Informality in Urban Metabolism expands conventional resource-flow analysis to include actors, exchanges and practices that remain absent from official statistics. The project focuses on the ways informal systems contribute to circularity and service provision while also reflecting unequal access to land, infrastructure, recognition and political voice.

The associated framework examines informal flows across water, energy, waste, food and mobility. It combines material-flow thinking with an actor-and-governance perspective, highlighting flexible regulation, affordability, gender, participation and land-use effects as central analytical dimensions. This makes it possible to represent informal activities neither as statistical noise nor as a single undifferentiated sector, but as varied arrangements with distinct environmental and social consequences.

Applied to Brussels and Wallonia, the project supports more inclusive circular-economy policy. It asks how public authorities can acknowledge the contribution of informal actors without erasing their autonomy or reinforcing precarity. The research was developed through Wallonia-Brussels International postdoctoral support and is linked to wider exchanges on looking south, grassroots metabolisms and formal–informal entanglements.