A heuristic device, not an actual map… revisiting the urban periphery

We are very grateful for Daniel Mullis (2021a, 2021b, 2021c) to have taken up and expanded, but even more for having critiqued our initial paper in this journal on ‘repositioning COVID-19 at the social and spatial per- iphery of urban society’ (Biglieri et al. 2020). The paper was written early in the pandemic and was published barely 2 months after the World Health Organization had declared a global health emergency in the face of the growing COVID-19 outbreak early in 2020. We acknowledge at the outset that we seem to share with Mullis an affinity for the larger debate on the theories of space and urbanization in the context of recent work on planetary urbanization and suburbanization. We agree, in the broadest sense, as Mullis notes with reference to both our common source in Lefebvre’s work and to our own musings about the subject, that centrality and peripherality are ‘produced in and through praxis’ (Mullis 2021a, p. 2). As we will note below, such praxis can be, and often is, more than action, more than momentary agency, but can be seen as a structural condition from which long-term inequalities are being cemented before, in and beyond this current health crisis and future ones to come. So, if centrality is changeable and subject to a ‘dialectical movement that creates of destroys it’ (Lefebvre 2003, p. 116), it is by no means fleeting. It can have staying power. The same can be said about peripheries – social, spatial and institu- tional ones as we have discussed in our previous work and the experience of being on the margins can have long-lasting and hard-to-overcome detrimental effects on oppressed urban communities and on the physical places where they live, work and play.