Global Restructuring of Social Reproduction and its Invisible Work in Urban Revitalization

Guest editorial: Setting the scene for street-level bureaucracy in different Souths: opportunities and challenges in context-based approaches

“…Rather, the analysis of the different Souths allows us to highlight the asymmetries of power between different territories also pointed out by other authors that choose to refer to Global South with the intention of making a shift from a central focus on development or cultural difference towards an emphasis on geopolitical power relations (Dados and Connell, 2012). At the same time, this Special Issue aims to interrogate dynamics that can be found in both the global North and the global South, such as the privatisation of state responsibility for social infrastructure, including water, schools, health care and waste collection (Miraftab, 2013). This has resulted in much of the responsibility for collective care falling back on women, a process described by Bakker (2003) as a re-privatisation, whereby the responsibility for social care is transferred from public institutions to the private sector and the domestic sphere of the home and family, especially women, especially racialised women.…”

Urbanizing social reproduction: (Re)thinking the politics of care in capitalist urban development

“…Following the three modalities of spatial strategies in capitalist urban development, we will discuss the emerging politics of radical care and how we can also see care as a site of contestation in each of these modalities. While capitalism seeks to enroll care into profit-making, as unpaid and underpaid care work licking the wounds inflicted by capitalism, in urban spaces of social reproduction, marginalized people and their movements also form alliances and launch practices of radical care to resist and dismantle capitalist urban production (see Miraftab, 2021). We close the article by stressing the political implication of our analysis for anti-capitalist organizing in urban space.…”

“…Overall, new configurations of institutions, territories, policies, and place-making practices evidenced novel ways for people's social reproduction that Kofman (2012) calls global householding. Paying attention to lifecycle stages and time-space manipulation of social reproduction and care work for transnational households of immigrant and displaced workforce, Miraftab (2016Miraftab ( , 2021 highlights what she calls the global restructuring of social reproduction as processes through which displaced families restructure temporally and spatially the reproduction work (i.e., both the family care and community/collective care) so that it can be performed elsewhere and by others. Just as restructuring of production involves fragmenting and outsourcing production, reproduction is outsourced and fragmented in the global restructuring of social reproduction.…”

“…We hope that others will elaborate on the distinctions, add, and modify to contribute to learning "the tools" that build the "master's house" (Lorde, 1984). We hope that by collating and comparing how capitalism enrolls care work through "bully urbanism," which relies on cycles of dispossession and displacement, we will encourage readers to rethink the relationship between social reproduction and urban development in ways that sustain life, placing lifemaking, not profit, at the center of urban decisions and policies-"humane urbanism" (see Miraftab, 2021Miraftab, , 2023. This, we hope, will encourage thinking about collective and mutual practices of care that build alternatives to patriarchal racial capitalism from the ground up and not merely patch the wounds that capitalism leaves behind.…”