Extended urbanization—a concept in search of a theory?

Keywords: Extended urbanization, planetary urbanization, urban political ecology, social reproduction
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 62

Abstract

Originally developed by Brazilian planning scholar Roberto-Luís Monte-Mór in the 1980s, the concept of extended urbanization has been deployed widely to analyze emergent worldwide patterns and pathways of capitalist urban transformation. While the concept is rooted in a neo-Lefebvrian agenda—in particular, the concern to supersede the limits of city-centric epistemologies of urban theory—it has, in practice, been tethered to rather diverse, and sometimes divergent, theoretical explanations of how and why non-city spaces are co-constitutive of the process of (capitalist) urbanization. This contribution differentiates two major streams of work on extended urbanization—city-extensionist approaches; and metabolic approaches. While appreciating the contributions of the former, I argue for a metabolic theorization of extended urbanization as one moment within a sociospatial dialectic that includes concentrated and differential urbanization as equally co-constitutive moments (see also Brenner and Schmid 2015). Building upon collaborative research in the Urban Theory Lab (Abouelhossein, Brenner, Conroy and Ghosh 2021), I articulate this theorization of extended urbanization to eco-feminist and eco-materialist approaches to social reproduction theory which emphasize the variegated “hidden abodes” of expropriation that support the wage nexus under capitalism (Moore 2015; Fraser 2020). From this point of view, the central problematique for a theory of extended urbanization is to illuminate the hidden abodes of the city—specifically, the non-city sociospatial and environmental transformations that support and result from city-building processes under capitalism. This line of theorization thus opens up a horizon for a reproduction-theoretical approach to the combined and uneven political ecologies of planetary urbanization (Brenner and Ghosh 2021).