• 1 In this article the term institution will be used with reference to a particular institution or org (...)
• 2 I use this expression with reference to the meaning that Kevin Lynch gives to the term. In his Wast (...)
• 3 The term Discard Studies was used for the first time by Robin Nagle, a north-American anthropologis (...)
• 4 RENO, Joshua, «Our Trash Is Someone’s Treasure The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill», in Jo (...)
• 5 DOUGLAS, Mary, Purity and danger, London, Routledge, 1966, p. 36.
• 6 Ibidem.
• 7 CRESSWELL, Tim, In Place/Out of Place, Minneapolis - London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
• 8 An example of out of place activity that the author reports is the Greenham Common women's peace ca (...)

1Urban waste and waste collectors offer a medium to analyse material and cultural relationships within institutional1 and informal policies and practices related to waste governance. Places around the world show tensions and connections between marginalized wasted environments2, subaltern workers and top-down environmental policies. Discard Studies literature3 draws upon multi-disciplinary approaches to investigate on waste, not just as «a rotten, broken, unwanted»4 thing or as a «matter out of place»5, but as a process, category, mentality, judgment, an infrastructural and economic challenge, and as a site for power struggles. As Douglas illustrated in her seminal publication Purity and Danger6, the concept of dirt and its relationships to our understandings of contaminant or purity can offer great insights into our understandings of how waste is dealt with in urban environments. Reflecting on the contrast between contamination and purity and relating it both to social organization and the human body, Douglas recognizes the importance of boundaries and limits in defining what is to be deemed as repulsive for the construction of classification systems. Human societies are therefore constituted as a system that tends towards order; rituals relating to contamination and purity tend to solve and/or get round anomalies that undermine classification cultural systems. These themes have provided the underpinning for other works such as Tim Cresswell’s elaboration on transgression and deviance7. In his In place/out of place the author stresses the key role of place in shifting perceptions embracing both materiality and ideology. He illustrates how notions of normality are rooted in place and how they happen to be de-naturalized only through relatively atypical transgression. According to Cresswell’s view there is a strong link between transgressive behaviour and deviance when both take place in violation of norms and rules set by dominant groups, adding that very often dirt, waste, pollution, and obscenity themes are commonly used to designate activities that are out of place in a normative landscape8.

• 9 CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, Gayatri, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in NELSON, Cary, GROSSBERG, Lawrence (edited (...)
• 10 SAITTA, Pietro, «Practices of subjectivity: the informal economies and the subaltern rebellion», in (...)

2Studies on (perceived) contaminated and deviant people have dominated an important area of cultural studies since the nineteenth century. Indeed, it is worth mentioning the attention these studies have given to subaltern workers - chiffonniers, beggars, rag packs – and their housing and working practices through which these people interact with governments and the rest of society in a subordinate relationship9. Within these studies, many have questioned the ways through which they engage with State practices managing originally their top-down socioeconomic and spatial exclusion10.

• 11 In the anthropological debate the term informal associated with economic science studies was introd (...)
• 12 On formality-informality and waste between North and Global South I should suggest: BERRUTI, Gilda, (...)
• 13 LAUTIER, Bruno, DE MIRAS, Claude, MORICE, Alain, L’Etat et l’informel, Paris, L’Harmanattan, 1991, (...)
• 14 On this subject see: BANKS, Nicola, LOMBARD, Melanie, MITLIN, Diana, «Urban Informality as a Site o (...)

4But what is informality? Recent research in the Global South and North has made an important effort towards defining what is meant by informality11 in specific contexts12. In its immediate economic sense, it is the absence of government or state regulation and taxation. It is defined as «a set of economic and commercial actions that escape legal, fiscal, social, juridical, or any type of statistical framework»13. Informality, as a disciplinary crossing category, is often applied within a setting in which certain groups secure livelihoods or commodities; or as a condition related to legal status. This tends to circumscribe the focus of urban informality to the urban poor: those people who commonly live, work, and access services and rights through informal channels and in informal sectors. Nevertheless urban informality includes all of these things, but also other often unexplored dynamics and relationships between different social actors. Artificial boundaries across economic, political, and spatial domains – as well as the over-simplistic formal-informal binary – have masked broader cross-cutting issues of political economy, by removing focus away from other groups and actors involved in urban informality14.

