Waste Regimes in the Global South: Bogotá, 18th to 21st Centuries

This paper presents a historical-environmental periodization of the relationship between a city from the global south and its waste. The main focus of the study is the change in the urban metabolism caused by waste regimes in the last three centuries. In this period, Bogotá transitioned from being a small colonial town to becoming an important metropolis in the global south, while the city went through four waste regimes. Sociologist Zsuzsa Gille provides the waste regime category, which is a socio-historical research tool that offers wide possibilities for the history of urban garbage in different societies. Bogotá has had four waste regimes: first, the miasmatic regime, from the end of the 18th century to 1870, in this regime waste was a mass of undifferentiated solid and liquid garbage, made up of human excrement and animals and some remains of kitchens and ashes; second, the hygienist regime, between 1870 and the mid-20th century, when urban garbage appeared, differentiated from residual water; third, the developmentalist regime between 1950-1988, defined by the state (municipal) appropriation of urban garbage seeking to turn it into an input for urbanization and commercial agriculture and, finally, the neoliberal-environmentalist regime from 1988 to the present, a moment in which solid urban waste becomes a commodity and part of the global market for urban cleaning systems. The temporary breaks in the different regimes do not indicate sudden changes, but rather processes and trends. The paper collects historical information from the city libraries and the Bogotá historical archive.