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Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban

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)

Introduction

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 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

Our central problematic, then, is to ask how social reproduction might generate different ways of knowing and investigating the urban in its constitutive and regulative relations. We have argued previously (Peake et al. 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018) that in terms of their social ontology, urban geographies are geographies of living, yet urban theories have distilled this living to capital and wage-labour in processes of production. This filtering process is part of the hierarchical knowledge production in which the knower's positionality is integral to theorizing and valuing subjectivity and experience. The dominant Enlightenment-bequeathed academic knowledge system of phallogocentrism - the privileging of determinateness and of the masculine (Derrida 1978; Cixous and Clément 1986 [1975]) - has sundered economic production and social reproduction, pitting them against each other as dichotomous opposites and privileging economic production over social reproduction. The dominant urban epistemology is thus one in which economic production and social reproduction have been historically presented as separate and different, both geographically and analytically, signifying domination and subordination, greater and lesser value, respectively. We start however from a problematic of the constitution of economic production and social reproduction as inseparable; they are two dimensions of one integrated system that are constructed, temporally and spatially, in processual relation to each other and marked by differentiation and struggle. We also start not with a notion of being 'different', but with social difference, which we understand conceptually as 'relational connectedness' (see Ware 1992, p. 119), whereby colonial, patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative disciplinary systems of domination and oppression play out through processes of production and social reproduction, attempting to determine who has the right to belong and the right to life itself. Finally, we argue that the potential for urban transformation lies both in the small slippages and seemingly prosaic aspects of everyday life, as well as in more exceptional events and encounters, organized and spontaneous struggles, and in the supplemental space of undecidability and indeterminacy.

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.

How then do we understand social reproduction? First, we consider social reproduction as a real object of knowledge - that is as a conceptually generative construct and productive way of knowing the urban, and of understanding how urbanization is being reorganized and resisted. Writing amidst the vestiges of modernity - of people-making, public space, freedom, citizenship (already profoundly limited forms) - that are all but eroded, we ask how people's agency, struggles, desires, hopes, and dreams, might be rethought in light of the erasure of the social wage and social contracts and their replacement by demonization, dispossession, and the downloading of responsibility for social life to 'the individual'. This increasing precarity of urban life and how this life is reproduced, in conjunction with the analytical framings used to examine them, has put the feminist intellectual and political project of social reproduction back on the urban agenda with a new urgency, engendering praxis and producing ideas that can be socially and epistemologically transformative (see, for example, Teeple Hopkins 2015; Buckley and Strauss 2016; Andrucki et al. 2018; Chattopadhyay 2018; Peake et al. 2018; Winders and Smith 2019).

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.

Third, our problematic also speaks directly to the imperative to decolonize feminist urban knowledge production, which is not free of hierarchical and imperial thought, produced within a social ontology shot through with whiteness and specific Western ideologies, values, and experiences. It is with this concern of decolonizing the epistemologies and ontologies of existing social reproduction analytical frameworks that we propose social reproduction qua method (Tanyildiz 2021), as a tool to think through the relationship between ontology and epistemology, which orients us towards how social reproduction is undertaken. As method, social reproduction is an attempt to explicitly connect some of the main aspects of critical feminist epistemologies - such as emphasizing the locatedness and partial nature of knowledge production and a willingness to continually scrutinize categories of analysis, embedded as they are...