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The ethos of liberal citizenship in Western democracies finds one of its most crisp articulations in the presuppositions frequently relied upon regarding everyday urban life. As a benchmark of modernization, urban forms present people with ‘proper’ infrastructures through which an individual’s life-chances in the capitalist market prosper, thereby ensuring a ‘successful’ integration into the public life of civil society. However, as is now abundantly clear, the relationship between capitalism, modernity, urban forms, and the reproduction of people’s everyday lives is not as straightforward as this modernist narrative suggests. Even for those historical instances in the global North in which there is a resemblance to this narrative, feminist and postcolonial scholars demonstrate that it is invariably subtended by gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized operations of power. Increasing neoliberalization, austerity, and precaritization, both in the global South and North, has been creating other everyday lives for the majority of urban residents, for which no blueprint is available; neither infrastructure nor people’s access to it can be taken for granted. A number of the chapters in this volume collectively argue that it is the intrinsically agentic nature of the social reproductive work of those pushed into precarity that mediates between infrastructures and the urban, highlighting the centrality of social reproductive work in the making of the urban.

Before turning to these contributions, we briefly consider Mbembe’s conceptualization of ‘superfluity’ and Simone’s conceptualization of ‘people as infrastructure’ in order both to interrupt hegemonic ontologies of the urban and to situate the contribution of these chapters in an ontologically reflexive context of knowledge production. The work of Mbembe and Simone show us the limits of metropole capitalism’s teleological social ontology, reminding us how the social ontology of the urban of former colonies is formed differently and how, within this latter social ontology of the urban, people become infrastructure (see also Roy 2009).

In considering the spatialization of an African metropolitan modernity as an historically specific urban form, Achille Mbembe offers the concept of ‘superfluity’, referring to both ‘the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labour and life, people and things’ and ‘the obfuscation of any exchange or use value that labor might have, and to the emptying of any meaning that might be attached to the act of measurement or quantification itself insofar as numerical representation is as much a fact as it is a form of fantasy’ (Mbembe 2004, pp. 374–375). In this way, superfluity can facilitate a socio-spatial investigation within the interstices of political, economic, biopolitical, and psychic approaches to the urban. Drawing on Simmel, Mbembe argues that ‘the ultimate form of superfluity is the one that derives from the transitoriness of things’ (Mbembe 2004, p. 399).

This transitory character of urban life constitutes the omitted predicate of a colonial urbanity that represents itself through the fixity of its infrastructure, as the immutable monument to its historical teleology, to its ‘developed’ and ‘civilized’ telos. AbdouMaliq Simone’s landmark conceptualization of ‘people as infrastructure’ in African cities provides a deeper understanding of this transitoriness by turning to the ‘incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used’ (Simone 2004, p. 407). People as infrastructure illuminates the provisional and precarious workings of the ‘the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labor and life, people and things’ (Mbembe 2004, p. 374) in relation to the reproduction of the urban by indicating ‘residents’ needs to generate concrete acts and contexts of social collaboration inscribed with multiple identities rather than in overseeing and enforcing modulated transactions among discrete population groups’ (Simone 2004, p. 419).

Focusing on expressive urban cultural practices in the wake of ‘natural’ disasters in Haiti and Puerto Rico, Nathalia Santos Ocasio and Beverley Mullings (Chapter 2) examine the conditions of possibility of people as infrastructure through a generative theoretical conversation between social reproduction, Simmel, and Simone. They ask their readers to consider how a society is possible in disaster- and debt-stricken contexts of austerity capitalism when the urban infrastructures of everyday life are devastated. In the course of their analytical deliberation, they first turn to Simmel’s conceptualization of forms of sociation as the unceasing emergences and interactions that produce the unity of society within which its members live. One such form of sociability, according to Santos Ocasio and Mullings, might be found in expressive cultural practices, in particular music. Performed as a part of social reproductive labour that ensures, amongst other things, the reproduction of intergenerational linkages between the Caribbean and its African inheritances, expressive cultural practices provide the conditions of possibility of people as infrastructure by making sure sociability itself is imaginable and enacted in the aftermath of disasters. Santos Ocasio and Mullings evoke the importance of deeply ancestral forms of music, dance, and gathering, in the form of intergenerational memory and knowledge sharing practices. Therefore, as opposed to taking social reproduction as the work that makes all other work possible, they point to a series of practices of social reproduction which are not tethered to the economic but express their own logics, drives, and histories, therefore turning their attention to sociation as a zero point of sociability.

