In La survie du capitalisme Lefebvre defined non-central urban spaces as submitted, exploited and dependent spaces; in short, as neocolonial spaces. Even though Lefebvre did not make a complete theorization on the subject, Goonewardena and Kipfer have pleaded for reviving the hints he left regarding the “colonial” aspects of current processes of urbanization. The historical context of imperialist colonization and the present urban processes are indeed very different and any excessive use that would trivialize the concept should be avoided, just as Lefebvre himself admitted.
But, on the other hand, and this is the relevant point here, Lefebvre stated that “colonization” referred to a certain political organization of territorial relations, and that it was applicable at any scale: “When a dominated space is generated and submitted by a dominant space – when there is periphery and center, there is colonization”.
In this presentation, we intend to dig into this idea while putting it in dialogue with other related theoretical elaborations such as “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey), “internal colonialism” (González Casanova 2006) or “margins” as spaces from where to resist capitalist violence on everyday life, from where to collectively regroup the forces, from where to design survival strategies on the margins of a system that is both oppressive and violent. There, the lines of rupture in the system would be opening up spaces from which to develop alternative critical practices as widely theorized from feminism and decolonial thinking (Hancock 2017)
Mots clés : urban margins|internal colonialism|accumulation by dispossession
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