Abstract
Discovering momentum from the “overlooked”
In conventional urban narratives, the “urban” with its towering buildings and rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape dominates the discourse, while those often-overlooked spaces where rural and urban components collide are often simplified as merely urbanization transitional zones awaiting further development plans.
Periurban Cartographies by Victoria Jane Marshall, focusing on Ward 13 of Maheshtala Municipality in periphery Kolkata, India, overturns this teleological perspective entirely, instead directing our attention toward the hidden sides disregarded by mainstream discussions. In doing so, she achieves considerable theoretical depth by recentering marginalized areas, lives, and labor to resist monolithic narratives of development, reorienting urban epistemologies, and revealing urban prospects invisible in official discourses. For researchers like myself, working on topics of multispecies flourishing and urban/periurban futures, this work offers a vital and timely provocation: to attend to the “informal” dimension of ecologies—spontaneously vegetated wastelands, micro-gardens, and infrastructural interstices—where biodiversity thrives and surprising cohabitations emerge. This “reversed gazing” constitutes a mindset, a methodological innovation, and an ethical commitment to amplifying subaltern realities, implying that peripheries might harbor resources for discovering inclusive, ecologically resilient futures.
The book's major contribution lies in its empirical findings based on immersive fieldwork and in methodological innovation—transforming cartography into a critical intervention. Moreover, it systematically challenges various manifestations of centrism—from city-centrism, development centrism to the fundamental anthropocentrism—bringing the periurban from the margins to the center of discourse. Through nuanced ethnography and innovative cartographical practices, the author unveils a dynamic “hybrid zone,” where urban/rural, human/non-human, and modern/traditional elements exist not as dichotomous oppositions but in continuous dialogue and co-creation. This book reimagines them as complex socio-ecological environments with distinct internal logics and temporalities rather than considering periurban areas as transitional anomalies. Kolkata's urban–rural interface exemplifies “Situated Periurbanization” (p. 298), where agricultural features (paddy fields and ponds) mingle with urban components (factories and informal industries). This hybridity serves as a theoretical foundation that is not limited to the Indian context, while contesting the hegemony of Northern cities and recreating urbanization theory with Southern perspectives, thus unpacking the multifaceted complexity of the Global South urban processes.
Consisting of eight substantive chapters, the theoretical framework begins with urban political ecology in the first two chapters which assess India's multi-level governance system that undermines local authority. The analysis in Chapters 3 through 7 focuses on micropolitics where critical cartography reveals socio-ecological networks beyond official maps and ethnography shows how women perform unacknowledged work to maintain communal strength. The transformation of land illustrates contradictions through the process of abandoned paddies which indigenous residents see as natural land regeneration while newcomers view them as untamed wilderness which demonstrates the dual nature of land as both an ecological process and capitalist battleground. The urban theory that centers on human actors faces a challenge when non-human elements such as decaying colonial infrastructure and invasive hyacinths and snakes modify hydrosocial cycles and cultural practices. The study of bagan (household gardens) demonstrates how residents negotiate their property rights with the environment and government in a dynamic process. The seventh chapter reveals how infrastructure exists in pieces and how ideological systems create “universal basic services” but the eighth chapter advocates the approach of “Situated Periurbanization,” which focuses on critical cartography and incremental practices to prioritize gradual change and non-human agency in Southern urban theory.
Cartography—a subversive practice
The monograph's brilliance manifests in revolutionizing mapmaking processes as political praxis against dominant knowledge production. In conventional spatial planning, maps function as technical tools that materialize realities and make them manageable through classification, simplification, and standardization. While official planning documents designate periurban agricultural land as “vacant” or “awaiting development,” which has erased the existing livelihoods, informal productivity, and socio-ecological dynamics, channeling development trajectories toward the singular goal of “becoming urban.” Marshall persuasively argues that such mapping practices transcend mere representation—they constitute mechanisms of power manipulation that rationalize capital-led urbanization by visually voiding periurban spaces of meaning and value.
To confront such epistemological violence, Marshall employed “re-rendering,” “incremental mapping,” and “visual ethnography” and related techniques to repopulate official maps’ “blank spaces” across different scales, richly texturizing Ward 13's socio-ecological landscapes into four dimensions: historical depth (overlaying colonial drainage systems with contemporary waterlogging), symbolic reconfiguration (introducing indigenous visual syntax), multispecies entanglements (non-human lifeforms as active producers), and household everyday practices. In addition, through careful cropping of historical maps, strategic addition of symbolic systems, and inventive shading methods, these critical cartographic practices restore complexity to simplified representations. This approach, complemented by “5 elements” land cover analysis and systematic transect documentation, constructs a methodological toolkit calibrated to capture periurban spaces as dynamic mosaics rather than developmental wastelands. Particularly illuminating is the author's temporal comparison of satellite imagery (2004–2018), revealing the slow pace of periurban transformation that contradicts mainstream urban studies’ emphasis on rapid urbanization.
