Through an engagement with the strand of critical urban theory, this dissertation brings the reworkings of Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘planetary urbanisation’ into a new synthesis with further inputs from urban political ecology and feminism—towards developing an ecofeminist lens to urbanization. Guided by the hypothesis “urbanization has been historically sustained through the patriarchal domination of women and nature’s reproduction,” the thesis seeks to critically explore how urbanization processes have historically and multiscalarly recurrently transformed the spatial configurations of reproduction from territories of extraction. It does so by engaging with the long durée historical problematique of the malm territory of extraction, as situated from Swedish Sápmi and through an intersectional ecofeminist approach. From the mid-1500s—Indigenous Sámi, Natures, and the bodies of especially women—have been violently subordinated through patriarchal-colonial-capitalist urbanization processes. Across scales and time, the so-called production has been designed by and for the BWMAh* as extraction. Through the malm territory—within and beyond Sweden—this has taken the form of iron ore mining, but also historically in linkage with other forms (i.e. fur and leather, large-scale reindeer, fishing, agriculture, forestry, coal, hydropower, research and development, tourism, data centres, fertilizers, space industry, dredging, fossil-free steel, or fossil- free hydrogen). Backgrounded and at the basis, however, extraction has been sustained through the violent domination of nature and women’s reproduction, as through the witch-hunts in different forms historically and still ongoing, femicides, the creation of the ideals of ‘the good woman,’ the myth of ‘the strong Sámi women,’ successive scientific revolutions, race biology, genetics, industrial colonialism, or the new green colonialism. Under the current ‘green everything’ transition where once again capital’s project is rearticulating and preparing for the next wave of accumulation underway—through an ever-backgrounded and deeper preceding crisis of reproduction—, it is ever more relevant to question the spatiality of the reproduction processes and the ways in which earlier rearticulations have dominated the reproduction of life in new forms.
The malm territory is then synchronically and diachronically mapped yet foregrounding the processes of subordination of nature and women—across scales and time—building up the ‘palimpsests of extraction.’ It uses Corboz’s metaphor of ‘the territory as palimpsest’ and expands its conception as a mapping method beyond cartography, to explore in which ways reproduction relations have been masked and not represented historically. The dissertation then goes on to argue that the existing literature on planetary urbanisation has been giving ontological priority to production, and this has precluded an analysis of the actual reproduction relations that have been at the root sustaining life however subordinated in the complete urbanization of society. By advancing an ecofeminist materialist lens to urbanization that reads—representationally and spatially—grasping the complex specificities through the key moments of rearticulation of patriarchal-colonial-capitalist urbanization—temporally and multiscalarly—in the long durée history of the malm territory yet foregrounding the forms of subordination of nature and women, I focus on the linkages that can be drawn between the relations of domination and alternatively collectively transformed.
* BWMAh: Bourgeois White Male Adult heterosexual