‘Wastelandia’: Infrastructure and the Commonwealth of Waste in Urban Ghana

Abstract

Can infrastructure provide the basis of urban public life and the foundation for the commonwealth? And how might this be possible in contexts of modernist failure marked by the evacuation of resources, rights, and state investments and the accumulation of waste, from human excreta to industrial discharge and the detritus of everyday consumption? These questions are explored through a case study drawn from the wastelands of Ghana's city of Tema. At the heart of the analysis is an expansive privately owned public toilet complex turned hostel, school room, meeting place, communal kitchen, and fledgling biogas plant. Akin to Hobbes’ Leviathan, here we see a putative ‘state of nature’ transformed into an infrastructure-based commonwealth of waste. Replete with political possibility despite its unstable and unfinished form, this ontological experiment re-assembles social relations by making tangible, scalable, and public the collective force of bodily waste.

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