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Our broad project of advancing a feminist urban theory for our time is predicated on recognizing the need to decolonize feminist knowledge production about the urban, including within this book. Coloniality, or the patterns of power resulting from colonialism that have shaped subjectivities, political and economic power, and knowledge (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Noxolo 2017), brings into view the way in which historical structures of gendered oppression, such as patriarchy and heteronormativity, work in concert with structures of class and racial ordering to shape contemporary urbanization. While postcolonial theory has long analysed how colonial power has shaped knowledge and global systems of economic, political, and cultural ordering emanating from Eurocentric epistemologies, decolonial theory from Latin American and Caribbean perspectives has theorized the relationship between coloniality and modernity, and liberation from coloniality as a political project. Latin American feminist traditions have further sought to critically interrogate decolonial scholarship through a ‘descolonial approach’ (Esguerra Muelle, Ojeda, and Fleischer, Chapter 9), emphasizing the role of gender oppression in colonial power and the need to connect with ongoing anti-colonial movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the same time, Indigenous scholars have sought to move beyond postcolonial concerns with representation to emphasize the lived voices and experiences of colonized subjects, particularly in spaces occupied by settler-colonists where Indigenous peoples and Indigenous geographies continue to be subjected to processes of dispossession (de Leeuw and Hunt 2018).

Urban theorists have used postcolonial analysis to argue for the heterogenization of urban theory, particularly through greater attention to cities in the global South (McFarlane 2010; Robinson 2011), and through calls to take historical difference seriously as a constitutive element of the urban (Roy 2016a; Jazeel 2019) – issues which assume particular salience in the context of the ascendance of comparison as a mode of analysis in urban studies in the 21st century (Nijman 2007; Ward 2010). Amongst the varied urban geographies presented in this volume are several chapters that provide insight into the formation of the urban through the predatory relations put in place by ‘economies of dispossession… those multiple and intertwined genealogies of racialized property subjection, and expropriation through which capitalism and colonialism take shape historically and change over time’ (Byrd et al. 2018, p. 2). In particular, they shed light on urban formations in the contemporary phase of capitalism, its logics of speculation, expropriation and dispossessive financialization, and the related biopolitical and necropolitical regimes of racialized value that they inaugurate (Tadiar 2013; Hong 2018).

In Chapter 3, Emily Fedoruk’s analysis of a public mural quoting the words of Qayqayt First Nations Chief, Rhonda Larrabee, in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster, British Columbia, highlights Indigenous social reproduction amidst ongoing processes of colonial dispossession in settler colonial Canada. Fedoruk situates the social reproduction of the Qayqayt First Nations into the broader context of settler-colonialism, thereby avoiding collapsing the ongoing violence of capitalist settler-colonialism into the violence of contemporary urban capitalism, making it possible to reflect on these different forms of violence relationally and historically. More importantly, by using social reproduction in this methodological way, this chapter directs us beyond social reproduction, towards Indigenous ontologies of life and history. In their exploration of the legacies of plantation economies and neoliberal urban transformation in the Caribbean, Santos Ocasio and Mullings (Chapter 2) discuss the ways in which processes of ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein 2007) and ‘debt imperialism’ (Kim 2018) shape urban dispossession in the wake of environmental disaster in Haiti and Puerto Rico. They commit to what Frantz Fanon (1961, p. 210) terms ‘passionate research’, in order to seemingly recover ‘beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, to some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence’ provides communities battered by disaster capitalism with the tools to rehabilitate themselves and others. In her chapter on spatial politics in Ramallah, Natasha Aruri (Chapter 8) discusses the confluence of neocolonialism and neoliberal modes of urban development in a context of ongoing militarized settler colonial occupation in Palestine. As a primary vehicle through which finance capital feeds into contemporary urbanization, Aruri tracks the proliferation of speculative capital in the real estate market and its deleterious impact on possibilities for everyday social reproduction in Ramallah.

Providing insights into the ways in which the urban is produced through the distribution of social reproductive labour across transnational circuits of care and labour migration, Chapter 6 by Faranak Miraftab and Chapter 9 by Esguerra Muelle, Ojeda and Fleischer demonstrate that at a transnational scale processes of social reproduction are organized through the legacies of historical colonial relationships, as well as racial divisions of labour in contemporary imperial formations. Miraftab analyses the transnational circuits of social reproduction that come to serve crises of capitalism in this latest era of global capitalism, enabling, amongst others, the revitalization of the United States ‘rustbelt’ town of Beardstown, Illinois. She explores the global restructuring of social reproduction, through the place-making practices of migrant workers from Central America and West Africa, and how social reproduction work is made invisible not only through its gendered normalization but also through its spatial fragmentation, both across the globe and within existing postcolonial racialized urban hierarchies. In doing so she challenges the racialization and criminalization of these migrant populations in nationalist discourse to render visible the transnational contributions of their labour. Esguerre Muelle, Ojeda, and Fleischer explore the multiple forms of violence that connect internal displacement in post-conflict Colombia, resulting from war and rural dispossession, with the re-enactment of colonial gendered and racialized labour relations in transnational care migration networks between cities in Colombia and Spain. Through a collaborative multi-sited ethnography conducted in four Colombian cities – Cali, Cartagena, Bogotá, and Medellín – and two Spanish cities – Madrid and Barcelona – they explore how Columbian women in Spain become trapped in a cycle of migration-return, effectively disposed to sustain uneven processes of urban production and, how in Colombian cities, madres comunitarias (communitarian mothers) conduct a form of underpaid care work sustained mostly by women of rural origin who have been forcedly displaced. Their work shows how the intertwined dynamics of war and globalized capital have forged a problematic geography of urban-based care work through which colonial power is constantly re-enacted.