In Chapter 8, Natasha Aruri also investigates the destruction of the social and its spatial preconditions and effects. In her chapter she traces ‘socio-cide’ in Ramallah, resulting from ongoing colonial violence and espoused through neoliberalism, via the urban development of its built environment and infrastructure. For Aruri, social reproduction, broadly construed, becomes an analytic not only to which city- and place-making are re-oriented but also through which decolonization might be imagined in a context where Palestinian lives are rendered superfluous. Demonstrating how individual parcelization and zoning upon which urban development in Ramallah is premised are reproductive of a colonial logic of governance and unusable antispaces, Aruri argues for a common land ownership model that would enable reconfiguring urban land as a continuum that is open to connections and relationalities. In this way, antispaces could be re-socialized as spaces of social reproduction through which decolonial resilience and resistance could be collectively organized against the colonial dispossession and occupation of Palestinian land. Such centering of social reproduction in the production of space better prepares the city to deal with uncertain and transitory vital infrastructures, such as the water infrastructures in Ramallah, which are the customary targets of colonial military violence. Understanding the urban as a commons oriented towards social reproduction, according to Aruri, helps dissipate colonial assumptions about the stability of life and vital infrastructures.

Thinking of people as infrastructure in conjunction with social reproduction is the theoretical focus of James Angel (Chapter 5). He draws on Ruddick et al’s. (2018) imperative of orienting analytical attention to the social ontology of the urban, lest we run the danger of forgetting people, struggle, difference, and history in our accounts of the production of the urban, ending with an autonomous epistemological category of the urban. Contributing to a social ontology of the urban that is centred around praxis, Angel focuses on the Catalan activist network la Alianza Contra la Pobreza Energética (the Alliance Against Energy Poverty, APE). He demonstrates that APE’s feminist urban praxis is ‘premised upon the creation of more caring and collectivized modalities of social reproduction’ for those who do not have access to vital infrastructures, such as gas, electricity, and water, for their survival. Angel’s analysis illuminates how social reproductive labour and people as infrastructure become intimately entangled during the processes of reproducing the urban and life within it, thereby providing us with the ethnographic details of a social ontology of the urban in Catalonia.

Tom Gillespie and Kate Hardy contribution (Chapter 11) also draws upon Ruddick et al.’s conceptualization of the social ontology of the urban. Operating within a framework of feminist comparative urbanism, Gillespie and Hardy discuss two urban social movements: The Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina (AMMAR), a sex workers’ union in Córdoba, Argentina, and Focus E15, a housing campaign in London, UK. Focusing on how these all-women or women-led grassroots activist organizations both reproduce the urban and their own subjectivities within the process, Gillespie and Hardy’s comparative methodology is hinged upon what Ruddick et al. call ‘infrastructures of social reproduction’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 396). Gillespie and Hardy employ ethnographic detail to analyse these movements’ struggles over the infrastructures of social reproduction – of health, education, and housing – and show how they employ various tactics, such as ‘demand[ing] access to existing infrastructures, creating autonomous infrastructures, and co-producing new infrastructures with the state’ (Gillespie and Hardy, Chapter 11). Their chapter not only highlights urbanization as ‘an open process determined through praxis, by actual people making the world they inhabit’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 399) but also signals the importance of historical difference in the constitution of the urban and to the fact that despite the seeming universality of social reproduction and its infrastructures they are always marked by this difference.

Meera Karunananthan (Chapter 7) also focuses on struggles over the infrastructures of social reproduction, through an account of the feminist network Solidaritas Perempuan’s campaign for the right to water in Jakarta, Indonesia. Through an intersectional feminist approach, Karunananthan examines the ways in which human rights discourse might be employed to make visible urban poor women’s social reproductive struggle with privatized drinking water systems. Moreover, Karunananthan elaborates on how the right to water activism might help to recast the Trotskyite transitional programme in a feminist manner to recuperate subaltern women’s revolutionary subjectivity and expertise, which, she argues, is often unnoticed by the male leadership in established leftist groups. Karunananthan demonstrates that through the demands of collectivizing social reproduction in relation to urban water infrastructures, feminist activists of Solidaritas Perempuan Jakarta (SPJ) give priority to use-value production at the expense of exchange-value production, thereby reversing transnational capitalist logic and exposing its gendered violence at the urban, household, and bodily scales. For her, the sites of social reproduction and social reproductive labour are crucial in defeating capitalism in cities of the global South, and a social imaginary of a ‘just city’ becomes tenable with the reclamation of ‘the labour power of women whose unpaid work has served to subsidize’ postcolonial capitalism.