Urban Life at the Extensions

Abstract

There has been much consideration of the ways in which urbanization exceeds the city form—particularly in its peripheries and hinterlands. Extended urbanization conventionally refers to the multifaceted processes through which urbanization articulates different logics and territories. Yet extensions reflect a going beyond that can take place anywhere, and which is manifested not only in new territorial formations but also in ways of living and inhabiting. Acts of extending urban form and life do not simply reproduce the dominant modes of valuation but unsettle, disrupting familiar categorization, as inhabitants attempt to situate themselves in the midst of increasingly unsettled terrain. Extensions and extending, then, are at the heart of an interplay between attempts to resettle and unsettle, to extract as much as possible but also to operate where nothing apparent is to be gained, nothing useful to the prolongation, either of the urban or life. Drawing from Black tactical life, extensions concern how a people spread out to cover the angles, to act as lookouts at all those interfaces where capture attempts to suture a conceit of seamlessness. It is also a stance against the everywhereness found in the proliferation of “dead exchanges”—where discourses of freedom and development become merely aspects of continuous assessment of the exercised efficacies of particular bodies and their trajectories and interactions.