A heuristic device, not an actual map… revisiting the urban periphery

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Peripheries, politics, centralities: geographies of COVID-19. Reflections from a German perspective on and beyond Biglieri et al

We are very grateful for Daniel Mullis (2021a, 2021b, 2021c) to have taken up and expanded, but even more for having critiqued our initial paper in this journal on ‘repositioning COVID-19 at the social and spatial periphery of urban society’ (Biglieri et al. 2020). The paper was written early in the pandemic and was published barely 2 months after the World Health Organization had declared a global health emergency in the face of the growing COVID-19 outbreak early in 2020. We acknowledge at the outset that we seem to share with Mullis an affinity for the larger debate on the theories of space and urbanization in the context of recent work on planetary urbanization and suburbanization. We agree, in the broadest sense, as Mullis notes with reference to both our common source in Lefebvre’s work and to our own musings about the subject, that centrality and peripherality are ‘produced in and through praxis’ (Mullis 2021a, p. 2). As we will note below, such praxis can be, and often is, more than action, more than momentary agency, but can be seen as a structural condition from which long-term inequalities are being cemented before, in and beyond this current health crisis and future ones to come. So, if centrality is changeable and subject to a ‘dialectical movement that creates of destroys it’ (Lefebvre 2003, p. 116), it is by no means fleeting. It can have staying power. The same can be said about peripheries – social, spatial and institutional ones as we have discussed in our previous work and the experience of being on the margins can have long-lasting and hard-to-overcome detrimental effects on oppressed urban communities and on the physical places where they live, work and play.

While, however, the dynamic relationship between the dialectics of change and stasis was repeatedly unveiled in the pandemic as we experienced it over the past 2 years, the exact nature of that dialectics may have at times been hidden from the casual view of an outside ‘spectator’ whose ‘glance is consolidating’ as, in her view, ‘the very form of the urban [is] revealed,’ as Lefebvre says (Lefebvre 2003, p. 116). The processes that produce this ‘consolidated’ image we can observe on a map, or on a tower or hilltop overlooking a city may coincide with the ravages of a pandemic, an economic crisis, a devastating flood or earthquake: But ultimately, those processes are hidden behind the back of the viewer and need separate exposition and explanation. Less abstractly put, the appearance of social, spatial and institutional peripheries in any given urban context may or may not be an exact reflection of the longer-term and far-reaching processes by which peripheral status is produced. Even more concretely: if the housing markets are structured and governed by systemic racism, classism and sexism, it may not come as a surprise that racialized working-class residents are experiencing the bulk of vulnerabilities that affect their everyday lives, be they financial, environmental, social or health related. We will note below in a brief comment about the suburban municipality of Brampton in the Toronto region that such circumstances can change through ‘praxis’, taken here quite literally as a deliberate, analytically or theoretically guided action to counteract the detrimental outcomes of systemic marginalization by deliberate, targeted and sincere practices to undo those inequities. But overall, we may be able to insist that the production of centres and peripheries can lead, and often does lead to long-term societal segregation, polarization or segmentation. To illustrate this with an example: The consistent exclusion of African Americans from certain types of housing opportunities has created a dramatic and persistent inequity in the distribution of urban land and property in the United States. It is along the lines of those kinds of structural inequities (perhaps not always visible to the outside ‘spectator’) that social, spatial and institutional vulnerabilities are manifested in any crisis, including this recent pandemic (Taylor 2019).

At the time of our writing, in the spring of 2020, the empirical basis for our hypothesis was thin, the landscape of infection, disease and death changed multiple times and expected outcomes were often qualified by new and surprising developments. We put forward this hypothesis as a heuristic device to discuss seven interrelated constellations we saw emerge at the start of the pandemic:

1. We intended to continue a conversation that had started following the publication of a conceptual paper by Connolly et al. (2021) that claimed that the emergence, and resurfacing of infectious disease had to be viewed against a growing tendency towards extended urbanization, by which the authors meant the expansion of urban society more generally, and the spread of infectious disease in and through peri- or suburban areas specifically.

