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Sustainable urban systems and just FEW nexus transitions Water, food, and energy systems are providing fundamental services for human wellbeing. However, the current management of these systems is often wasteful, creating inefficiencies that need to be urgently addressed to reduce the over-consumption of our limited natural resources. Here, Jana Fried, Adina Paytan and Waste FEW ULL project participants look at lessons from the Waste FEW ULL project for reducing waste and increasing efficiency in the FEW nexus.
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Solutions to waste management in informal settlements in South Africa
Solutions to waste management in informal settlements in South Africa South Africa has retained some of the unjust laws following the Apartheid system, but rapid urbanisation has resulted in burgeoning informal settlements, often situated on the periphery of major cities and towns, where clean water is often inaccessible and waste management is limited. Clean water is the main catalyst for the projects conducted by the Waste FEW ULL team, Kevin Winter, Adina Paytan, Sue Charlesworth, and Jana Fried. The motivation for developing the ULL arose out of concern about the contaminated water and its impact on human health and the environment. Rising demand for land and houses has made people struggle to overcome existing income and wealth disparities, with high levels of unemployment and poverty remaining, leaving many only able to live in so-called informal settlements. The concept of Urban Living Labs (ULLs) has advanced from centres that were largely seen as test beds of innovation to become sites of learning and places where stakeholders can co-create solutions to address critical issues and challenges.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1830104
- PAR ID:
- 10428192
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Open Access Government
- Volume:
- 37
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2516-3817
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 464 to 465
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Sorting waste at-source (or household recycling) helps optimize the efficiency of waste management systems and safeguard the health of waste handlers. Recently, segregation of waste has become an urgent policy imperative that has been written into national waste management policies in India. While urban Indian households have had a long-standing tradition of segregating and selling high-value recyclables to actors in the informal sector, in contemporary policy discourse, women are constructed as recalcitrant urban subjects who need to be disciplined in accordance with the new mandates of waste segregation. This paper locates these processes of subject formation within the changing political economy of waste. Waste sorting is a labor-intensive process, and certain waste management technologies require presorted materials. In addition, presorted recyclables also offer up a source of revenue for waste management service providers. Beyond seeing the need for source segregation simply in abstract environmental and public health interests, this paper argues for contextualizing this imperative within the ongoing processes of privatization and mechanization of waste management systems. These processes dispossess informal waste collectors from their means of subsistence while relying on the unpaid labor of certain women, thus reproducing gender, class, and caste relations.more » « less
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Abstract The Urban Living Lab (ULL) approach has the potential to create enabling environments for social learning and to be a successful arena for innovative local collaboration in knowledge co-creation and experimentation in the context of research and practice in sustainability transitions. Nevertheless, complex issues such as the urban Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus present a challenge to the realization of such ULL, especially regarding their inclusiveness. We present ULL as a frame for a local knowledge co-creation and participation approach based on the project "Creating Interfaces - Building capacity for integrated governance at the Food-Water-Energy-nexus in cities on the water". This project aims at making FWE Nexus linkages better understandable to the stakeholders (citizens and associations, city government, science, businesses), and to facilitate cooperation and knowledge exchange among them. This paper focuses on and discusses inclusiveness as a key aspect and challenge of ULLs and on what literature and our experiences in this regard suggest for the advancement of the concept of ULL towards ULL 2.0. These findings often also relate to framing transdisciplinary research in a wider sense.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.56367/OAG-037-10465
