Plastic and the city
The burden of single-use plastic bags on urban infrastructure has been a focus of the environmentalist movements and urbanist thought in the 21st century. Single-use plastic bags, however, are not the only plastic that becomes entangled in the cityscape. In fact, plastic in all its forms is so integrated into cities that it is not possible to imagine urban infrastructure without it.
What follows is an exploration of the intertwined social and material landscapes of Dakar – the bustling capital of Senegal. Senegal banned plastic bags one year ago, in April 2015, as a means to curb environmental and infrastructural damage particularly severe in the nation’s capital. The vignettes capture social interactions in which plastic objects transcend material stagnancy and figure dynamically in the social lives of Dakar’s inhabitants. Urban dwellers differ by origins of class, place, occupation, race, and so on. And so they also differ in ways by which they engage plastic objects
[Read full article at the Uneven Earth website]
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