Decolonising Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures

How do decolonial feminist urban imaginaries of urban futures begin to interrogate twenty-first century urban life? The urban futures signaled by the chapters in this book highlight overlapping dimensions of urban imaginaries―capitalism, temporality and the everyday. While the first dimension connects the privatisation and commodification of urban infrastructures to the realisation of state-based and capitalist discursive efforts to make the urban, the second dimension concerns temporal convergences of past, present and future in visions of the urban. It is in these convergences that the recursive logics of coloniality are reproduced in re-mappings of the landscapes of urban inequality and dispossession through which encounters between historical sedimentations of colonial relations and emergent (neo)colonial formations take place. Third, authors take up the everyday as a site of struggle through which women’s negotiations and placemaking practices offer alternative decolonial urban imaginaries.

The book is based on papers given at the ‘Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures’ conference, held in September 2019, at York University in Toronto, Canada, organised by the transnational feminist research project ‘Urbanisation, Gender and the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network’ (GenUrb). It was originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.

Linda Peake, FRSC, is Professor Emerita at York University, Toronto, Canada, and Principal Investigator on the GenUrb project ‘Urbanisation, Gender and the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network’. She is a feminist urban geographer engaged in urban theory production and empirically informed research on women in cities in both North America and Guyana.

Nasya S. Razavi holds a PhD in Human Geography from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and is currently Latin America program manager at social justice organisation Inter Pares. Affiliated with the Municipal Services Project and transnational feminist collective GenUrb at York University, Toronto, Canada, Nasya’s work focuses on public water governance, gender, and urban spaces.

Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin is Associate Professor at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and co-PI on the GenUrb project. She is a feminist researcher whose current research explores the intricate interplay between precarity, creativity, and embodied youth labour and the relationship between the city and the body in Nigeria.

Elsa Koleth was a post-doctoral fellow on the GenUrb project at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include the spatialities and temporalities of urbanisation, migration and mobility, transnationalism and border-making, and the shifting nature of governmentalities and subjectivities, particularly in relation to the intersections of race, gender, and class.