The enclosure of ‘waste land’: rethinking

informality and dispossession

Carlo Inverardi-Ferri
The paper contributes to the recent geographical debates on the connection between dispossession and
informality. Existing scholarship recognises that informality is an integral part of capitalism. Arguments reinforcing
the formal–informal dichotomy dominate research on processes of dispossession. Drawing on analyses of the
struggle of waste recyclers in Beijing, this paper conceptualises informal activities in relation to circuits of capital.
It contends that theories of dispossession need to be extended in order to analyse processes of enclosure in the
informal economy. The conclusion discusses the potential of reconceptualising dispossession as a variegated
process operating both outside and within the capitalist space.

Key words China; accumulation by dispossession; variegated capitalism; waste; informality; commons

Department of Geography and Global Production Networks Centre, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570
Email: carlo.inverardi-ferri@nus.edu.sg

Revised manuscript received 21 August 2017

The capitalist knows that all commodities, however tattered
they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith
and in truth money, [. . .], and, what is more, a wonderful
means for making still more money out of money. (Marx
1976 [1867], 256)
Introduction
The relationship between informality and dispossession
is firmly on the intellectual agenda in human geography
today (Gillespie 2016 2017; Samson 2015). In attempt-
ing to theorise and empirically examine this relation-
ship, geographers have engaged with political economy
(Glassman 2006). While I will present this literature in
the following part, I turn here to two ‘geographical
metaphors’ (Dematteis 1985; Fall and Minca 2013) to
introduce this paper and frame my argument, antici-
pating central ideas on the connection between dispos-
session and informality. The first comes from
The grapes of wrath, where John Steinbeck describes
the hardship that farmers in the southern region of the
USA experienced during the Great Depression:
requisitioned. Masses of farmers moved west in search
of work. On arriving in new states, they usually
gathered into impromptu settlements, which soon
became known as Hoovervilles. Hoovervilles were
typically situated on the fringes of big cities, and
sheltered men and women in basic dwellings made
from discards, as described in the passage above.
The second metaphor comes from Le citt a invisibili
by Italo Calvino. Calvino explores the imaginable
through the tales of different imaginary cities. One of
these is Leonia.1 Here, citizens ‘wake between fresh
sheets every morning, wash with just-unwrapped cakes
of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest
model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the
last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio’. In
Leonia, street cleaners, who remove the impurities of
the city in a respectful silence, are welcomed like
angels, while
nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of
refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city
expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back.
(Calvino 1997 [1972], 102)

He drove his old car to Hooverville. He never asked again,
for there was a Hooverville on the edge of every town. The
rag town lay close to water; and the houses were tents, and
weed-thatched enclosures, paper houses, a great junk pile.
The man drove his family in and became a citizen of
Hooverville – always they were called Hooverville. (2000
[1939], 245)
In the thirties, a series of severe dust storms repeatedly
destroyed crop fields in southern USA. Small produc-
ers defaulted on bank loans and had their land
These two literary images came to mind during my first
visit to a Chinese recycling site in autumn 2013. I vividly
remember the landscape I was faced with. The village
was spilling over with waste and dirt. Houses peeked
out between piles of junk. A thick layer of grime
covered everything. Cans of soft drinks were turned
upside-down in the local deli to protect them from dust.
The remains of yellow insulating foam from dismantled
refrigerators decorated the sides of the roads, where
animals wandered in search of organic remains to eat.

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of
the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2017 doi: 10.1111/tran.12217
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
2 The enclosure of ‘waste land’
The noise of trucks transporting discards into the
village provided a constant background drone, while
the smell of burning refuse hung thick in the air, filling
my nose and seeping into my clothes. Over the
following months, I discovered that these kinds of
places are quite common in China. Usually called waste
or recycling markets, they appear at the rural-urban
fringes of metropolises. They are not dumpsites, quite
the contrary – they are production sites; agglomerations
of businesses specialised in the secondary processing of
waste materials. Every kind of discard, from construc-
tion sites, households or local businesses, is exchanged
here. Wood, plastic bottles, old newspapers, clothes,
computer motherboards, washing machines and the
like are traded daily. At waste markets, not only does
waste metamorphose into a commodity through the
process of exchange, but also new value is objectified
through the labour process into refurbished products
and processed materials.
Like the Hoovervilles described by Steinbeck, waste
markets appear at the edges of large cities where
migrant workers gather from rural regions. However,
different from the shantytowns of the Great Depression,
waste markets are not stagnant pools of unemployed
workers, but rather places that thrive with economic
activity. Waste markets are the nodal points of a socio-
territorial entity, built over the period of three decades
by a migrant community sharing the same culture and
values. Similar to the street cleaners of Calvino, the
recyclers who inhabit these places bring their load of
refuse outside the city, but every year have to fall further
back: the process of urbanisation brings about the
frequent demolition and relocation of waste markets,
forming the recyclers into a nomadic population.
To describe the struggle of these people, the paper
discusses the concept of primitive accumulation (De
Angelis 2001 2007; Federici 2014 [2004]; Harvey 2005;
Marx 1976 [1867]). The paper shows that Beijing
recyclers are subjected to a twofold and ongoing
process of dispossession. Besides urban forces that
contribute to divorce these people from their land, the
introduction of environmental regulations and disposal
technologies result in the enclosure of another means
of production: the waste commons. Recyclers are
separated from the land where their activities are
carried out and divorced from the very resource that
contributes to their livelihood – waste. To analyse these
processes, the paper engages with recent geographical
debates on primitive accumulation and the informal
economy (Gillespie 2016; Samson 2015). The paper
adopts the variegated capitalism framework (Jessop
2014; Peck and Theodore 2007; Zhang and Peck 2014)
as a way to move beyond the formal–informal divide.
This is important to offer a new reading of the
relationship between dispossession and informality.
Rather than identifying informality as the other of the
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© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
formal capitalist economy, the paper understands it as
inherently linked and existing within the ecology of
varieties of capitalism (Jessop 2014). Following this line
of argument, the paper extends concepts of disposses-
sion to the analysis of processes operating both outside
and within the capitalist space.
