Rethinking the spaces of waste management infrastructure: towards integrated urban strategies to avoid urban solid waste in contemporary city

This paper examines the issue of solid waste management in urban contexts, by an architectur- al perspective. In light of the emerging waste crisis, this paper proposes to redesign and grad- ually reintroduce waste management facilities in the urban tissue. The capacity to learn from trash can help to design a new generation of facilities, aiming to recover suburban areas and to re-establish a lost ecological balance. The paper underlines the need to radically reconsider the spatial articulation and the organiza- tional structure of the current waste management infrastructure, through an integrated ap- proach aiming to define a decentralized and distributed urban model. Finally, the paper explores heuristic potentials for architectural design, identifying hybrid figures and finding key actions to intervene in the contemporary city, inspired by the notion of ‘unblackboxing’.