A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time

The book’s origins lie in our belief in the necessity of feminist urban knowledge production, a belief further endorsed by our prior critical engagement with the analytical framework of planetary urbanization and our collective ruminations during and post this engagement on the nature of urban theory (Reddy 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). Not least the considerable response to the theme issue of Society and Space (Peake et al. 2018) showed us that there was an audience desirous of troubling the hegemony of urban theory. Moreover, our approach of working as a team across hierarchies of junior and senior scholars, generations, genders, sexualities, institutions, and disciplines – a praxis we refer to as ‘the intergenerational social reproductive labor of knowledge production’ (Peake et al. 2018, p. 377) – had been fruitful and positive and we wanted it to continue. It was as much a pedagogical experience of reading and writing together, and sharing meals, as it was an exploration of our places within the academy and an intellectual foray into urban theory. And while Roza Tchoukaleyska left for Newfoundland, Elsa Koleth, a new post-doctoral fellow at the City Institute at York University, joined us.

Our Canadian location, although mediated by our own migrations from Australia, India, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, led us to put out a call for papers in 2018 on the theme of a ‘feminist urban theory for our time’ at the annual conferences of the Canadian Association of Geographers, the American Association of Geographers, and the Urban Affairs Association. Some of our contributors answered these calls for conference papers, while others are members of the GenUrb (SSHRC-funded) project (Urbanization, gender and the global south: a transformative knowledge network). Much has been written in urban scholarship by feminist and postcolonial scholars on global circuits of knowledge production and the privileging of Anglo-American scholarship. We recognize that sending conference calls to those attending North American based conferences not only reduces the geographic locations of the research reported but also heightens whiteness as a political and epistemological position and that this volume is thereby limited in its capacity to pluralize and broaden the epistemic community engaged in feminist urban theory. Nonetheless, our authors come from Colombia, Germany, Greece, Iran, Palestine, Puerto Rico, and South Africa as well as Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. And they report on research based in cities in Argentina, Canada, Columbia, Greece, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Collectively, the contributors explore how the urban can be understood through the light shone on the dynamics of social reproduction in people’s everyday lives and their interaction with processes of capitalist accumulation as they are actively reconfigured through the manifold processes of contemporary urbanization. They proffer the insight that a feminist social reproduction approach to the urban offers not only an engaged analysis of the variegated nature of the urban but also of the relationship between capitalism and the production of social difference. With a focus on the everyday urban contexts within which social reproduction takes place, the various contributions make visible the insidious, often unacknowledged, and seemingly innocuous ways in which lives are being transformed, highlighting the moral economies within which these contexts are normalized and rendered ordinary rather than unlivable.

As we wrote, the pandemic conditions that have gripped the globe in the most catastrophic and intimate ways have cast many of the processes discussed in this book into sharp and brutal relief. We are reminded once again of the absolute necessity of social reproduction for human survival, of the fragility of the infrastructures and bodies that make social reproduction possible, and of the grossly unjust systems of power that secure the social reproduction of the few through the disposability, expulsion, and annihilation of many others. Whether seen through the near collapse of health and welfare systems in urban centres already ravaged by austerity, the mass exodus of impoverished migrant workers back to rural villages, or the significant reductions in women’s participation in numerous labour forces, the prevailing crises of social reproduction around the world have been exacerbated exponentially in current conditions.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge the work undertaken by the contributors to this book, a number of them junior scholars, as well as their patience in revising various drafts of their chapters. We also thank Antipode ’s book series editors, Sharad Chari and Vinay Gidwani, who started the process of creating this book with us and Nik Theodore who saw us through to the end, for their interest in our project and providing us with the opportunity to pursue it through to its publication.

Linda Peake, Rajyashree N. Reddy, Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz, Elsa Koleth, and darren patrick/dp

1 Peake, L., Patrick, D., Reddy, R., Tanyildiz, G., Ruddick, S., and Tchoukaleyska, R. (2013). Placing planetary urbanization in other fields of vision. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (3): 374–386. doi: 10.1177/0263775818775198

2 Reddy, R.N. (2018). The urban under erasure: Towards a postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (3): 529–539.

3 Ruddick, S., Peake, L., Patrick, D., and Tanyildiz, G.S. (2018) Planetary urbanization: An urban theory for our time? Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (3): 387–404. doi: 10.1177/0263775817721489

Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz (Brock University)

Linda Peake and Elsa Koleth (York University)

Rajyashree N. Reddy (University of Toronto Scarborough) darren patrick/dp and Susan Ruddick (University of Toronto)

As we move through the 21st century, the changing geographies of urbanization, increasingly unfettered capital accumulation, unprecedented levels of migration, and crises of climate and viral pandemics, have added further urgency to the seemingly intractable question of which categories and methods are adequate to understanding and researching the urban. And yet, notwithstanding their increasing inability to explain 21st century urbanization and urbanism in their ‘infinite variety’, the 19th and 20th century economic compacts upon which mainstream and Marxist urban theory have been based – the nexus of urban land, circuits of capital, production, and agglomeration economies – remain in place. While it is still customary to approach the contemporary urban by recounting the shifts in the structures and agendas of capitalism and the impacts of these shifts on daily life, we contend it is not possible to think through the urban without considering the role and relations of social reproduction: which are neither subordinate to production, nor an embellishment; neither something to be ‘added to urban theory’, nor an after-effect to the analysis of processes of urbanization that was assumed adequate without it. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of the global crisis in social reproduction, large swathes of mainstream and critical urban scholarship continuously fail to recognize both the analytical interdependence between relations of social reproduction and production, and how this interdependence shapes social relations and urban futures. It has been left to feminist urban scholars, time and again, to call attention to the radical incompleteness of urban thought, decrying theory that writes life and lives out of time and place 1(see, for example, Kollontai 1977 [1909]; Burnett 1973; Hayford 1974; Lofland 1975; Mackenzie 1980; Markusen 1980; Wekerle 1980; Hayden 1983; Ferguson et al . 2016; Fernandez 2018; Kanes Weissman 2000; Rendell, Penner, and Borden 2000; Spain 2002; Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2004; Meehan and Strauss 2015; Miraftab 2016; Peake 2017; Pratt 2018; Ruddick et al . 2018). We offer this book with the hope that is amplifies and resonates with this long-growing feminist chorus. 2