A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

through. In our view, it is a mistake to think of social reproduction as the production of life itself because such an approach to social reproduction can envelop every possible subject and their everyday struggles into a unitary vision. In this level of universality, it can easily be argued that all people have the same problems (‘we are all in this together’) and require the same solutions. However, this is to push the problem of life not only out of social ontology, but also out of history. In such a scenario, social reproduction is epistemologically operationalized as a false universal appealing to a transhistorical and transgeographical ‘human nature’. Social reproduction then ceases to be a method of investigating and sustaining social ontologies, instead replacing social ontology with itself as life, foreclosing how social reproduction is taken up under different life forms within history.

      Amongst the potential pitfalls of such an approach, of making social reproduction a stand-in for life itself, is that of foreclosing appreciation for and engagement with approaches that have deeply rooted political, cosmological, and ontological understandings of and orientations towards the relations that must be sustained in order that life – and not only human life – can thrive. Collapsing these relations into the relations of social reproduction in an anticipation of a unitary framework of analysis stymies the possibilities of reflecting relationally and historically on different forms of violence that render life unliveable for those who are on the receiving end of these violences, as well as for those who directly or indirectly benefit from them.

Moreover, such an approach to social reproduction runs the danger of rendering the social of social reproduction into an index of empirical varieties of oppression, as opposed to having a formational view of it whereby it is not taken for granted but understood in the historicity of its contingent precarity. For instance, slavery, ongoing settler-colonization, and the violence of contemporary capitalism and heteropatriarchy make social reproductive work extremely difficult, for in the aftermath of and during these violent regimes, the social itself needs to be reconstituted. Therefore, as opposed to taking social reproduction as the work that makes all other work possible, an approach that examines what undergirds social reproduction by focusing on the collective re-constitution of the social becomes necessary.

      It follows that we need to interrogate the limits of what is signified by the ‘social’ in social reproduction, for example, by probing the anthropocentric conceptualization of social reproduction. The divisions within and between the human and nonhuman that underpin capitalist urbanization (Ruddick 2015) also function to ground an anthropocentrism within frameworks of social reproduction (Andrucki et al. 2018). The following chapters are haunted by organic and inorganic materialities beyond the human, such as water, crops, landscapes, buildings, which, however, largely come into articulation within this volume at the point where they become relevant to human reproduction. In the age of climate crises and viral pandemics, anthropocentric frameworks are increasingly inadequate on their own to either diagnose or respond to the more than non- and more than-human forces and processes that shape futures in and beyond the urban (Meehan and Strauss 2015; McKiethen and Naslund 2017). The current context of changes in the planet’s systems and the role of the urban in those processes has necessitated rethinking of the relationship between social and ecological processes (Derickson 2018b, p. 427; see also Ruddick 2017), including through consideration of multispecies encounters and entanglements across various scales from the microbial to the planetary (Tsing 2015; Leiper 2017).

Reconsidering the limits of what is understood as the social also brings us to the question of the constitutive outside of social reproduction, of questions of undecidability, and of alternative conceptual schemas for understanding the social and the urban that could usefully be brought into conversation (see Peake et al. 2018). Thinking through the historical constitution of social reproduction, its constitutive outsides, and opening up the social may be instrumental in providing insights into how we can think through the possibilities for transformative political action in the midst of crises in social reproduction. While the following chapters, for example, address the potential of social reproduction to create material conditions of life that escape capture by capital, more needs to be done to excavate the revolutionary potential of social reproduction work through commoning practices (cf. Linebaugh 2008) to create what Caffentzis and Federici (2014) refer to as ‘anti-capitalist commons’ and De Angelis and Harvie (2014) as ‘commoning-beyond-capital’.

      Coda: Social Reproduction and the Urban During a Pandemic

      As we submit this volume for publication, we have been living in what has been routinely referred to as the unprecedented time of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Each in our own distinct and interlinked ways, the authors of this chapter and editors of this book have confronted the individualizing paradoxes and isolating demands of the present moment from the vantage point of our own homes and eerily empty city streets here in Toronto. While it is important to be reflexive about how we ourselves have coped, as editors and authors of a book focused on feminist urban theory and social reproduction, we are also compelled to question the oft-mentioned phrase that we are living in unprecedented times. We ask: What exactly is unprecedented about this time? Is it unprecedented that inequality will increase? That millions will fall into poverty? That migration to cities will increase in the face of poverty? That once open cities will move to closure? That people are not able to safely access the healthcare they need because of enduring spatializations of racism? That those who suffer from ill health rooted in socio-environmental injustice will suffer in greater numbers from a novel virus? That people who are told to stay at home are not able to do so because they have no home or because their partner or parent is violent? That people will be made sick doing an underpaid and insecure job because their employer refuses to provide for basic health and safety considerations? Or that national governments and institutions alike are exploiting a crisis to institute militarized regimes of population control, to cut off access to information, to consolidate power? We could easily ask many more questions, those which address the issues that the pandemic does not so much create these calamitous conditions, but rather exposes them.

The deep systemic injustices, inequalities, and violences that have been accelerated by responses to this crisis are not new phenomenon, especially for the huge swathes of the world’s population living in states governed by conservative and neo-fascist leaders, but they are surfacing with a new intensity, shining light on capitalism as the history of the separation between capital and life. The spatial organization of our lives is marked by the pain and anxiety of this separation of life and capital. By the time you read these words, ‘the situation’ will have again shifted enormously; the constancy of change is now more apparent than ever, as is Dr. King’s call to attend to the fierce urgency of now. Thus, at the same time as the deeply stretched relations of social reproduction that form the warp and weft of urban everyday life are in the spotlight, we need to confront the violent re-instantiation of the ‘health’ of ‘the economy’ at the expense of everything and everyone else.

      And yet the time of COVID-19 has also shown the city to be a site of ethical and political possibilities. The politics of care and connectivity that have surfaced in accounts of everyday life in cities across the globe reveal a bottom-up collective vision for helping those who lives are marginalized – refugees, immigrants, the homeless, the underpaid, targets of violence – in ways that are sustainable and speak to equality. Time will tell if there will also be a renewed politics of solidarity that arises out of these experiences. Rather than economizing, financializing, and dehumanizing society, we call for socializing and humanizing the economy, as the path by which we can reconsider, reclaim, and reconstruct our ways of being together to envision meaningful lives. This necessary re-orientation to life beyond capitalism will require reconsideration of social reproduction for years to come.

      Acknowledgements

      We would like to thank the contributors to this book, the anonymous reviewers, and Leeann Bennett and Mel Mikhail for their help with the bibliography and all things technical.

      Notes

      1 1 In the long history of urban scholarship, genealogies of feminist interventions into the urban and social reproduction can be traced back 150 years to the 1870s.