The paper is organised as follows. First, literature on
dispossession and informality is reviewed. Then,
empirical findings are presented, and two different
forms of dispossession affecting waste recyclers in
Beijing are analysed. Conclusions push forward the
notion that dispossession should be studied as a
variegated process. Methodologically, the paper draws
on long-term ethnographic research conducted over 16
months of in-depth fieldwork in China. The research
was undertaken between September 2013 and Decem-
ber 2014 and comprised three main methods. First,
long-term participant observation was carried out in
the two ‘waste markets’, now demolished, of Dongxi-
aokou and Xiejia in Beijing. Second, 37 semi-struc-
tured interviews were conducted with workers and
other actors in the Chinese waste industry. Third,
hundreds of informal conversations, transcribed in
reports and journals, took place throughout the entire
period of the fieldwork. These activities were carried
out both independently and in collaboration with local
academics and environmental activists. This ensured
that gender, class and race biases were taken into
account, allowing triangulation between data collected
by researchers with very different positionalities
(Yeung 2003). This way, it was possible during field-
work to pay attention to the perspectives of both the
insider and the outsider, without falling into the trap of
seeing only what the researcher wanted to see (Yeung
2007). At the same time, this methodology also
enabled recurrent ‘metatriangulation’, since the
researchers did not always embrace the same theoret-
ical perspective (Yeung 2003). Finally, secondary
sources, such as media and official reports, provided
a counterpart for cross-referencing the data collected
in the field (Clark 1998).
Informality and dispossession
In volume one of Capital, Marx elaborates on the
notion of primitive accumulation and defines it as the
‘historical process of divorcing the producer from the
means of production’ (Marx 1976 [1867], 875). Marx
argues that in early modern England, this original
appropriation of resources appeared in its classic form
as the enclosure of rural land and enforcement of
‘bloody legislation’ against the expropriated peasantry
(Marx 1976 [1867], 896). Orthodox interpretations of
these pages have understood primitive accumulation as
a historical process (Gillespie 2016; Rossi 2013) with a
‘clear-cut temporal dimension’ (De Angelis 2001, 1).
Carlo Inverardi-Ferri
Perelman (2000) suggests that this reading is in part
due to the first mention of primitive accumulation in
chapter 23 of Capital. Here, Marx, somehow echoing
Adam Smith, gives a mythical aura to this notion,
describing primitive accumulation as an originary
process that occurred ‘once upon a time’ and made
the capitalist able ‘to frequent the market as a buyer of
labour-power’ (Marx 1976 [1867], 714).
Building on the work of Rosa Luxemburg (2003
[1913]) on expanded reproduction, Harvey (2005)
suggests that it is necessary to go beyond the idea that
relegates accumulation based on extra-economic mech-
anisms to an original stage of capitalism or outside of it.
Harvey (2005) argues that both economic and extra-
economic mechanisms, such as fraud, predation and
violence, are persistent elements of accumulation
within capitalism. As also pointed out by De Angelis,
primitive accumulation is indeed ‘an inherent and
continuous element of modern societies, [whose] range
of action extends to the entire world’ (2001, 3). It is
therefore an ongoing and constituent process of cap-
italist relations and accumulation (De Angelis 2007;
Federici 2014 [2004]). To give account of this fact,
Harvey suggests reconceptualising the notion of prim-
itive accumulation and substituting it with the term
‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2005, 144). Following
this line of thinking, in this paper, the term accumu-
lation by dispossession, or simply dispossession, is
employed to refer to ongoing processes of primitive
accumulation and enclosure under capitalism.
A corollary of the argument outlined above is to call
into question the link between primitive accumulation
and the shift to wage labour. While classic readings
bind up the ‘setting free’ of surplus population with the
emergence of new social relations of production, i.e.
wage labour, the concept of accumulation by dispos-
session does not (Li 2010; Samson 2015). As argued by
Glassman (2006), capital does not always benefit from
full proletarisation, since this would imply paying the
full costs of social reproduction. Similarly, Samson
(2015) notes that this phenomenon is true in the
informal economy. Not all people dispossessed of their
means of production turn to wage labour – some of
them enter the informal economy to make a living
(Samson 2015). Unsurprisingly, different interpreta-
tions of this phenomenon exist in the literature. As
pointed out by Lora-Wainwright (2016), informal
activities, being at the same time pre- and post-
industrial in their character, elude easy categorisations.
While orthodox Marxists understand their emergence
as a sort of pre-capitalist delay (Moore 2004), for
Sanyal, the informal economy represents an endoge-
nous and necessary product of capitalism (Sanyal
2007). The Indian political economist suggests that
informality is a form of social protection for people
excluded from formal employment. Yet he also
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
3
contends that the circulation of commodities in the
informal economy reflects the logic of pre-capitalist
commerce. Building on a famous passage of Capital,
Sanyal argues that in the informal economy, commodi-
ties circulate as commodity-money-commodity (C-M-
C’), rather than moving in the capitalist circuit of
money-commodity-money (M-C-M’). It follows that
surplus is not created in the sphere of production, but
rather by alienation, i.e. by ‘buying cheaper and selling
dearer’ (Wood 2002, 78). However, this is not always
the case, as this paper aims to show.
Building on Gidwani and Wainwright (2014), Sam-
son (2015) contends that Sanyal fails to recognise the
link between the two spheres of the economy. Accord-
ing to Samson, such analysis underestimates the com-
plexity of the informal economy, which also employs
wage labour and captures surplus during production.
Samson suggests, therefore, a more nuanced under-
standing of the relationship between dispossession and
informality. Indeed, individuals strategically choose to
move from formal to informal activities, and vice versa,
and intentionally create linkages between economies
(Samson 2015). Moreover, Samson suggests that a
central question in understanding the relationship
between dispossession and informality is the investiga-
tion of how the state and formal capital capture spheres
of accumulation previously created in the informal
economy (Samson 2015). Samson’s (2015) work shows
that dispossession is a complex process that encom-
passes both semiotic and material dimensions. Her
analysis points out that the dispossession of material
resources also entails epistemic injustice, erasing the
positive role of informal actors in knowledge produc-
tion. Additionally, it breaks with unidirectional narra-
tives that describe the informal economy as an outcome
of processes of dispossession, and demonstrates that
informality also creates wealth that is subjected to new
processes of enclosure.
