Paradoxes of the periphery

ABSTRACT

Urban scholars have increasingly turned to urban peripheries for understanding the emergent urban forms, new and old political and economic forces at play, and everyday practices of urban transformation. Joining this peripheral turn, Ayona Datta’s paper on the informational periphery makes a rich and timely intervention by tracing the development of urban peripheries as charged theaters where the techno-political drama of information and logistics is currently playing out. Her findings in Bhiwandi complicate the ways in which we have tended to discern the space and category of urban periphery. In thinking with Datta, this paper proposes that, instead of the periphery, peripheralization offers a potential for evaluating the complex and multi-scalar processes that congregate in specific sites in expected and unexpected ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Periphery
• peripheralization
• agrarian urbanism
• informational periphery
• comparative urbanisms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is an impressive body of work that critically engages with urban peripheries, suburbs, greenfield development. See, e.g., Arabindoo (2011); Caldeira (2017); Dupont (2011); Denis and Zérah (2017); Friedmann (2016); Mukhopadhyay, Zérah, and Denis (2020); Gururani and Dasgupta (2018); Follmann (2022); Gururani (2020); Hamel and Keil (2015); Keil (2017), Keil and Wu (2022); Kennedy and Sood (2016, 2019); McFarlane (2018); Nijman 2007; Ren (2021a; 2021b); Roy (2016a); Schmid et al. (2018); Schmid (2018); Sawyer et al. (2021); Simone 2022; Upadhya (2017; 2020; 2021); Sood and Kennedy 2020; Upadhya and Rathod (2021); Wu (2020); Wu and Keil (2020).