Trash Land: The Landfill, the Campamento, and Transnational Geographies of Disaster

Abstract

In 2020, an estimated 1,500 families built an informal settlement (campamento) on a landfill in Santiago, Chile. This article experiments with an interscalar approach within a critical disaster studies framework to examine nested layers of crisis and opportunity that unfolded over multiple time scales and geographies and contributed to the settlement’s creation. The landfill serves as a site of analysis to generate perspectives on the intersections and disjunctions of phenomena within and across temporal and spatial scales connecting the landfill, the campamento, and transnational geographies of disaster.