‘Your daily reality is rubbish’: Waste as a means of urban exclusion in the suspended spaces of East Jerusalem

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic and visual research, this article examines the role of waste in two areas of occupied East Jerusalem cut off from the city by the Separation Wall and military checkpoints, Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Refugee Camp as well as their immediate surroundings. In asking how urban exclusion operates on the margins of the city, we argue that rubbish can disclose broader socio-spatial relations at work in Jerusalem from the ground up. We find that waste serves to reduce the ambiguity at work in these interstitial zones by furthering exclusion – it operates through the urban everyday where the legal and political situations are in suspension. Conceptually, we contribute to the discussion on spatial stigma associated with infrastructural violence by arguing for a multi-layered understanding of the way waste ‘works’ in urban exclusion. Three registers mutually constitute each other in this process: the materiality of waste with its embodied and affective interactions, the symbolic and discursive violence associated with waste, as well as spatialised stigma and bordering processes.