From this perspective, accumulation by disposses-
sion is a process that serves to colonise spaces of
informality and to integrate them into different terri-
tories of market discipline (Samson 2015; Soederberg
2012). In spite of its advances, this argument is still not
sufficient to move beyond the formal–informal divide,
and eventually reinforces it. Therefore, this paper
suggests that both the linkages between formal and
informal economies and the relationship between
informality and dispossession are better understood if
informed by studies on variegated capitalism (Peck and
Theodore 2007; Zhang and Peck 2014). While litera-
ture has clearly suggested that informal economies
represent integral elements of capitalism (Chen 2012a
2012b), the understanding of how these activities relate
to its heterogeneity is still an open question (Hudson
2011; Peck 2013; Peck and Zhang 2013; Yeung 2007).
While the informal economy can be understood as an
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4 The enclosure of ‘waste land’
outcome of uneven development, it also represents a
central characteristic of a variegated mode of produc-
tion. It is through the investigation of this dialectic that
the paper moves beyond the dichotomy between
formality and informality and understands informality
as embedded in circuits of capital, coproducing eco-
nomic formations.
It is worth making more explicit the relevance of this
argument and why it is desirable to move beyond the
formal–informal divide. Recognising how informal, ille-
gal and illicit activities are an integral part of the overall
economy provides a great opportunity to understand
how different patterns of uneven development and
inequality come into being (Massey 1995 [1984]). The-
oretically, moving beyond strictly defined categories and
applying a more nuanced understanding of the connec-
tion between formality and informality should shed light
on relevant aspects of the political economy of capitalism
(Hudson 2014). Empirically, this would have practical
implications in understanding how marginalised eco-
nomic practices can make a positive contribution to
development (Amin 1994; Hudson 2014).
At present, the world of heterodox economics is
seemingly in widespread agreement about the defini-
tion of informality as an economic activity outside the
reach of official governance (Guha-Khasnobis et al.
2006). It is suggested that while some informal activities
break the law, evade taxation and operate without
licences, this does not always imply illegality (Gregson
and Crang 2017). Indeed, informal activities may be
tolerated or even promoted by governments as a way to
control social conflicts (Briassoulis 1999). In fact,
research has shown that the informal economy can
reach a high level of organisation, transforming the
economic structure of cities and expanding the organ-
isation of labour across local, regional and global scales
(Grant and Oteng-Ababio 2012; Herod et al. 2014; Hu
and Zhang 2017). Furthermore, rather than being a
homogeneous ensemble, informality is a variegated
phenomenon including a diversity of actors and struc-
tures such as petty capitalists, family-owned enterprises
and large international business networks.
Transposing Marcuse’s argument on the city (Marcuse
2005), it could be argued that the term informality
represents a perverse metaphor. Its use can obscure the
diversity of existing conflicts and interest groups that
compose and are in relation with the informal economy.
However, as Ma correctly argued in relation to Mar-
cuse’s criticism, metaphors are still valid tools and
discarding them would imply ‘to throw out the baby with
the bath water’ (2006, 377). As argued by a number of
works in the field (Meagher 2013), while definitions can
be contested (Schindler 2014 2017), these vocabularies
still maintain some value as heuristic devices. However,
rather than uncritically adopting categories of formality
and informality, the paper unpacks them, through an
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© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
analysis of how they are mobilised in different socioeco-
nomic contexts.
As such, moving beyond the formal–informal binary
is not a straightforward process of substituting one term
with another. Indeed, this would only risk further
highlighting the tension between informality as a
theoretical concept and as an empirical fact. As pointed
out by Schindler,
there is nothing inherently ‘informal’ about a particular
economic activity, but rather, the boundary between for-
mality and informality is blurry, fluid and determined by a
corpus of regulations, court rulings, enforcement practices,
and efforts to skirt regulations. (2017, 250)
Informality can appear for example in many different
combinations, such as unregistered labour in formally
registered companies or as unregistered companies
operating outside a societal regulatory framework
(Meagher 2013).
Empirically, the label ‘informal’ therefore applies to
the everyday practices of a multitude of actors that
operate within capitalist economies in both developed
and developing countries (Hudson 2014). However, as
a social construction (in legislation, official discourse,
press, academic literature, etc.) informality often
appears as discursively portrayed outside formal capi-
talist economy (Samson 2015). Here lies the contra-
diction that needs to be addressed. Conceptualising
informality as being part of circuits of capital in a
variegated economic system serves to unravel this
puzzle and to explain how wealth produced within the
capitalist mode of production can be subjected to
processes of dispossession. To better explain this
argument, Figure 1 gives a visualisation of circuits of
capital in waste recycling.
Here, discards become the inputs for new rounds of
commodity production (Crang et al. 2013; Moore 2012;
Wong 2015), which enter the formal economy as raw
materials, ready-made commodities and the like (Har-
ris-White and Rodrigo 2015; Samson 2015). The
dashed curves in the sphere of production describe
the porous nature of the relationship between what are
usually defined as formality and informality, as well as
between commodity and waste, while the dotted lines
represent the interruption of the circuit during the
production process. As the schema suggests, different
actors, engaging in both formal and informal practices
at different points in time and space, are engrained into
capitalist circuits of M-C-M’ and non-capitalist circuits
of C-M-C’. Indeed, what is usually defined as the
informal economy is an inherent part of the overall
economy (Chen 2012a; Hudson 2014; Meagher 2013).
