Land for Livelihoods

Abstract

Abstract Rapid urbanization and ever-expanding surplus populations are rooted in the tendency of global capitalism to destroy established livelihoods faster than it creates new ones. This growing relative surplus population is differentiated along racial, gender, and citizenship lines. Drawing on illustrations of cities in the global South and the global North, this chapter argues that sections of the dispossessed rural classes are reproducing themselves in urban spaces and converging with different strata of wage laborers to eke out an agricultural livelihood. This places urban agriculture and food production as an important arena of land struggles and a livelihood option for sections of both the old and newly formed urban classes. It is also thus one of the key pillars of the urban land question and anticapitalist agrarian struggles in the twenty-first century. These land struggles are shaping in consequential ways the process of urbanization, transforming socioecological relations and landscapes in the city.