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.