Klavs Bo Christensen: Garbage City
These striking photos by Danish photographer Klavs Bo Christensen were taken in Manshiyat Naser, or “Garbage City”; a district on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. Although the first impression when looking at these images might be that of a filthy slum, there is (or at least was) rather more order here than is first apparent.
Until recently, Cairo's waste disposal was the responsibility of the Zabbaleen, a community consisting mainly of Christians belonging to the Coptic Orthodox Church. The Zabbaleen made their living by collecting the city's waste, sorting and recycling it and selling the raw materials back to businesses.
In addition, unlike the largely Muslim inhabitants of the rest of Cairo, the Zabbaleen also kept pigs; these animals were fed on the organic waste, and their manure sold for compost and fertiliser. This system was highly efficient: most sources put the Zabaleen's recycling rate at around 80 percent of collected waste, a phenomenally high figure compared to most recycling programmes, even allowing for bias.
However, in 2003 the governors of Cairo decided that the city's waste management should be privatised and contracted to European multinational disposal companies, effectively removing the Zabbaleen's means to make a living. It quickly became apparent that the new contractors were nowhere near as effective as the Zabbaleen in this environment; as they struggled to keep up with the amount of waste, recycling rates fell dramatically.
Then, in 2009, the H1N1 swine flu epidemic led the Egyptian government to cull the country's entire population of pigs, the majority of which were situated in Zabbaleen neighbourhoods. This rash move meant that suddenly, the vast amounts of organic waste produced by Cairo's approximately 16 million inhabitants had nowhere to go (see this article in the NY Times).
This interesting but ultimately sad story would seem to support a strongly held view of mine: that existing systems which have evolved slowly to fill a particular need often perform much better than a headlong rush toward change and modernisation.
Via Inhabitat
- "Garbage City - Cairo", Klavs Bo Christensen
- "The Garbage Villages", Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1999
- "Cairo: a story of waste mis management", Laila Iskandar, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, October 2009
- "Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs", Michael Slackman, New York Times, September 19 2009
- "The garbage people of Cairo", Jessica Boyd, The Geographical, May 2008
- "Egypt dumps 'garbage people'", Sarah Gauch, The Christian Science Monitor, January 6 2003
- "The Middle East @ Work", American Public Media, May 2008
