Livable Cities - London AMPS | City, University of London Page 158 the recent decades, as users increasingly moved centre stage of the design process, which brought real- world use scenarios to the fore. There are also excellent alternatives currently under development that offer more sustainable sourcing of raw materials. However, there is little thought about what happens once the products start to fail, or are kept unused for any other reason. Of course, manufacturers are increasingly pressured by the public and policymakers to enable easier repairability and recyclability of their products, as proposed by the Right to Repair movement.15 Nevertheless, at any given second, virtually every city and town in the world is discarding high volumes of materials. A considerable part of those materials should not need to end up in recycling or incineration, or piled in landfills. Potential value is literally being wasted everywhere. The solution for that is not merely logistical. There are political issues to be unveiled, as well as cultural ones. Waste has deep connections with inequality.16 My thesis aims to significantly contribute to that discussion, starting with a reconnection of goods and products with the local and regional contexts in which they are used. The first time I read about ‘bioregions’ was in the writings of John Thackara.17 It is a perspective that asks one to think in a systemic way that integrates city, rural areas and nature. It provides a powerful way to expose assumptions often kept under the radar, especially to acknowledge externalities. Even though the themes around repair, reuse and waste are not related to a rural or a natural setting in obvious ways, it is still useful to think on a scale wider than only the city to understand how matter flows and is transformed within it. Bruno Latour18 uses the image of ‘black boxes’ to describe mechanisms whose internal functionality is opaque within a system. Such conceptual objects are only expected to receive inputs and, from them, provide outputs efficiently. One may argue that opening up black boxes and making them transparent reduces the overall performance of the system. On the other hand, it is only possible to have a clear picture once we look into the black boxes, expose the assumptions they are based in, and include more people in defining how they operate. The usual depiction of waste management systems is full of black boxes. My research tries to intentionally open up some of them. BEYOND CIRCULARITY The vision of a circular economy is central to any contemporary discussion about waste and reuse. Nonetheless, my research is not completely aligned with that perspective. One of the many interesting questions I was asked shortly after moving to Dundee came from Professor Jon Rogers, Principal Investigator of the OpenDoTT programme. How about, he asked me, you thought of shapes other than a circle? Once I let that sink in, I began to understand what my main problem with the circular economy was. We can, inspired by the cradle-to-cradle concept,19 accept that ‘waste equals food’, or in other words, that the residues of industrial production could be seen as nutrients that can be fed back to the system. The second step would then be creating ways to ensure that the nutrients are efficiently identified, sorted, cleaned and transformed back into food. It is, however, important to ask what sort of creature we are feeding with those nutrients. In other words, should a more circular economy be used to provide frictionless nutrient flows to an industrial sector that has proved time and again that its only goal is to reproduce itself infinitely with no respect for nature and humankind? My take differs in shape, if not in substance. Instead of nutrients, I like to think of discarded materials as potential value, or potential wealth. In 2016, I spent some weeks in Nantes, France. I was there invited by a local arts organisation to explore the scenario of circular economy projects in the region. The most valuable thing I learnt then was about the agents valoristes, in the original. It is an actual professional role: the person whose job is to evaluate what parts of discarded or donated materials can be either sold, repaired, or transformed. It reminded me of those TV shows of antique traders going to small towns to find potential acquisitions for their businesses. There is situated knowledge, skills and sensibility in that to be understood and put to use. The image of the valoriste was a constant inspiration for my research.