This has a major theoretical implication for our
understanding of dispossession. Theories of primitive
accumulation and accumulation by dispossession are
usually mobilised to analyse the colonisation of spheres
Carlo Inverardi-Ferri
Figure 1 Circuits of capital
Source: Author, based on Harvey (2017), Herod et al. (2014), Hudson (2005) and Marx (1978 [1885])
of the economy outside the capitalist space (De Angelis
2007; Federici 2014 [2004]; Harvey 2005). However, the
line of argument above suggests that processes of
dispossession in the ‘so-called’ informal economy need
to be understood as operating both outside and within
the capitalist space. Indeed, specific varieties of capi-
talism colonise the space of other varieties as a way to
expand accumulation. Yet capital needs first to socially
construct other varieties as outside the dominant
model. Here, it is important to stress that this process
should not be understood as a mechanical outcome, but
rather as the result of the uneven capacity of different
private groups and the state to ‘use soft power, force,
and domination to impose specific patterns of valori-
sation, appropriation and dispossession’ (Jessop 2014,
54), in other words, the capacity to impose a specific
variety of capitalism.
China is a paradigmatic example of these dynamics.
Over the last few decades, the country has undergone a
major shift in its political economy. This change has
been an engineered process, initiated and led by the
party-state that sought to impose a transition to what is
usually labelled a ‘socialist market economy’ (Peck and
Zhang 2013). Yet the progressive marketisation of the
country has also been characterised by a great deal of
heterogeneity. A wide range of economic formations
have emerged in specific territories and different
industries (Zhang and Peck 2014), giving rise to a
hybrid system (Yeung 2000 2004). These transforma-
tions have not occurred without engendering processes
of dispossession that surprisingly have received little
attention in the literature (Webber 2008a 2008b).
Scholars have been silent on the geographies of
primitive accumulation in China and in particular on
the connection between dispossession and informality.
There are good reasons why this should concern us.
The analysis of dispossession in China can shed light on
particular forms that primitive accumulation assumes in
this geoinstitutional context and greatly contributes to
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
5
economic geography (Liu 2009; Yeung and Lin 2003).
Therefore, the paper contends that investigating waste
recycling in Beijing provides particularly fertile ground
for filling this major gap in the literature.
First, the paper shows that the evolution of waste
recycling over the last three decades has been
unequally co-dependent on circuits of capital that
characterise Chinese urbanisation. In other words, the
urbanisation process of Beijing has consistently influ-
enced the economic organisation of the recycling
industry. Here, it is necessary to note that while in
the Global North urbanisation is driven by secondary
circuits of capital (Harvey 1985), in developing coun-
tries urbanisation is often a state-led process that
involves not only secondary but also, and mainly,
primary circuits of capital (Lin and Yi 2011). As clearly
shown by Lin and Yi (2011), the production of the
urban in China is strictly connected to the political-
economic imperatives of the state and thus represents a
different logic compared with the rationale of waste
recycling. Urbanisation is a process that serves, besides
others, the need to foster regional growth. The
government thus plays an active role, building alliances
with the private sector, mobilising capital and setting
the right conditions for urban development (Lin and Yi
2011). In this process, ‘waste markets’ usually represent
one of the obstacles to be removed when new urban
plans are deployed.
Second, the paper outlines how another force, which
has a strong impact on waste recycling, seeks to
formalise the sector, that is to say, there exists a
political and economic effort to promote the passage to
machinery-based and large-scale industry for waste
recycling. The paper shows how, before dispossession
can take place, the development regime of recyclers
needs to be portrayed as ‘informal’, in other words,
outside the normal functioning of the dominant
economic model. Both the urbanisation process and
the formalisation of the sector take the shape of a
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6 The enclosure of ‘waste land’
dispossession. In the first case recyclers are divorced
from the land, in the second they are separated from
the waste commons. However, the paper demonstrates
that the nature of these two enclosures is different,
pointing at important theoretical implications for an
understanding of dispossession as a variegated process.
To further discuss this argument, the paper now turns
to the empirical study.
The enclosure of ‘waste land’
This part engages with the emergence of informal
recycling in Beijing and sets the groundwork for a
reconceptualisation of informality as being part of the
circuit of capital. First, it shows that the emergence of
unemployment in the countryside at the beginning of
the opening-up policies pushed many rural migrants
into the metropolis (Webber 2008a). While some
migrants were integrated into capitalist production as
wageworkers, for instance in the construction industry,
others turned to a variety of everyday practices to make
a better living. With the growing of the recycling
industry, migrants produced a specific urban landscape
in the peripheral areas of Beijing, generally defined as
‘urban villages’ in academic literature, and in particular
known as ‘waste markets’ in the industry. These
settlements, colliding with the imperatives of urban
restructuring, were recurrently demolished and rede-
veloped into middle-class areas. The section shows how
this kind of urban redevelopment is inherently con-
nected with a process of land dispossession (Shin 2016).
Second, it examines how this phenomenon resulted
in an acceleration of the concentration and centralisa-
tion of capital in the community of recyclers and
suggests that this brought about a complex social
stratification with the emergence of owners of capital
and wageworkers (Beja et al. 1999). While waste
recycling grew into a mature industry, it also co-existed
and was unevenly interrelated with urban circuits of
capital (Jessop 2014). The section shows that the
evolution of waste recycling has been a process
co-dependent on these circuits.
After the introduction of the reform and opening-up
policies in the early 1980s, the construction industry
was booming and the need for workers in metropolises
was high. A massive army of rural migrants, usually
referred to as the floating population (Fan 2011; Wang
2013), offered the labour-power required to sustain
these transformations. As described in a personal
communication by Wang Laoban,2 a local recycler,
back in those days, the entire country needed workers, they
were recruiting workers everywhere. I had a relative who was
working for a construction company, he told us that there
were job opportunities and brought us with him to Beijing.
We stayed in Chaoyangmen, where nowadays there is the
Ministry of foreign affairs [. . .]. [At the time], I used to work
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© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
for a construction company. With my team we worked
underground. Excavation. Physical work. Six Yuan per day.
At the time of the interview, Wang Laoban had modest
accommodation, composed of two small rooms and a
big courtyard that he used to stockpile materials. A coal
stove provided warmth: to maximise the heat produced
by the fire, the stovepipe traversed the entire room
before exiting through the opposite wall. During the
coldest months the temperature in Dongxiaokou could
drop to 15 degrees or lower. To fight the winter, Wang
Laoban, his wife and their child used to sleep together
on the big bed that served, during the day, as a sofa.
