A city's garbage functions as a continuous resource stream for those at the margins, who extract value by sorting, salvaging and reselling what others define as worthless. The pickers' prosperity rises and falls with what the city consumes and throws away, tying their fortunes directly to distant patterns of middle-class consumption.
Viewing the garbage mountain as a lived-in landscape, rather than a site to be cleared, reveals social hierarchies, romance, memory and belonging rooted in the trash itself. What outsiders and courts see as a hazard to be erased is, to its residents, a place of attachment whose removal would destroy a community.
Official campaigns to seal, regulate or close the dumping ground, often prompted by fires, court orders and sanitation goals, threaten the only livelihood available to the pickers without providing an alternative. The push to make the city cleaner and more orderly operates against the interests of the poorest people who survive on its disorder.