GARBAGE CITY
The concept of garbage environment was raised up by Martin Edward Pawley (1938-2008), an outstanding British architectural writer, critic and teacher, in his book Garbage Housing published in 1975.1 The basic idea of garbage housing is quite straightforward, which is taking use of garbage and transferring it into building materials to build houses mainly for people with low income to solve the problem of housing shortage.
Pawley pointed out that mass-production, over-consumption and advertising were the current social-economic background during his time. The owner occupation phenomenon has spread worldwide through the power of advertising, and the idea that owner-occupied suburban housing equals wealth is deeply etched in the population's mind-frame. The dwelling acts as a container (consumer envelope) rather than as a shelter, and it has become a stage where consumption expands and possessions can be displayed. This idea that everyone has to own a dwelling has contributed to the housing shortage, since it reinforces an image of what a house should be and rises the price of housing. Additionally, conventional building methods and materials cannot alleviate this shortage. One way of solving this housing shortage would be to take advantage of mass-production so that housing itself can become an integral part of the cycle of production and consumption. Expanded consumption has led to mass production of waste and pollutants. These by-products have the potential to become building materials, and participating industries can benefit from this type of self-propaganda.2
The idea of houses as containers is also reflected in Jane Bennett's Powers of the Hoard. The hoarders could be regarded as an extreme representation of over-consumption and over-possession. Jane addresses the "thing power" in three aspects to explain the phenomenon of hoarding. However, the hoarders could also be seen as people that are particularly sensible to objects, and the connections that can be established with them.3 This idea is in coordination with the claim that trash has its potential and value.
The best feature of Pawley's ideal concept is that it could reduce the amount of abandoned trash without quenching people's desire of consumption, since over-consumption is something that can be exploited in our favor, and since this means getting the support from industries without harming their interests.
The garbage housing idea has been implemented in several projects during Pawley's time and some of them were quite successful for a period. The garbage housing program, conducted by Cornell in Chile in 1972, took advantage of abandoned vehicles as building materials for the homeless4. Another precedence is the sulfur concrete house conducted by the Cree band in the Saddle Lake Indian reserve and the Minimum Cost Housing Group of McGill University, which transferred sulfur, an industrial by-product of mining operations that's of very little value to most, into building material. The statement "one man's pollution can be another man's housing" can be interpreted as a more contemporary, innovative version of "one man's trash is another man's treasure5." The most famous example is the WOBO project, developed by Alfred Heineken, which used the Heineken beer bottles, designed in two sizes to mimic one brick and half brick, as building materials. The project solved the recycling issue of the bottles and the buildings build by the beer bottles could advertising for the company. Unfortunately, after a period, most of them were destroyed and the bottles went out of production They instead became a valuable collector's item, rather than an affordable construction material.6
40 years from Pawley's time, the issue of over-consumption and pollution is increasingly serious. Even though Pawley's theory is too ideal and has never been fully conducted in reality, the idea of exploring the inside value of trash and transferring it into new materials and products still has significant impact today. As Lydia Kallipoliti talked in Dross City, there is no way to get away from the e-waste in such a virtual age. We need "more artificiality and less nature." The waste has the potential to be reassembled, transformed and reused to serve a second time.7