Aarushi Nitharwal

The Mountain View investigates landfills as enduring infrastructures of environmental injustice and socio-spatial inequality. As sites where urban waste, policy failure, and marginalization converge, landfills raise urgent questions about governance, public health, and human dignity. Focusing on the Ghazipur landfill in East Delhi, the project examines how systemic negligence, rooted in necropolitical policies and spatial exclusion, has allowed the site to grow into a toxic monument of infrastructural collapse. Drawing on critical urban theory and thinkers such as David Harvey and Achille Mbembe, the thesis juxtaposes Ghazipur with Vienna’s Waste-to-Energy system. A small educational zine accompanies the written work, translating key ideas into an accessible format and exploring how waste, justice, and education can be reimagined. Together, the two components reflect on whose lives and whose futures are discarded in the making of urban space.