When the margin is the center: urban geography and possibility amid crisis

Source abstract

This essay is an attempt to think through the current state and future possibilities of urban geography amid crisis. I draw on an approach to urban geography, coming from the traditions of Black Studies and Cultural Studies, that offers a vantage point from which to appreciate antiblack racism as the geographic precondition for excessive incarceration, deportation, and environmental degradation in the U.S. The provisioning and sustaining power of these same geographies, I argue, allows us in the present, to advance historically informed protest and see the international valences of this violence in places like Gaza. Furthermore, I consider space and time within the same interpretive frame – both in its compression of opportunity and experience, and in our ability to bring the weight of history to discover sites of possibility.