The task of imagining a feminist urban theory that is capable of both analysing these recursive colonial logics and of envisioning possibilities for decolonization returns us to the political conjuncture of the epistemological, the methodological, and the ontological at the core of feminist philosophy. Given the deep imbrication of knowledge systems in the proliferation of colonial power, decolonization necessitates an interrogation of knowledge creation processes in terms of who generates theory, how, and the ends that theory serves (Jazeel 2019). The creation of possibilities for decolonization within the academy through privileging the ‘singularity of indigenous, southern and subaltern narratives’ (Jazeel 2019, p. 11) is contingent on meaningful attempts to pluralize and heterogenize the bodies and voices that constitute the epistemic communities of the academy. As Tuck and Yang (2012) have reminded us, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor.’ Rather, it is a radical and transformative political practice that belongs outside the confines of the academy. In this context, the decolonization of knowledge frameworks within and beyond the academy serves as an aid to political efforts to end colonial domination, from the dismantling of racist epistemological frameworks that underpin Eurocentric power, to Indigenous campaigns for the radical restructuring of relationships to land, resources, and the environment (Esson et al. 2017). As Indigenous scholars have long argued, the impulse to render legible and explicable, which is inherent in intellectual cultures of subsumption, may militate against the ontological possibilities proliferating from attempts to reach for a decolonial horizon (Hunt 2014; see also Santos Ocasio and Mullings, Chapter 2 and Fedoruk, Chapter 3). May we go so far as to ask whether an analysis of the creative and insurrectionary energies of decolonial praxis requires that we question and disinvest from the framework of social reproduction?

In the ongoing quest for locating ‘new geographies of theory’ in urban studies (Roy 2009), for example, Jazeel’s recent call for a focus on ‘singularity’ as a way to open up to difference in knowledge production provides a useful epistemological intervention that begins by rendering visible disciplinary cultures of subsumption, which serve to reduce ‘examples and cases to exchangeable instances, or conceptual givens, for the benefit of a disciplinary theory culture located in the EuroAmerican heartland’ (2019, p. 11). If we were to privilege singularity, we may have to contemplate that decolonization as praxis may fall outside of any one overarching explanatory framework, including that of social reproduction, and may indeed exceed our known epistemological grids of representation (Jazeel 2019). For example, Santos Ocasio and Mullings’ chapter on the role of expressive musical practices in enabling the reconstruction of relational community infrastructures in the event of natural disaster, and in asserting critiques of ongoing imperial and colonial dispossession, offers a compelling example of urban praxes that manifest ‘affective and grounded alternatives to economies of dispossession’ (Byrd et al. 2018, pp. 11–12). Santos Ocasio and Mullings conclude their analysis by casting doubt on the transformative potential of the expressive arts to effect material change in the world. It might be worth asking could we gain more in dwelling in the space of the unspeakable evoked by the Haitian song leader they cite in their article, who says: ‘If you don’t have this reaction instilled in you, you cannot understand it; it’s inexplicable!’

Following ‘fragments’, translation and untranslatability, and poetics, are amongst the tactics put forward by Jazeel (2019) for working towards singularity. In Chapter 3, Emily Fedoruk traces the poetics of urban space through fragments of text and in so doing reflects on the role of illegibility in rejecting settler colonial regimes of recognition of Indigenous people in Canada. Juxtaposing it with another poem that also appears on the same building (by architect Graham McGarva), which adopts a colonial voice, she articulates some of the complexities of authorship. Ruminating on the space between translation and untranslatability, the written and unwritten, Fedoruk examines the potential of a fragmented poem in a public space to reclaim the survival of Indigenous people against the genocidal processes of colonial place-making. Fragments are also present in Chapter 8, with Natasha Aruri’s call to reclaim the ‘antispaces’ resulting from colonial logics of spatial dissection in Ramallah, and to re-imagine the possibilities of these forgotten spaces for grounding a politics of communal regeneration and, ultimately, decolonization in a context of ongoing military occupation. Such readings of fragments and untranslatable utterances map ‘decolonial geographies as constellations in formation’ (Daigle and Ramirez 2019, pp. 79–80), which evince tactics of refusing and resisting racialized economies of containment, displacement, and interconnected violences against lands, spaces, and bodies.