Housing Waste (2025-ongoing)
Postdoctoral project I am realising in the years 2025- 2030 as part of the SNSF Consolidator grant 'The Battle of Materials: Commodity “Research and Propaganda” and the Road Towards Immoderate Consumption, 1900–1980' led by Prof. Moritz von Brescius at the Institute of Global European Studies, University of Basel.
Housing Waste: Recycling Industrial By-Products into Construction, and the Globalisation of Building Research
Second Book Project, Europainstitut, University of Basel (2025–2030)
Since the late nineteenth century, the production of the built environment became a field of scientific and industrial transformation, driven in part by a new type of modernising institution: the building research laboratory. Notable examples include the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (1880), the UK’s Building Research Station (1921), the Polish Building Research Institute (1945), and India’s Central Building Research Institute (1947). This project examines a recurring agenda across these globally dispersed institutions: turning industrial by-products (‘waste products’) into raw materials for construction.
Revalorising bagasse, wood chips, blast-furnace slag, fly ash, mine tailings, sulphur, and other residual substances has been an important contribution of building science to reducing the cost of housing and infrastructure production. In the twentieth century, such research emerged to mitigate material shortages and economic crises resulting from war, support the autarkic ambitions of local industries and state administrations, and reduce dependence on volatile and increasingly globalised resource markets. Building a research agenda around waste recycling fostered new relationships between construction and other industrial sectors, increasing the efficiency and speed of building production, but also resource consumption, emissions, and waste generation.
The project sets out to understand the extent to which the built environment has thereby been turned into a ‘sink’ for increasingly diverse and unpredictable substances. It asks who benefited from this process, whose problems of scarcity or waste disposal it solved, and what adverse consequences it produced for the human and non-human inhabitants of the resulting environments. It will result in my second monographic book, which aims to develop a global history of industrial waste through the built environment, firmly anchoring the history of construction within a broader environmental history of the Anthropocene.
See more Europainstitut profile for more information on the project.
Additional Funding
Linda Hall Library Virtual Fellowship 2026-27 (4200 USD)
Workshops and conferences
'Cementing Waste: Recycling and the Globalization of Lightweight Concrete Blocks during the Cold War', Workshop Recycling in the Cold War Era: Capitalist and Socialist Waste Regimes, History of Technology unit, TU Berlin