• 15 CASTÁN BROTO, Vanesa, Urban Energy Landscapes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

5Vanesa Castán Broto’s Urban Energy Landscape15 illustrates this particularly well. By successfully connecting the macroscale of energy governance with the microscale of everyday practices in urban settings, dealing with a wide range of energy production, the author explores the modalities through which resource availability makes possible the creation of a «connective tissue» determined by urban energy governance, infrastructure, social practices and energy transition.

• 16 CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, Gayatri, Can the Subaltern Speak?, cit.
• 17 SARKAR, Sumit, The conditions and nature of subaltern militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to non-co-ope (...)
• 18 CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, Gayatri, Can the Subaltern Speak?, cit., p. 35
• 19 BAYAT, Asef, «From ‘dangerous classes’ to ‘quiet rebels’: the politics of the urban subaltern in th (...)
• 20 BAYAT, Asef, «Radical religion and the habitus of the dispossessed: does Islamic militancy have an (...)

6With regards to subalternity, there are a number of studies that have approached the subject. In this essay I find myself questioning Gayatri Spivak’s line of thought16. According to the feminist scholar, the subaltern is a subject who does not have a voice, because speaking is itself a transaction between speaker and listener. Subaltern is not just a term representing the oppressed; everything that has limited or no access to cultural imperialism as subaltern. Authors such as Sarkar have emphasized the fundamental relationships of power, domination and subordination17, thus subalternity came to be seen as the condition of those who did not and could not belong to the elite classes, a «general attribute of subordination»18. Equally important as a theme in subaltern studies is the question of political agency. The scholar Asef Bayat19 argues that in a urban space a marginalized and deinstitutionalized subaltern crafts a street politics best understood as a distinctive type of political agency: informal life. For Bayat informal life is characterized by «flexibility, pragmatism, negotiation, as well as constant struggle for survival and self-development»20.

• 21 CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, Gayatri, A critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of the vanishing p (...)

7Through my ethnographic findings from fieldwork, I engage with subalternity and informality as categories by describing Moroccan waste pickers’ daily practices and their work within a specific normative framework, investigating their (informal) relationships with different social actors such as governmental control groups and devices, wholesalers and local people. In doing so, I draw upon Spivak’s critique of “itineraries of the subaltern”. Writing against those studies that identify the subaltern as the subordinate classes, as the «demographic difference»21, I will argue that studying the subaltern means thinking about it as an object constituted of different representational and knowledge perspectives, in lieu of an ethnography that claims to speak for the authentic subaltern.

• 22 ALIER, Joan Martinez, The environmentalism of the poor − a study of ecological conflicts and valuat (...)
• 23 The spatial element in the notion of justice was conceptualized mainly by Henri Lefebvre through th (...)
• 24 SHELLER, Mimi, op. cit., p. 2.
• 25 SHELLER, Mimi, op. cit., p. 100.

8The concept of spatial justice emerged in contemporary debate thanks to the influential perspectives of scholars such as Harvey, Lefebvre, Sheller and Soja22 who affirmed that the concept of spatial and mobility justice can be achieved visibly in contextual space23. In other words, they cannot be achieved in an abstract way, since the social relationships take place in certain places and temporalities. «Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our days and focuses attention on the politics of unequal capabilities for movement, as well as on unequal rights to stay or to dwell in a place»²⁴. It is a useful instrument that allows us to think more clearly about the existent interconnection between bodies, streets, transport systems, objects and (natural or not) resources. The term immobility is meant to signal that it is strictly connected with its “opposite”. Both terms are not intended as binary opposites, but dynamic constellations of multiple practices and politics. Also, the macro category of (im)mobilities is thought of as comprehensive, not only people and mobilities processes, but also politics, things, resources, and last but not least waste mobilities. As Sheller suggests, behind the insurgence of (im)mobilities phenomena and crises, there is a part of a wider disturbance in prevailing institutions concerned with the management of mobilities and immobilities, both at locally and globally25.

