Circular Researching - Why I Followed Trash Around Phnom Penh (and What It Taught Me About the City)

On Sept, 11 I gave a talk on "Circular researching. A method to make sense of the sociomateriality of the urban fabric". The keynote was in the framework of the workshop "Repurposing Phnom Penh: Built Forms and Infrastructure as Archive" by Dr. Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier at the Center for Khmer Studies in Phnom Penh.

The talk revolved around a method I have developed through years of research in Cambodia's vibrant, complex, and often overlooked recycling economy: circular researching.

What’s in a Pile of Plastic?

When I first arrived in Phnom Penh, I was struck by something that many others seemed not to notice. Waste. More specifically, the people who move through the city collecting it—recyclers known as Ed Jai. They do not simply gather discarded materials. They circulate. Moving through neighbourhoods, alleyways, markets, and informal settlements, they create pathways, rhythms, and connections that become woven into the city's fabric.

Their movements became the starting point for my research.

What would happen if I followed these circulations? Not only physically across the city, but also historically, materially, and conceptually. What stories might emerge if discarded objects were treated not as endpoints but as entry points into larger questions about urban life, infrastructure, memory, and change?

This is how the idea of circular researching emerged.

Rather than approaching the city as a fixed object to be mapped and analysed, circular researching follows movements, repetitions, returns, and transformations. It traces how materials travel, how meanings shift, and how seemingly disconnected histories become entangled through everyday practices.

In this sense, the city is more than an archive of buildings, monuments, and official records.

It is also an archive of practices.

A crumbling façade, an informal recycling depot, a pile of discarded plastic, or a forgotten landfill all contain traces of how people organize, imagine, and remake urban life. The city stores not only things, but also ways of doing, knowing, and relating.

Here, I draw inspiration from the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who argued that archives are not merely collections of documents but systems that shape what can be known, remembered, and made visible. Yet in Phnom Penh, these archives often exist beyond official repositories. They are embedded in infrastructures, material flows, and everyday practices.

This raised a series of questions that became central to my work.

What counts as waste?

Who decides?

And what histories become visible once we begin following discarded materials rather than ignoring them?

The answers led far beyond the recycling depot.

Following plastic and aluminum through Phnom Penh revealed unexpected connections to colonial histories, Cold War geopolitics, development agendas, and shifting aspirations of modernity. Aluminum entered Cambodia through multiple pathways, including military infrastructures connected to the Vietnam War. Plastic arrived as a symbol of convenience, prosperity, and progress, becoming increasingly embedded within everyday life during the second half of the twentieth century.

Yet these materials carried particular visions of development, consumption, and urban futures.

This became especially apparent when examining contemporary efforts to promote concepts such as the circular economy. While global policy frameworks increasingly present waste as a resource waiting to be reintegrated into economic cycles, Phnom Penh already possesses highly dynamic, largely informal systems of recovery, repair, and circulation. These systems do not simply mirror international sustainability models; they operate according to their own histories, values, and logics.

The practices of Ed Jai often complicate official waste strategies in precisely these ways.

While planners and policymakers frequently envision clean, efficient, and standardized solutions, informal recycling infrastructures emerge through proximity, necessity, improvisation, and long-standing social relations. Their effectiveness cannot be understood solely through economic indicators or technical assessments. They are embedded in particular forms of knowledge and ways of inhabiting the city.

Listening to these infrastructures requires paying attention to what often remains hidden: the routes materials travel, the relations they create, the histories they carry, and the forms of labour that sustain them.

This is what circular researching attempts to do.

It moves back and forth across time, between disciplines, and through unexpected corners of the city. It follows materials while remaining attentive to the social worlds that gather around them. It treats waste not as a residual category but as a productive entry point into broader questions about urban transformation, memory, inequality, and environmental change.

Ultimately, my talk was an invitation to think differently about cities and the methods we use to study them.

Not simply as historians, urban planners, or social scientists, but as what I somewhat playfully call circularists: people willing to follow connections wherever they lead, to question dominant narratives, and to allow seemingly mundane objects—a discarded bottle, a piece of scrap metal, a pile of plastic—to open up much larger questions about how urban worlds are made and remade.

If this has piqued your curiosity, you can still watch the full keynote here:🎥 Watch here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE6HuIZ4350