Next to the bed, a computer screen broadcasted images
of the yard’s entrance, in order to check who was
approaching the property. In the yard there were piles
of valuable discards: old compressors, microwaves
ovens, fire extinguishers and principally all kinds of
products containing copper. A fancy family car was
parked just outside the courtyard on the dusty road that
bisected the village. Wang Laoban was a relatively rich
man, a ‘small boss’. In the past, when the market was
still booming, he used to hire two or three workers on a
weekly basis to help him with his business.
Wang Laoban emigrated from the province of
Henan. He arrived in Beijing equipped only with his
youth, hope and courage. At the time, migrants were
moving illegally because of the restrictions related to
the hukou regulations. This household registration
system was originally established in 1958 and aimed
to control internal migration.3 Although it failed to
prevent rural residents from moving into urban areas,
the system did succeed in unevenly dividing the labour
market (Peck and Zhang 2013). The hukou resulted,
therefore, in a strong discriminatory measure for
migrants (Chan and Zhang 1999) who offered them-
selves as a cheap and unprotected force to boost the
urbanisation process in metropolises. ‘In the early
years, before they controlled the temporary resident
permit’, says Lao Li, a fellow villager from Henan,
we used to live together with many families. In the middle of
the night, anybody could shout to give the alert [that the
police was coming]. In a hurry everybody had to run away.
People leaving alone, and others with wives. It was not
convenient to have children. Sometimes, just the man used
to run away. We used to lock the doors and leave wives and
children inside, in silence. They shouldn’t make a noise.
Before the progressive reform of the hukou and the
normalisation of the process for obtaining a temporary
resident’s permit, which led to a relative increase of
inclusion of migrant workers into the urban society, this
group represented an extremely vulnerable population
(Chan 2015). Illegally working in Beijing, migrants were
easily subjected to repressive measures when political-
economic imperatives required implementation. While
contributing to the urban economy, in the impossibility
Carlo Inverardi-Ferri
of obtaining a local hukou, migrant workers experienced
the denial of the most basic social services provided to
the urban population (Chan and Buckingham 2008). As
described in the accounts above, they became, at best,
second-class citizens or, at worst, a persecuted group
relegated to a clandestine state (Zhang 2001). It is from
the womb of this extremely unprotected proletariat that
a number of workers turned to waste recycling (Gold-
stein 2006). These rural migrants, not willing to endure
the life of wageworkers in the metropolis, started to
trade discards as a strategy to make a better living. In
waste commerce, migrants coming from poorer rural
regions recognised a way to move to a more indepen-
dent and remunerable activity, improving their socioe-
conomic status and enabling their agency (Coe 2013;
Coe and Hess 2013; Herod 1997; Lund-Thomsen and
Coe 2015). Indeed, dispossession was not linked here
with the shift to wage-labour (Glassman 2006; Samson
2015), rather the opposite.
In the harsh urban environment, common roots and
social ties, a so-called guanxi network (Yeung 2004),
played a central function in initiating newcomers and
supporting them through their endeavours in the
metropolis. A complex system of institutions supported
recyclers over time. Since its beginning, this industry
has therefore appeared as an economic activity socially
embedded and institutionally mediated. This system
was not isolated, but coexisted and was connected in
different ways with other circuits of capital that
characterised both state-led and formal private
entrepreneurship (Jessop 2014). The recycling industry,
evolving in the economic ecology of post-Maoist
Beijing, co-depended on and was unevenly affected by
other urban dynamics.
In the domain of real estate, private and state-led
redevelopment projects provided many business oppor-
tunities for recycling. Besides boosting local and national
economies (Hsing 2010), a major consequence of the
urbanisation process was the explosion in the production
of construction waste. Many of the people who first
engaged in waste recycling were therefore migrant
workers recruited by construction companies. Some of
them quickly realised that it was possible to make a
better living collecting at night what their employers told
them to demolish during the day. ‘At the very beginning’
says an environmental activist, who investigated the
waste industry in China for several years,
the big majority of migrant workers were all employed in
construction sites. They realised that the entire city of
Beijing was demolishing and rebuilding. During the demo-
lition, there were always discarded products. Maybe what
was discarded in one place was needed somewhere else.
Recyclers captured and enhanced value from commodi-
ties discarded by the real estate industry and sold them
back as raw materials. This shows how these practices,
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
7
usually defined as informal, now connected with so-
called formal activities, boosted the overall economy.
Mediated by labour, discards re-entered the production
process as raw materials or ready-made commodities
(Herod et al. 2014). In Beijing, these activities were
characterised by an organisation of labour anchored in
specific sites that enabled this process to unfold, as
shown in the following paragraphs.
From the very beginning, agglomeration economies
characterised the trade of discards. The first migrants
who specialised in recycling gathered over the rural–
urban fringe of Beijing. Here, they could rent cheap
land from rural collectives and establish settlements for
living and carrying out their trade not too far from the
city centre. This practice also enabled rural villages on
the outskirts of the metropolis to produce new flows of
incomes from the rental of their unused land (Inver-
ardi-Ferri 2017a). Originally, one group clustered
around the area of Jianxiangqiao, almost six kilometres
from the city centre. At that time, as described by Lao
Liu, the area was still a wasteland.
When we first arrived, we used to live where now there is the
north fourth ring road. At the beginning we lived at
Jianxiangqiao, then we moved to several other places. At
the time, it was extremely far from the city centre. There
were no buildings, no people, and no cars. We collected
waste. Cans, papers. Little by little we earned more money.
Lao Liu was the son of a big market boss in Xiejia, a
major hub for the refurbishment of electronics in the
northern periphery of Beijing. In contrast to Wang
Laoban, his family occupied a higher rank in the social
stratification of waste recyclers, acting as a mediator
between the migrant community and the local admin-
istration. His family, as many others, emigrated from
Henan in the late 1980s. They first lived in Jianxi-
angqiao, in the village of Erlizhuan, until this first
settlement was destroyed for the construction of the
fourth ring road. Urban circuits of capital engendered
processes of dispossession that pushed this group of
migrants to relocate their activities. In other words, the
incapacity of recyclers in shaping the economic ecology
of Beijing (Jessop 2011) resulted in recurrent dispos-
session of land from the migrant community and
the accelerated evolution of the industry’s economic
structure.
