Seeking Partners: Waste Note, A Segment of the New York City (Steady) State Project

Recognizing the importance of waste as a global issue, Waste Not, a forthcoming volume of the New York City (Steady) State project, investigates the creation of a system without waste. Beginning in New York, we are trying to imagine a world without waste.

Looking systematically at the city’s styles and outputs of waste, our study focuses on changing consumption habits that are based on disposability, on the creation of products and practices that induce a looping, “cradle to cradle” approach, and on the potential morphological changes in the city that will be the outcome and support for this vision.

We are looking up and down the waste chain, seeking to clear streets from piles of garbage bags, to eliminate the need for landfills and disposal, to end the toxic processes of extraction, manufacture and delivery and to radically reduce the pernicious “externalities” of the global net of negative production.

As part of this study we are “crowd-sourcing” solutions at every scale with applicability to New York. How, for example, might a city block function if one lane of every roadway were to be taken from the automotive realm and devoted to new forms of sustainability. What apparatus could be designed and added to support recycling and re-use, composting, assembly and distribution, education and broader forms of environmental management. How might such systems be scaled up to neighborhoods and down to buildings and apartments? How will the post-waste urban landscape look, feel, and perform? We welcome visions both modest and extensive for the encyclopaedia we are compiling.

Waste Not: Crowdsource: We invite contributions in the forms of texts, designs, and documentations that address issues at the intersection of cities, design, urbanization, and sustainability.