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 three overlapping dimensions of urban imaginaries—capitalist, colonialist, (neo)colonialist—and how women’s struggles, negotiations and placemaking practices offer alternative decolonial urban imaginaries. The first dimension connects the privatization and commodification of urban infrastructures to the realization 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 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, organized by the transnational feminist research project, ‘Urbanization and Gender in the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network’ (GenUrb). It was originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.