The cities of the Global South as global references of collapse

Abstract

The widespread collapse of modernisation places the cities of the Global South as explanatory references of the urbanisation process worldwide. In this essay, based on a theoretical reflection built with an extensive literature review on critical social theory, we intend to discuss such a process. We explore how these cities have been transformed into references as well as objects of reflection on the processes taking place in the cities of the Global North, constituting a new parameter of the current social production of space, suggesting the idea of the peripheral condition as a result of the crisis of capital. In the sequence, we present the causes and consequences of this process, which lead to the reconfiguration of the pattern of the relationship between the centre and periphery. Faced with this situation, we see that the periphery has become the index of the current critical reproduction of capital. Here we develop the argument of the Global South as a reference of the world, an index of the phenomenon of collapse we are experiencing.