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The feminist political economy analyses of social reproduction discussed above, and their recognition of the need to situate processes of social reproduction – in bodies, households, institutions, and processes of globalization – has yet to extend to the urban. Reorienting social reproduction from the household to the global capitalist system at large, not least because ‘the renewal of labour-power occurs in, and through, the policing of borders, flows of migrants and the remittances many send to their countries of origin, army camps, refugee camps, and other processes and institutions of a global imperialist order’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 31), social reproduction theory has tended to treat the urban merely as a spatial and empirical accoutrement. In this way, the question of space, spatiality, and spatial forms in contemporary social reproduction theory become naturalized to the phenomena under consideration. In other words, it is not that an urban spatial-blindness marks these theories; rather, urban space does not figure as an analytic category in the making of these theories.

Feminist political economy has yet to rethink social reproduction as a feminist urban problematic, namely that the urban is increasingly the site and urbanization is increasingly the process through which social reproduction takes place. Why do we argue this? Certainly we cannot ignore that the world’s population is now predominantly living in places called urban (such as towns, suburbs, cities, megalopolises, and so on). And we cannot overlook that, within the next few decades, it will be approximately two-thirds of the world’s population living in urban places, owing not only to rising rates of urbanization in Southern cities (through natural increase and the movement of the world’s rural population into urban places), but also to the reclassification of rural areas into urban ones.⁸ Our argument is driven primarily, however, by the realization that it is now urbanization, the engine of this growth and movement, that increasingly drives capitalism. Harvey’s voluminous work on the urban process under capitalism and the ‘secondary circuit’ of capital, has shown how surplus capital is turned into fixed assets of land and real estate (i.e. the built environment). Others have pointed to the increased embedding of the state into urbanization processes. Especially in Southern cities, urban land development – through infrastructure projects, real estate for local elites, and mega projects – are often now prioritized over the provision of jobs and industrial development (Schindler 2017; Goodfellow and Owen 2018). But it is arguably Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) thesis on urban modernity in crisis in The Urban Revolution, in which he theorized a trajectory of the replacement of the industrial city through a process of ‘complete urbanization’, that has best understood the role of the urban beyond capital accumulation and class-based struggle.

As we wrote previously (Ruddick et al. 2018), from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, Lefebvre followed the transformation of everyday life, to formulate a concept of the urban revolution, which he invested with two meanings. In the first, the urban revolution inverts relationships between the pre-capitalist rural and the ‘urban’ and subsequently the relation between capitalist industrialization and capitalist urbanization: ‘The “rural” no longer produces the “urban”, but the reverse. Moreover, the urban is no longer merely an effect of capitalist industrialization. Once produced, the urban does not depend on industrialization for its own continuity; it becomes capitalism’s opening to different labour processes through a reorganization of socio-spatial relations’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 394). Lefebvre referred to urban society’s transcendence of industrial society as the engine of capitalism, as processes of ‘implosion and explosion’ and of concentaration and dispersion, in which cities could be understood as zones of agglomeration that themselves implode, fragment, and destruct while also extending their infrastructural reach deep into previously remote areas (Brenner 2014).

It is in the second sense in which Lefebvre uses the urban revolution – as a shift in the site of struggle from the factory to the everyday – that he opens a space for social reproduction and the urban as a ground for the formation of difference, ‘alluding to the potential for a new politics of urban revolution, which can transform everyday life in all its aspects’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 394). Beyond Lefebvre, however, rarely have (non-feminist) critical analyses of the urban turned to the relationship between urbanization and social reproduction.⁹ And yet social reproduction is inexorably implicated in driving crises of capitalism (Briggs 2017). As Norton and Katz (2017, pp. 7–8) state: ‘A crisis of social reproduction occurs when existing social, political economic, or environmental conditions and relations can no longer be reproduced…. Likewise, a crisis of social reproduction occurs if the labor force cannot be reproduced in a given time and place or find the means to labor productively in a given setting.’ Crises of social reproduction, alongside climate and environmental crises, war, conflict, and the resultant poverty and lack of livelihoods, have resulted in the displacement of millions to and within urban places, either within their country of origin or beyond.¹⁰ Urban life, marked by unprecedented levels of migration and inequality,¹¹ has led David Harvey (2014, p. 60) to note that: ‘The massive forced and unforced migrations of people now taking place in the world, …will have as much if not greater significance in shaping urbanization in the 21st century as the powerful dynamic of unrestrained capital mobility and accumulation.’ Not least, people on the move and the deepening of inequality from increasingly unregulated rounds of capital accumulation has loosened the relation between the state, capital, work, and labour, increasing the myriad ways in which lives are reproduced outside the wage. In the 21st century, migration, forced and unforced, is primarily a stake in a future, a stake in life itself.¹²

