South Park’s relationship to waste is currently not reciprocal - value is being extracted and diverted out of the neighborhood, while the negative social, ecological, and economic impacts are staying. To address this problem, we propose a “material sovereignty” framework, which is the right to healthy, non-toxic, and culturally beautiful materials and material processes that communities determine themselves.

The process starts by using material process interventions like the biodigester as the point of initiation for imagining shifting, reclaiming, and healing this relationship between the community and waste. We imagine a process in which the community initiates and owns a small-scale material process intervention, such as converting neighborhood food scraps to energy, compost, and fertilizer through the biodigester. Next, those opportunities are tested, communicated, or visualized within the community, and ownership models solidified. The biodigester shares a site with a Ground Up installation, catalyzing community wealth building on the foundation of soil health through a process of depaving, phytoremediation, and soil education