As an ideal and material space, the ‘urban commons’ is often understood in relation to either defence or to the production of new collectives. The commons is both something in need of defending, and a generative source for practising ways of living with difference, developing new forms of collective life, and collaboratively producing new urban resources and imaginaries. In this paper, I seek to stretch the geographies of the urban commons through attention to everyday metabolic processes that both defy distinctions of urban-rural and body-global, and which become known and politicised in often strikingly different ways. More broadly, the paper seeks an alternative engagement with both the ‘urban’ and the ‘commons’ and their conceptual and political relation. It does so in relation to research on informal settlements, especially in India.