2. We sensed an emphasis in the media, early on, to focus on the big city stories from Wuhan to Milan, from London to New York, while we saw the relationships of such central places to peripheries elsewhere (e.g. from Wuhan to the first German cluster of infections in Stockdorf, a Munich suburb)¹ and the role of those central cities’ peripheries in the emergence and perception of the burgeoning health threat (the case of Codogno by Milan in particular, a story retold and illustrated well by Mendoza 2021). Furthermore, patterns of socio-economic inequalities have also been documented with reference to the urban region of Milan and the first outbreak area of Codogno (see Consolazio et al. 2021).

3. We linked to earlier work on SARS in 2003 as the first infection of the global age and insisted on countering the narrative that had then been dominant: that such a globally spreading disease was one of the networked centralities of the command centres of the global economy (Ali and Keil 2008).

4. To sensitize the perspective on the unfolding perspective on the unfolding pandemic to the normally hidden dimensions of urban life in the working-class and popular quarters, the racialized neighbourhoods that often have to fight for recognition or even visibility. Turning our attention to those social and institutional spaces in the ubiquitous ‘in-between cities’ of the extended urban world that had been largely outside both the empirical prospect and conceptual narrative on global urbanization (De Vidovich 2019).

5. To show the plight of a particular group of marginalized individuals, older adults and patients in long-term care homes who were all but abandoned by the central and local authorities in the early onslaught of the virus (Iacobelli et al. 2021).

6. To call on academics, practitioners and the public to examine lived experiences at all scales through a relational care lens – between the personal, interpersonal, government policies, communities, planning, and socio-cultural political structures (Biglieri et al. 2021).

7. Finally, to mobilize a deeper understanding of the power of marginalized communities and their civil society-based organizations and spontaneous ingenuities in playing a major role in the struggle against the disease that was engulfing urban communities and presenting potentially fatal challenges to states and markets everywhere (we drew here on ongoing work on such initiatives during the Ebola pandemic in West Africa in 2014/15; see Ali et al. 2022).

We agree with Mullis that such a weighted focus on the peripheral (in society, space and institutional governance) may cloud the view towards the centralities that, following Lefebvre, are ‘the essential aspect of the urban phenomenon’. Yet, after more than a year has passed, we largely stand by our chosen focus at the time. As the pandemic dragged on, from wave to wave, and even during the rollout of vaccine strategies, the ‘hunch’ of the peripheral at the centre of the outbreak proved itself to be more than that but a sustained and justified basis for an analysis of the social, spatial and institutional effects of COVID-19 in many, if not most parts of the urban world (as is now beginning to be documented in significant collective research compendia, e.g. Doucet et al. 2021, Shin et al. 2022). Prioritizing the narratives of the periphery over those of the centre as a tactical choice, an emphatic statement early in the pandemic can stand, in our view, as an attempt to quell the loud voices of privilege that usually come with the centre. We knew, and experienced, that those in power, in the centre of the pandemic narrative would speak loudly, that the central story would be broadcast widely on all media, including social media (Loreto 2021). We meant to turn the table on such centralized views and come at the pandemic city from the outside and, implicitly, adjust the epistemological lens through which the relationships of cities and health might be viewed.

