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Urban scholarship originating from Southern Africa and Latin America has many common theoretical underpinnings, even if it is often characterized by disparate terminologies. From examining a relational understanding of industrialization and urbanization processes (Quijano 1967, Hart 2003, Brenner and Schmid 2015) to the financialization of the housing market (Butcher 2020), or a neo-extractivist “super-exploitation” of labor (Hart 2014, Arboleda 2020, Reis and Antunes de Oliveira 2021, Crankshaw 2022), bringing these linguistic and cultural geographies into conversation with one another could yield fertile ground. We find it particularly useful for interrogating the concept of the “periphery,” which is utilized differently throughout the field of urban studies broadly (Caldeira 2015, 2017, Meth et al. 2021, Howe 2022, Reis and Lukas 2022).

For example, empirical research in Southern Africa and Latin America demonstrates how people’s options are constrained or enabled by the geography of national territorial systems and city-regions, from colonial and apartheid legacies of spatial planning to market forces of where people can live. This frequently entails a relegation of poor and historically underprivileged populations to the geographical peripheries, where transport is both more expensive and more limited – as well as corresponding to calls for “urban rights,” and forms of resistance to the logics of capital and the state. On the other side, economic and political elites actively (re)produce and capitalize on these differential and power-laden socio-spatial relations and processes. We therefore assert that it is not possible to understand peripheralization without understanding dependencies across scales, and without investigating both multi-scalar and relational urbanization processes as well as the power of people’s agency in staking claims to their urban environments.

This session thus welcomes contributions that engage with the concept of “periphery” as a place and/or “peripheralization” as a process. For example, this can include discussion of: transscalar routines, forms of mobility, and temporalities (Simone 2020) that reveal the spatial dialectics of the periphery; investigation of distinctive modes of territorial production or value capture (Robinson and Attuyer 2021; Howe 2022); logistical urbanization and extractive urbanism (Arboleda 2020; Lukas and Brück 2018); theoretical work contesting the existing canon of theory from decolonial perspectives; or ethnographic work on “transversal” logics, exposing the relational settings in which otherwise invisible systems can be revealed (Star 1999). Peripheral spaces, and conceptualizing the processes that shape them, can thus contribute to decentering urban theory and indicate a promising future line of urban research (Meth et al. 2021, Reis and Lukas 2022), as this session aims to do.


References
Arboleda, M. 2020. Planetary Mine. Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism. Verso.
Brenner, N, and Schmid, C. 2015. Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban? City 19(2–3):151–82.
Butcher, S. 2020. Appropriating rent from greenfield affordable housing: Developer practices in Johannesburg. EPA: Economy and Space 52(2): 337–361.
Caldeira, T. 2015. Social Movements, Cultural Production, and Protests. São Paulo’s Shifting Political Landscape. Current Anthropology 56(S11): 126–136.
Caldeira, T. 2017. Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. EPD: Society and Space 35(1): 3–20.
Crankshaw, O. 2022. Urban Inequality. Theory, Evidence and Method in Johannesburg. Bloomsbury.
Hart, G. 2003. Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. University of California Press.
Hart, G. 2014. Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony. University of Georgia Press.
Howe, L.B. 2022. Processes of peripheralisation: Toehold and aspirational urbanisation in the GCR. Antipode 54(6): 1803–1828.
Lukas, M. and Brück, A. 2018. Urban policy mobilities und globale Produktionsnetzwerke: Städtische Planung in Chile als Legitimationsinstanz extraktiver Industrien. sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung 6(2/3): 69–90.
Meth, P., Goodfellow, T., Todes, A. and Charlton, S. 2021. Conceptualizing African Urban Peripheries. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45(6): 985–1007.
Quijano, A. 1967. Dependencia, cambio social y urbanización en Latinoamérica. ILPES.8.
Reis, N. and Antunes de Oliveira, F. 2021. Peripheral financialization and the transformation of dependency: a view from Latin America. Review of International Political Economy. doi: 10.1080/09692290.2021.2013290
Reis, N. and Lukas, M. 2022. Beyond the Megacity. New Dimensions of Peripheral Urbanization in Latin America. University of Toronto Press.
Robinson, J. and Attuyer, K. 2021. Extracting Value, London Style: Revisiting the Role of the State in Urban Development. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45(2): 303–331.
Simone, AM. 2020. The complicity and interdependency of temporalities. Urban Geography 41(10): 1274–1276.
Star, S.L. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391.

Non-Presenting Participants