• 26 DE CERTEAU, Michel, L’invention du quotidien. Essai sur les nouvelles classes moyennes, Paris, Pres (...)
• 27 CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, Gayatri, Can the Subaltern Speak?, cit., p. 25.

9Getting inspiration from Joan Martínez Alier, Lefebvre and Sheller’s studies, I explore what can be learned from waste circulation on the mobility justice of waste collectors. By illustrating adaptation responses and tactics26, the article forces us to question categories represented as subaltern versus a dominant single narrative of reality established as normative27.

• 28 Casablanca experienced an unprecedented economic and urban development thanks to the decisions of G (...)

11Casablanca, in Moroccan Arabic ad-Dār al-Baīḍaʾ (literally The White House), underwent a recent and quick transformation. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was a coastal settlement with a population of about 20.000 inhabitants. After the French Protectorate was established in 1912, Casablanca became a «real urban laboratory of modernity»28.

• 29 AWAD, Hassan. «Morocco’s Expanding Towns», in The Geographical Journal, 130, 1/1964, pp. 49-64.
• 30 PUSCHMANN, Paul, Casablanca. A Demographic Miracle on Moroccan Soil?, Leuven, Acco, 2011.
• 31 CATTEDRA, Raffaele, «Nascita e primi sviluppi di una città coloniale: Casablanca 1907-1930», in Sto (...)
• 32 PUSCHMANN, Paul, op. cit.; SANTUCCI, Jean-Claude, «Casablanca», in CAMPS, Gabriel (ed. by), Encyclo (...)
• 33 The term now refers to any kind of settlement positioned in economically exploitable areas. For fur (...)
• 34 RACHIK, Abdelrahman, «Périphérie, émeutes et politique urbaine : Le cas de Casablanca», in Horizons (...)

12There were two significant changes in the city which are still visible today. The first refers to the consequences that building a marina, railway and road enhancement, had on producing a considerable internal migration of rural dwellers from the countryside to the city29. The second is the cumulative process of «hyper-urbanization»30, which definitively marked the organization of the urban space, including Casablanca’s periphery extension to the south and south-east of the city. Colonial administrations encouraged mixed economy real estate companies by promoting flexible assistance for construction through loans, interest rate subsidies and tax exemptions. The result was a massive urban development and an uncontrolled and chaotic private housing market, due to frantic land and real estate speculation31. The hope for better living conditions brought many people from the surrounding rural areas to Dār al-Baīḍaʾ. According to a census conducted at the end of the French protectorate, 75% of the city’s population originated from the countryside32. The majority of waste pickers I met during my fieldwork working in Casablanca, come from the countryside and live in the suburbs that created in that period (one of which is the Lahraouine neighbourhood where I conducted part of my research). During the twentieth century, the labour market started to saturate. Many rural dwellers, who were now inhabiting the suburbs of the city, started to dedicate themselves to informal markets and activities such as rag and waste picking. Consequently, a significant housing shortage arose that inevitably led to a rapid increase in the unemployment rate and the subsequent formation of slums (the so-called bidonvilles33) in the periphery of the city34.

• 35 RIVET, Daniel, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat français au Maroc (1912-1925), vol. I, Paris (...)
• 36 RACHIK, Abdelrahman, Structure urbaine et politique coloniale au Maghreb, in RIERA, Antoni, GUITART (...)
• 37 Tensions produced by demographic pressure and popular discontent nourished the Moroccan nationalist (...)

13Moreover at the beginning of the twentieth century diseases like the plague, smallpox and typhus spread to Morocco. The colonial administration implemented a “strategy of urgency”35. This involved the repression and destruction of shanty houses and settlements considered unclean (such as those neighbourhoods located in close proximity to Derb Ghallef, a district originally intended to host European inhabited settlements) and the construction of New Medina (in French nouvelle medina and Dārija medina al-jadīda), a set of neighbourhoods built and designed to accommodate the Muslim Moroccan population36. The west central area, including the Maârif and Bourgogne, populated mainly by Europeans and the south eastern area, populated mainly by locals. This ethnic spatial distinction is still recognizable today. If on the one hand the city was developing economically, attracting increasing numbers of Moroccans from rural areas, a movement exacerbated by a period of severe drought and famine, on the other, the bidonvilles located in peripheral areas continued to receive an increasing number of rural dwellers37.

