Page 86 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

72 X. TONG

changed over time (Strasser 2000). This has involved more than providing
technical solutions for the disposal of physical detritus. Increasingly critics
have been targeting the mode of mass production and consumption and
the consumer culture it supports (Featherstone 2007). Furthermore, there
has been growing popular sympathy for the marginal populations working
in this informal economy sector in miserable conditions (Medina 2010).
These expanded definitions of the waste problem have led us to take a
more inclusive view of current solutions and proposals for improvement,
among which community-oriented tools have received increasing attention
in both theory and practice (Zotos et al. 2009; Weinberg et al. 2000;
WorldBank 1999).
In this paper, we offer tales of two villages with high concentrations of
urban scavengers and recyclers—Bajia in the Haidian District, and
Dongxiaokou in the Changping District—both located in the northern
rural-urban fringe of Beijing. In the next section, we place the story of these
two communities within the “confusing ramifications” (Churchman 1967)
of the evolving urban waste management system as it has developed during
the dramatic Chinese social-economic transition that started in the 1980s.
In the section entitled “The Illusory “Urban Circular Economic System””,
we analyse the community-oriented strategies used by the municipal
administration in the design of the “urban circular economic system” since
2000, exploring its linkages with the waste villages and its consequences for
landscape change. In conclusion, we call for constructive answers from the
urban planning system to the challenge of waste by suggesting some prin-
ciples of design for recycling in community public spaces.

TALES OF TWO “WASTE VILLAGES” IN BEIJING
The economics of waste has changed drastically in China over the past
decades, so have the practices of recycling and reuse in people’s daily life
(Goldstein 2006). The growth of waste in urban China is a by-product of
fast industrialization and urbanization. The rapid transition of urban life-
styles towards mass production and consumption poses a major environ-
mental challenge for Chinese contemporary cities (Yang et al. 2014; Xiang
et al. 2011). As a result waste has become embedded into the collective life
of modern cities, not only creating unpleasant landscapes, but also pro-
ducing spaces that embody social and environmental injustice.
Waste villages are places of particular tensions and conflicts in urban
development. They have received increasing public attentions since the late