Billstraße Currents.

Tracing Labour, Extraction, and Electronic Waste Across Planetary Harbour Landscapes

Digital technologies appear clean and immaterial, yet every device is embedded in global networks of extraction, labour, production, logistics, and waste. This project traces these hidden geographies through cobalt and quartz, following their journey from extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo and China, through semiconductor production in Taiwan and China, to the Port of Hamburg, Billstraße, and ultimately e-waste economies in Accra, Ghana.

The project positions Billstraße as Hamburg’s mirror to Accra: a landscape where electronic waste, migrant labour, repair economies, and environmental degradation converge. Rather than treating e-waste as something that happens elsewhere, it reveals how these global systems continue locally through dismantling, repair, trade, and recycling.

By mapping relationships between workers, businesses, waterways, waste, and ecological processes, the project identifies opportunities where environmental and social systems can be addressed together. It proposes Billstraße as the first node of a wider network of Water Commons, working with existing industries and economies rather than replacing them.

Three interventions structure the proposal: Junkyard Commons, improving access to the Billekanal between scrapyards and gardens; Material Commons, transforming a fire-damaged site into a rainwater landscape with repair spaces, a workers’ bazaar, and cooperative facilities; and Garden Commons, combining shared gardens, housing, and canal-edge wetlands to filter polluted runoff.

Against the proposed industrial intensification of Billstraße, Currents of Labour treats its migrant workers, repair economies, and material networks as assets. Ecological restoration and labour justice become interconnected, offering a more inclusive and regenerative harbour future.

Decolonial Waterways and Harbour landscapes, Technische Universität Berlin - 2026

Group members: Rayan Alfadel, Muriel Wittmann, Anna Ruß