Extended urbanisation and the agrarian question: Convergences, divergences and openings

Abstract

The question of urbanisation ‘beyond the city’ has generated a lively debate in the fields of urban studies and geography in recent years. This paper brings a key concept from this discussion –‘extended urbanisation’– in conversation with distinct yet related concepts from critical agrarian studies. We briefly review the ‘classic’ agrarian question in order to situate contemporary agrarian questions within the historical geographies of capitalist restructuring since the late-nineteenth century. We then examine a selection of contemporary agrarian scholarship attuned to the interconnectedness of agrarian and urban sociospatial relations to argue that the concept of extended urbanisation and urban studies more generally have much to gain from a closer engagement with this work. To this end, we identify three openings for further analysis: (1) ‘global depeasantisation’ and ‘deruralisation’ as the labour dimensions of extended urbanisation; (2) the co-existence of banal ‘operational landscapes’ with landscapes of high-intensity extraction and agro-industrialisation; and (3) relational periodisations of urbanisation that incorporate successive world-historical ‘food regimes’ and their associated commodity frontiers in order to unearth geohistories of extended urbanisation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. We conclude by rearticulating the ‘right to the city’ in terms of a broader ‘right to space’ as a means of re-centring ongoing struggles against capitalist urbanisation in spaces beyond the city.

Extended Urbanization through Capital Centralization: Contract Farming in Palm Oil-Based Agroindustrialization

“…This process is frequently facilitated and enforced by state capitalist regimes under neoliberal economic policies [8]. In summary, dispossession is a prerequisite and key apparatus of extended urbanization for producing new urban territories of capitalism [14,15]. Contrary to this assumption, this paper challenges the notion that extended urbanization processes only hinge upon land dispossession.…”

Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene

“…Significantly, ISF is envisioned not as a mere continuation of planetary urbanisation but is instead articulated in attempted opposition to the historical-geographical relationality it entails. At core, planetary urbanisation is a conceptualisation of unbounded infrastructural interconnection, integration and relationality, meant to capture how contemporary capitalist transformations operationalise heterogeneous, distant sites to support agglomerations of urban life with energy, food, water and other resources (Ghosh and Meer, 2021). Planetary urbanisation: the linking via roads, pipelines, supply chains, cables and distribution routes of all social and ecological relations into an ever-thickening, uneven and variegated worldwide infrastructural fabric (Arboleda, 2020; Brenner, 2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2014, 2015; Merrifield, 2013; Rickards et al, 2016).…”

“…Planetary urbanisation and relational entanglement analytics may describe existing formations, but forecasts of their continuing infinitely (whether linearly or dialectically via implosion/explosion) towards ever greater enmeshment may be premature. As climate change progresses and urban adaptive responses mutate in kind, perhaps the unique late 20th- and early 21st-century formation known as planetary urbanisation (Ghosh and Meer, 2021) – itself superseding 19th- and early 20th-century spatial models – will splinter into other Anthropocene sites. Clearly, they will not resemble past or present spaces.…”

Modernization through capitalization: The hidden costs of Ethiopia’s Gibe III Dam and NESTown initiative

“…Depeasantization and capitalization are intimately connected: depeasantization operationalizes the hinterland for regular and articulated revenue collection, even as country and regional economies remain mainly agricultural (Brenner and Katsikis, 2020). Arguing that “the urban question itself…is inextricable from the so-called agrarian question,” Ghosh and Meer (2020: 3) advance that “‘global depeasantisation’ and ‘deruralisation’ [are] the labour dimensions of extended urbanisation” (1) and that to effectively periodize urbanization in a world-historical way we must attend to various food regimes, the commodity chains that underpin them, and the “operationalisation of distant landscapes” that render the so-called hinterland “ colossal urban-industrial spatial configurations” (13). In short, agrarian studies and (extended) urban studies meet when analyzing projects like Gibe III and NESTown.…”