This process is not the exclusive result of market
forces. In order to drive recyclers out of a specific
location, dispossession needs to take place. The state
plays a major role in mediating this process, being the
principal owner of land. Local governments recurrently
integrate communal rural land into new urban admin-
istrative districts, in order to develop new residential and
commercial areas. When land undergoes a ‘rural–urban
conversion, collectives and their members are not in a
position to negotiate with the municipal or county
ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2017 doi: 10.1111/tran.12217
8 The enclosure of ‘waste land’
governments who act on behalf of the state’ (Lin 2009,
11). As a result, recyclers carrying out their activities in
these spaces need to recurrently relocate at the new
rural–urban fringe (Tao et al. 2014; Tong and Tao 2016).
Compensations are offered to rural villagers and some-
times also to recyclers. Yet these are often very small, as
lamented by a recycler who was forced to leave
Dongxiaokou in the 2010s (personal communication):
The government provided a relatively low compensation to
the villagers. Two hundred thousand yuan for one mu,4 but
they didn’t agree. [. . .] We [recyclers] are also compensated
for the constructions [we built] in our market. This is
calculated in square meters. One square meter is compen-
sated with a few hundred yuan. Extremely low. [. . .] The
villagers can negotiate a bit better compared to us; after all
they belong to a rural collective.
Following the demolition of Erlizhuan in the 1990s,
some recyclers established their activities anew in Wali
and Bajia. Literature usually refers to Bajia as Henan-
cun or the village of Henan (Beja et al. 1999) since the
large majority of recyclers came from this region. In
these settlements, said Lao Yang, the son of a big boss
in Dongxiaokou, in a personal communication,
recyclers were mainly small investors. But a bit of scale
had already appeared, mainly in Wali and Longwangtang.
In the village, somebody had built a warehouse. There
were maybe ten, twenty or thirty enterprises that gathered
together.
The relocation to Bajia and Wali contributed to the
production of a new spatial organisation of the
economic activity. At the beginning of 2000s, however,
the awarding of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to
Beijing resulted in a new wave of redevelopment
projects, and therefore in a new wave of dispossessions.
‘In 2001, Wali was destroyed because of the Olympic
games’ (personal communication) and recyclers had to
move once again. The project for the construction of
the Olympic park and the redevelopment of neigh-
bouring areas brought about the demolition of spaces
where recyclers carried out their activities. Once more,
dispossession accelerated the evolution of the industry,
resulting in an increased concentration and centralisa-
tion of capital, as described below by Lao Yang. At the
time of these events, Lao Yang’s father was a petty
merchant. He decided to seize this opportunity to climb
the social ladder. He borrowed money to invest in the
establishment of a new market in the rural village of
Dongxiaokou:
In 2002 Beijing had just reached the third ring road. The
fourth ring road didn’t exist yet. Dongxiaokou is outside the
fifth ring road and at the time it was still a rural village.
During an entire day you could not see one single car. The
village was very poor. [. . .] All around was wasteland.
The grass was one or two people tall. We used bulldozers to
level the land. It took us three days.
ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2017 doi: 10.1111/tran.12217
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Lao Yang’s father realised a number of infrastructural
works to create the waste market and then rented out
plots of land to fellow villagers who relocated their
activities there. New social relations now tied Lao
Yang’s father to his fellow villagers and empowered
him with more responsibilities. Besides the work for the
material construction and maintenance of the market,
he was now responsible for a number of administrative
procedures. He acted as a mediator between local
authorities and small recyclers. This involved, for
instance, the sorting out of commercial licences. The
new role played by Lao Yang’s father increasingly
differentiated him from both small bosses and informal
wageworkers. While the two latter groups appropriated
value as a direct product of their labour, Lao Yang’s
father mainly captured profits by subletting land. As a
result, his role was that of a different kind of
entrepreneur, one who resembled a genuine capitalist.
This distinction prompted him to enter into new
economic behaviours. He started to differentiate and
fragmentise his businesses. He reinvested some of his
profits in different sectors through a small asset
management company that he established with his
son in order to valorise the capital of the family.
The demolition of the village of Wali had provided
Lao Yang’s father the opportunity to improve his social
condition. This process also resulted in a new economic
organisation of the industry in Dongxiaokou. Here the
organisation of labour, in what some define as the
informal economy, reached a high level of complexity –
the emergence of different social classes and a
multifaceted network of actors showed that so-called
informal practices cannot be conceptualised as outside
capitalist economy or separated from official gover-
nance. Therefore, the term ‘informality’ to refer to
these variegated activities masks the multitude of actors
at play in these power geometries (Yeung 2005),
integrated within the overall economy at different
scales and through a variety of governance arrange-
ments. Processes of dispossession thus operate in
spaces situated both outside and within capitalism.
Both the metamorphosis of Lao Yang’s father and
the evolution of informal recycling were interrelated
with the dynamics of urbanisation and with the
dominance of circuits of capital that drove this process.
Circuits of capital in urban development not only
recurrently dispossessed recyclers of their means of
production, but also shaped the evolution of their
economic activities over the years, accelerating the
concentration and centralisation of capital in the
community. Somehow, urbanisation worked as a pro-
cess of creative destruction (Harvey 2008; Schumpeter
2010 [1942]). Here, it is also worth noting that while the
relative impacts of urbanisation and recycling activities
were different, these two spheres of the economy were
interrelated and plausibly complementary (Jessop
Carlo Inverardi-Ferri
2014). The following part focuses on discourse pro-
cesses and shows how specific groups in society
construct and utilise the metaphor of informality as a
means of dispossession.
The enclosure of the ‘waste commons’
The first empirical part has shown that activities usually
defined as informal should be conceptualised as linked
to the overall economy. A corollary of this argument is
that processes of dispossession in the ‘so-called’ infor-
mal economy need to be understood as operating both
outside and within the space of capitalism. This second
part further examines how this mechanism unfolds. It
shows how dominant groups in society appropriate the
metaphor of informality in order to construct specific
spheres of the economy as outside the desirable
development regime and subsequently colonise them.
