Everyday scalar politics: navigating insecurity in the competitive city

ABSTRACT

This contribution asks how urban inhabitants (trans)form their everyday practices in the face of insecurity in Neoliberal Urbanism. Based on the analysis of interviews conducted in the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, which has seen enormous rises in property prices, short-term rentals, and numbers of tourists, I argue that urban dwellers adapt to asymmetrical manifestations of insecurity through care networks and adapted mobilities, and such everyday practices sometimes turn into more collective, political practices. By combining feminist perspectives on everyday practices in austerity, relational geographies, and work on everyday responses to insecurity, I develop the notion of “everyday scalar politics’ to offer a relational reading of city-dwellers’ practices in the competitive city. The concept highlights that those not participating in formal governance decisions, do enact political agency, and reach beyond their neighbourhood and the local state, unsettling assumptions of passivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Everyday practices
• insecurity
• Mexico
• Oaxaca
• urban space
• scalar politics

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Ana Álvarez (Citámbulos, México), Rosa Lehmann (Heidelberg University), Hugo Fanton (University of São Paulo, IRGAC), Aysegul Can (Leibniz Centre, IRGAC), Emma Elfversson (Uppsala University), and Tareq Sydiq (Marburg University) and the whole Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict Studies Network for valuable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Draft versions were presented at European International Studies Association EISA, 2019, and the 2020 Latin American Urban Research in Dialogue Workshop at University of Applied Sciences Bremen.

The qualitative interview research was approved by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute’s internal ethics review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The publication of this article was supported through the Project “Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict Studies” [grant number 01UG2205D] funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).