A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

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Название A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Жанр Социология
Серия
Издательство Социология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119789178



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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 place1 (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

      The process of the urban coming into being through the relational connectedness of social reproduction and production is thus never fully complete. Only partially determined, this urban process is exceeded both by the struggle of contending classes within capitalist history, including its present, and by the social and political relations that reverberate within histories that can neither be sedimented as, nor absorbed by, the history of capitalism and its attendant structures of subjectivity. We argue that the enduring necessity of social reproduction constitutes an embodied openness to these different histories, an openness that is violently truncated by hegemonic regimes of exploitation and oppression. Tapping into this openness through the urban everyday, we can unsettle the apparent certitude of capitalist value-producing logic and its historical teleology. The urban, therefore, not only spatially conditions and mediates the unfolding of the capital-labour contradiction but it is also reshaped and reorganized in this process. Perhaps most importantly for our time, the spatial organization of embodied urbanization is open both to resurgent histories that resist the economy’s subsumption of life and to everyday struggles that make other lives and futures possible. These too often ignored aspects of the urban come into focus in this book – an urban that opens to radical histories and struggles of life-making through social reproduction, and a social reproduction that is not an end in itself, but a methodological entry point into understanding how people in their everyday lives shape and reshape the spatial forms of their lives.

      Second, notwithstanding the decisive role of social reproduction, it has formed only the theoretical ‘constitutive outside’ of the urban since non-feminist urban theorizing began (as the ‘illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility’ Butler 1993, p. xi) (Peake 2016; Roy 2016b; Jazeel 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). We ask how we can transition from treating social reproduction as a mere constitutive outside to being constitutive of how, where, when, and through whose labour the urban emerges. Hence, we see social reproduction as a real object of the urban – an empirical reality to be mapped, documented; a tableau that writes the urban even as it is written by it. Moreover, we consider the who, where, when, and how of social reproduction and the alternative social and spatial relations it produces to be historically contingent and only partially discernable through their specific relationship to the mode of production in which they are unfolding.