Picking Up On The Streets And Behind The Trucks With The Sanitation Workers Of New York City

Author : Robin Nagle
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466836733
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City written by Robin Nagle and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's largest city generates garbage in torrents—11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don't give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not? On a schedule so regular you could almost set your watch by it, someone always comes to take it away. But who, exactly, is that someone? And why is he—or she—so unknown? In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle introduces us to the men and women of New York City's Department of Sanitation and makes clear why this small army of uniformed workers is the most important labor force on the streets. Seeking to understand every aspect of the Department's mission, Nagle accompanied crews on their routes, questioned supervisors and commissioners, and listened to story after story about blizzards, hazardous wastes, and the insults of everyday New Yorkers. But the more time she spent with the DSNY, the more Nagle realized that observing wasn't quite enough—so she joined the force herself. Driving the hulking trucks, she obtained an insider's perspective on the complex kinships, arcane rules, and obscure lingo unique to the realm of sanitation workers. Nagle chronicles New York City's four-hundred-year struggle with trash, and traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it's ever been. Throughout, Nagle reveals the many unexpected ways in which sanitation workers stand between our seemingly well-ordered lives and the sea of refuse that would otherwise overwhelm us. In the process, she changes the way we understand cities—and ourselves within them.

Author : Robin Nagle
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374299293
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City written by Robin Nagle and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charting New York's four-hundred-year struggle with trash, an anthropologist who spent ten years with sanitation workers of all ranks reveals what it takes for the Department of Sanitation to manage Gotham's garbage.

Author : Robin Nagle
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 9780374534271
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City written by Robin Nagle and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Meticulous . . . [Nagle's] passion for the subject really comes to life." —The New York Times New York City produces more than twelve thousand tons of household trash and recyclables a day. As quickly as it accumulates, it's hauled away. But who makes that happen? What's life like for the workers with careers built around garbage? In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle takes us inside New York City's Department of Sanitation, a largely unseen and often unloved army responsible for keeping the city alive. Nagle spent a decade with sanitation people of all ranks to learn what it takes to manage Gotham's garbage. She even took the job herself, driving trucks and plowing snow while enduring the physical aches, public abuse, and risk of injury that are constant realities of the job. Nagle offers an insider's perspective on the complex hierarchies, intricate rules, and obscure language unique to this mostly invisible world. Not just a contemporary account, Picking Up charts New York City's four-hundred-year struggle with trash. It traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to today's far more vigorous practices, which have made the city cleaner than it's been in decades. Complete with vividly evoked characters and memorable descriptions of the sights and smells of the job, Picking Up reveals the vital role sanitation workers play in every city across the globe.

Author : Max Liboiron
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262369516
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Discard Studies written by Max Liboiron and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable. In this book, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution. Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, centers, and power, using content moderation as an example of how dominant systems find ways to discard; and use theories of difference to show that universalism, stereotypes, and inclusion all have politics of discard and even purification—as exemplified in “inclusive” efforts to broaden the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, they develop a theory of change by considering “wasting well,” outlining techniques, methods, and propositions for a justice-oriented discard studies that keeps power in view.

Author : Alan Ehrenhalt
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307474372
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City written by Alan Ehrenhalt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eye-opening and thoroughly engaging, this is an indispensible look at American urban/suburban society and its future. In The Great Inversion, Alan Ehrenhalt, one of our leading urbanologists, reveals how the roles of America’s cities and suburbs are changing places—young adults and affluent retirees moving in, while immigrants and the less affluent are moving out—and addresses the implications of these shifts for the future of our society. Ehrenhalt shows us how the commercial canyons of lower Manhattan are becoming residential neighborhoods, and how mass transit has revitalized inner-city communities in Chicago and Brooklyn. He explains why car-dominated cities like Phoenix and Charlotte have sought to build twenty-first-century downtowns from scratch, while sprawling postwar suburbs are seeking to attract young people with their own form of urbanized experience.

Author : Brian Floca
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1534493786
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Keeping the City Going written by Brian Floca and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caldecott Award winner Brian Floca gives a heartfelt thank you to the essential workers who keep their cities going during COVID-19 quarantine in this tenderly illustrated picture book. We are here at home now, watching the world through our windows. Outside we see the city we know, but not as we’ve seen it before. The once hustling and bustling streets are empty. Well, almost empty. Around the city there are still people, some, out and about. These are the people keeping us safe. Keeping us healthy. Keeping our mail and our food delivered. Keeping our grocery stores stocked. Keeping the whole city going. Brian Floca speaks for us all in this stirring homage to all the essential workers who keep the essentials operating so the rest of us can do our part by sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Author : Elizabeth Royte
Publisher : Little Brown
ISBN 13 : 9780316141819
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.1X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Garbage Land written by Elizabeth Royte and published by Little Brown. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of sight, out of mind ... Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels... But where do these things go next' In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away' In Garbage Land, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us on the wild adventure that begins once our trash hits the bottom of the can. Along the way, we meet an odor chemist who explains why trash smells so bad; garbage fairies and recycling gurus; neighbors of massive waste dumps; CEOs making fortunes by encouraging waste or encouraging recycling-often both at the same time; scientists trying to revive our most polluted places; fertilizer fanatics and adventurers who kayak amid sewage; paper people, steel people, aluminum people, plastic people, and even a guy who swears by recycling human waste. With a wink and a nod and a tightly clasped nose, Royte takes us on a bizarre cultural tour through slime, stench, and heat-in other words, through the back end of our ever-more supersized lifestyles. By showing us what happens to the things we've "disposed of," Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact-and that unless we undertake radical change, the garbage we create will always be with us: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we consume. Radiantly written and boldly reported, Garbage Land is a brilliant exploration into the soiled heart of the American trash can.

Author : Tom Finkelpearl
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262561488
Total Pages : 476 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dialogues in Public Art written by Tom Finkelpearl and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the changing attitudes toward the city as the site for public art.

Author : Carl A. Zimring
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 147987437X
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clean and White written by Carl A. Zimring and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race-- whites are "clean" and non-whites are "dirty"-- have shaped where people have lived, where people have worked, and how American society's wastes have been managed. Zimring draws on historical evidence from statesmen, scholars, sanitarians, novelists, activists, advertisements, and the United States Census of Population to reveal changing constructions of environmental racism, focusing on constructions of race and hygiene. The bigoted idea that non-whites are "dirty" remains deeply ingrained in the national psyche, continuing to shape social and environmental inequalities.

Author : Martin V. Melosi
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548354
Total Pages : 576 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fresh Kills written by Martin V. Melosi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh Kills—a monumental 2,200-acre site on Staten Island—was once the world’s largest landfill. From 1948 to 2001, it was the main receptacle for New York City’s refuse. After the 9/11 attacks, it reopened briefly to receive human remains and rubble from the destroyed Twin Towers, turning a notorious disposal site into a cemetery. Today, a mammoth reclamation project is transforming the landfill site, constructing an expansive park three times the size of Central Park. Martin V. Melosi provides a comprehensive chronicle of Fresh Kills that offers new insights into the growth and development of New York City and the relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal. He traces the metamorphoses of the landscape, following it from salt marsh to landfill to cemetery and looks ahead to the future park. By centering the problem of solid-waste disposal, Melosi highlights the unwanted consequences of mass consumption. He presents the Fresh Kills space as an embodiment of massive waste, linking consumption to the continuing presence of its discards. Melosi also uses the landfill as a lens for understanding Staten Island’s history and its relationship with greater New York City. The first book on the history of the iconic landfill, Fresh Kills unites environmental, political, and cultural history to offer a reflection on material culture, consumer practices, and perceptions of value and worthlessness.