Why should our waste lay waste to another place? To the north of India’s capital, Delhi, lies Bhalswa, a town infamous for a towering dumpsite, and subsequently, the worst urban degradation in the city. Bhalswa can be understood as resulting from infrastructural collapse, one where the city’s waste management system is too overburdened by its ever-growing population. However, Bhalswa is much more - a once integral ecosystem subject to decades of environmental degradation owing to neglect and marginalization. If there is a future for Bhalswa, it can only evolve from an acute understanding of its history and how it shaped the crude reality it presents today.
In a synthesis of historic cartography, dated imagery, oral histories, and the author’s own analysis, ‘Wasted Heritage’ is a narrative exploring Bhalswa as it once could have been, to what we have driven it to be today.
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