Urban waste picking has largely been examined through economic, policy-oriented, or social-problem frameworks, with limited attention to its spatial and embodied dimensions, particularly in Iranian cities. This article offers an ethnographic analysis of waste picking as a mode of urban dwelling shaped by movement, embodiment, and everyday negotiations with urban order. The study is based on four months of qualitative fieldwork in Amol, Iran, using participant observation and in-depth engagement with purposively selected waste pickers across specific urban locations and temporal rhythms. Findings indicate that waste pickers actively participate in the social production of urban space through repetitive routes, strategic timing, and spatial tactics that transform marginal sites into functional and meaningful nodes within the city’s lived geography. Their bodies emerge as key sites where environmental inequality and urban exclusion are materialized; continuous exposure to contamination and risk demonstrates how structural vulnerability is inscribed onto lived experience. At the same time, adaptive mobility and strategic invisibility function as forms of everyday resistance within regimes of control. By integrating urban anthropology, embodiment theory, and environmental justice, this study argues that understanding contemporary cities requires attention to marginalized, mobile, and environmentally exposed forms of urban life that remain institutionally unrecognized yet materially indispensable