EFFECTIVE CYNICISM: Waste, Power, and the Negotiation of Urban Decay and Renewal in Ulaanbaatar

In this article, I show how “effective cynicism” allows residents to decipher unequal power relations in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Ethnographic analysis of the myriad ways residents hold onto dilapidated housing in a failed redevelopment scheme reveals how residents' cynical reflections assist in their efforts to decipher and mobilize state authority. Residents undertake this while simultaneously negotiating the insidious decay of waste accumulated as a by-product of failed redevelopment processes. Throughout, I focus on the presence of waste and cynicism as phenomena that both foreclose and open possibilities. I argue that residents' repurposing of cynicism as a diagnostic tool, rather than producing detachment, presents a reframing of Peter Sloterdijk's (1987) discussions of cynical realism, where such realism holds generative potential. Considering the lived experience of urban decay through the three-pronged analytical framework of cynicism, power, and waste reveals subtle residential reconfigurations emerging within the materialities of for-profit redevelopment.