Extended urbanisation and the agrarian question: Convergences, divergences and openings

Abstract

The question of urbanisation ‘beyond the city’ has generated a lively debate in the fields of urban studies and geography in recent years. This paper brings a key concept from this discussion –‘extended urbanisation’– in conversation with distinct yet related concepts from critical agrarian studies. We briefly review the ‘classic’ agrarian question in order to situate contemporary agrarian questions within the historical geographies of capitalist restructuring since the late-nineteenth century. We then examine a selection of contemporary agrarian scholarship attuned to the interconnectedness of agrarian and urban sociospatial relations to argue that the concept of extended urbanisation and urban studies more generally have much to gain from a closer engagement with this work. To this end, we identify three openings for further analysis: (1) ‘global depeasantisation’ and ‘deruralisation’ as the labour dimensions of extended urbanisation; (2) the co-existence of banal ‘operational landscapes’ with landscapes of high-intensity extraction and agro-industrialisation; and (3) relational periodisations of urbanisation that incorporate successive world-historical ‘food regimes’ and their associated commodity frontiers in order to unearth geohistories of extended urbanisation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. We conclude by rearticulating the ‘right to the city’ in terms of a broader ‘right to space’ as a means of re-centring ongoing struggles against capitalist urbanisation in spaces beyond the city.