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‘Popular economies’ refer to the variegated, promiscuous forms of organising the production of things. The term also includes the repair, distribution and use of these things, as well as the provision of social reproduction services that are differentiable from conventional modes of capitalist production.
The popular economy is not reducible to notions of informality, shared, social or solidarity economy. Instead it embodies the efforts of those with limited access to wage labour to generate a livelihood and to anchor such livelihood in forms of accumulation that enable them to participate in larger circuits of sociality, to concretise and sustain experiments with remaking collective life, and to elaborate the semblance of a public infrastructure. As such, an emphasis on the popular economy recognises the skills, abilities and dynamic strategies through which particular subjects question, negotiate and alter established socio-economic orders and rules of the game.
The Sheffield Desk on Popular Economy is a collaboration between the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (USP) and the Urban Institute (UI). It seeks to bridge conversations among researchers across the university interested in the urban popular economy. What is meant by this term?
Examples include:
- residents of Sadr City revolting against the diminishing material horizons of their everyday lives
- residents of Buenos Aires attempting to maintain the positions of their clothing workshops in existing commodity chains without reproducing relations of exploitative labour
- residents of Birmingham trying to piece together new institutions supportive of basic social reproduction in the face of sustained austerity
- residents of Beirut appropriating the demise of urban services as a locus for national political renewal
- residents of Manila circumventing the general war on the poor in efforts to protect the everyday intimacies of neighbourhood organisation
- residents of Brooklyn fighting to retain public housing and black residency in the face of gentrification
- residents of El Alto where, confronted by colonial cultures of planning, Aymara indigenous peoples integrate their modes of socio-economic and political organisation within the urban fabric
- residents of Freetown where women organise to ensure the equitable distribution of opportunities to participate in civic affairs
All of these diverse instances are manifestations of a concern about how lives could be lived under difficult circumstances.
Coordinated by AbdouMaliq Simone and Victoria Habermehl from UI, and Gabriel Silvestre and Philipp Horn from USP, the collaboration started this Spring with a virtual workshop held on 24th March. Since then, online seminars have been organised with distinguished speakers from different parts of the globe. Solomon Benjamin (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras) and Felipe Nunes Coelho Magalhães (Federal University of Minas Gerais) presented their respective work examining the Indian and Brazilian contexts of shifts in production and labour relations and their impact on popular livelihoods. In May, Mpho Matsipa (University of Witwatersrand) and Amen Jaffer (Lahore University of Management Sciences) discussed their separate research on the gendered practices of livelihood and sociality in South African and Pakistani cities.
This collaboration has three aims: to listen to and discuss the work and interests of participants which, in one way or another, touch upon popular economy; to map out possible conceptual and practical connections amongst this work; and to identify possible ways of working collaboratively across the University and beyond to consolidate possible research or pedagogical work in this area.