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Informal workers produce economic, social, and environmental value for cities. Too often, policy elites, including those promoting sustainable cities, overlook this value, proposing formalization and relying on deficit-based framings of informal work. In this perspective piece, we bring critical research and community-produced knowledge about informal work to sustainability scholarship. We challenge the dominant, deficit-based frame of informal work, which can dispossess workers, reduce their collective power, and undercut the social and environmental value their work generates. Instead, thinking historically, relationally, and spatially clarifies the essential role of informal work for urban economies and highlights their potential for promoting sustainable cities. It also reveals how growth-oriented economies reproduce environmental destruction, income inequality, and poverty, the very conditions impelling many to informal work. Rather than formalization, we propose reparation, an ethic and practice promoting ecological regeneration, while redressing historic wrongs and redistributing resources and social power to workers and grassroots social movements.

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This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption practices like bicycling among the new middle classes of Bangalore, India. I argue that expansions of bicycling practices are dependent on the construction of defensive distinctions, which I define as distinctions that draw equally on lifestyle-based and ethics-based discourses to normalize bicycling among Bangalore’s middle classes. With their environmental discourses and signage, middle-class cyclists make claims to being ethical actors and ecological citizens concerned about global environments. Their high-end bicycles and special gear enable them to maintain their social status in personal and professional circles, despite adopting what is an essentialized and stigmatized mobility practice in a social context where personal automobiles are a dominant symbol of respectability and propertied citizenship. These defensive distinctions are anchored in communities that facilitate social learning, skill-building, and the creation of collective identities. I highlight the importance of considering the role of ethical discourses in consolidating “low-status” social practices among “high-status” class fractions and discuss the implications of promoting sustainable consumption through the othering of the poor. By applying a social practice analytic to study middle-class bicycling practices, this article makes a significant contribution to the growing literature that investigates the applicability of practice-based approaches to environmental behaviors and sustainable consumption in a novel context.