Urban crisis and the geographies of critical social reproduction in peripheries: between the structural and the everyday life in a Brazilian periphery

Keywords: periphery; urban geography; social reproduction; urban crisis
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Investigating the complex web of critical social reproduction in the periphery is fundamental to understanding the contemporary dynamics of the urban crisis. This paper seeks to contribute to characterising what I call "critical social reproduction" that develops in peripheral areas. To this end, I explore the relationship between Brazil's structural insertion in the planetary economy of capital as a country with a dependent economy and the dimension of everyday life in a Brazilian periphery. The proposed discussion is based on recent analyses of the "material geographies of social reproduction" and seeks to establish associations with a Marxist crisis’ theory. I hope that this text can contribute in at least three ways: (i) to the development of a theory of reproduction based on the analysis of the conditions that the peripheral population has in its daily struggle to survive in the adversities that accumulate; (ii) to the development of a Marxist theory of crisis that can offer a mediation between the scales the concrete totality of capital and the daily life of individuals; (iii) to a theory of the periphery by analysing the dynamics of social reproduction and the contradictory movement of capital towards its own dissolution. From the analysis of some strategies of social reproduction in peripheral territories in the context of contemporary crisis, the discussion of the material geographies that are produced and mobilised by them sheds light on the trans-scalarity of the urban crisis.