ABSTRACT

Waste within the city and how it relates to urban space denote ecological and political conflicts as well as the materialization of asymmetric power and class relationships. Recent appropriation over waste shifts its historical dimension of being a problem to be solved, toward becoming a new urban commodity. This chapter analyses a set of public resolutions in Paris in the late nineteenth century and Montevideo, Uruguay, between 2012 and 2017, specifically by questioning accumulation by dispossession in the production of urban space, both of which undermined the access of waste pickers to recyclable materials as well as to the center of their cities. By problematizing these new regulations regarding restrictions on access to public space and conflicts around the ownership of waste, the chapter raises the concept of the right to the city as a conceptual tool to create new citizen relationships that can claim waste as a commons.