• 38 ONU HABITAT, Programme des Nations Unies pour les Etablissements Humains – ONU-HABITAT Mission d’ap (...)

14The tensions those events created manifest today and the city is undergoing a massive gentrification process involving the demolition of bidonvilles. The project Villes sans bidonvilles, whose aim is to wipe out self-built dwellings in all Moroccan cities by 2020, has been promoted since 2004 by the Moroccan government as part of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme38 - where the main funding bodies are the World Bank and the European Commission.

• 39 LEFEBVRE, Henri, Le Droit à la ville, Paris, Anthropos, 1968.

15The Douar Wasti neighbourhood is an illustrative example of these tensions between institutional plans and dwellers’ claims for the rights to the city39. On September 21^st, 2018, a police operation cleared and demolished Douar Wasti; a district situated in the middle of the former industrial area of Aïn Sebaâ, on the northern shoreline of Casablanca. Its’ approximately 1,500 residents were forced to collect their belongings and leave their houses at very short notice.

• 40 PORTELLI, Stefano, LEES Loretta, «Eviction and Displacement from the Neighbourhood of Douar Wasti i (...)
• 41 Ibidem.

16«Most residents had to find accommodation in the houses of parents and friends, while several others camped on the area to manifest their anger, surrounded by mountains of garbage and ruins, their personal belongings scattered around the demolition site»40. Douar Wasti demolitions were carried out before negotiation could be concluded and residents were offered plots of land 30 kilometres away from the city center, with no housing means41.

• 42 NASSIRI, Said, «Politiques urbaines et recompositions sociales à Casablanca», in Archimedia.it, URL (...)

17This long-lasting tendency towards the creation of social-spatial marginalities and injustices and the constant opposition between «Casablanca the rebel»42 and its paternalist and colonial institutions leads me to introduce non inclusive dynamics related to waste urban management and decision-making processes.

• 43 AJIR, Abdelkader, «Gestion des déchets solides au Maroc: Problématique et approche de développement(...)

18In the light of these preliminary considerations on colonial and post-colonial urban planning in Casablanca, I will illustrate some specific economic aspects on waste management in the city. Studies in this field have revealed important details on the entire waste management system, such as the contemporary and exponential growth of waste produced in the city and the difficulty in its disposal operations which are due in part to some flaws resulting from the cooperation between municipalities and private recycling companies43.

• 44 Metabolism in urban political ecology is a key concept. Urban metabolisms are «exchange processes w (...)
• 45 ERIKSEN, Thomas, Fuori controllo. Un’antropologia del cambiamento accelerato, Torino, Giulio Einaud (...)

19Over the last twenty years of the twenty-first century, Casablanca has undergone a radical change that also affected visible and material aspects of the city: the production of goods and commodities, their consumption, and the consequent accumulation of waste. By definition, waste production is an effect of the radical transformation of the metabolic urban system44 and socio-economic dynamics, the most visible, perceptible and fetid side effect45.

• 46 Secondary raw material is a material obtained from a first waste-recycling step that can be used in (...)

20The potential economic value of waste has attracted the attention of far-sighted investors. In the last twenty years, public policies promoted by international organizations and funding bodies (such as the World Bank, European Union directives, bilateral partnerships, etc.) have tipped the balance towards a waste prevention and recycling logic rather than a simple removal logic, supporting the growing demand for secondary raw materials46.

• 47 Loi 28.00, «Loi n° 28-00 relative à la gestion des déchets et à leur élimination», in Adala Justice (...)

21In Morocco economic and institutional stakeholders became interested in waste when two important political and legislative actions were taken. The first action, in 2006, is the law 28.0047, whose goals were the economic valorisation of waste and the creation of a recycling chain through a meticulous distinction of waste objects according to their nature. Generic waste became categorised into domestic, industrial, medical, hospital and pharmaceutical, hazardous, inert, agricultural, final and biodegradable wastes, changing its ontological condition to a re-usable and recyclable product.

