This paper examines the issue of solid waste management in urban contexts, by
an architectural perspective. In light of the emerging waste crisis, this paper proposes to
redesign and gradually reintroduce waste management facilities in the urban tissue. The
capacity to learn from trash can help to design a new generation of facilities, aiming to recover
suburban areas and to re-establish a lost ecological balance. The paper underlines the need to
radically reconsider the spatial articulation and the organizational structure of the current waste
management infrastructure, through an integrateed approach aiming to define a decentralized
and distributed urban model. Finally the paper explores heuristic potentials for architectural
design, identifying hybrid figures and finding key actions to intervene in the contemporary city,
inspired by the notion of ‘unblackboxing’