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How can cities upgrade urban waste infrastructures while also supporting the livelihoods of the poor? While development experts now agree that informal recyclers should be included in urban waste systems, many cities struggle to implement inclusive reforms. With a case study of informal recycling in Asunción, Paraguay, which compares dumpsite and street recyclers, this article addresses a gap in the literature by focusing on the policies, politics and frameworks that inhibit the implementation of pro‐poor reforms. Proposals to include waste pickers misunderstand key dynamics of informal waste work and locate waste‐picker cultures as the key barrier to successful waste‐picker integration. However, they overlook the historical production of waste‐picker organizing styles and underappreciate the diversity between different groups of informal recyclers. They seek to institute cooperatives, a promising model for segments of highly organized recyclers but one which threatens to exclude a large share of waste pickers who opt to work individually. Successfully integrating informal recyclers into waste management requires significant investments in the sector, meaningfully including waste pickers in proposal design and an epistemic shift to prioritize waste‐picker needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging debates on the contemporary reconfigurations of work question previous understandings of the relationships among and between waged, unwaged, and reproductive labour, situated processes of value formation and/or enclosure, and the constitution and limits of contemporary capitalism. Taking Cindi Katz's notion of countertopographies and Gillian Hart's notion of relational comparison as inspirations, this Symposium draws attention to new and existing conceptual frames and modes of analysis to situate contemporary permutations of work within the shifting dynamics of uneven development in specific state, local, and institutional contexts. This Introduction summarises the interrelated and overlapping contributions that papers in this Symposium offer methodologically, analytically, and politically. The open‐ended aspiration that emerges from these contributions is that close attention to heterogeneous formations of work outside the wage might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the co‐optation and enclosure of people's creative energies, and move toward realising the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the affective politics enabling urban development in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, a young frontier boomtown where the volume of the extralegal transborder trade once exceeded the GDP of the entire nation. Against stereotypes of the city as lawless, I demonstrate how governing practices work through affect and emotion. I argue that local strategies of governing have temporal and spatial dimensions that produce an affective field of uncertainty for hawkers and street vendors. Paradoxically, the legal and spatial ambiguities that produce uncertainty as a disciplining structure of feeling are also the grounds from which vendors make claims to urban space. Yet vendors develop their own registers of need and entitlement through a politics of affective interconnection. This paper contributes to debates on the government of precarity and to geographical studies on emotion and affect by exploring how this dialectics of uncertainty enables exclusionary urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]