FROM PEMBA TO BARRANQUILLA: A Feminist Political Ecology of the Urban Home

Abstract

This chapter brings together the work of feminist scholars who have defined the home as a key site in the daily life of women (and for the reproduction of gendered identities) with work from feminist urban studies, which reveals women's experiences as too often excluded from urban perspectives. This chapter reveals how this work is extended with political ecology, advancing the concept of homescape to denote a produced place in which interdependent social, material, and ecological processes unfold in and around the domestic. Drawing from work in low-income neighbourhoods of Barranquilla and Buenaventura (Colombia), and Maputo and Pemba (Mozambique), the chapter explores the interconnected infrastructural histories and arrangements, ecological changes, and social power relations that constitute homescapes.