Explosions: Repeasantization of the Urbanizing (Global) South

I spent most of Thursday in Jackson discussing cooperative strategy with regional movement leaders.  The experience was very revealing and enlightening drawing clear distinctions between the Birmingham cooperative movement and the rest of the South.  Particularly the notion that reruralization is not only a thing, but the future of the movement for justice in the South.  Serendipitously, on the same day, I received Neil Brenner's edited volume Implosions/Explosions: Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanism. https://www.jovis.de/en/books/details/implosions-explosions.html

There are some important caveats about this volume's arguments, the biggest of which is that there are no longer rural areas or cities, but global processes of urbanization.  The globe is essentially a network of territorialized capital, sociocultural, political, and socionatural process.  I say socionatural because one of the central arguments in the book is that there is no wilderness since all of nature has been shaped by human hands - or at least climate change, itself a function of urbanization.

As such, an urban place is not a discrete entity, but a dynamic, constantly transforming agglomeration of these processes, many of which are contradictory.  For instance, in Birmingham, regional governance would be great for capital, but is politically impossible because of the politics of race.  Capital is trying to territorialize the entire region, while political processes are defending the boundaries.

Uneven development also plays a major role in the emergence of megacities, which hold two thirds of the American population and just under half of the global population.  Within these urbanized spaces exists centers of decision making and wealth creation, while, increasingly, the peripheries are places of profound lack.  One billion people live in slums in peripheries of megacity regions.

Even those that don't live in megacities are urbanized through transportation networks, media, and information technologies.  People in Harlen County, Kentucky are singing along to the same music as the Southside of Chicago.

While there was once hope that cities offered real opportunity for some utopian future, that hope has faded.  Across the globe capital has seized on urbanizing processes and produced staggering profits for a very few.  However, there are opportunities.

Much of the arguments in Implosions/Explosions revolve around the work of Lefebvre, probably the most important urban theorist in history.  He argues that one of the major processes of urbanization is the destruction or agrarian economies and industrialization and automation of them.  The city exists because of industry.  Thus, my question is why can't we create an alternative form of urbanization using a cultural, political, and economic agenda of repeasantization?  (I understand that the term peasant in the west has a negative connotation, but it is not meant this way in academic literature.  I'm specifically invoking the research of anthropologist, Eric Wolf and his analysis of peasant societies as dynamic and fully integrated into the modern world.  It means a group of people who have a distinct style of life and who farm, often with time honored techniques.  For more information of Wolf's ideas see here.)

A rough outline of such an agenda follows:

 Economic - seizing of land through legal or extra legal means and turning it into productive landscapes, community owned housing, or other assets.  Land banks could be used.  Aquaponics is highly desirable because of its productivity and ability to produce strong revenues.  Long term, strong, autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives are a must.
Cultural - This should be worked out particularisticly by communities in resistance, but should include some broad notion of shared wealth.  It should also include a clear narrative articulating values through as many different media outlets as possible.  Clever, sensational, and attention-getting protest is a plus.
Political - a broad agenda for public money spent on productive agrarian industries that should include a strategy for every level of governance from global to local since these political processes combine to help produce the urban.

I want to end with a story from Alabama.  Uniontown in Perry County has become a hot site for activists, who have helped the people there bring a great deal of attention to the plight on the Uniontown residents with coal ash.  It is important to recognize, however, that the coal ash dump is a process of urbanization.  The coal is dug in a poor town in Appalachia, shipped to a plant, used to generate electricity, which satisfies demand of urban residents, and then shipped to Uniontown.  The coal ash exists because of demand from urban residents.  Uniontown is being urbanized in a particularly oppressive way.

However, the creation of autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives, long term would erase the existence of coal ash, and reterritorialize the urbanization process of energy production.  The only way to stop the dumping of coal ash in poor communities is to eliminate demand for the coal, to urbanize alternatively.