Unblackboxing Waste Management in Practice. A Set of Actions Enabling Circular City Making

This contribution intends to focus on the crisis of waste, particularly on the impact of post-use materials on practices of city making in the European context. Waste is framed as an evident, perpetual and pervasive phenomenon that has affected both the geosphere and the organosphere. To deal with such an issue, it is needed to imagine new evolved forms of radical co-existence with discards, enabling circular practices. The waste management infrastructural networks belong to an industrial system and their functioning corresponds to a black box model.  In the age of information and transparency, the notion of unblackboxing is here introduced with the aim to propose a set of actions for circular city making. Actions are based on three main considerations regarding the informational value of waste, the relationship between society and waste and, finally, the relationship between waste and city. The actions will be described with examples, references and research-driven initiatives provided by the author.