Livable Cities - London AMPS | City, University of London Page 156 possible in legal terms and acceptable by public opinion – or invisible from it —, such organisations will: • Increase prices as much as possible, occasionally making use of sophisticated techniques to manipulate consumers’ perception in terms of style and identity. That allows them to make their products be seen as more valuable than the competitors’ – even in the cases where they are objectively the same. • Reduce wages and working conditions to the bare minimum established by legal or class-based workers’ rights regulations, often relocating their industrial plants to parts of the world where labour is cheaper, or less protected. • Employ materials from unethical provenance – sometimes relying on child labour, environmentally questionable extraction and processing of materials, poor workers’ protections, or even sourcing materials from conflict and war-thorn areas, as well as engaging with corrupt actors. • Ignore the long-term impacts of their products once they are not in use any more – sometimes actively promoting planned obsolescence and/or concealing known information about the low repairability or the high toxicity of their products.5 I argue that society can truthfully seek novel and holistic ways to address the impacts of excess materials, but profit-oriented corporations should not be the only actors involved. A coalition of stakeholders representative of the many forces at play must be forged. Unfortunately, we must accept that waste production is inevitable for the foreseeable future. My doctoral investigation centred on how localities can cope with excess materials under a conceptual framing of reuse – through repairs, upcycling, or re-circulation. This specific research focus was based on two elements. The first, my hands-on involvement in the past with community initiatives promoting the reuse of materials. I build on experiences reusing discarded electronic equipment in the MetaReciclagem network – active in Brazil between 2003 and 2012. The second factor in deciding on this particular research topic is the scarce literature I found connecting inclusive urbanism, digital equality and environmental issues. Particularly in discussions about smart cities, there seems to be no awareness of the rich scholarship, for instance, on Lefebvre’s concept of Right to the City6 and its implications in how policy is designed and implemented. Equally absent are approaches to handling waste in urban contexts that go beyond logistics and discuss impact and benefits to local communities and society. WASTE AND CITIES The entirety of my research journey, from arriving in the UK in 2019 to the moment I finished reviewing my thesis in Berlin in 2024, followed an explicit goal. That is, going beyond merely deploying technologies, rather discussing how to pursue a better future for cities and their populations. My thematic choice for that investigation was to focus on local systems to promote the reuse of excess materials – broken, unfit, unused, discarded objects – in contemporary cities and regions. Regarding cities, discussion about the reuse of materials is often affiliated with the field of waste management. There are, however, problematic points in such a thematic association. The first question is the extent to which public understanding of waste has gradually been reduced to the attempt only to increase the volume of recyclable materials collected and processed by municipal services. The dominance of a top-down view of recycling as the end goal of waste management leads to distortions that must be addressed. The second problematic point, perhaps of a more conceptual nature, is that accepting to define things out of use as waste conditions society’s perception and expectations about such materials. To that point, not even the well-known formulation ‘waste is matter out of place’ is sufficient. The theme ought to be challenged from a perspective that considers power dynamics and conformity to a consumerist society.
