Decolonising feminist explorations of urban futures

ABSTRACT

How do decolonial feminist urban imaginaries of urban futures begin to interrogate twenty-first century urban life? The urban futures signaled in this special issue highlight three dimensions of urban imaginaries. The first connects the privatization and commodification of urban infrastructures to state-based and capitalist discursive efforts to make the urban. The second concerns temporal convergences of past, present and future in visions of the urban that reproduce the recursive logics of coloniality by re-mapping the landscapes of urban inequality and dispossession through encounters with sedimentations of colonial and neocolonial formations. Third, authors take up the everyday as a site of struggle through which women’s negotiations and placemaking practices offer alternative urban imaginaries. These articles are based on papers given at the 2019 “Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures” conference organized by the transnational feminist research project, “Urbanization and Gender in the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network” (GenUrb).

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial feminist urban imaginaries
• Urban futures
• Urban global South

The kinds of places we imagine tell us about the kinds of futures we aspire to inhabit. In this special issue we ask: what might urban futures look like when imagined from a decolonial feminist perspective and from the vantage point of the everyday urban lives of marginalized women? Geographical imaginaries relate to our taken-for-granted spatial orderings of the world; forms of worlding that are at once discursive and material, embodied and affective (Gregory, 2011; Roy & Ong, 2011). Feminists, in dialogue with postcolonial and other critical thinkers, have long used spatial imaginaries attentive to social difference as tools to render visible the contours of systems of power and domination, for example, the politics of location (Rich, 1984) and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988; Mohanty, 1988), as well as to contest and re-make dominant geographical imaginaries, including through articulations of borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987), counter-topographies (Katz, 2001) and a Black sense of place (McKittrick, 2006). The genesis of this special issue was an invitation issued to feminist urban scholars to build on such traditions of critical thought by sharing visions for urban transformation and urban futures.

Notwithstanding calls for provincializing and shifting the geographies of urban theory to the global South that have resonated in urban studies for some time (Al Sayyad & Roy, 2004; Bhan, 2019; Lees, 2012; Parnell & Robinson, 2012; Peake & Rieker, 2013; Roy, 2009; Roy, 2011; Sheppard et al., 2013), in the context of the persistent hegemony of the global North in the global knowledge economy and the normatively patriarchal character of urban studies as a field (Peake et al., 2018), these calls require labor and organizing to be realized. Hence the 2019 Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures conference, from which the papers in this special issue are drawn. The conference aimed to foreground feminist urban research from the global South and to create a forum for transnational feminist dialogue on urban placemaking and decolonial feminist re-imaginings of possible urban futures.¹ The opening plenary session consisted of a panel of invited speakers – Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, Amita Bhide, Faranak Miraftab, Lata Narayanaswamy, Dalia Wahdan, and Lorena Zarate – addressing the conference on the theme of decolonizing the urban in a time of neocolonialism.² The sight of these scholars and practitioners, sharing the stage to formally initiate the discursive exchanges of the conference, is a scene that is all too rarely witnessed in mainstream, or feminist, urban studies conferences. Its exceptionalism re-enforces the ongoing need to create spaces for feminist urban scholars to engage in ongoing processes of decolonizing urban research.

Decolonial feminist urban imaginaries

How do decolonial feminist urban imaginaries begin to interrogate twenty-first century urban life? The contours of urbanization in the twenty-first century are rapidly changing as urban growth continues to be marked by economic, social, and environmental insecurities and their structural violences of “militarism, patriarchy, imperialism, environmental degradation, settler colonialism, racism, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism” (Oswin, 2018, p. 613), which permeate the daily experiences of urban residents. The dialogues that ensued during the conference revealed the challenges of fashioning decolonial feminist imaginaries of the urban in global contexts of historical and contemporary dispossession, and multiple and intersecting crises of the environment, capital and social reproduction. Across their historical specificity and geographical range, the urban imaginaries presented in this special issue are characterized by lifeworlds that reveal the precarious nature of everyday existence in the city, as well as negotiations over contending imaginaries of the urban emanating from the state, private corporations, and urban populations striated by varying and intersecting axes of difference, including, class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability. For the authors in this special issue, a decolonial feminist urban imaginary must engage with the precarious everyday lives of marginalized women – who now constitute the majority of urban residents – and their ability to realize their hopes and dreams.

