So what is M.E.W-U?

M.E.W-U was my year-long senior thesis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As a recent graduate of their bachelor of architecture program, this project is still on my mind. Challenging and important, the goal was to create a system that deals with potential environmental hazards, a process that does not exist in the USA…yet! I began by studying the effects of mining and stumbled across literature about e-waste. I didn't even know what e-waste was! Simply defined, it is electronic waste (computers, phones, etc.) and my focus began to shift.

So how did I become interested in e-waste?

I did not know exactly what I wanted to tackle for my thesis, but I definitely knew I wanted to investigate how humans interact with machinery — to explore how human and non-human spaces relate to one another. During my research, I began to see how e-waste could become a much needed resource in order to avoid shipping waste to China, never be seen again. I wanted to extend the life cycle of electronics and create a product that could be used to “build a city.” 

I didn’t leave it at that. I had to make it a mobile, a city onto itself. That’s where my project was truly born.

To dive deeper, M.E.W-U is a roaming, urban e-waste collector — a gathering and processing rig that capitalizes on the unseen resources of discarded technological objects. In addition to mining, it consumes and eventually de-materializes existing, unmanageable e-waste landfills. The M.E.W-U platform also interfaces with a series of secondary infrastructural ports, vertical landfills, and extraction systems docked in most developed countries. Eventually, the economic forces born out of this mega-structure could give rise to new urbanism and a global network of production. As you can probably imagine, I did not sleep much trying to make my M.E.W-U work.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to being a city, it is a speculative, nomadic, urbanized infrastructure that offers an alternative scenario to the informal communities that currently mine e-waste landfills. It is a scenario that explores an urban tectonic that envisions a productive dialogue between a human space (the city) and non-human space (the machine). M.E.W-U is a framework where both human and non-human inhabitants begin to interact with one another in new ways and develop relationships to build environments and economies.

Although this may not be realized any time soon (and seems out of this world), it is a starting point. We can begin to look through a different lens at certain, modern-day challenges and see how the built environment and technology may work together towards unexpected solutions. Hopefully, exercises such as these can snowball into changing the world.

Thank you for taking the time to peek at my thesis concept.

Luis Guardado