Rethinking Life at the Margins

'This excellent collection brings a new focus to an enduring and vital question: how is urban marginality produced, lived and contested? Inspired by poststructural and postcolonial accounts of the city, it provides rich accounts of how the heterogeneity of urbanity produces marginality. By investigating a wide ranging set of domains architectures, publics, infrastructures, slums, waste and others a vivid and nuanced picture emerges of how people and things are sorted into particular urban geographies and how they challenge and exceed those geographies. An important contribution to debates on urban life and inequality.’
Colin McFarlane, Durham University, UK

'Rethinking Life at the Margins demonstrates that Southern Urbanism is not a geographic concern but a much more profound epistemic act. This impressive volume, with its masterful introduction, is illuminating and essential reading for urbanists determined to rethink and remake the city anew.’
Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town, South Africa

'[Th]e book offers is an excellent introduction to previous and the proposed vitalist approach to the study of social marginality. The case studies present a fantastic panorama of the politics one can uncover through vitalist thinking and contribute to a clarification of the critical purchase of the concept of assemblage. As 10 out of the 12 fine-grained and detailed case studies have an urban focus the book seems particularly useful for students and scholars interested in a vitalist perception of urban marginality.'
Leonie Tuitjer,Durham University (UK), Society & Space