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In Ruddick et al. (2018), we approached theories of the urban through a primary focus on social ontology, aiming not simply to situate the subject as an intellectual problem – ‘who acts’ – but to centralize processes of subjectivation. In this volume the authors track the empirical folding and unfolding of subject formation in ways that show the subject is not a mere artefact which can later be ‘situated’ within more or less determined processes of urbanization. As ‘the sedimented outcome of material social practice’ (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2004, p. 10), subjects are not only constituted relationally, but also by their physical environments which play a role in constituting intersubjective encounters. Beyond urban form, Hoffman’s (2014) research on how the politics of urban governance in Chinese cities leads to the normalization of the self as cosmopolitan – however incomplete – further evidences how subjectivities are shaped through urbanization, producing subjectivities that are not only in but also of the urban. She shows how urban politics is located in the constitution of new categories of subjects in Chinese cities giving rise to new modes of self-governance such as self-enterprise, volunteerism, and charitable giving. In the Chinese context, ‘This has produced particular kinds of cities (entrepreneurial, financially “efficient”) emerging in tandem with particular kinds of subjects (professionals and volunteers)’ (Hoffman 2014, p. 1583).

The formation of the self leads to a range of political possibilities – some collectively revolutionary, others highly individualistic. The contributors in this volume are not searching for a new or singular revolutionary subject, one which will indicate the exit, complete or otherwise, from any capitalist mode of production. Neither do they tend to an over-presence of the urban subject as a replacement for the industrial worker as the collective agent of revolution. As Mantha Katsikana describes in Chapter 4, the barriers to the construction of an anarchist and anti-authoritarian commons in Athens, many revolutionary movements continue to emphasize ‘the accumulation and display of male power’ as opposed to the ‘affective and connective labour practices’ needed for the ‘social and emotional change necessary to build and reproduce durable relationships’. Katsikana’s work speaks to the need to demasculinize radical and revolutionary subjectivities in order to better understand and appreciate how the ‘emotional needs and manual tasks necessary for the everyday context of collective actions’ are undertaken primarily by women in these movements (as well as the broader context in which many contemporary transformative movements are led by queer women and women of colour). Her work points to the collective renegotiations necessary to enable the malleability of subjectivity as a relational form of collective self-understanding. Katsikana’s study is a welcome antidote to the now well-travelled theories of revolutionary urbanization and revolutionary subjectivity within urban studies that have overlooked the role of social reproduction and the fabric and texture of everyday life in promulgating transformations. Seeing greater potential for an engagement with gendered subjectivities in the shift from the factory as the heart of revolutionary struggle, feminist scholars have argued that struggles are not just about belonging in the city but also about how the city belongs to those whose invisibilized and unpaid labour maintains the urban (Buckley and Strauss 2016). We also see this engagement in Karunananthan’s work with SPJ, which ‘calls for Marxist debates regarding revolutionary praxis to be re-examined in light of both the constraints faced by women living in the margins of cities of the global South as well as their aspirations.’

What is evident from the research reported in these chapters is that for increasing numbers of people their own social reproduction is increasingly precarious and provisional, falling outside of and challenging the norms of a neo-liberal political subjectivity. Precarity, generally, speaks to the disintegration of stable societal bonds, social protections, and senses of entitlement and belonging, creating lives structured by insecurity, eroding the possibility of life itself (Puar 2012). Precarity is not born of the economic project of neoliberalism, but is a signifying characteristic of it. With increasing inequality, the reorganization of economic and social relations in the context of the hollowing out of social and political institutions, and in the absence of infrastructures (Butler 2012), we can think of the governance of precarity as designating not only working and living conditions but also subjectivities and embodiment, and therefore agency. And as such, as Lauren Berlant (2011) notes, precarity is also a structure of affect internally inculcated into subjectivity via anxiety as the dominant lived experience of insecurity. From the point of view of organizing the everyday, the increasing inability to replenish the self, materially and mentally, has had enormously deleterious effects. Decades of neoliberal scouring out of the social and the permeation of the values and organizing principles of finance capital into society more broadly are leading to new forms of subjectivation, with a depleted, indebted, and anxious subject now prevailing across a wide variety of places.

