I am interested in the role of waste materials, including household and industrial waste, as well as rubble from destroyed buildings, in urban space. At the moment, I am researching this in three sites - Beirut’s coastal landfills, Berlin’s ‘rubble mountains’ piled up from World War II debris, and several parks in London where the ‘natural landscaping’ is in fact also made up of wartime rubble. I am interested in the way waste is used to turn spaces of destruction, death and decay into areas of health and vitality, and what this means about urban memory politics.

I have been interviewing German environmental organisations and Syrian refugees about the way the German state has sought to educate new arrivals on proper waste sorting. I read urban infrastructures as sites of exchange and negotiation between the state and its new residents, but also as locales where new citizens’ behaviours are moulded to reflect ‘German’ values. This work is funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

In a participatory project, funded by UCL Gand Challenges, refugees and hosts in Lebanon made a film about refugee children in the recycling industry - Waste Journey (2018).

I’ve written about Khaled Jarrar’s work on sewage in Palestine and organised film screenings and roundtables around filmic engagements with waste in Lebanon and Palestine. Based on my ongoing exchange with a number of artists, a forthcoming paper will look in depth at artistic representations of Lebanon’s coastal landfills.

With Manal Massalha, I have written about the role waste plays in liminal or suspended spaces of Jerusalem, which are inside the municipality, but cut off by the Separation Wall. In these spaces, we argue, the symbolic and embodied abjection of waste draws boundaries of urban belonging through everyday lived experience.

Find the full article - including Manal’s excellent photographs such as the one below - here: Baumann & Massalha (2021) ‘Your daily reality is rubbish’ in Urban Studies.

Film still above from Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins & Ali al-Deek’s Waste Siege (2017).