Paradoxes of the periphery

Abstract

ABSTRACT Urban scholars have increasingly turned to urban peripheries for understanding the emergent urban forms, new and old political and economic forces at play, and everyday practices of urban transformation. Joining this peripheral turn, Ayona Datta’s paper on the informational periphery makes a rich and timely intervention by tracing the development of urban peripheries as charged theaters where the techno-political drama of information and logistics is currently playing out. Her findings in Bhiwandi complicate the ways in which we have tended to discern the space and category of urban periphery. In thinking with Datta, this paper proposes that, instead of the periphery, peripheralization offers a potential for evaluating the complex and multi-scalar processes that congregate in specific sites in expected and unexpected ways.