A heuristic device, not an actual map… revisiting the urban periphery

We are very grateful for Daniel Mullis (2021a, 2021b, 2021c) to have taken up and expanded, but even more for having critiqued our initial paper in this journal on ‘repositioning COVID-19 at the social and spatial periphery of urban society’ (Biglieri et al. 2020). The paper was written early in the pandemic and was published barely 2 months after the World Health Organization had declared a global health emergency in the face of the growing COVID-19 outbreak early in 2020. We acknowledge at the outset that we seem to share with Mullis an affinity for the larger debate on the theories of space and urbanization in the context of recent work on planetary urbanization and suburbanization. We agree, in the broadest sense, as Mullis notes with reference to both our common source in Lefebvre’s work and to our own musings about the subject, that centrality and peripherality are ‘produced in and through praxis’ (Mullis 2021a, p. 2). As we will note below, such praxis can be, and often is, more than action, more than momentary agency, but can be seen as a structural condition from which long-term inequalities are being cemented before, in and beyond this current health crisis and future ones to come. So, if centrality is changeable and subject to a ‘dialectical movement that creates of destroys it’ (Lefebvre 2003, p. 116), it is by no means fleeting. It can have staying power. The same can be said about peripheries – social, spatial and institutional ones as we have discussed in our previous work and the experience of being on the margins can have long-lasting and hard-to-overcome detrimental effects on oppressed urban communities and on the physical places where they live, work and play. While, however, the dynamic relationship between the dialectics of change and stasis was repeatedly unveiled in the pandemic as we experienced it over the past 2 years, the exact nature of that dialectics may have at times been hidden from the casual view of an outside ‘spectator’ whose ‘glance is consolidating’ as, in her view, ‘the very form of the urban [is] revealed,’ as Lefebvre says (Lefebvre 2003, p. 116). The processes that produce this ‘consolidated’ image we can observe on a map, or on a tower or hilltop overlooking a city may coincide with the ravages of a pandemic, an economic crisis, a devastating flood or earthquake: But ultimately, those processes are hidden behind the back of the viewer and need separate exposition and explanation. Less abstractly put, the appearance of social, spatial and institutional peripheries in any given urban context may or may not be an exact reflection of the longer-term and far-reaching processes by which peripheral status is produced. Even more concretely: if the housing markets are structured and governed by systemic racism, classism and sexism, it may not come as a surprise that racialized working-class residents are experiencing the bulk of vulnerabilities that affect their everyday lives, be they financial, environmental, social or health related. We will note below in a brief comment about the suburban municipality of Brampton in the Toronto region that such circumstances can change through ‘praxis’, taken here quite literally as a deliberate, analytically or theoretically guided action to counteract the detrimental outcomes of systemic marginalization by deliberate, targeted and sincere practices to undo those inequities. But overall, we may be able to insist that the production of centres and peripheries can lead, and often does lead to long-term societal segregation, polarization or segmentation. To illustrate this with an example: The consistent exclusion of African Americans from certain types of housing opportunities has created a dramatic and persistent inequity in the distribution of urban land and property in the United States. It is along the lines of those kinds of structural inequities (perhaps not always visible to the outside ‘spectator’) that social, spatial and institutional vulnerabilities are manifested in any crisis, including this recent pandemic (Taylor 2019). At the time of our writing, in the spring of 2020, the empirical basis for our hypothesis was thin, the landscape of infection, disease and death changed multiple times and expected outcomes were often qualified by new and surprising developments. We put forward this hypothesis as a heuristic device to discuss seven interrelated constellations we saw emerge at the start of the pandemic: