Too often, planning theory misidentifies how planning and governance practice actually works in troublesome zones understood as unplanned or ungoverned. To counter this tendency, I use ethnographic research in one of the most active border economies in the hemisphere, where noncompliance with trade and use-of-space laws is widespread. In contrast to the commonly held assessment that Ciudad del Este, Paraguay is lawless and unplanned, I show how planners promote elite-led and exclusionary urban transformation via the strategic deployment of narratives of the unplanned city, what I call "city-stories." However, city-stories are also a terrain of contestation. I analyze the city-stories of precarious street vendors as a diagnostic of power, as embodied perspectives on everyday practices of regulation that can clarify how local state actors actively foster spatial disorder and legal uncertainty as part of planning practice.