It is within this context that Simone’s notion of ‘people as infrastructure’ and Caroline Moser’s notion of women’s triple role – of reproductive, productive, and community-managing activities – come together to highlight how a strongly gendered division of labour not only in the household but also within communities, underlies, ‘economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalized from and immiserated by urban life’ (Simone 2004, p. 407). Belinda Dodson and Liam Riley (Chapter 10) illustrate this convergence with reference to food systems in three African cities: Kitwe in Zambia, Kisumu in Kenya, and Epworth in Zimbabwe. Within households in these cities women are largely responsible for food procurement, allocation, and preparation, and in the broader urban food economy they are ‘important actors … as traders, processors and producers, especially in the urban informal sector.’ It is their paid and unpaid time engaged in food-related labour that helps reproduce patriarchal family structures and limits women’s participation in other activities, placing strictures on their subjectivity formation. This particular ‘mode of provisioning and articulation’ speaks not necessarily to an ‘efficient deployment’ of the ‘energies of individuals’ (Simone 2004, p. 407) but to ‘the gendered social forms and practices that reproduce life, family and labour in conditions of urban precarity’ (Dodson and Riley).

With the urban as the primary mode through which capitalism endeavours to organize the social, political, and economic realms, a number of other chapters also highlight how processes of subject formation in the realm of social reproduction reveal fractures in capital’s attempts to address those relations which capitalism has not yet been able to fully undo, incorporate, or defeat. For example, Angel argues that it is ‘through engagements with irregular infrastructural connections, that new ways of navigating and producing the city (and urban subjectivities) are being performed.’ In other words, APE activists saw themselves as engaging in a feminist praxis, given their efforts to ‘sustain life’ in ‘collective and egalitarian ways’. Although they show glimpses of a more emancipatory urban future, these struggles were also replete with the violence and precarity that leads to the formation of fragmented fugitive and indebted subjects, who had to resort to illegal occupation and illegal connections to the city’s formal water and electricity networks. And while APE’s collective actions saw success in legalizing water connections, they were less successful in securing legality for electricity connections, leaving poor inhabitants in a state of insecurity.

Also with a focus on the urban politics of infrastructure, Gillespie and Hardy’s account, in Chapter 11, of their comparative study of AMMAR and Focus 15 shows how ‘women’s subjectivities’ that emerged from these engagements changed over time ‘from victimised, stigmatised and invisibilized subjects to agential actors with collective strategies for changing the conditions in which they live.’ Faced with considerable ignominy, as sex workers and single mothers, both groups ‘initially mobilised around notions of motherhood.’ Despite the positive narratives of political motherhood that arose in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina with the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the sex workers’ engagement with union activities eventually led to them identifying primarily as members of the working class. In both Córdoba and London, women’s changing subjectivities led to new demands. In the UK, the single mothers also moved on from an identification solely as mothers to being housing rights campaigners, as they increasingly came to recognize that they were part of ‘a much wider housing crisis that had not only gendered, but also classed and raced dimensions.’ In Cordoba, the focus shifted from police repression to demand for access to infrastructures of social reproduction in education and healthcare.

Santos Ocasio and Mullings (Chapter 2) address the development of a collective subjectivity in a context of the absence of any reference points for an imagined future. In their exploration of the role of musical expressive practice in urban social reproduction, they address the ‘impulse to sociability’ – what brings people together and how that coming together sustains and enables the intergenerational and ancestral (re)connection to a sense of collective subjectivity, belonging, and liberation. Integral to sustaining a collective subjectivity is not only the unpaid work involved in social reproduction, including the passing on of knowledge, social values, and cultural practices, but also the forms of sociability and collective critique found in the expressive labour of making music.