• 48 PNDM, «Programma National des déchets ménagers, in Ministère de l’énergie, des mines, de l’eau et d (...)
• 49 For a more profound gaze on PPP, I suggest ZINEB, Sitri, «Partenariats public-privé au Maroc: souba (...)

22The second action was the approval and implementation of the Programme National des Déchets Ménagers (PNDM)48. Adopted in 2007, following an agreement between the Moroccan Ministry of the Environment and the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior (and financed by the World Bank), the PNDM aims to renew the waste management system through the so-called Gestion déléguée. This delegated management involved the outsourcing of waste from the state directed service organised by the municipality to private enterprise, in a characteristic Public Private Partnership (PPPs)49.

• 50 Derichebourg, URL: < https://www.derichebourg-maroc.com/fr/accueil [consulted on 24 October 2020].
• 51 Averda, URL: < https://www.averda.com/ > [consulted on 24 October 2020].
• 52 CIRELLI, Claudia, FLORIN, Bénédicte, Sociétés urbaines et déchets. Eclairages internationaux, cit., (...)

23Based on the main points of the regulatory framework in force in Casablanca, since June 2019, 80% of garbage collection has been entrusted to two private entities: Derichebourg50 (a French multinational) and Averda51 (a Lebanese multinational), «while 20% of the city's surface is not covered by any waste collection service»52. Averda and Derichebourg are required to collect household waste during the night (from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM to avoid traffic congestion during the day), garbage trucks and manual trailer trolleys are all equipped with electronic chips, more resistant containers have been placed in the busiest places, the service providers of both companies are paid on a flat-rate calculation rather than tonnage (as was the case prior to 2019). However, despite the good intentions and the alleged avant-garde tools implemented, the city continues to fight with problematic waste management and collection, and local discontent is growing day by day.

• 53 Numerous references on the ‘dirtiness’ of Casablanca can also be found on digital webpages such as (...)

24During informal interviews with my interlocutors, the city has often been referred to as casa-negra, the ville poubelle (the city-garbage) pointing to the constant presence in many parts of the city of overflowing garbage bins, acrid and nauseating smells, high concentrations of abandoned waste along main streets or the open spaces hosting uncontrolled dumping sites53. In this specific urban context, waste pickers’ work stands out. Also called in Arabic bouâara (or mikhala in a strongly derogatory sense) and in French chiffonnier, they wander through the main streets of the metropolis, armed with a cart (al-karoussa), selecting and collecting materials from garbage containers that can be sold and recycled.

• 54 This article is based on the findings of long fieldwork I carried out in Casablanca from September (...)
• 55 The Karoussa is the moroccan term to refer to the cart used by waste pickers use to collect garbage (...)

26Waste becomes an everyday urban concern. In the Casablancan context, a wide range of relationships and social interaction can be observed between waste workers, neighbours, tourists, military and police forces and with their colleagues in the formal sphere (street cleaners and official waste collectors)54. Different mobility patterns appeared based on alternative vehicles – karoussa55, iron poles, motorcycles, etc. – and on tactics to speed up and skip the jams.

• 56 They are also called chiffonniers in french language or bouâara in dārija. In this article I will u (...)
• 57 All these information come from the ethnography and data gathered from interviews and informal conv (...)
• 58 Waste pickers generate their livelihoods and sustain themselves and their families by retrieving re (...)

27Informal waste pickers⁵⁶ move around the streets of the city with their cart which can weigh up to 500 kilograms of material⁵⁷. Their main activities consist of selecting and collecting from garbage containers, all the material which can be sold to wholesalers and then recycled by private enterprise. The term “informal” associated to the recycling sector tends to refer to individuals (or a chain of individuals and enterprises) who dedicate themselves to the collection of wasted materials and similar practices that are not necessarily sponsored, financed, recognized, supported, organized, or acknowledged by the formal solid waste authorities58.

• 59 FLORIN, Bénédicte, «Rien ne se perd ! Récupérer les déchets au Caire, à Casablanca et à Istanbul», (...)

