My doctoral thesis is based on an examination of the relation between waste and urban environment in Delhi. As Indian cities have
been facing considerable population growth and concentrate wealth generation and rising consumption levels, solid waste generation
increases rapidly in urban areas. In Delhi, the accelerated urbanisation pace and urban space densification processes of the last
decades have remarkably transformed the urban landscape and brought about their own set of challenges. As a result, solid waste
management is an ever more critical issue given the multiple shortcomings of which it is suffering. Primarily resting upon the
municipal authorities and informal waste workers, it has opened up to large companies with public-private partnerships on the rise,
along with other actors such as non-governmental organisations and other corporate actors. My research is inspired by urban
political ecology and aims to describe how the urban environment is being produced and reproduced through the reconfiguration of solid
waste management networks emerging from the arrival of new actors. This study's ambition is to analyse these changes through a
multilevel approach and to provide a comprehensive picture of the sector's evolution as well as the sociopolitical, economic and
cultural relations on which it rests. It puts into perspective firstly - the local arrangements governing waste flows in a context of
privatisation of door-to-door garbage collection; secondly - the emerging changes in the recycling networks; and thirdly - the logic
and practices of waste treatment infrastructure through public-private partnerships. This approach opens on reflections on the
transformation of the Indian city, the complex relations between the powers guiding its management, and how this affects and
transforms the urban environment.