︎
Garbage Housing in the World of Waste Colonialism
by Siraphob (Ice) Khuptiphongkun
Course: Transsclarities 2023
Instructor: Beril Sarisakal
    Nowadays, waste is traded globally between high GDP countries and lower-income countries for recycling fees. For the exporters it is cheaper to pay other countries to receive their waste than to pay for waste treatment centers in their own countries. For importer countries money is their main incentive due to the lack of produce to participate in the global market. In these waste economies, landfills become open dumping sites instead, due to a lack of good waste processing facilities. Causing problems such as illnesses for those within close proximity to emission and contamination of the environmental pollution from waste. This trade system is also referred to as ‘Waste Colonialism’, due to the exporter’s domination and exploitation of other lands through waste. Waste, given global systems, is a colonial material economy that dominates produce, land, and health in importer countries.



    In the 1970s, Martin Pawley published his idea of Garbage Housing as a proposal to tackle housing issues using disposable containers of consumer waste as construction materials. During that time, dedicated disposal sites were a common practice in handling waste. This subsequent practice of consumerism followed the period of mass production in the late nineteenth century. This practice of dedicated disposal sites would eventually evolve from local landfills to other countries with the current global waste trade. Pawley connects material economies by mentioning that housing materials were always in short supply, the over-production of disposables offered an alternative abundant supply of materials if they could be reused for construction.

    One of his major works on Garbage Housing was at Cornell University. The project involved designing prototypes for emergency housing in Chile based on available secondary use materials. One design by Cornell student Jeffrey Skorneck utilized unused car parts from Chile’s Citroën factory. This car metaphor was used by Pawley to challenge the permanent nature of a house and the preconceived notion that an ownership of a house must be tied to an ownership of a land. However, this work was not received well in his home country of the United Kingdom, where it came into conflict with the popularization of the property-owning democracy concept at the time. Meanwhile, the Chilean coup of 1973 spelled an abrupt end for the Cornell project along with its main sponsor, the Unidad Popular government.



    Pawley eventually realized that his implementation of Garbage Housing suffered from its overreliance on support from the government and changed the trajectory of his later works to be less about changing the industry and developed them more into individual-scale assemblies without reliance on manufacturing process. In his published book on Garbage Housing, he also stated that the housing shortage was not getting solved because it was being maintained by the government and housing industry.

    The same can be said about the ongoing waste colonialism, in which countries on both sides of the trade achieve their goals, while the problems they create for the people are ignored. The implementation of Garbage Housing concept in the world of Waste Colonialism, likewise, should not be a project supported by the government, but an active effort to overturn the system and the parties involved by increasing the value of waste and destabilizing the trade incentives. Economies of material waste as a colonial project informs Martin Pawley’s Garbage House by framing an alternative housing construction that redevelopment power regimes through personal-scaled waste management interventions.


Bibliography
- Skorneck, Jeffrey. Automobile Body Components Housing, Citroen 2CV
- Fourgonnette. 1973. In Martin Pawley, Garbage Housing, 90-91. London: Architectural Press, 1975.
Running on Cargo