28They explore certain areas of the city before garbage trucks pass, taking advantage of the availability of waste before it is collected. In most cases observed, they are male, with ages between the youngest, of around 13-15 year olds, to the older of the group at around 60. A relevant gender note emerges: according to what was stated by Florin and on the basis of the observations made during my fieldwork bouâara women generally deal with the selection in enclosed spaces, away from prying eyes. It is common to find them in the goulssa where they carry out further selection and sorting of materials59.

• 60 GODARD, Xavier, FATANZOUN Innocent (eds.), Urban Mobility for All, Lisse, Swets & Zeitlinger, 2002.
• 61 Field notes dated 26 November 2016, Zakariya, Salé.
• 62 Clifford Geertz, who conducted a fieldwork as a part of his research in Sefrou (a small town in the (...)

29The karoussa carts and their uses were prohibited in 1975. Before this, their circulation was regulated by special control offices managed by municipal prefectures. Today, these vehicles are widely tolerated and rarely subject to controls despite the ban60.When this happens, police accusations of scattering waste material during the process of searching for valuable, re-sellable, materials in garbage bins, can result in the confiscation of karoussa carts. Waste picker activities are controlled, not only by police, but also by other institutional devices such as district managers working for private companies responsible of waste management in the city, because «their intervention is necessary to keep the activity of bouâara under control, who always leave waste all around the garbage bins»61. Also, informally, neighbours control waste pickers use of carts by tactics of ridicule and intimidating insults. Waste pickers have developed strategies to deal with these controls, such as a preference to work at night. Collection takes place discreetly, quickly and quietly, and interactions rarely occur with other urban dwellers. Both the controls and strategies of acceptance are all symptoms of balancing strong tensions between officially institutionalized norms and socially accepted practices62.

• 63 Fieldnotes 28 April, 2017, Moustapha, Lahraouine Goulssa, Casablanca.
• 64 Moustapha is the owner of the goulssa where I conducted part of my fieldwork. I met him for the fir (...)

32Once collected, waste is sold by collectors to the owners of goulssa, the sorting and storage centers located on the outskirts of the city. At the goulssa “waste” undergoes further processing to make it suitable for sale to private industries dealing with recycling, operating officially back within the city. Waste is the subject of a double process: it becomes the product, a commodity with specific value to be processed and sold, and it transforms to become the material on which to construct a means to make a living. «Everything here is built with different waste materials»63. Moustapha, who is the owner of a goulssa64 located in the Lahraouine neighbourhood, defines himself as the spécialiste dial plastique (the businessman of plastic materials) and has decided to work exclusively with plastic material. Five waste pickers work and live in his goulssa, but all around the area there are about 500 of them working within an indefinite number of goulssa.

• 65 Fieldnotes 28 April, 2017, Moustapha, Lahraouine Goulssa, Casablanca.

34Cleaning, shredding and pressing occur in a separate space, transforming waste objects into a material suitable for sale to private companies dealing with recycling. «This process serves to save space and facilitate storage for better yield and better sales65». Once the volume is reduced, the shredded material is collected in huge plastic bags. These will then be loaded onto trucks, owned by the goulssa wholesalers, and transported to private enterprises, mostly located in the Sidi Maârouf district of Casablanca (where the main commercial and financial activities of the metropolis are concentrated). The entire waste recovery and recycling chain thus stands up and from the periphery to return back to the city center as a product.

• 66 Fieldnotes 28, April, 2017, Moustapha, Lahraouine Goulssa, Casablanca.
• 67 FLORIN, Bénédicte, Les récupérateurs des déchets à Casablanca: l’“inclusion perverse” de travailleu (...)
• 68 Fieldnotes 16, April, 2017, Hamid, Bourgogne, Casablanca. These words were pronounced by one of my (...)
• 69 Fieldnotes 09, October, 2019, Moustapha, Lahraouine Goulssa, Casablanca.

35It should be mentioned that the Moustapha’s goulssa is located in a valley within the Lahraouine soil, which makes it «almost invisible from the outside»66. Moreover its peri-centric position (near the periphery) «can be understood by its very proximity to the ex- Sidi Moumen open landfill, currently closed»67. The area is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the metropolis, it is a space «that must not be crossed, since there is nothing but waste»68. Moustapha himself once told me that: «Lahraouine is a land forgotten by the Moroccan government»69. Basic water, electricity and sewage services are often non-existent and there is a high percentage of informal employment.

