The latest edition of the DSI/NRF/CSIR Chair in Waste and Society webinar series is entitled "Waste, Capital, and The Capital: Space contestations in the “post-apartheid” city.
Presenter: Mr Pierre Reyneke
Host: Prof Melanie Samson
Date: Thursday, 2 September 2021
Time: 12h00
WEBINAR LINK
ABOUT PRESNETER
Pierre Reyneke is a researcher with a background in Anthropology. As a researcher and project manager at Nova InsInsttitute (NPO), his current work entails developing and implementing sustainable solutions with low-income communities in South Africa. His research to date has focused on the contribution of the informal sector to waste management. He has a personal interest in the way that materiality shapes relations between people, specifically how people relate to each other regarding their own relation to waste materials.
Pierre Reyneke joined the Nova Institute in the year 2013 after completing his Social Science (Honours) degree in Anthropology. He took up the role of Project Manager of the Brickstar improved cooking stove project. He has fulfilled this role ever since.
Parallel to his employment at the Nova Institute, he completed a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Pretoria. This research project entailed an ethnographic study of the waste management system at the Garstkloof and Hatherley landfills, situated in the City of Tshwane. This approach involved identifying changes brought about by the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality (CTMM) within the waste management system and offered a detailed account of how individuals making a living from waste have responded to these changes. He is currently enrolled in a doctorate program at The University of Witwatersrand in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences and forms part of the SARChI Chair in Waste and Society. His study investigates the form and role of ‘reuse and remake’ practices in the production of space and the urban waste economy of The City of Tshwane.
ABSTRACT
Within a neoliberal global context, the socio-economic divide between the wealthy and the poor is ever increasing. South Africa has not been averse to this global phenomenon and is currently the most unequal country in the world (WID, 2019). Nowhere is this reality more starkly evident than in the metropoles of the country, where affluent residential suburbs and high-end strip malls border on poor informal settlements. The country’s administrative capital the City of Tshwane constitutes such an urban space and the wealthy Eastern node of the city, known as Pretoria-East, is the focus of this study. This geographical space is characterised by wealthy security estates, corporate office blocks, and some of Africa’s largest shopping malls. Anomalous to this, the area houses numerous pockets of informal settlements where the urban waste precariat live and work. This paper offers a historical account of the processes that have shaped this unequal urban space and continue to do so in intensified measures. It shows through the case study of Plastic View informal settlement that these spaces are highly contested as the poor seek to forge an income albeit a precarious one, in the face of profit-driven private property developers and state entities. Through ethnographic accounts, newspaper articles, and archival data the paper illustrates how the pliability of waste objects offers an opportunity for the urban waste precariat to gain a foothold in this contentious space. In addition, by critically analysing and debunking the term ‘vagrant’, used in reference to the urban waste precariat, the paper offers a counter-narrative, proving that the presence of the urban poor within this space traces back to almost a century. Lastly, the paper argues that new forms of accumulation by dispossession enacted by the state and private property developers are cutting the waste precariat from income streams they have imaginatively opened for themselves.
Presenter: Mr Pierre Reyneke
Host: Prof Melanie Samson
Date: Thursday, 2 September 2021
Time: 12h00
WEBINAR LINK
ABOUT PRESNETER
Pierre Reyneke is a researcher with a background in Anthropology. As a researcher and project manager at Nova InsInsttitute (NPO), his current work entails developing and implementing sustainable solutions with low-income communities in South Africa. His research to date has focused on the contribution of the informal sector to waste management. He has a personal interest in the way that materiality shapes relations between people, specifically how people relate to each other regarding their own relation to waste materials.Pierre Reyneke joined the Nova Institute in the year 2013 after completing his Social Science (Honours) degree in Anthropology. He took up the role of Project Manager of the Brickstar improved cooking stove project. He has fulfilled this role ever since.
Parallel to his employment at the Nova Institute, he completed a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Pretoria. This research project entailed an ethnographic study of the waste management system at the Garstkloof and Hatherley landfills, situated in the City of Tshwane. This approach involved identifying changes brought about by the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality (CTMM) within the waste management system and offered a detailed account of how individuals making a living from waste have responded to these changes. He is currently enrolled in a doctorate program at The University of Witwatersrand in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences and forms part of the SARChI Chair in Waste and Society. His study investigates the form and role of ‘reuse and remake’ practices in the production of space and the urban waste economy of The City of Tshwane.
ABSTRACT
Within a neoliberal global context, the socio-economic divide between the wealthy and the poor is ever increasing. South Africa has not been averse to this global phenomenon and is currently the most unequal country in the world (WID, 2019). Nowhere is this reality more starkly evident than in the metropoles of the country, where affluent residential suburbs and high-end strip malls border on poor informal settlements. The country’s administrative capital the City of Tshwane constitutes such an urban space and the wealthy Eastern node of the city, known as Pretoria-East, is the focus of this study. This geographical space is characterised by wealthy security estates, corporate office blocks, and some of Africa’s largest shopping malls. Anomalous to this, the area houses numerous pockets of informal settlements where the urban waste precariat live and work. This paper offers a historical account of the processes that have shaped this unequal urban space and continue to do so in intensified measures. It shows through the case study of Plastic View informal settlement that these spaces are highly contested as the poor seek to forge an income albeit a precarious one, in the face of profit-driven private property developers and state entities. Through ethnographic accounts, newspaper articles, and archival data the paper illustrates how the pliability of waste objects offers an opportunity for the urban waste precariat to gain a foothold in this contentious space. In addition, by critically analysing and debunking the term ‘vagrant’, used in reference to the urban waste precariat, the paper offers a counter-narrative, proving that the presence of the urban poor within this space traces back to almost a century. Lastly, the paper argues that new forms of accumulation by dispossession enacted by the state and private property developers are cutting the waste precariat from income streams they have imaginatively opened for themselves.
