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SENSEABLE CITY LAB

Foreword F o r e w o r d F o r e w o r d

Carlo Ratti © Massachusetts Institute of Technology All Rights Reserved

What will the human race be at the moment of its extinction? A certain quantity of information about itself and the world, a finite quantity, given that it will no longer be able to propagate itself and grow.

—Italo Calvino, World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories , 1968

A little-known short story by Italian writer Italo Calvino, called “World Memory,” imagines a future human condition when all information pro-duced by humanity will be stored and available for search. In other terms, it will be “an archive that will bring together and catalogue everything that is known about every person, animal and thing, by way of a general inven-tory not only of the present but of the past too, of everything that has ever been since time began, in short a general and simultaneous history of everything, or rather a catalogue of everything, moment by moment.”

Calvino’s fictional condition could not be more topical today, as the amount of digital data we generate and store on the planet is growing at an unprecedented rate. It is sometimes estimated that up to 90 percent of all of the information available in the world today was produced in the past two years (2015 and 2016) alone. Most of our actions—the calls we make, the apps we use, the credit cards we scan—are recorded and added to a grow-ing digital repository of human life. Our deliberate actions also contribute toward this ever-growing Big Data: when we post a picture, tweet a thought, or share moments of our life with friends and the broader network. To employ a word now commonly adopted in research, our own human self is becoming quantifiable and quantified.

Most of the digital footprints that are recorded today are somehow con-nected with some measure of human activity. They tend to concentrate in cities (where humans abound …) and record actions that society considers of value—things that are meaningful to us. In this book, Dietmar Offen-huber takes an unprecedented approach and turns his informational lens

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upside down. He focuses not on what is meaningful and has value but on what society discards: waste. He uses it as the starting point of a reflection on human life not through its direct observation, but through the proxy of what it constantly excretes.

As archaeologists have often shown, dumps can offer unprecedented snapshots of past civilization. The minutia of life that might be lost in offi-cial recordings emerges there with new force. The immediacy of what has been disposed of provides unexpected angles on the processes that pro-duced it—and then got rid of it as waste. Also, the examination of what is discarded, and what is not, helps us also understand what was “waste” and what was not, a definition that changes in different times and different societies. Offenhuber takes this lens to the present day and—as a digital archaeologist of the contemporary era—embarks in a multifaceted analysis of “Waste as Information.”

Implicit in Offenhuber’s investigation seems to be an agenda of social justice. Waste is just another aspect of societal rejection, as determined by the local conventions of a given time and place. He writes: “Waste sys-tems cannot be separated from systems of production, and notions of value cannot be seen in isolation.” The value of an object and the value of the human work attached to it cannot be separated. By elevating waste as the focus of this investigation, Offenhuber seems to rehabilitate those circles of society that suffer from the same rejection.

As one reads through the pages of this fascinating book, little by little the line between waste and nonwaste becomes increasingly blurred. This reminds us of an excerpt from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), where waste seems to become the organizing principle of the world in the city of Leonia: “Leonia’s rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crest of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia’s boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption.”