These cartographic strategies extend further through their visualization of non-human actors’ liveliness; integrating water hyacinths, snakes, mosquitoes, and other species into urban analysis, the author repositions these entities from passive background elements to active participants shaping spatial relations. Merging a multispecies perspective with critical cartography, the approach illuminates relational networks systematically overlooked in mainstream urban studies—revealing how water systems govern land use patterns, vegetation transforms abandoned farmland, and animal/insect movements recalibrate human spatial practices. Such interactions constitute vital vectors of urban biodiversity, serving as everyday routines for human–non-human coexistence.
Incubating theories from the margins
Central to its analytical framework, the book continuously challenges various forms of centrism. It methodically illustrates how periurban complexity evolves through intricate interactions across scales (state to local), actors (societal to household), and ecologies. Each layer of research untangles the complex geographical, social, and multispecies processes that define these hybrid zones, revealing their contested but productive nature. The analysis begins with spatial reconfigurations: informal landscapes such as repurposed drainage systems and spontaneous settlements reveal adaptive logics. For instance, house-land and garden-land maintained by long-term residents sustain ecological functions despite diverging interpretations—long-term residents view fallow fields as dormant agricultural spaces, while newcomers see uncontrolled “wilderness,” illustrating the periurban as a mosaic of coexisting possibilities rather than a unidirectional transition. Shifting to social dynamics, the study foregrounds obscured labor, particularly Indian women's invisible roles in maintaining community rhythms through childcare, water management, and flood resilience. Categorized as “non-workers” in formal statistics, these women sustain informal social infrastructures that bypass state frameworks. Simultaneously, non-human agents actively shape periurban realities: water hyacinths alter hydrology, colonial-era infrastructure decays with lingering effects, and multispecies interactions in bagan highlight ecological negotiations.
Insights and constraints
While groundbreaking in its contents, it is impossible that this work is not without limitations. First, the case study's representativeness remains debatable given its 1 km2 land area and the varying degrees of periurbanization in different areas. How can situated periurbanization apply to regions with distinct agrarian histories or governance structures? Second, translating critical cartography's potential into planning practice encounters institutional resistance, leaving practitioners to ponder how such methods might infiltrate policy arenas. Another minor constraint is that the book explores structural injustices in Kolkata's periurban landscape, including land mafia dynamics and gendered labor constraints. Yet, its emphasis on hybridity occasionally leaves certain dimensions of systemic power less navigated. A deeper interrogation of caste and class hierarchies could deepen this analysis and reveal regional socio-spatial politics, particularly in grounding hybrid assemblages within their context-specific struggles for resource access and territorial justice. The openness of the work invites such extensions, as it charts new possibilities for entwining non-human relations with intersectional critiques of enduring inequities.
Conclusion: Margins as spaces of possibility
Throughout the book, the core concept of “slow urban–rural hybridization” dismantles entrenched dichotomies between city and countryside, tradition and modernity, and nature and culture. This hybrid mindset is also mirrored methodologically in its integration of multiple forms of knowledge—official documents versus residents’ oral narratives, remote sensing data against in-field observations, and colonial maps compared with contemporary images. The author's intertwining of perspectives avoids confining the suburb to a singular story, instead portraying it as an open space of multiple possibilities. However, Marshall's critical stance does not go to the extreme—she neither romanticizes the traditional appearance of the suburbs nor denies the value of urban development. On the contrary, a moderate and egalitarian view of the suburb as a “mixture” of elements is maintained, emphasizing that each of its components—human and non-human, urban and rural—has its own vitality and storytelling. Through centering ordinary rather than exceptional cases, Marshall builds a framework that transcends simplistic binaries and captures the intricate reality of Southern periurban life.
Periurban Cartographies reminds us that it is a prerequisite to understand urban futures through spaces seen as incomplete or transitory, as these margins cultivate new possibilities for coexistence. The periurban emerges not merely as a transitional form but as a dynamic process of becoming and unbecoming, containing clues to address environmental crises and social inequality through water recycling systems, mixed land use, and community self-organization that demonstrate alternative logics to capitalist urbanization. Through systematic reversed gazing, Marshall enriches conceptual tools for Southern Urbanism scholarship while inviting us to consider what we might find by shifting attention from the glamorous center to the neglected margins—perhaps the starting point for reimagining a future of hybridity.