But we are also humbled by the ability of communities in the periphery to organize and to be resilient, and for the social forces around them to put pressure on state authorities to lift them out of their abandoned state. In our original article in this journal, we made mention of racialized communities in the inner suburbs of Toronto as being particularly vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. As it showed later, it wasn’t just the inner residential suburbs where the virus found a disproportional number of infected, sick and dying bodies. It was also in the outer periphery, the statistically better-off immigrant suburbs around the core city of Toronto, where hotspots of infection were found. Like the inner suburban areas of apartment towers, those communities in the wider periphery were home to many essential workers, whose jobs in low wage services (including medical), warehousing, manufacturing and logistics made them particularly vulnerable to exposure. A rich and insightful dossier by Globe & Mail journalist Dakshana Bascaramurty and her team of investigators on the ground found a devastating pattern of infection, isolation and marginalization in the largely South Asian immigrant ethnoburb of Brampton (Bascaramurty and Bhatt 2021; see also Keil 2020). For months, through the winter and spring of 2021, communities especially in the L6P postal code of that city suffered the worst numbers anywhere in Ontario, perhaps even in Canada. We cannot unravel the details of these communities’ stories and statistics in this short commentary but want to emphasize, in closing, that the communities in these suburban parts of the Toronto region have seen a remarkable surge of community-based activities that have lifted Brampton out of the pandemic maelstrom. Once the symbol of concentrated need in face of out-of-control infection, state failure and neglect, Brampton has recently been celebrated as a success story of community resilience and public health success. In late November 2021, 86% of residents 12 years and older in Peel Region, the larger administrative unit of which Brampton is a part, were fully vaccinated, a feat almost inconceivable early in the year. Observers credit the community itself with the turnaround: public health staff working around the clock, stringent public health measures supported by all subnational levels of government, collaboration of official and informal public health groups, faith-based organizations, and the largely non-white community whose ‘indefatigable’ efforts showed results, wore down the ‘hard barriers’ of structural injustice with steadfast actions of solidarity and collaboration (Raza 2021). This kind of turnaround reminds of the types of community-based activities that helped beat back the Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa 5 years prior (see Ali et al. 2022). These grassroots initiatives – people in the periphery quite literally changing the narrative and caring for their communities – are an example of the relational caring lens we called upon researchers, practitioners and the public to use when viewing the pandemic (De Vidovich et al. 2021). In turning to Lefebvre (2003, p. 116) one more time, we also interpret this remarkable development as an instance of the dialectics of centrality and peripherality that will always and constantly (re)make the city, and its prospects for health, sustainability and justice.

Finally, as a nod to Mullis’s other perceptive point, based on his remarkable research on these matters, we do acknowledge the importance of looking at the political fallout of the societal challenges we have seen during the various stages of the pandemic. While neither in Canada nor in Italy, the two empirical bases in our original piece, the political Right could be as closely aligned with COVID-19 hotspots as it appears to have been in Germany (with the exception perhaps of the failure of hands-off, free market policies brought in by the Canadian province of Alberta during the summer of 2021; see Oates 2021). Yet, in turn, in all three cases, Canada, Italy and Germany, we may have seen a plethora of ‘democratic moments’ during which common people have defied the base instincts of a deadly, individualistic, and often conspiracy-driven politics and have, in contrast, organized their communities – and their own behaviour – in solidarity with the larger society, especially with those most affected by the pandemic (Allahwala and Keil forthcoming).

The global gulf of core-periphery, the unequal distribution of everything between the North and the South, which is not an urban question per se, has steadfastly remained locked in its status quo or even gotten worse. We write these lines as the ominous Omicron COVID-19 variant begins to circle the globe. Shockingly, instead of a clear pivot of richer, western, more ‘central’ and metropolitan nations towards providing vaccine protection to the poorer African countries where the new variant may have originated and have found its first victims in a largely unvaccinated population, those same nations closed their borders to travelers from the southern periphery. There remains work to be done both conceptually and empirically with regards to the relationships of centre and periphery at the global scale.

In closing, and in response to Mullis’s comment about intersectionality as a concept that reconciles or interrelates race, class and gender, we are reminded of the fact that is also significant that the paper was published 2 weeks before the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, on 25 May 2020. We had, in our original piece, mentioned the intersectional vulnerabilities that populations in the peripheries of the urban world experienced before and when the virus hit, including along the lines of ability and age as well. After the streets of North America and the world erupted in protest against anti-Black violence and police brutality, the view from the margins became politicized and vocal. This also changed the ways in which the social, spatial and institutional peripheries, the homes and workplaces, educational and health institutions, streets and transit lines where non-white and marginalized communities were concentrated, and where the virus caused disproportional illness, economic hardship, trauma and death, became an active force of change.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Keil

Biographies of the authors can be found with original article at doi:10.1080/23748834.2020.17883205

Notes

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-China-health-webasto-idUSKBN1ZR0WY