How can the study of waste contribute to our understandings of urban forms, processes, and experience? The Incinerator in the Garden uncovers the ways in which waste has both produced and been produced by the complex socio-natural landscape of the state of New Jersey. This project explores the history of waste sites in three categories—wasteland, obsolescence, and waste systems—extending from superfund sites and sprawling suburban developments to materials recovery facilities. The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanization can be told as a fundamental history of waste, one which can critically inform contemporary design and the concept of sustainability in postindustrial, post-urban environments.

Mariana Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism. Her writing and research on the design and politics of the public realm have appeared in publications, including Praxis, Candide, Future Anterior, and Guardian Cities, as well as the edited volumes Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (Routledge, 2013) and Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). She was an inaugural fellow of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities (2014–15) and a member of the winning team in the Van Alen Institute/National Park Service competition, National Parks Now. Mogilevich holds a PhD in the history and theory of architecture from Harvard University and has taught architectural and urban history at Harvard, NYU, Pratt, and Princeton University.