Wasteland encompasses the real and the imagined of a waste-defined landscape in a canny utilitarian valorisation of land within the production of the urban. Challenging its antithetical relationship to nature, the objective of this priority theme is to bring in multidisciplinary conceptual tools from archaeology, anthropology, geography/remote sensing, architecture/planning, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, etc., to challenge not only its pejorative connotations but also open up new analytical possibilities to theoretically and empirically employ waste in charting the uneven geographies of urbanisation relationally across the global North and South.