Developing decolonial feminist imaginaries of the urban requires not only the constant interrogation of changing urban realities, but an equally vigilant analysis and revision of the conceptual categories and methodological frameworks that scholars use to investigate urban life. In feminist scholarship, the scale of everyday life has been recognized as a crucial political site from which ontologies and epistemologies of the urban emerge, are enacted and contested (Buckley & Strauss, 2016; Ruddick et al., 2018; Vaiou, 2014, 2016). Feminist scholarship has long emphasized the significance of the everyday as the lived space in which life occurs, in which labor and social relations are reproduced and subjectivity is formed through routine and repetitive practices and accommodations, as well as through mobile transgressions (Hall, 2019; Smith, 1989). Urban scholarship though has engaged much less with the everyday, with the important exception of Lefebvre (2011). He understands the everyday as both the epistemological terrain upon which knowledge about the urban is produced, and as a seedbed of struggle, theorizing the “shifting terrain” of everyday life as imbued with revolutionary possibilities for the emergence of new political imaginaries of the urban. As Ruddick et al. (2018) note however, such “possibilities” are not responses to, or an after effect, of an urbanization that proceeds in a linear or sequential fashion (first urbanization, then differentiation, and then response), rather, they are the very ground upon which urban futures are fought over.

The urban futures signaled by the articles in this special issue highlight three overlapping dimensions of urban imaginaries. The first connects the privatization and commodification of urban infrastructures to the realization of state-based and capitalist discursive efforts to make the urban. The second, related, dimension concerns temporal convergences of past, present and future in imposed visions of the urban that reproduce the recursive logics of coloniality by re-mapping the landscapes of urban inequality and dispossession through encounters between historical sedimentations of colonial relations and emergent (neo)colonial formations. Third, authors take up the everyday as a site of struggle through which women’s negotiations and placemaking practices offer alternative urban imaginaries.

The articles addressing the first dimension examine the adverse urban contexts shaped by various imposed elite state and non-state imaginaries of urban futurity based on programs for urban governance and urban development concerning infrastructure, housing, and municipal service provision. Across different cities, they convey programs for urban development that incorporate logics of financialization, through the privatization and commodification of basic urban infrastructures, and related visions of urban citizenship tied to these privatized urban futures.

Kimari and Ernstson’s (2022, this issue) article on the Angolan city of Luanda examines the locality of Kilamba as an icon of Angola’s “dreams” of progress and modernity in the context of postwar reconstruction. They analyze the housing developments of Kilamba as a concrete realization of Angola’s vision of urban modernity through built form and infrastructure investment but focus in particular on the reproductive labor of domestic workers who clean, maintain and serve the largely middle-class occupants of these new housing developments, yet cannot access the material advantages accruing from these developments. Esra Alkim Karaagac’s (2023, this issue) contribution also exposes classed differences in urban housing infrastructures by exploring the housing programs of Turkey’s Mass Housing Administration (TOKI), which sells houses to low-income groups in mass housing estates on the periphery of Istanbul. Her analysis of the financial arrangements underpinning the state’s low-income housing strategy not only highlights the commodification of housing under a social housing provision model that ultimately propagates a vision of urban transformation based on private home ownership and advances the interests of the construction sector, but also reveals the gendered nature of debt geographies.

In the context of privatization, Josie Wittmer (2023, this issue) examines the turn to “inclusive” urban governance in waste collection in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. In a city where waste picking is feminized labor, the article examines the gendered implications of governmental attempts to integrate waste pickers into the mechanization of waste collection in formalized waste management systems. Wittmer examines the uneven enlistment of grassroots organizations into programs for urban governance reform and shows how workers and their livelihoods are impacted upon by the tensions between the differing priorities of the state in pursuing agendas for privatization, private entities contracted to provide waste collection, and grassroots organizations seeking to advocate for the interests of workers. The mechanization of waste management promotes a vision of urban modernity in “clean” cities, while simultaneously stigmatizing the informal manual labor of women waste pickers, which is associated with unclean “traditional” forms of waste management. In another examination of municipal services, Sage Ponder (2022, this issue) analyzes strategies of municipal debt restructuring in Puerto Rico through the privatization of public infrastructures such as water and electricity grids. Ponder critiques these forms of “financial repair” as recalibrations of urban accumulation that have adverse impacts on personal finances and public health outcomes.

