Social reproduction, infrastructure, and the everyday

Abstract

One of the main preoccupations of contemporary (feminist) urban theory is to conceptualize social reproduction, infrastructures, and everyday as the constitutive elements of the processes of urbanization. In this commentary, I engage with McFadden's contribution to these efforts from the standpoint of the study of concept formation. This commentary dwells on McFadden's theoretical object of knowledge (i.e. ‘infrastructures of social reproduction') within the empirical context of ‘educational landscapes’ both in terms of the method of its construction and the political consequences of this method. I argue that while it is important to insist on the inseparability of social reproduction and infrastructures within the spatiotemporal unfolding of urbanization, our theoretical attempts must go beyond asserting this inseparability to be able to produce transformative social knowledge of the (non-)urban. A way in this direction, I suggest, is the method of recuperation of the specificities that produce social reproduction and infrastructures as both indivisible and individual under concrete socio-spatial histories, conditions, and principles.