deconarch

The green website inhabitat.com just reported about “Garbage City” – indeed not the title of a Al Gore-style “What will become of us in the future”-movie, but already sad truth: Manshiyat naser – or Garbage City – is a slum settlement on the outskirts of Cairo.

Bas Princen, Garbage City

Inhabited by a community of workers called Zabbaleen who collect, sort, reuse, resell or otherwise repurpose Cairo’s waste. Although the area has streets, shops, and apartments like any other area of the city, it lacks infrastructure and often have no running water, sewage or electricity (more…).

Furthermore, inhabitat.com tells us: “Recently several photographers have trained their cameras upon the city, and now we see what it would really be like to live in the aftermath of our own consumption. Bas Princen recently displayed a photo at the Netherlands Architecture Institute. Klavs Bo Christensen has a stunning collection of black and white images on Lightstalkers. Alexander Heilner documents a drearier day-to-day on Marketplace.”

Bas Princen, Garbage City

And: “This oddly fascinating metropolis is actually a very efficient waste management system: food scraps are fed to livestock, what can be repaired is, and everything else is recycled, sold for scrap, or burned for fuel. The Zabbaleen live at poverty levels but live a long-held tradition of scavenging as skill. Not surprisignly, many photographers have become fascinated with the community.”

“Cairo has attempted to replace this mass of independent workers with multinational waste management corporations, putting an already impoverished community at risk. To make matters worse, the government ordered a widespread slaughter of pigs earlier this year in an attempt to curtail the potential spread of swine flu. These are the same pigs to whom the Zabbaleen fed compotable waste. The result has reportedly been a trash-strewn Cairo. Which meant, at least in September, that many Egyptians might have felt a little like Zabbaleen.”

Quotes and images from inhabitat.com