Turning to the issue of the urban impacts of displacement and refugee mobilities resulting from regional armed conflict, Acara and Özdemir (2022, this issue) examine how Syrian refugee women are integrated into the public service provision infrastructures of the Turkish city of Izmir. Highlighting that urban infrastructures for service provision to refugees are constructed through multiple layers of national, international, and municipal levels of governance and programs for welfare, development and humanitarian aid, their article analyzes how access to services for Syrian refugees is mediated by the racialized nature of public space and resulting constraints on the everyday mobilities of refugees through the city.

While these articles address state-based and elite imaginaries of the urban, a second aspect of urban imaginaries emerges from a focus on the urban present and future urban development, revealing that the urban is produced at the conjuncture of multiple temporalities of past, present, and future (Roy & Ong, 2011), with urban imaginaries being informed by circulations of versions of modernity in historical and contemporary formations of colonialism and imperialism. For example, Ponder’s (2022, this issue) analysis of municipal debt restructuring in Puerto Rico reveals how, in a settler colonial context, programs for urban public infrastructure construction and repair and strategies of incremental financial repair reproduce the logics of racial capitalism through the maintenance of colonial debt relations and economies of extraction. Luna Lyra’s (2023, this issue) article on the ocupação (squat) of Vicentão in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte highlights that contemporary racialized urban inequality in Brazil, as manifested in lack of access to housing and basic urban infrastructures, is rooted in the Latin American region’s historical experience of European colonization, and the ongoing systemic oppression of Black and Indigenous peoples in Brazil stemming from colonialism. At the same time, Kimari and Ernstson’s (2022, this issue) analysis of Kilamba’s middle-class housing developments, reveals that imaginaries of the urban are also produced through extended geographies of geopolitical and economic exchange, which are forging new relationalities between cities and regions in emergent landscapes of neo-colonialism. Their analysis of the infrastructural articulations of new visions of modernity circulating in exchanges between Angola and China, and the specific forms of “petro-urbanism” under which the built form of the city is funded by oil-backed loans and foreign credit, signals the emergent neocolonial contours through which urban transformation in one place is materially shaped by distant elsewheres (Mbembé & Nuttall, 2004).

These articles reveal the uneven and exclusionary nature of state and elite visions of urban modernity and urban futures, and the concomitant precarity engendered by strategies of urban development pursued by state and non-state actors in relation to housing, public infrastructure provision, and municipal service provision. At the same time, they show the absolute necessity of the bodies and labor of the very people who are excluded from the promises of these elite programs of urban development for the production and social reproduction of the urban. The articles analyze the urban from the situated perspectives of its subaltern inhabitants, by examining how they contribute to the reproduction of the urban, and at the same time contest the terms of inclusion and promises of progress in elite visions of urban development, through their everyday negotiations and embodied practices in the city. In response to the realities of urban precarity prevailing in each city, residents develop creative strategies to work around––and, in some cases, to subvert––the logics of financialization and racial capitalism that drive imposed visions of urban change. The articles thus reveal a third dimension of urban imaginaries by shedding light on the ways in which people negotiate their own imaginaries of urban futures out of marginality, and materially assemble the conditions for their own survival in the urban by participating in various scales of political engagement, mobilization, and an everyday politics of exchange, aid, and auto-construction (Jiménez, 2017; Simone, 2019).³

Kimari and Ernstson (2022, this issue) examine the experiences of the women whose labor as domestic workers is central to the social reproduction of middle-class housing developments in Kilamba, as a form of contestation against their exclusion from the infrastructural promises of urban modernity represented by Kilamba. In the mass housing estates that relocate Istanbul’s urban poor to the peripheries of the city through the promise of private home ownership, Karaagac (2023, this issue) explores lived experiences of indebtedness to analyze the reproductive labor engaged in by women and households to service debts generated through mortgage arrangements. The everyday lives of women reveal that the debt-based relations institutionalized by state-led mortgage systems, based on unaffordable repayment models, draw women into precarious and exploitative labor arrangements in the productive economy. Additionally, women engage in often invisibilised and undervalued social reproductive strategies for managing household debt through embodied “austerity practices” such as “juggling” debts, and “shrinking” their needs and mobility, while simultaneously being excluded from social security provisions and deprived of control over their personal finances, thereby reinforcing patriarchal structures of subordination in the home and the labor market.