• 70 Even the waste pickers can take possession of the goulssa where they work, becoming semi-wholesaler (...)
• 71 The term moqaddem derives from the Arabic root (قَدَّمَ) qa-dda-ma and indicates the one who announ (...)
• 72 In contemporary Morocco the Makhzen represents a multifaceted and soft-edged political entity. It i (...)
• 73 The caïd is a senior official in charge of the caïdat control and supervision, corresponding to the (...)
• 74 FLORIN, Bénédicte, Les récupérateurs des déchets à Casablanca, cit., p. 11.
• 75 Fieldnotes 26 May 2017, Moustapha, Lahraouine, Casablanca.

36There is another relevant element to highlight. Although Moustapha’s goulssa officially exists and occupies on government-owned land, it is subject to a change of ownership which usually takes place from father to son (otherwise, it can be sold to the best buyer)70. It emerged from fieldwork that government control policies take place in the goulssa through the assigned role of the moqaddem71 within the Makhzen72 government. Referring to the caïd73, he is responsible for the control of a district of a municipality. He observes everything that happens and report facts and events, even the most irrelevant or of little importance to the caïd74. Both Moustapha and other interlocutors have also confirmed a thought that often crossed my mind: the moqaddem often and willingly abuse their power, imposing certain rules of behaviour on the owners of the goulssa and on waste pickers near the garbage cans, sometimes even requesting forms of bribes to compensate for their un-official occupation of the territory. «We are at war with them because both us and they own this piece of land»75.

• 76 CAVÉ, Jérémie, La ruée vers l’ordure. Conflits dans les mines urbaines de déchets, Rennes, Presses (...)
• 77 Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) is a global network focused on emp (...)

38In the last thirty years, a local and transnational analysis approach has set waste and its use as the object of policies aimed at limiting their impact on the environment, through either recycling or disposal76. Thus, new actors involved in this process emerged: on the one hand the private sector (multinational companies specialized in waste management and materials recycling) and on the other civil society, organized in structures specialized in the field of social and solidarity economy (e.g. WIEGO or the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers77). In all cases, garbage recovery activity has been analysed in its relationship with the institutionalized sector since the latter has not been able to absorb informal activities within its system.

• 78 To give some examples, in Mexico rubbish dumps are placed within poorest areas and the country’s ma (...)

39Socio-economic inequalities also refer to environmental inequalities; those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid hardly avoid the consequences of motor vehicle exhausts, polluting industry and energy plants or the poor distribution of essential facilities. This unequal distribution of environmental threats is compounded by the fact that globally and nationally the poor are not the major polluters78.

• 79 Recent protests from the movement Black lives Matter that has spread globally from North America ha (...)

40Poorest citizens, and those most affected by socio-environmental injustices (such waste pickers operating in the Dour Wasti region of Casablanca described in this article) are often low-income workers and communities of colour or belonging to religious and ethnic minorities. Lahraouine neighbourhood in Casablanca represents a clear example: people living and working there face the greatest exposure to harmful waste because their less-privileged neighbourhoods are characterized by a greater concentration of polluting industrial facilities, power plants, hazardous waste sites and disposal facilities, and by a lack of environmental enforcement or clean-up facilities⁷⁹.

• 80 DAVIES, Anna, «Geography and the matter of waste mobilities», in Transactions of the institute of B (...)

41However in more recent studies scholars such as Davis, Gille, Gregson and Crang⁸⁰ are questioning the notion of waste – and waste pickers – trying to subvert that dominant narration that depicts both of them as passive or subaltern. They are doing so by listening to their stories, their projects, their aims, and by connecting those stories to dynamic and flexible representations.

• 81 GUTBERLET, Jutta, «Cooperative urban mining in Brazil: Collective practices in selective household (...)

