Shitcare Mapping Practicing Intimate Geographies of Waste, Neglect, and Minor Infrastructures

Abstract

Shitcare mapping is proposed as a queer-feminist method that traces intimate geographies of waste, decay, and maintenance in Istanbul across the interwoven scales of body, infrastructure, and neighborhood. Drawing on Hélène Frichot’s Dirty Theory (2019), which emphasizes the generative potential of dirt, contamination, and impurity, the project approaches waste not as something to be expelled but as a spatial and political force, one that holds the city together even as it is systematically erased from dominant power narratives. Emerging from a collective process with architecture students in Istanbul, this research engages design as a practice of staying with contaminated, marginal, and often invisible spatial conditions, emphasizing multiple perspectives and shared vulnerabilities. Each scale mobilizes distinct techniques, working with site materials, engaging in dialogue, drawing together, 3D scanning, and video recording, while remaining grounded in bodily experimentation. Our studio table functions as active infrastructure: a surface that absorbs gestures and residues so that cracks, smudges, and stains become evidence of shared labor and precarity. By listening to neglected spatial stories and embracing friction, shitcare mapping cultivates alternative spatial literacies and renders minor infrastructures and solidarities perceptible.

Keywords: geographies of waste, care practices, dirty theory