Abstract
Abstract The modern 'sanitary landfill', pioneered in the United States, is a unique solution to a universal problem of cities: where to put the waste generated by their citizens. It purposefully attempts a permanent separation of people from their byproducts and represents a rupture in both US and world urban history. After a brief excursus on the long history of middens using the example of Çatalhöyük, one of the world's oldest cities, this article explores historical waste-disposal practices in three US cities (New York, Chicago and El Paso), showing how garbage was an integral part of a strategy of creating new land for these cities to expand onto. Waste was thus a tool for the (symbolic and literal) production of usable urban place. By contrast, one of the broadest, most invisible impacts of today's sanitary landfill is that it breaks this spatial and material cycle, instead producing empty ex-urban space.
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