episode, under the pretext of ‘explor[ing] the psychology behind compulsive storing’ – quoted from the show’s website – mostly exhibits the untidy, dirty, and overflowing interiors of victims of the disorder. The documentary Waste Land (Walker 2010), also set in a Brazilian metropolis, reveals the divergences between what the well-off consume, and what the inhabitants of the favelas find through the city’s trash. Among the many contrasts that can be found in the documentary, the juxtaposition of images of the Jardim Gramacho landfill and of Vik Muniz’s exhibit in Rio’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM) highlights the very same extended oxymoron. It thus seems undeniable that garbage and money are intrinsically related, complicating any attempt at conceptualizing the variations in waste production and management in the modern city. Starting with an analysis of a curious obsession for waste in Le Corbusier’s utilitarian plan, his ville radieuse, this chapter will look at the urban particularities and qualities of garbage, at its economic repartition and the environmental issues that arise out of it. Before being taken out of sight, out of mind, to the landfill, itself generally on the outskirts of or well outside the city, what place does garbage hold in the city? According to Le Corbusier, garbage takes many forms, and it can enlighten more recent conceptualizations of urban waste management. Yet nowadays, zero waste lifestyles emerge on the social media (Instagram, blogs, Twitter) with similar aesthetics and pose the question of responsibility and economical gaps in considerations of waste: are the new ‘filthy rich’ literally people who can afford to be close to their garbage and to analyse it so as to reduce it? Are we making sustainability in general into something only the privileged class can afford to care about? Paradoxically, in order to understand the close relation between garbage and social inequalities anywhere, it is productive to look back at the 1930s. In Radiant City, where he exposes his vision for a ‘green’ city, Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier declares ‘the problem of architecture is the basis of social equilibrium today’ (Le Corbusier 1967: 19). As one of the vanguards of modern urbanism, he takes part in what could be considered as a contemporary feeling of disgust for cities, as he wonders: ‘Does the big city express a fortunate or a harmful occurrence?’ (Le Corbusier 1967: 35). Robert Fishman, in Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, observes such a disgust for cities in modernist planning theory: three major visionaries of urban planning, namely Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, he writes, ‘hated the cities of
their time with an overwhelming passion. The metropolis was the counter-image of their ideal cities, the hell that inspired their heavens’ (Fishman 1977: 12). Unsurprisingly, Le Corbusier’s personal disgust – expressed in the exalted and obsessive first-person narrative of Ville radieuse, is fundamentally dependent on the notion of garbage. Explaining the purpose of Ville radieuse, he denies that the book belongs to the genre of literature:
Il exprime le martèlement de la vie présente, la croissance accélérée et violente d’un phénomène neuf: l’urbanisme; l’explosion des malaises accumulés, l’éclatement des crises; les impasses . . .
