Waste and Urban Environmental Crisis in Cochin: the Case of Brahmapuram Landfill

In urban context, solid waste management is not merely a question of bureaucratic efficiency but a deeply political issue, entangled in various forms of socio-environmental contradictions. In Cochin, a major port city and industrial urban space in Southwest India, the issue of urban waste circulation intersects with urban land commodification, industrialisation of leisure, water management, and urban planning. Government-led urban waste management programmes, especially the clean city initiatives, promote hygienic urban citizenship through intensive campaigns, moral appeals to reduce waste production, and educational efforts targeting waste collection and processing works. The existing studies on the issues of urban waste production and landfill focuses on the administrative spaces of the cities. This study analyses the politics of urban waste through the theoretical lens of environmental history and political ecology. By analysing the debates and movements related to the Brahmapuram landfill, the article argues that the ‘green city’ initiatives contributes to the elimination and dispossession of marginalised social groups – including peasants, fishers, and migrant workers - as well as the degradation of ecologically sensitive areas such as backwaters, rivers and marshlands. By adopting multi-scalar geographical frames of analysis, this paper argues that solid waste management is not limited to a city. The study carried out qualitative field visits to understand the complex spatialities of waste production and circulation in the context of Cochin. Informed by the concept of urban social metabolism concept, this paper argues that the production, circulation and the processing of waste constitutes a geographically extended urban process. This process, in turn, generates precarious environments for people located outside of visible boundaries of the city. The research underscores the need to frame urban waste production and circulation as a question of the right to the city and the right to sustain indigenous modes of life, which are increasingly getting toxified. In doing so, it challenges the commodification landforms as mere landfills spaces and proposes an alternative discourse on the issues of the right of everyone to access the city as non-commodified nature.