Following Lefebvre, we understand the urban as the conceptual knot mediating between the everyday ontological struggles of oppressed peoples, and the global spatial restructuring of hegemonic modes of production. However, rethinking the conceptual status of the urban as mediating does not confer it with an untethered epistemological salience and autonomy, thereby overriding the processes, lives, struggles, and subjectivities it is supposed to explicate. It is through social reproduction as method (as opposed to this epistemological autonomy), that the processes of urbanization, including its undoing, become ‘knowable’, albeit never entirely known, due to the urban’s undecidability. In this way, we argue that a contemporary consideration of the spatial organization of our social lives needs to investigate the ways in which the processes of urbanization themselves are in need of explanation through social reproduction.

Whether in situations arrived at through displacement or through decades of in-situ neglect, the capacity for the social reproduction of everyday urban life is being eroded, characterized by uncertainty, insecurity, and disposability. The rise of precarious labour is driven in part by the desire of corporations to keep down costs – that is monetized subsidies to social reproduction: zero-hour contracts, payment below the minimum wage, short-term contracts, in short the ‘gig economy’, increasingly characterize the world of work, underpinned by capital’s reduced commitment to the social wage and social contract. Simone’s (2009) research across multiple cities reminds us that ‘people as infrastructure’ is not a new phenomenon; informal employment has always been an inherent part of capitalist systems of production. Precarity and insecurity, however, are now the primary material and emotional conditions through which social reproduction is instantiated, whereby the devolution of responsibilities onto the individual is not imposed but rather has become an accepted norm as it articulates with other commonsense understandings and becomes entrenched in socio-spatial practices.

The practice of migration, and its growth globally, is also partially a manifestation of the financialization of society as migration has become a way for individuals to navigate risk in the absence of the state providing conditions for their social reproduction.¹³ In particular, the increasing financialization of social reproduction has influenced the ways in which urbanization takes place and is experienced. It is only slightly over a decade since the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States spread globally, generated by the restructuring of lending through the predatory pursuit of subprime mortgages, which centred on urban neighbourhoods, adding to the deepening of inequality, displacement, and austerity politics. There were a number of pressures directly related to the financialization of social reproduction, that increased vulnerability, not the least of which was to increasingly entreat low-income Latinx and African-Americans, who had previously been redlined out of the housing market, to monetize their home-space, as a retirement plan and investment. Wade (2009, p. 40) reports that in the United States in 2008 alone ‘more than 3 million houses were foreclosed in 2008, meaning that about 10 million people shifted into rented accommodation, vans or shelters’ (quoted in Feldman, Menon, and Geisler 2011, p. 12).

In the face of such devastation, we turn to the chapters in this volume to explore the social reproduction of everyday urban life. Building on feminist urban theories and social reproduction feminisms, the chapters shed light on different aspects of the relationship between the urban and social reproduction, within different contexts but always through socio-political action. In what follows, we outline how the book’s contributors address not only this relationship but also their irrevocable relation to questions of urban feminist knowledge production. We recognize themes that speak directly both to the production of the urban in relation to infrastructures, labours, and subjectivities, and the politics of this production, which engage the challenges of decolonizing feminist urban knowledge production and methodologies.