42They play an important role in urban waste management systems, work in complex relationships to official waste collection and disposal agents. They collect from the streets, dumpsites, or landfills re-usable and recyclable discards materials that can be reincorporated into the economy's production process81. Despite the benefits that they generate to society, waste-pickers are ignored when waste management policies are formulated.

• 82 LIBOIRON, Max, Plasticizers: A twenty-first-century miasma, in GABRYS, Jennifer (ed. by), Accumulat (...)
• 83 VIALE, Guido, Un mondo usa e getta. La civiltà dei rifiuti e i rifiuti della civiltà, Milano, Feltr (...)
• 84 CALAFATE-FARIA, Francisco, Marginal Attachment and Countercycling in the Age of Recycling, in LANCI (...)

44Spaces used as waste dumping grounds, such as municipal or wild landfills, or the regions that host polluting industries have a common feature: they are places designed to host those materials that must be moved spatially and conceptually “away”; perceived as unwanted they are to be taken from our sight,, they have been used and become “waste”. From the second half of the twentieth century, waste began to grow in terms of tonnage and toxicity, becoming increasingly heterogeneous82 and giving life to what has been defined as a «throw-away society»83. Among the processes that contributed in important ways to define a throw-away society, there is certainly the production of “distant” spaces; distant «from the places where the main economic and cultural activities take place»84.

• 85 ALEXANDER, Catherine, RENO, Joshua (edited by), Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation o (...)

46The anthropologist Reno helps us with the answer, speaking of «political removal and emptying»: spaces where waste arrives and then remains are “empty” because they have enough space to be filled with discarded materials and because they lack the necessary means to resist and cope with the arrival of unclean material. Polluting industries are often positioned in areas that provide, for a variety of reasons, «less political resistance»85.

• 86 Lefebvre elaborates a conceptual triad to explain how space is actually produced: spatial practice, (...)

53The need for recoverable and recyclable materials allows them a professional and social positioning within the waste management chain in Casablanca and in Morocco in general, through interpersonal agreements between administrations, traders and large commercial chains, as excellent suppliers of quality waste. Douar Wasti clearance and demolition events can be interpreted as a clear example of the relationship between institutions, their urban policies and the dynamic perception of a space (that can be interpreted as conceived, perceived and lived, according to Lefebvre theory⁸⁶) from different social actors’ perspectives. On the one hand Moroccan government, following the guidelines of the Ville sans bidonville, implements an urban regeneration policy by dismantling entire semi-informal settlements and relocating their inhabitants to peripheral areas, away from the economic and decision-making centers of the city. In this case we find the purity and out of place Douglas’ notions applied. Informal settlements such as that of Douar Wasti are conceived by local and international institutions as impure, as out of place in relation to the position and space they occupy in a specific period of time. For this reason, evacuation and displacement practices are aimed at resolving a contrast that characterizes these spaces and that refers to how they are conceived and lived: the institutions make them fall into the category of bidonville for being in a space that is not suitable for informal or irregular settlements, and act on its inhabitants with threats of demolition and eviction. Nevertheless, these spaces are experienced by the people who inhabit them as their home, in which the bond between people and the space they inhabit is being constituted daily.

• 87 DOUGLAS, Mary, Purity and Danger, cit., p. 173.

55Secondly, this article demonstrated that waste hazards intersect with newly generated forms of social vulnerability where the institutions cooperate with non and semi institutionalized social actors – waste pickers, wholesalers, goulssa’s owners – generating original and collective forms of political agency that explore those interstices where represented subaltern workers express their actions. Their affiliation to the social and community infrastructure of the urban space, sometimes in contrast with the hegemonic rules of waste management, tends to produce discourses focused on the transgression of these norms, as Douglas states: «when people break social norms [...] they violate the boundaries of the community, becoming exiles or aliens from that community»87.

• 88 DE SOTO, Hernando, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere (...)
• 89 ROY, Ananya, «The Potency of the State: Logics of Informality and Subalternity», in The Journal of (...)

57Thirdly, despite authors such as De Soto’s claim that the poor⁸⁸ engage in informal activity because their only chance to survive and have an income is to work outside the official law, I argue that waste pickers and their activity is not separate and distinct from the formal governmental sector89.