Filthy Flourishing: Para-Sites, Animal Infrastructure, and the Waste Frontier in Kampala

Thousands of marabou storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city's green spaces and eating up to 2 kilos of organic matter daily, mostly rotting garbage found in the city's open dumps. Weedy birds, they flourish amid Kampala's garbage crisis. Storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, and cast out from the imaginary of a clean, green, urban future. Theorizing animal and informal infrastructures together as "para-sites," this paper follows marabou storks through Kampala's ever-shifting waste frontier: the postconsumer equivalent to the extractive frontier that subtends the capitalist fantasy of endless growth. Kampala's topography, hydrology, and class structure ensure that trash flows downhill, accumulating in slums where it leads to flooding and outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses as well as to endemic malaria. Waste with wings, marabou storks remake the urban waste landscape, undermining efforts to stabilize the city's ultimate sinks in landfills, slums, and wetlands as they flourish in filth and defecate in the heart of greenness.