Living With the Leftovers

Abstract

Across Pakistan’s rapidly expanding cities, waste does not simply accumulate; it endures. It seeps into soil, air, and water, shaping everyday environments through persistent exposure to polluted drainage systems, informal dumping, and recurrent waste burning. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, semistructured interviews with residents and informal waste workers, spatial observation, and photographic documentation, this article examines how waste infrastructures organize unequal experiences of environmental exposure in Pakistan’s urban peripheries. Bringing urban political ecology into dialogue with environmental humanities and recent scholarship in discard studies, the article argues that waste infrastructures are not only systems of collection and disposal but also institutional and material arrangements through which environmental burdens are unevenly distributed across urban space. Rather than treating waste as a temporary problem of environmental management, the analysis demonstrates how prolonged exposure to polluted environments becomes incorporated into everyday life through recurring encounters with contaminated water, toxic smoke, deteriorating drainage, and delayed municipal intervention. Building on scholarship on slow violence and environmental temporality, the article shows how waste infrastructures shape unequal experiences of endurance while contributing an empirically grounded account of how infrastructural inequalities are lived, negotiated, and normalized in Pakistan’s urban peripheries. In doing so, it contributes to debates on urban political ecology, discard studies, infrastructure, and environmental justice by demonstrating how waste infrastructures organize not only material landscapes but also unequal conditions of health, visibility, and political recognition.