Waste Capitalism and Rust Belt Life

Drawing on a decade of life in Youngstown Ohio, this dissertation seeks to deepen our understanding of the kind of place and phase of time that is the 'postindustrial' U.S. city. Deindustrialization scholarship powerfully rendered places like Youngstown in the moment after mass shutdown, describing a crisis of company abandonment and working class life. Subsequent studies framed the Rust Belt as a place of social and economic loss, joblessness, ruin and nostalgia. But forty years have passed since the upheaval of mass shutdown in Youngstown, and in this stretch the city has continued to transform. Generalized poverty and unfurling infrastructure now sit alongside big projects of corporate profit. Financial and work experiments that deal in the abundance of after-things have flourished. The 'old days' have changed, refracted through shared experiences of ongoing scrounging and enjoyment and predictable patterns of extraction and out-corruption. I call this phase in Youngstown a sag– a pocket that opens in the wake of some big project, when things loosen and people fall out of previous routines into a more dilated world. From the vantage of the sag, this study develops a frame of waste capitalism, describing how toxified land, deteriorated buildings and relative poverty have been mobilized as conditions of exceptional market opportunity. These waste capitalist projects don't cultivate, control and milk so much as they scavenge, poach and drain, and to this extent leave room for a range of smaller projects that make a living with leftovers. This fold of Rust Belt life and waste capitalism is explored through the city's unraveling architecture, its feral houses. The analysis traces how boomtime market strategies rendered the house an impossible possession for Youngstowners, loading buildings with negative value, and how real estate investors then reimagined the evacuated, debt-laden, decomposing house as a flickering asset. Feral form is introduced as a way to approach things that have persisted beyond their designed-for use and proper compacts of care and control. Moving with people who glean from and live in these spaces, I ask what techniques of claiming, tending and arrangement emerge in this iffy version of the house. How might these expand our understanding of inhabitation, and add to our sense of how people live on in an enduringly unraveled present? The analysis then turns to the world of junk work, focusing on Youngstowners who deal in the city's slew of cast aside stuff. Situating this work within a larger process of lumpenization, I explore how the shifty value of junk has shaped work habits of exchange, reward and investment. What sorts of working selves and others emerge in this context, where people work beyond most of the legal, representational and safety protections established in the previous era? The risks of this position, I argue, are managed through particular kinds of collaboration and intoxicating exposure. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of junk work as post-working class sensibility, identifying some pasts and futures that have surfaced after one loud story of enfranchised work and its rewards has quieted down.