When: Thursday 16– Saturday 18 June 2022
Where: At the British Academy Summer Showcase, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH
Tickets are free but registration is needed
Link and programme:https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/british-academy-summer-showcase-2022/programme-exhibits/
Dr David Garbin, Senior Lecturer in SSPSSR, will contribute to the prestigious Summer Research Showcase Festival organised by the British Academy in central London on 16-18 June. He is curating an exhibition on urban sustainability and the informal economies and ecologies of waste tyres in mega-city Lagos (Nigeria).
The tyre is a truly global commodity, a symbol of historic dependency on motor vehicles. But in a mega-city like Lagos, the problem of waste tyres is particularly acute: end-of-life tyres (ELTs) are discarded on the streets, in waterways, stockpiled or burned. Non-biodegradable, stockpiled ELTs can pose significant fire hazards and become a breeding ground for malarial mosquitos.
Used tyres are not only the by-products of deficient, pot-holed and overburdened road infrastructures, they are at the heart of a thriving – mostly informal – roadside economy of small garages, vulcanizers as well as an ‘upcycling’ sector (dominated by female workers), through which tyres are repurposed in many ways.
The project explores the complex relationships between waste, sustainability, creativity and wellbeing in the use and re-use of tyres across economic, infrastructural and social domains of the mega-city, using Lagos as a case study.
The exhibition draws upon data collected as part of the ‘Pneuma-city’ project (2019-2022) which Dr David Garbin leads as Principal Investigator, working in collaboration with award-winning visual artist Andrew Esiebo. The exhibition will showcase photography, video as well as innovative tyre-based installations and material culture of tyre repurposing. The project is supported by a £300k award from the Global Challenges Research Funds as part of the wider ‘Cities and Infrastructure of Well-Being’ Programme.
The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Kent, York, Toronto, and Lagos and is truly multidisciplinary as it combines Urban Anthropology, Sustainability Science, Material Engineering, Urban Planning and Sociology of Work.
