August 26, 2010
The city is primarily a space for commerce. A space where buying and selling is the order of the day, and indeed night. The retail section presents as a juxtaposed collection of disparate window displays, all vying for the unreasonable and excessive attention of the passing public, trying to seduce them into the game of consumer fetishism that embodies the vision of freedom through lifestyle consumption in a neoliberal world.
Today we see people; especially the middle classes, increasingly retreat into suburban havens that include shopping malls. They no longer partake in the culture of street life but rather disengage it, both geographically and politically. When they walk the city streets it is for work or shopping. They walk past the cultural detritus of the present and the past, avoiding the unclean consumer waste on the street or in the parklands, muttering that there is a need to ‘clean up’ the debris.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, waste, Adelaide parklands, 2010
Of course, there are other forms of waste in the city--the idle of bodies of the homeless, mentally ill, aborigines, unruly public drinkers, drug users. The attitude is that there is a need to remove the waste, to ‘clean up’ the streets.
The moral economy of waste is at work in the moral economy of urban renewal of wasted spaces that are earmarked for regeneration and revitalisation projects.
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