Once particular spheres of the economy are discur-
sively portrayed and/or legally defined as outside the
preferred variety of capitalism, a specific pattern of
dispossession can be imposed (Jessop 2014).
In China, recycling activities that were tolerated, and
eventually endorsed by authorities in the past as an
engine to promote local growth, are nowadays por-
trayed as outside the new imperatives of ‘ecological
modernisation’ and sustainable development (Lora-
Wainwright 2016; Schulz 2015). Since the beginning of
the 2000s, narratives describing local recycling econo-
mies as a source of uncontrolled environmental pollu-
tion have increasingly influenced policy-making (Balde
et al. 2015), resulting in legislation favouring the
interest of large-scale industrial recycling (Inverardi-
Ferri 2017b).
Here, it is worth noticing that the expropriation of
land, analysed in the previous part, appeared as a
recurrent process. However, it did not represent a
final enclosure, since recyclers managed to relocate
their activities to other parts of the city. Instead, the
dispossession of waste, through the means of law,
represents a different kind of enclosure. It mirrors the
historical process of ‘primitive accumulation’, engen-
dering the emergence of new social relations of
production. In other words, once informal activities
become illegal and financial incentives are given to
large-scale complexes, traditional recyclers can only
become wageworkers if they want to remain in the
industry. This account contributes to shape our
understanding of dispossession as a variegated
process.
In recent years, public policies in China have
principally focused on building municipal collection
systems for recyclables (Wang et al. 2008; Zhang and
Wen 2014), introducing cutting-edge technologies for
the final disposal of solid waste (Li et al. 2015), and
establishing management schemes for the recycling of
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
9
specific waste streams, such as waste electrical and
electronic appliances (e-waste) (CHEARI 2015; Tong
et al. 2015). In Beijing, a number of pilot projects for
the establishment of a municipal collection system for
recyclables have been realised over the years (Wang
et al. 2008; Zhang and Wen 2014). Clearly, these efforts
have been a direct source of competition for actors
already established in the metropolis. Their effective-
ness, however, has often been questioned. According to
Chinese scholars, these projects did not achieve their
goals, for they failed to integrate existing recycling
networks into their systems (Chi et al. 2014; Zhang
et al. 2010). As a result, traditional actors today still
dominate the door-to-door collection of recyclables
(Linzner and Salhofer 2014). As pointed out by a well-
known Chinese scholar in the domain of waste man-
agement in a personal communication, this has
occurred because traditional waste recyclers are able
to maximise value creation and enhancement.
Although they have achieved limited results, these
pilot projects have nevertheless been highly contested
(Zhang and Wen 2014). Likewise, the introduction of
end-of-pipe technologies such as waste-to-energy plants
has also been a debated topic (Johnson 2013). In
China, the number of incinerators has sharply
increased in recent years. Fifty-seven new operating
power plants have been built between 2011 and 2013
and these numbers are estimated to grow (Li et al.
2015). The practice of completely disposing of waste,
occupying small land areas and generating power, is a
solution usually advocated as an efficient alternative for
the final disposal of municipal solid waste (Li et al.
2015). Similarly, the recent implementation of the
‘extended producer responsibility’ scheme for elec-
tronic waste (CHEARI 2015) appears to be rooted in
analogous dynamics. Here, the institutional design of
the scheme strongly supports big operators. The
establishment of a certification system aiming at
standardising and controlling recycling practices acts
as a barrier to entry for small-scale operators, usually
portrayed by official narratives as pursuing activities
with high environmental costs (Schulz 2015).
Unsurprisingly, the introduction of new technologies
has far-reaching social and political consequences
(Hobson 2015). Besides the growing concern for the
uneven displacement of environmental and health
externalities produced by large plants, capital-intensive
facilities also represent a major threat to the livelihood
of traditional recyclers (Gutberlet 2012). As pointed
out by Demaria and Schindler (2015), the development
of large-scale industry in developing countries usually
implies new value/waste chains that exclude small-scale
actors. The reconfiguration of urban metabolisms in
favour of large-scale complexes appears therefore as a
form of enclosure that dispossesses traditional recyclers
who make a living through waste processing. While it is
ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2017 doi: 10.1111/tran.12217
10
difficult to assess the factual scope of this process due
to the lack of reliable data on the industry (Lepawsky
et al. 2015), it is not difficult to understand that the
introduction of new regulatory technologies is charac-
terised by circuits of capital that appear as antagonistic
to traditional recycling activities and therefore per-
ceived as a major threat, as expressed by a Beijing
recycler who anticipated that ‘in a few years [they] will
all be replaced’ (personal communication). Indeed,
environmental policies implicitly involve political and
economic choices that promote specific circuits of
waste, value and capital.
While these dynamics have clearly important material
consequences, they also occupy fundamental symbolic
spaces. The definition of what the ‘informal economy’ is
plays a major role in defining existing recycling activities
as outside the dominant development regime (Schulz
2015). White papers, reports and guidelines, produced by
local and international organisations and the private
sector, contribute to defining informality and how this
‘problem’ should be solved (Inverardi-Ferri 2017b). The
redefinition of the environmental discourse and the
stigmatisation of existing forms of recycling is indeed a
form of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) that excludes
traditional actors from both material and semiotic
dimensions of waste recycling (Samson 2015). As pointed
out by one of my informants:
the first to collect discards were migrant workers employed
in construction companies. At the very beginning they all
started in this way, with a bicycle or a tricycle. At the time,
they collected plastics and non-ferrous metals. Some mate-
rials could be collected freely while others were still
controlled under the planned economy.
Migrant workers, as described in the fragment above,
started to scavenge waste materials in the 1980s (Kirby
and Lora-Wainwright 2015), and were responsible for a
new appreciation that transformed the social ontology
of waste into the valuable resource from which they are
now separated. This account underlines the importance
of both narrative and legislation in socially constructing
traditional recycling as outside the dominant develop-
ment regime (Schulz 2015). This enables processes of
dispossession through the transition to different prop-
erty regimes. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1980s
some waste materials could be collected freely while
others were still administered under planned economy;
in the following decades, the industry was progressively
deregulated and a great variety of recyclables entered
the market. Instead, in recent years the introduction of
new waste management schemes, under the banner of
ecological modernisation, had the not too indirect
effect of redefining who has the right to recycle waste.