Writing from the Turkish city of Izmir, Acara and Özdemir (2022, this issue) map the landscape of the city from the perspective of urban residents who are doubly marginalized by their gender and their status as refugees. Using mental maps drawn by the female participants in their study, they highlight how these refugee women imagine and navigate the racialized landscape of the city’s public spaces to meet their social reproductive needs of caring for their children and accessing health care services, despite their various forms of exclusion from and marginality in the Turkish state’s urban welfare and service provision infrastructures. Their mapping exercises reveal the mobilities of those rendered precarious by their migration status, and the intersecting forms of economic, gendered, ethnic, linguistic, and racial precarity that structure their presence in the urban context.

In her recounting of the everyday lives of women in an ocupação (squat) of Vicentão in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, Lyra (2023, this issue) examines how women, through their everyday placemaking practices, respond to the lack of infrastructure and resources they face by forging new ways of living (modos de vida) through a shared praxis that is feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial. Through an exploration of the socio-spatial experimentation undertaken in the communal and private living spaces in Vicentão, she highlights the revolutionary potential of the reproductive work engaged in by women in shaping grassroots solidarity economies in response to neoliberal urban dispossession. Furthermore, drawing on Latin American feminist scholarship on decolonial feminism (Lugones 2010, cited in Lyra) and amefricanity (Gonzalez 1988, cited in Lyra), Lyra, argues that these everyday strategies produce feminist re-imaginings of the urban outside of the raced, gendered and classed grids of coloniality.

Ponder (2022, this issue) explores embodied experiences of infrastructural systems in the context of social reproduction to re-imagine approaches to the maintenance and repair of urban public infrastructures. In contrast to the financial infrastructural repair strategies of the state, which reproduce the logics of racial capitalism to maintain colonial debt relations, the practices of social reproduction, mutual aid, and solidarity practiced by local residents in Puerto Rico in the face of eviction from their homes under the weight of indebtedness manifests an alternative imaginary of urban futurity, which enacts collective self-determination and “reparative social healing” built on communal bonds.

Despite governmental discourses of “inclusive” urban governance through the integration of waste pickers into mechanized waste management systems in Ahmedabad, India, Wittmer (2023, this issue) highlights how imaginaries of urban modernity that offer a promise of urban citizenship to middle- and upper middle-class Indians can operate to stigmatize, exclude and render invisible the labor of women waste pickers within a structure of gender, class and caste-based urban marginalization. The perspectives of women waste pickers reveal that, in contrast to corporate waste management systems, alternative imaginaries of informal labor confer autonomy, flexibility, security, and a more reliable source of income for women. In the wake of the failures and contradictions of urban citizenship in state visions of urban development, and the limitations of grassroots organizing to secure employment, as a matter of necessity women waste pickers devise their own strategies for finding income-earning opportunities through their own networks and situated knowledges of their communities and occupations

Concluding thoughts

As a collection, these articles show that the struggle for sustaining alternative feminist and subaltern visions for urban futures in the face of persistent inequality and deprivation is not a question of choosing between hope or despair. For people living through these conditions, the task of making urban life liveable is not necessarily heroic or spectacular in its proportions, rather it is an everyday matter of pragmatic negotiation, contention and experimentation with existing urban realities, and imposed visions of the urban, often resulting in praxis that is necessarily provisional and iterative.

The articles in this special issue also reveal that there are many different decolonial feminist imaginaries of the urban, both at the level of the diverse ways in which people inhabit, experience, and perceive the city, and at the level of scholars who study, interpret, and write about the urban from distinct locations. They accentuate the range of gendered subjects who occupy the urban and highlight that imaginaries of the urban are contested spaces, replete with tensions across various axes of difference, and across varying interests attached to those different social locations. The work of the authors in this volume underscores how the everyday lives and collective practices of women in urban settings lay bare the failures of the promises of modernity as encapsulated in received frameworks of political subjectivity, such as citizenship, and test the limits of received frameworks of urban resistance, such as the right to the city. By focusing on the creative practices of everyday reproduction and political advocacy in the face of these failures, these articles draw attention to the diverse enactments of praxis across different urban contexts.

