A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

zones of agglomeration that themselves implode, fragment, and destruct while also extending their infrastructural reach deep into previously remote areas (Brenner 2014).

It is in the second sense in which Lefebvre uses the urban revolution – as a shift in the site of struggle from the factory to the everyday – that he opens a space for social reproduction and the urban as a ground for the formation of difference, ‘alluding to the potential for a new politics of urban revolution, which can transform everyday life in all its aspects’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 394). Beyond Lefebvre, however, rarely have (non-feminist) critical analyses of the urban turned to the relationship between urbanization and social reproduction.⁹ And yet social reproduction is inexorably implicated in driving crises of capitalism (Briggs 2017). As Norton and Katz (2017, pp. 7–8) state: ‘A crisis of social reproduction occurs when existing social, political economic, or environmental conditions and relations can no longer be reproduced…. Likewise, a crisis of social reproduction occurs if the labor force cannot be reproduced in a given time and place or find the means to labor productively in a given setting.’ Crises of social reproduction, alongside climate and environmental crises, war, conflict, and the resultant poverty and lack of livelihoods, have resulted in the displacement of millions to and within urban places, either within their country of origin or beyond.¹⁰ Urban life, marked by unprecedented levels of migration and inequality,¹¹ has led David Harvey (2014, p. 60) to note that: ‘The massive forced and unforced migrations of people now taking place in the world, …will have as much if not greater significance in shaping urbanization in the 21st century as the powerful dynamic of unrestrained capital mobility and accumulation.’ Not least, people on the move and the deepening of inequality from increasingly unregulated rounds of capital accumulation has loosened the relation between the state, capital, work, and labour, increasing the myriad ways in which lives are reproduced outside the wage. In the 21st century, migration, forced and unforced, is primarily a stake in a future, a stake in life itself.¹²

      Following Lefebvre, we understand the urban as the conceptual knot mediating between the everyday ontological struggles of oppressed peoples, and the global spatial restructuring of hegemonic modes of production. However, rethinking the conceptual status of the urban as mediating does not confer it with an untethered epistemological salience and autonomy, thereby overriding the processes, lives, struggles, and subjectivities it is supposed to explicate. It is through social reproduction as method (as opposed to this epistemological autonomy), that the processes of urbanization, including its undoing, become ‘knowable’, albeit never entirely known, due to the urban’s undecidability. In this way, we argue that a contemporary consideration of the spatial organization of our social lives needs to investigate the ways in which the processes of urbanization themselves are in need of explanation through social reproduction.

      Whether in situations arrived at through displacement or through decades of in-situ neglect, the capacity for the social reproduction of everyday urban life is being eroded, characterized by uncertainty, insecurity, and disposability. The rise of precarious labour is driven in part by the desire of corporations to keep down costs – that is monetized subsidies to social reproduction: zero-hour contracts, payment below the minimum wage, short-term contracts, in short the ‘gig economy’, increasingly characterize the world of work, underpinned by capital’s reduced commitment to the social wage and social contract. Simone’s (2009) research across multiple cities reminds us that ‘people as infrastructure’ is not a new phenomenon; informal employment has always been an inherent part of capitalist systems of production. Precarity and insecurity, however, are now the primary material and emotional conditions through which social reproduction is instantiated, whereby the devolution of responsibilities onto the individual is not imposed but rather has become an accepted norm as it articulates with other commonsense understandings and becomes entrenched in socio-spatial practices.

The practice of migration, and its growth globally, is also partially a manifestation of the financialization of society as migration has become a way for individuals to navigate risk in the absence of the state providing conditions for their social reproduction.¹³ In particular, the increasing financialization of social reproduction has influenced the ways in which urbanization takes place and is experienced. It is only slightly over a decade since the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States spread globally, generated by the restructuring of lending through the predatory pursuit of subprime mortgages, which centred on urban neighbourhoods, adding to the deepening of inequality, displacement, and austerity politics. There were a number of pressures directly related to the financialization of social reproduction, that increased vulnerability, not the least of which was to increasingly entreat low-income Latinx and African-Americans, who had previously been redlined out of the housing market, to monetize their home-space, as a retirement plan and investment. Wade (2009, p. 40) reports that in the United States in 2008 alone ‘more than 3 million houses were foreclosed in 2008, meaning that about 10 million people shifted into rented accommodation, vans or shelters’ (quoted in Feldman, Menon, and Geisler 2011, p. 12).

      In the face of such devastation, we turn to the chapters in this volume to explore the social reproduction of everyday urban life. Building on feminist urban theories and social reproduction feminisms, the chapters shed light on different aspects of the relationship between the urban and social reproduction, within different contexts but always through socio-political action. In what follows, we outline how the book’s contributors address not only this relationship but also their irrevocable relation to questions of urban feminist knowledge production. We recognize themes that speak directly both to the production of the urban in relation to infrastructures, labours, and subjectivities, and the politics of this production, which engage the challenges of decolonizing feminist urban knowledge production and methodologies.

      Making the Urban Through Feminist Knowledge Production

       Infrastructures

The ethos of liberal citizenship in Western democracies finds one of its most crisp articulations in the presuppositions frequently relied upon regarding everyday urban life. As a benchmark of modernization, urban forms present people with ‘proper’ infrastructures through which an individual’s life-chances in the capitalist market prosper, thereby ensuring a ‘successful’ integration into the public life of civil society. However, as is now abundantly clear, the relationship between capitalism, modernity, urban forms, and the reproduction of people’s everyday lives is not as straightforward as this modernist narrative suggests. Even for those historical instances in the global North in which there is a resemblance to this narrative, feminist and postcolonial scholars demonstrate that it is invariably subtended by gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized operations of power. Increasing neoliberalization, austerity, and precaritization, both in the global South and North, has been creating other everyday lives for the majority of urban residents, for which no blueprint is available; neither infrastructure nor people’s access to it can be taken for granted. A number of the chapters in this volume collectively argue that it is the intrinsically agentic nature of the social reproductive work of those pushed into precarity that mediates between infrastructures and the urban, highlighting the centrality of social reproductive work in the making of the urban.

      Before turning to these contributions, we briefly consider Mbembe’s conceptualization of ‘superfluity’ and Simone’s conceptualization of ‘people as infrastructure’ in order both to interrupt hegemonic ontologies of the urban and to situate the contribution of these chapters in an ontologically reflexive context of knowledge production. The work of Mbembe and Simone show us the limits of metropole capitalism’s teleological social ontology, reminding us how the social ontology of the urban of former colonies is formed differently and how, within this latter social ontology of the urban, people become infrastructure (see also Roy 2009).

      In considering the spatialization of an African metropolitan modernity as an historically specific urban form, Achille Mbembe offers the concept of ‘superfluity’, referring to both ‘the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labour and life, people and things’ and ‘the obfuscation of any exchange or use value that labor might have, and to the emptying of any meaning that might be attached to the act of measurement or quantification