When Planetary Urbanization Meets the Agrarian Question
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When Planetary Urbanization Meets the Agrarian Question
The urban question itself is inextricable from the agrarian question.
the period of ‘long national developmentalism’ originating in the early 20th century and intensifying in the period between 1945 up to the 1970s; and
the period of ‘postcolonial neoliberal globalism’ beginning in the 1970s.
Global depeasantization and deruralization as the labor dimensions of extended urbanization: The concept of extended urbanization emphasizes the transformation of spaces beyond the limits of cities because of their ‘operationalization’ to meet the ‘socio-metabolic imperatives’ of urban growth: food, water, energy and so on. At the same time, planetary urbanization specifies two other elements including the extension and intensification of infrastructure development as well as the enclosure of land via privatization, commodification and other forms of accumulation by dispossession. The concept of deruralization refers to the same set of processes but from an obverse standpoint. Even as Araghi frames his analysis in terms of the spatial discontents of a historically specific form of capitalist development, his guiding focus is the manifestation of ‘historical value relations and class formation’ in ‘rural space’ or landscapes of agricultural production. Araghi pays close attention to the global class differentiation engendered by processes of depeasantization and the constitution of an ‘enclosure food regime’. ‘Deruralization’, in this context, refers not only to the transformation of erstwhile agricultural land into non-agricultural land but also to the urbanization of labor both in terms of unprecedented ‘rural to urban’ migration and the ‘urbanization of agricultural employment’intheGlobalSouth.
Operational landscapes beyond the ‘colossal’: This banal operationalization of landscapes does not necessarily entail a departure from agriculture in term of land use, nor an irruptive descent of global capital upon previously ‘untouched’ landscapes but rather incremental and uneven transformations in social relations effected by supply chain reorganization and vertical integration. This often results in social fragmentation within agrarian communities, as relations of production and social reproduction – including ethnic, caste, religious, gender and household relations – are reconfigured by generalized market imperatives.
Towards relational periodization: Such an approach to the historical analysis of urbanization processes could be developed in relation to the world historical periodization of global agrofood arrangements developed by proponents of the food regime perspective. The food regime perspective thus offers a concrete critical-historical basis for periodizing, historicizing and comparing the socio-spatial (and socio-ecological) transformations that have enabled and resulted from food regimes transitions and consolidations in the long 20th century, and for analyzing the relations between specific operational landscapes and sites of agglomeration. Conversely, historicizing the dialectic of urbanization with regard to historically and geographically specific commodity frontiers – from the production of the grain frontier in the American Midwest in the mid-19th century to the construction of the Punjab ‘canal colonies’ in the late-19th century – might not only unearth other geohistories of capitalist urbanization but also help illuminate the rescaling processes and sociospatial interdependencies attendant to successive world-historical food regimes.
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