Today, while some categories of waste appear as
commons (Cave 2015; Lane 2011; Schlager and Ostrom
1992), others do not. For instance, the certification
ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2017 doi: 10.1111/tran.12217
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
The enclosure of ‘waste land’
system of the e-waste scheme legally entitles a limited
number of companies to process this category of
discards (CHEARI 2015), institutionalising the domi-
nance of specific circuits of capital over others. These
patterns of appropriation, practices of valorisation and
dynamics of dispossession are the result of economic
and political strategies that involve both the market and
the state (Jessop 2014). Indeed, the case of the
‘formalisation’ of the waste industry in China shows
that dispossession is a variegated phenomenon that can
be engendered by a diversity of causes such as a specific
political project, the ‘relative weights of different
varieties’ of capitalism and/or ‘the uneven impact of
different circuits of capital’ (Jessop 2014, 54).
Conclusion
This paper has proposed an analysis of dispossession as
a variegated process, operating both outside and inside
the capitalist space. Developing this argument through
an empirical account of the struggle of a migrant
community of waste recyclers in Beijing, the paper has
sought to contribute to recent geographical debates on
the connection between dispossession and the informal
economy (Gillespie 2016 2017; Samson 2015) and,
more widely, to theories of primitive accumulation and
accumulation by dispossession (De Angelis 2007; Fed-
erici 2014 [2004]; Harvey 2005).
First, engaging with scholarship on the informal
economy, the paper has aimed to reconceptualise infor-
mality in relation to capitalist production. Some scholars
have argued that informality can be understood as a safety
net for poorer classes and analysed it as an economic space
where commodities are produced and circulate outside
capitalist relations (Sanyal 2007). The paper, however,
has shown that this reading fails to recognise the
complexity of what is usually defined as the informal
economy (Meagher 2013; Samson 2015). The paper has
highlighted the importance of linkages between formal
and informal activities and reconceptualised informality
as an element embedded into circuits of capital. Rather
than as a phenomenon operating in non-capitalist spheres
of the economy, informality also exists as an integral part
of the capitalist space (Hudson 2014).
Second, the paper has shown that the formal–
informal dichotomy still dominates our understanding
of dispossession. The paper has sought to move beyond
this impasse. It has shown that practices described as
informal are usually discursively defined as outside the
dominant development model as a way to foster
processes of dispossession. Addressing this point, the
paper has argued that the social construction of
informality as a space outside formal capitalist econ-
omy enables specific circuits of capital to colonise the
geographies of other economic organisations. It has
Carlo Inverardi-Ferri
contended that dispossession in what is usually defined
as the ‘informal economy’ can be therefore analysed as
the result of the uneven impact of alternative circuits of
capital and/or varieties of capitalism. This reinforces
our understanding of informality as an element embed-
ded into circuits of capital of a variegated mode of
production (Jessop 2014).
The empirical sections have shown that both the
urbanisation process and the introduction of new tech-
nologies and regulations for waste management have a
significant impact on the community of traditional
recyclers in Beijing. Urbanisation has regularly dispos-
sessed recyclers of land, who have repeatedly been forced
to relocate their activities to other areas of the city. A few
successful community members, who invested their
capital in renting activities, have coordinated these
relocations. As a result, the urbanisation process has
accelerated the centralisation and concentration of
capital in the community, unevenly shaping the evolution
of these economic activities over the years. Here, urban
circuits of capital have been unequally interrelated with
practices of waste recycling. Yet they appear as comple-
mentary to them (Jessop 2014).
This has not been the case for circuits of capital fixed
into new regulatory technologies associated with the
political-economic project of ‘formalising’ the industry.
This project, and the circuits of capital associated with it,
represents a rival economic force, which appears unlikely
to co-exist with traditional practices of recycling. Indeed,
cutting-edge technologies pave the way for a variety of
capitalism highly based on machinery, large-scale indus-
try and wage labour, which colonises the economic space
of traditional waste recyclers. While these two enclosures
appear different in their unfolding, they are, nevertheless,
underpinned by a similar mechanism. Narratives con-
structing traditional recyclers and their spaces as outside
the preferred development model are the mainstay of
processes of dispossession and enclosure under the
dominant market discipline.
This has implications in understanding dispossession
as a variegated process. While literature has understood it
as a process of enclosure of spaces outside capitalism, the
paper has shown that theories of dispossession need to be
expanded to embrace processes also occurring within the
capitalist space. Certainly, this paper can only scratch the
surface of this phenomenon. New questions arise on the
analysis of which processes and practices underpin
dispossession within the diverse geographies of capital-
ism, pushing both theoretical and empirical research into
new challenging territories.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Maan Barua for his comments and
support, but more importantly for all the reading we did
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
11
together in Oxford. I would also like to thank Shamel
Azmeh, Sophie Cranston, the Editor Adrian Bailey, and
three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. I
thank Helge Peters and members of the Oxford’s Trans-
formations and Technological Natures Clusters for their
insightful comments on earlier versions of the paper. In
addition, I am grateful to Filippo Celata, Maura Bene-
giamo, and the organisers of the 2015 Societ a di Studi
Geografici Annual Conference, where an earlier draft of
this paper was presented. I also thank Fiona Nash for her
support during the different phases of the paper’s review
process. Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Tong
Xin and Tao Dongyan at Peking University, and Luca
Gabbiani at EFEO for their hospitality and support
during my fieldwork in China. As usual, all errors,
omissions and misinterpretations are my own responsi-
bility.
Notes
1 Jennifer Gabrys (2011) evokes the same passage from
Calvino.
2 Pseudonyms are used to protect the anonymity of
informants.
3 In December 2014 the State Council published a propo-
sition for the reform of the hukou system in small and
medium townships. However, substantial restrictions
remain unchanged for megacities (cities with more than
5 million people). See State Council (2014).
4 1 mu is around 615 m2.
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