Residual urbanism: sanitary infrastructures and the governance of waste in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article is an historically-minded ethnographic exploration of the making of Rio de Janeiro's first sacrifice zone. Drawing from research undertaken in and on the neighborhood of Caju since May 2022 as part of a collective research and documentary film project, we revisit the structuring of 19th-century sanitary governance in Rio de Janeiro by focusing on three key infrastructures built by the state in the 19th century: a cemetery, a landfill, and a hospital for the treatment of epidemic diseases. Our research methods include ethnographic fieldwork, photography and filmmaking, in-depth interviews with residents and social actors such as government officials, street level bureaucrats, activists and local political leaders, and iconographic archival research in public city archives and in residents' private collections. We propose the idea of residual urbanism as a perspective to explore the logics of agglomeration and the generative dimension of infrastructures produced through the everyday governance of death, waste and disease. Finally, we examine the entanglements of nature, labor, knowledge and politics that highlight the invisible centrality of materialities, relations, agents and processes at the margins of modern master narratives of urbanization.