Dakar has lost its lungs: What the spatialised inequalities of waste can tell us about climate (im)mobilities

Abstract

Described by Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr as a city that has ‘lost its lungs’, Dakar is significantly affected by the climate crisis. In particular, coastal erosion driven by rising sea levels and rapid urbanisation, which is exacerbating problems with waste. Drawing on Mbembe’s concept of the universal right to breathe, focus is placed upon waste in Dakar as a means to analyse relations of power and the spatialised inequalities of environments and (im)mobility that are embedded within racial capitalism. Dakar’s coastal fishing communities and the landfill site, Mbeubeuss, areas where internal rural migrants move to seek employment, are taken as case studies of waste(d) spaces and complex mobilities. Once seasonal, these historical rural to urban mobility patterns are shifting through the combined impacts of the climate crisis and socio-economic structural factors destroying agricultural livelihoods. Concomitantly, Dakar’s fishing ecosystem is itself impacted by the climate crisis, ocean grabbing, rapid urbanisation, as well as waste, leading some people to feel they have ‘no choice’ but to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Through focus on waste, a counternarrative is then given to contest depoliticised narratives of climate migrants as threat to the Global North, visibilising instead the unequal power structures at the heart of the climate crisis. A counter narrative that includes resistance and draws attention to the multiple ways in which people seek to endure and to contest spatialised inequalities through im/mobility.