we submit this volume for publication, we have been living in what has been routinely referred to as the unprecedented time of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Each in our own distinct and interlinked ways, the authors of this chapter and editors of this book have confronted the individualizing paradoxes and isolating demands of the present moment from the vantage point of our own homes and eerily empty city streets here in Toronto. While it is important to be reflexive about how we ourselves have coped, as editors and authors of a book focused on feminist urban theory and social reproduction, we are also compelled to question the oft-mentioned phrase that we are living in unprecedented times. We ask: What exactly is unprecedented about this time? Is it unprecedented that inequality will increase? That millions will fall into poverty? That migration to cities will increase in the face of poverty? That once open cities will move to closure? That people are not able to safely access the healthcare they need because of enduring spatializations of racism? That those who suffer from ill health rooted in socio-environmental injustice will suffer in greater numbers from a novel virus? That people who are told to stay at home are not able to do so because they have no home or because their partner or parent is violent? That people will be made sick doing an underpaid and insecure job because their employer refuses to provide for basic health and safety considerations? Or that national governments and institutions alike are exploiting a crisis to institute militarized regimes of population control, to cut off access to information, to consolidate power? We could easily ask many more questions, those which address the issues that the pandemic does not so much create these calamitous conditions, but rather exposes them.
The deep systemic injustices, inequalities, and violences that have been accelerated by responses to this crisis are not new phenomenon, especially for the huge swathes of the world’s population living in states governed by conservative and neo-fascist leaders, but they are surfacing with a new intensity, shining light on capitalism as the history of the separation between capital and life. The spatial organization of our lives is marked by the pain and anxiety of this separation of life and capital. By the time you read these words, ‘the situation’ will have again shifted enormously; the constancy of change is now more apparent than ever, as is Dr. King’s call to attend to the fierce urgency of now. Thus, at the same time as the deeply stretched relations of social reproduction that form the warp and weft of urban everyday life are in the spotlight, we need to confront the violent re-instantiation of the ‘health’ of ‘the economy’ at the expense of everything and everyone else.
And yet the time of COVID-19 has also shown the city to be a site of ethical and political possibilities. The politics of care and connectivity that have surfaced in accounts of everyday life in cities across the globe reveal a bottom-up collective vision for helping those who lives are marginalized – refugees, immigrants, the homeless, the underpaid, targets of violence – in ways that are sustainable and speak to equality. Time will tell if there will also be a renewed politics of solidarity that arises out of these experiences. Rather than economizing, financializing, and dehumanizing society, we call for socializing and humanizing the economy, as the path by which we can reconsider, reclaim, and reconstruct our ways of being together to envision meaningful lives. This necessary re-orientation to life beyond capitalism will require reconsideration of social reproduction for years to come.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the contributors to this book, the anonymous reviewers, and Leeann Bennett and Mel Mikhail for their help with the bibliography and all things technical.
Notes
1 1 In the long history of urban scholarship, genealogies of feminist interventions into the urban and social reproduction can be traced back 150 years to the 1870s. Social reproduction has been the (waxing and waning) central thread of feminist urban work since the early 1970s when it was ignited by the path-breaking debates between feminist political economists. The early work of Boserup (1970) in this period, which related to Southern cities, based on a classification of different types of cities according to the presences and absences of men and women, fell between the cracks. While development feminists took up Boserup’s work in relation to women’s various modes of integration into development, urban feminists remained largely unaware of it, their focus being on Northern cities and the above-mentioned debates. Northern-based scholars began to amalgamate empirical studies of the gendered division of labour within households with feminist Marxist political economy accounts of urbanization to address the role of social reproduction in capitalism. Building on this work, urban feminists initiated a field of study of the sites and processes of social reproduction in urban place-making and urbanization, and of the ways in which changes in spatialities and processes of social reproduction and production affect and transform the urban. The first review of this work by urban feminists came as early as 1974 (Hapgood and Getzels 1974), followed shortly by others (Hayden and Wright 1976; Wekerle 1980) (see Peake 2020 for further elaboration).
2 2 Although they have not stopped in their efforts to problematize and transform this intellectual erasure, feminist scholars’ patience with the tenacity of this lack of engaging with questions of social reproduction has been wearing thin over several decades and is resulting, amongst other responses, with a refusal to engage with masculinist urban theory (see Katz 2006; Derickson 2018).
3 3 Katz’s most recent definition of social reproduction falls squarely in the political economy tradition, as ‘the daily and long-term reproduction of the means of production, the labor power to make them work, and the social relations that hold them in place’ (Norton and Katz, 2017, p. 1).
4 4 The following are some of those whose contributions defined this field for a whole generation of scholars: Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Veronica Beechey, Patricia Connelly, Maria Rosa Dalla Costa, Diane Elson, Silvia Federici, Bonnie Fox, Selma James, Martha Gimenez, Meg Luxton, Martha MacDonald, Maureen Mackintosh, Angela Miles, Maxine Molyneux, Ruth Pearson, Wally Seccombe, Lise Vogel, and Annie Whitehead.
5 5 Although feminist scholars did not introduce the term ‘social reproduction’ (it was first introduced in the 18th century), socialist feminists were responsible for developing a fully-fledged account of it (for a genealogy of the term, see Caffentzis 2002).
6 6 Numerous studies have shown that although some men are engaging more in domestic work, this is uneven and far from reaching equality of participation (Altintas and Sullivan 2016; Office for National Statistics 2016; Bourantani 2017; Moyser and Burlock 2018; Woodman and Cook 2019).
7 7 We include fields essential for social reproduction that cross the waged/unwaged work divide, such as those of childcare, domestic work, education, and healthcare (see also Pearson and Elson 2015).
8 8 We agree with other critical urban scholars who argue that the lack of any global agreement on a definition of the urban, the uneven pace and form of urbanization, and the incompatability of national data sets raises serious questions about the nature of the ‘global’ urban (see Brenner and Schmid 2014).
9 9 Space prevents us from even a brief overview of this literature, but see, for example, Castells (1983) on the city as a spatial unit of collective consumption, and feminist critiques of why the provision of goods and services by the state fall short of a comprehensive understanding of social reproduction.
10 10 The global geoeconomic transformations triggered by the financial crash have also facilitated the global rise of the right – with its associated ideologies of fascism, nationalism, populism, xenophobia, and militarism. The associated reassertion of patriarchy and misogyny, in fixing the unstable subject of woman, is also accelerating the trend to increase the burdens on women to carry the costs of social reproduction.
11 11 See, for example, Piketty 2015; UN-Habitat 2016; Vidal, Tjaden, and Laczko 2018.
12 12 Scholars have documented the feminization of migration through the transnational migration
