Monika Streule

Urban extractivism is an emergent concept increasingly discussed within Latin America-based scholarship but less known in anglophone urban geography. The devastating social and environmental impact of large-scale natural resource extraction, usually accompanied and driven by infrastructure megaprojects, is the main domain to which activists and scholars are currently applying the concept of extractivism. However, extractivism-related accumulation also applies to urban contexts, as for instance, scholars argue using this lens to analyze the production of exclusive urban territories in central Buenos Aires. In this contribution, I suggest to broaden the concept of urban extractivism to address pressing challenges of urban transformations in the peripheries of Mexico City, particularly concerning urban infrastructure megaprojects and Indigenous socio-territorial movements that advocate for a more sustainable use of natural resources. Critical reflection on the extractivism of knowledge reveals the need for more collaborative research methods in urban geography and beyond.

Streule, Monika (2023) Urban extractivism. Contesting megaprojects in Mexico City, rethinking urban values, Urban Geography 44.1, 262–271. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2022.2146931

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Recorridos explorativos and entrevistas en movimiento are two complementary strategies that sets ethnography in motion. Together they form the basis of a specific methodological design of mobile ethnography that draws on well-established qualitative strategies and adapts them to study large and heterogeneous urban territories. Framed as such, mobile ethnography is a systematic and situated – and at the same time inventive and comparative – strategy to empirically study urbanisation, and possibly useful to analyse other current multi-sited and multi-scalar socio-spatial transformations more in general. Such a mode of inquiry invites anthropologists to further decentralise methodological perspectives, particularly by encouraging more collaborative ways of knowledge production.

Streule, Monika (2023) How to set ethnography in motion. In: Sánchez Criado, Tomás and Adolfo Estalella (eds.) An ethnographic inventory. Field devices for anthropological inquiry. New York: Routledge, 133–142.

This article compares how state-initiated mass housing urbanization has contributed to processes of peripheralization in three very different historical and geopolitical settings: in Paris from the 1950s to the 1990s in Hong Kong from the 1950s to 2010s and in Mexico City from the 1990s to the 2010s. We understand mass housing urbanization as large-scale industrial housing production based on the intervention of state actors into the urbanization process which leads to the strategic re-organization of urban territories. In this comparison across space and time we focus particularly on how, when and to what degree this urbanization process leads to the peripheralization of settlements and entire neighbourhoods over the course of several decades. This long-term perspective allows us to evaluate not only the decisive turns and ruptures within governmental rationales but also the continuities and contradictions of their territorial effects. Finally, we develop a taxonomy of different modalities of peripheralization that might serve as a conceptual tool for further urban research.

Kockelkorn, Anne, Schmid, Christian, Streule, Monika, Wong, Kit Ping (2023) Peripheralization through mass housing urbanization in Hong Kong, Mexico City, and Paris, Planning Perspectives 38.3, 603–641. DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2022.2126997

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