At the same time, the imaginaries conveyed in these papers are not simply distillations of the subjective views or experiences of urban dwellers in each city, rather, they are products of each author’s engagements with their respective research fields and subjects. In compiling this special issue, we asked authors to reflect on their own positionality and the politics of their location in relation to the contexts that they were studying. In their reflections, the authors reveal the persistent configurations of unequal power between urban researchers and their interlocutors and research sites, as well as the role of intersecting privileges (including, ethnic, racial, economic, gender) that create the conditions of possibility for authors to access and extract data from research sites and interlocutors and produce knowledge about the urban. The necessarily patchy nature of these accountings reflects the complexities of multiple positionalities, as insiders and outsiders, negotiations with privilege, allyship, solidarity, silence, enunciation, as well as frustrations and misunderstandings emanating from the mismatch between the temporalities and purposes of academic research and the life worlds and needs of communities. The complex landscape of the politics of location and positionality demonstrates the ongoing need for reflexivity as a critical and recursive practice in urban research praxis, particularly as feminist urban scholars grapple with the challenge of enacting decolonial praxis in the context of the proliferating complexities of urban contexts that may exceed and confound our existing epistemic frameworks of analysis.

Little did we know when we met at the Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures conference in September 2019 that the different urban contexts discussed at the conference would shortly be connected in an urgent and fatal way by an epochal global pandemic. In the context of the resultant drastically curtailed transnational mobility, the opportunity for this meeting and the interpersonal connections that it allowed seemed like a privilege redolent of a remote past. While the papers presented at the conference drew on research conducted prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the knowledges exchanged at the conference and the need to continue such decolonial feminist dialogues about the urban are more urgent now than ever. The strategies outlined in the articles of this special issue, strategies of experimentation, repair, care, solidarity and exchange undertaken by urban dwellers, enact alternative epistemologies of the urban on an everyday basis, and actively continue the work of materializing another kind of city, built on imaginaries for more just urban futures.

Thinking through the present historical conjuncture, in the ruins of modernity and in the grips of converging crises, even as we struggle with inherited normative frameworks such as citizenship, or human rights, which are undone by the dispossessive and necropolitical racial logics of capitalist urbanization and its discontents, these articles remind us that the future of the urban is not yet determined, and that it is being re-made in various insurrectionary modes. While scholarly analysis may well be behind the urgency of urban transformation on the ground, and while reflexive feminist praxis demands that we concede that our understandings of the urban may be as provisional as the urban contexts we study, we nevertheless hope that this special issue pushes at the edges and limits of hegemonic visions of the urban and that it expands spaces for re-imagining urban worlds.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to GenUrb Project Manager, Leeann Bennett, particularly for her key role in coordinating the Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures conference.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This special issue was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Grant, “Urbanization, gender and the global south: a transformative knowledge network” (File number 895-2017-1011), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connections Grant, “Feminist explorations of urban futures international conference” (File number 611-2018-0610).

Notes

1 The Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures Conference, held from 26-29th September 2019, at York University in Toronto, Canada, marked the mid-term point of the transnational feminist research project, “Urbanization and Gender in the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network” (GenUrb), funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). GenUrb comprises a network of over 40 feminist scholars and activists studying women’s everyday practices of placemaking across six cities of the global south, namely: Cochabamba, Bolivia; Delhi, India; Georgetown, Guyana; Ibadan, Nigeria; Ramallah, Palestine; and Shanghai, China. The conference brought together over 200 feminist urban scholars and activists with attendees from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, China, Egypt, Germany, Guyana, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Palestine, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, the UK, the USA, and Zimbabwe. This geographical range was a reflection of the establishment of a fund to support participation by scholars, students and activists based in the global South, as well as invitations to speakers from China, Egypt, India, and Palestine, and to civil society organizations, such as Habitat International Coalition and the UN-Habitat Gender Hub.

2 A recording of this plenary panel discussion is available on GenUrb’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKMGpVCtb2Ipm7mJx8pBESQ.

3 Jiménez (2017, p. 452) proposes auto-construction as a method by which to understand the life of cities as "a perceptual and material system for sharing resources, knowledge, and experiences … . a placeholder for how grassroots projects think and feel and grab hold of the city as a horizon of hope and responsibility". See also an interview with Jiminez on auto construction: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/de-reconstructing-auto-construction-an-interview-with-alberto-cors%C3%ADn-jim%C3%A9nez.